VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Two in Performance (Lattimore translation)

Book 2 of the Iliad of Homer contains the famous "Catalogue of Ships," from kata+logos, a "down-telling," or listing, of all the contingents of soldiers who came to Troy from Hellenic, Greek-speaking places. A similar catalogue of Trojans and their allies ends the book, with the besieged Trojan people and their friends all marching out to meet the horde of Hellenic invaders. Note that the Hellenes (or Greeks, as the Romans later called them) are also called Danaans, Achaeans, and Argives, with broadly similar meanings for the poem. Book II also contains some of the most archaic poetry in the epic.

It's an especially touching poetic text for the brief anecdotes of fate and loss that are strung along its length like harmoniously spaced beads on a string. The micro-story of the brothers Protesilaos and Podarkus is a gemlike example, here silently (visually) mapped into a modern parallel for the vividness of its heartbreak.

Here and there, I have speeded up the movie, never omitting a word of Lattimore's translation, but increasing the playback speed to tighten what the modern ear might feel to be longueurs.

Homer's darkly beautiful epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, beginning with the Trojan War itself c.1180 BCE, and eventuating in a vast epic tradition that has kept that war's human images alive. Around the 740's BCE, the most resilient of the fragmentary poetic results of those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin.

My 2010 book about Homer will soon be available for free on Scribd. I haven't had time to scan and upload it just yet, but it's coming soon. Meantime, Chapters 2 & 3 are downloadable here: https://ncpsychoanalysis.academia.edu/JameyHecht .

Enjoy the show! And may the bittersweet wisdom of the ancient world make your time in this one more fruitful and engaging.