In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle travels back 4,000 years to find the world’s first great epic In 1850, a series of clay tablets came to light in the Middle East, in what is now Iraq. They were shipped back to the British Museum, where […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discovers the epic poets who wrote continuations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey When I began this column back in May last year, it was intended to be an online extension of my first book for a general audience, The […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that resists our analysis Of all the epic poems from the classical era, Homer’s Odyssey is the most modern. In ancient Rome, at the court of the Emperor Nero, Petronius parodied its episodic […]