Homer: Iliad I

Poets are holy vessels

In which the wine of life,

The spirit of heroes is preserved;

But this young man’s spirit,

The quick—would it not burst

Any vessel that tried to contain it?

Let the poet leave him untouched like the spirit of Nature,

For both reduce to a bungling boy, the masterly craftsman.

In the poem he cannot live and last,

He lives and lasts in the world.

—Friedrich Hölderlin, “Bonaparte”

READING LIST (ALL TEXTS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST):

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Ch. 1: “Odysseus’ Scar.” Princeton University Press, 1968.

Griffin, Jasper. Homer on Life and Death. Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1988.

Homer. The Iliad: Book I. Trans. A. T. Murray. Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1999.

Jaeger, Werner. Selections from Paideia, Volume I. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Lukacs, Georg. Selections from Theory of the Novel. The MIT Press, 1971.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Selected Essays on Homer: “The Greek State” and “Homer’s Contest”. in The Nietzsche Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. “To Die and Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before and After”. In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. Routledge, 2011.

Introductory Texts:

Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought. Selections: Chs. 1-2. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Ford, Andrew. “Introduction” to the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Iliad. Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Graziosi, Barbara. Selections from Homer: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Further Recommended Criticism:

Bremmer, Jan. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton University Press, 2003.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 2008.