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A new, illustrated study of the Iliac tablets, a group of objects inscribed in miniature with epic episodes. Like the tablets themselves, Michael Squire tackles major themes through small ones, by relating their production to macroscopic problems of signification in Graeco-Roman antiquity.
The next hilarious compendium of "User Friendly" comic strips from the wicked hand of the elusive "Illiad". Chronicling the continuing saga of Canada's hardest working ISP, Columbia Internet, "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell" serves up more details and stories from the lives of everybody's favorite characters: A.J. Cobb, Pitr, Mike, Dust Puppy, Miranda and Greg.
TOLSTOY CALLED THE ILIAD A miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer’s story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or written. But until now, even the best English translations haven’t been able to re-create the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace, and pulsing rhythm of the original. In Stephen Mitchell’s Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful. Mitchell’s Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after the Iliad was first written down, to the detriment of the music and the story. Omitting these hundreds of interpolated lines restores a dramatically sharper, leaner text. In addition, Mitchell’s illuminating introduction opens the epic still further to our understanding and appreciation. Now, thanks to Stephen Mitchell’s scholarship and the power of his language, the Iliad’s ancient story comes to moving, vivid new life.
Pope Benedict XVI will go down in Church history as one of the greatest popes. In this heartfelt defense of Pope Benedict's words and works, a tribute to his life and legacy and a homage to his sanity and sanctity, Joseph Pearce's biography provides an unforgettable encounter with this great historical figure. As the defender of the Faith, Pope Benedict XVI fought tirelessly and largely successfully against the forces of secularism first as the indomitable Ratzinger and then as the incomparable supreme pontiff. As an uncompromising defender of the dignity of the human person, he fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death. Within the Church, he fought against the spirit of the world in his war on modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age, restoring the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his defense of tradition. Years from now, Catholics will still look back on Pope Benedict's enduring legacy with enormous gratitude. For he successfully steered the barque of Peter in charity and truth against the evil tides that sought to engulf the Church.
WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2012 Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfill his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.
"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt...and his excitement is contagious."—James Wood, The New Yorker Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.
