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 […]
Tag: Classical Literature
The Odyssey: Notes Towards an Analysis of Homer’s Poem
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 […]
Lucian: The Syrian Satirist Who Invented Science Fiction
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks at the work of the master of the comic dialogue, Lucian of Samosata It all started with a Syrian writer about whom he know virtually nothing. He was born in around AD 120 and died in 180, or […]
10 of the Best Epic Poems Everyone Should Read
Are these the best epic poems? Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Epic poetry has been a part of literature from the beginning, as the following selection of ten of the greatest epic poems demonstrate. Spanning nearly four millennia, each of these classic works of epic poetry tell us something about […]
The Argonautica – The Forgotten Classical Epic Poem That Changed Literature
In his latest Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Apollonius of Rhodes’ classic tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece In the world of classical Greek epic poetry, two poems are universally renowned: The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both, of course, are attributed to Homer – whoever […]