Homer – Interesting Literature

Why the Trojan Horse Almost Certainly Wasn’t a Horse

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of the story of the Trojan Horse

If you had to name the famous work from classical antiquity which told the story of the Trojan Horse, which work would you name? The work of literature which offers the most in-depth account of the Trojan War, and the defeat of the Trojans by the Greek forces, is Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem about the last stages of the war. And yet the Iliad makes no mention of this crucial part of the Greeks’ victory over their enemies. Readers will look in vain within Homer’s poem for mention of the Trojan Horse.

Following Homer: The Epic Poems of the Cyclic Poets

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 Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History. Just as that book had arisen out of this very blog, so it returned to the blog, its natural home.

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 style for his scurrilous and daringly modern ‘novel’ the Satyricon; nearly 2,000 years later, James Joyce used its episodic structure for his scurrilous and daringly modern ‘novel’ Ulysses. There is something novelistic even in Homer’s original poem. Far from being solely a glamorous epic idealising heroes and glorifying war and adventure, Homer’s Odyssey is also about how heroism and adventure often fail to live up to our expectations of them.