Rage, goddess, sing the rage of Pilius's son Achilles.

I'm Michael Knowles, this is the book club.

We will be singing the rage of Pilius's son Achilles in The Iliad by Homer, probably by Homer.

I don't know, we'll get to that question too.

We will be doing it with Joshua Katz, who has read this poem for a very, very long time,

a classicist of many, many years, graduate of Yale,

of Harvard, professor at Princeton, now senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

We will not hold any of those affiliations

with those fancy schools against you, Joshua.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming in the show.

One of them I share with you.

That is true.

You're outing me on that.

This book, I actually didn't read it at Yale because you know by the time I went to Yale we were all reading I don't know. Not quite Ibrahim Kandy yet, but all sorts of silly things that didn't get very often to the real source texts.

And this is about as foundational a text as it gets.

This is considered, I guess, the first major work of Western literature?

Yeah, this is a foundational text of Western civilization.

It is arguably the foundational text of Western civilization. And what does it mean the Iliad? The word

Iliad means literally the epic of Troy. What is Troy? Troy was a citadel in the far northwest of what is now Turkey

across the mainland of Greece, across the Aegean Sea.

And a Greek word for Troy was Ileon.

...