If you take a pretty girl who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo as war booty and refuse to have her ransomed, Apollo will rain plague on your troops. Zeus “the father of gods and men” is a henpecked husband who is also partial to domestic abuse.ģ. Victory or defeat in ancient Greek wars is primarily the result of marital spats and/or petty sibling rivalry in Zeus and Hera’s dysfunctional divine household.Ģ. What I learned from this book (in no particular order):ġ.

Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BCE. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BCE, while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BCE. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. In the Western classical tradition, Homer (Greek: Ὅμηρος) is considered the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets.

The illiad book 22