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Michial Farmer, Jordan Poss, and Coyle Neal talk about books 23 and 24 of Homer’s Iliad.
Show Notes
- Our translations of the Iliad: Robert Fagles (1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997).
- Diomedes has a lot in common with Biff Tannen.
- Book 23 is a Breather Episode.
- James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom talks about football as a mode of worship.
- Jordan found helpful marginalia, for once, in J.E. Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts.
- What would Pat Tillman think about Achilles?
- Antigone also has to do with the appropriate treatment of the bodies of one’s enemies.
- Achilles shows pietas for once.
- C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost on the Iliad and the Aeneid:
I have read that his Aeneas, so guided by dreams and omens, is hardly the shadow of a man beside Homer’s Achilles. But a man, an adult, is precisely what he is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy. You may, of course, prefer the poetry of spontaneous passion to the poetry of passion at war with vocation, and finally reconciled. Every man to his taste. But we must not blame the second for not being the first. With Virgil European poetry grows up
- G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man on the sadness of paganism:
A thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy.
- And on the Iliad itself:
But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
- Virgil seems to predict a messiah in Eclogue 4.
- Quintus of Smyrna’s The Fall of Troy fills in some of the gaps. So does Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
- We’ll meet Achilles again in the Odyssey, Book 11.
- Midnight in Paris critiques antiquarianism in a way that the Iliad does not.
- Apollonius of Rhodes loves the generation before the Iliad.
- Jordan thought about W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South in conjunction with Greek social collapse. Also Thomas Nelson Page.
- Jordan’s novel Griswoldville is about Georgia being destroyed.
- Our theme music was provided by Blue Dot Sessions.
Relevant Network Shows
- Christian Humanist Podcast 18: Sports.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 27: Superheroes.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 28: Kings.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 30: Revenge.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 60: Sophocles.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 72: Valor.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 130: A C.S. Lewis Overview.