The Kosmos Society

Agamemnon
Book Club

Book Club | October 2021: Agamemnon, the Pathetic Despot

"What was Agamemnon like as a character for Homer and his audience? More fundamentally, how should we approach the topic of characterization itself, following the discoveries of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and their successors?" For October, we will read Andrew Porter’s Agamemnon, the Pathetic Despot: Reading Characterization in Homer, available at the Center for Hellenic Studies website. Discussion starts and continues in the Forum, and via Zoom on Tuesday, October… Read more

Reading Homer

Homeric Iliad 1.1–67

As you well know the first word of the poem, mēnis, indicates ‘anger’, as both Greg and Lenny have so carefully discussed. This first word establishes a tone or mode for the complete work as anger is exchanged through an economy of metaphors with violence, death, grief, lamentation, and ultimately with kleos itself as the final price of an heroic life: that is, the poetic medium of this narrative song.… Read more

Topic for Discussion

Change Your Point of View and Change What you See

The play Agamemnon is the hot topic in the community at the moment. If you know Aeschylus’ work you know this is the first play in a trilogy which leads to a showdown between the old goddesses of claw and fang versus the new goddess of the city. Having read the Agamemnon before and knowing where the trilogy takes us, I chose to change my perspective this time. Read more