Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece declassified.

Episode 3.

Dying for Immortality in Homer's Illion.

Rage!

Sing, O goddess, of the rage of Pilius' son, Achilles, and its devastation, which put

pains thousandfold upon the Greeks, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls of heroes, and left their bodies to

the feasting of dogs and birds as the will of Zeus was done.

Thus begins Homer's Iliad, a song about a long-lost world when heroes and demigods once roamed

the earth. It's a long, epic story that

was told by a bard in a singing rhythmical voice. In that respect, it's not completely unlike

rap music, except hip-hop is a relatively young genre, but imagine if hip-hop continued to exist for 300 more years, and during

that time it became more mainstream and prestigious, and every generation of artists memorized

the best hits of the previous generation and could incorporate those bits into their own songs.

So after 300 years, imagine this becomes an art form enriched with a huge database of songs

and stories that every performer has in their head, and they can just spin out lengthy,

engaging stories in song by stringing together all these best hits from the past ten generations.

That would be a closer analogy to the kind of artist who put together the Iliad.

As the first line of the Iliad, which you just heard, indicates, this is a song about anger,

one man's anger in fact.

It starts when Achilles gets really angry and then a lot of

things happen over the course of a few weeks while the Greeks are encamped outside the

walls of Troy and then when Achilles finally ceases to be angry it ends and obviously

...