"This was Argos, whom patient-hearted Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any work out of him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front… Read more
Anger [mēnis], goddess, sing it, of Achilles, son of Peleus— disastrous [oulomenē] anger that made countless pains [algea] for the Achaeans, and many steadfast lives [psūkhai] it drove down to Hādēs, heroes’ lives, but their bodies it made prizes for dogs [kuōn, pl.] and for all birds, and the Will of Zeus was reaching its fulfillment [telos]. In this very familiar passage at the start of the Iliad we see… Read more
For centuries of European art, one of the most frequently portrayed moments from classical antiquity was that of an apocryphal meeting of the young Alexander of Macedonia (later to be known as "the Great") and the much older Diogenes of Sinope (later to be known as "the Cynic"). It is hard to imagine a more unlikely pair. Alexander was the brash young king of Macedonia, who had conquered Greece and… Read more
