How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume I we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the dawn of civilization through the fall of Rome. Today’s session is on the The Iliad:

The fountainhead of the Greek and Roman literary cultures are the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, presumably fashioned from preexisting traditions by Homer, a blind bard writings in perhaps the 700s B.C. The Iliad rcounts several weeks towards the end of the Trojan War, which would have taken place around 1200 B.C. Homer has us confront the shape of history in terms of war, renown, wrath, friendship, loss, political responsibility, discord, and reconciliation.