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 […]
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 […]
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 […]