There is a lot of controversy regarding the true locations of the places in the Odyssey. One of the most notable places is the island where Odysseus meets Polyphemus the Cyclops. Where did this incident supposedly take place? Is it...
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...
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet whose epic work Theogony has elevated him to the status of Homer and "a major source on Greek mythology," according to modern scholars.
Theogony (Birth of the gods in Greek) is a monumental work...
In the seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Homer wrote the Odyssey. This fascinating tale of adventure and loss would captivate readers for centuries, even millennia. It tells the story of Odysseus attempting to travel home after the Trojan War.
One...
One of the oldest surviving written fragments of Homer’s Odyssey has returned to public display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing visitors face to face with a remarkable piece of ancient Greek literary history. The small papyrus...
Greek mythology features many strange and fantastical locations. One such location was a group of islands known as the Isles of the Blessed. They feature in many ancient Greek records. What do these records tell us? And were the...
Ancient Greek bards preserved some of the most extraordinary works of the ancient world long before anyone in Greece recorded them on paper. For centuries, the Iliad and the Odyssey existed entirely through oral tradition—more than 27,000 lines of...
One of the most famous groups of monsters in Homer's Odyssey is the Cyclopes. While often dismissed as purely mythological creations, some evidence suggests the Cyclopes may have been exaggerated representations of a real people—the Minoans.
Where did the Cyclopes...
