The epic clash between Achilles, the main character of the Iliad, and Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, was a battle of titans that would determine the fate of Troy.
Homer’s epic poem, along with The Odyssey, has retained enormous influence on...
The Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of Frogs and Mice”) is the only surviving complete ancient Greek epic parody, a humorous adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. Scholars place its composition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, or possibly later. The...
The Trojan War is one of the greatest events of Greek legend. It was a war that involved far more than just a single city. In fact, representatives from all over Greece participated in this event, according to the...
The city of Mycenae was the most powerful city in Greece during much of the Bronze Age. That is why the entire Late Bronze Age and part of the Middle Bronze Age are known as the Mycenaean Era. However,...
Homer was the composer of the Iliad, the most famous account of the Trojan War. Generally, Homer is thought to have actually lived many generations—possibly even centuries—after the events he described. Yet some ancient commentators believed that Homer actually...
In Greek mythology, Palamedes, the hero of the Trojan War, stands out for his remarkable intelligence and creativity. Unlike many warriors who gained fame through strength and valor, Palamedes distinguished himself through intellect and innovation.
He became renowned as a...
In the Republic, Plato scrutinizes Homer’s epics with a severity that often goes unrecognized.
He argued that many celebrated epic stories portray gods and heroes in ways that are unsuitable for shaping the moral imagination of younger generations. Therefore, poets...
The world described by Homer reveals a very different picture of Greek cities and political power before the rise of Classical Greece.
While Homer's epic poems are not placed in a specific historic context, they do offer a glimpse to...
Homer was one of the most important figures in ancient Greece. His contribution to ancient Greek culture was immense, due to his two most famous poems - the Iliad and the Odyssey. To the ancient Greeks, the works of Homer were...
Scholars continue to be fascinated by the question of when Homer composed the Iliad, and one recent study even applied mathematics to try to pinpoint its date. There are numerous ways of investigating this, such as examining artwork on...
