Tag Archives: Homer

The Hero and the Goddess

By Robin Bates | Published: February 1, 2020

My reflections on the meaning of Homer’s gods “The Odyssey.”

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Odysseus’s Emasculation Anxieties

By Robin Bates | Published: January 29, 2020

“The Odyssey” is obsessed with a fear of emasculation.

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What Do Odysseus’s Monsters Mean?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 27, 2020

My explanation for the monsters in “The Odyssey.”

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The World Will End in Fire AND Ice

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2020

When Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” it now appears (judging by Australia and Greenland) that everyone is right.

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Mentor: Rare for Sons to Be Like Fathers

By Robin Bates | Published: December 30, 2019

Homer explores the difficulty of a young man living up to his famous father. It’s a problem that continues with fathers and sons.

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Welcoming the Stranger

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2019

In Homeric terms, Trump, in his treatment of immigrants, is akin to barbarians like the Cyclops and the Laestrygonians.

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To Avoid War, Look to The Iliad

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2019

As we once again hear war’s drum beat, it’s good to return to “The Iliad” and its vision of peace: the Achilles-Priam truce.

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Calvino on Reading the Classics

By Robin Bates | Published: September 17, 2019

In a famous essay, Calvino gives us multiple reasons to read the classics.

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Homer, Anti-War Poet

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2019

Tuesday One of my most satisfying reads in recent years is Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and The Trojan War. Alexander is the kind of writer that I aspire to be: an academic who taps into the meticulous research of other scholars to write for a popular […]

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