Tag Archives: Iliad

The World Will End in Fire AND Ice

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2022

With extreme climate, the world in likely to end (to cite Robert Frost) in fire AND ice.

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The Classics as Teen Survival Guides

By Robin Bates | Published: September 21, 2021

Vietnamese immigrant Phuc Tran uses various classics to survive American adolescence.

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Saving the Classics from Ideologues

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2021

A Univ. of Chicago classicist fears the alt-right will appropriate the classics for their own ends.

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The Dangers of Emotional Identification

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2020

In which I push back against an article warning about emotional identification with literary characters.

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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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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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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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Amazon Fires and the Fury of Achilles

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2019

Monday Few news items have alarmed and depressed me as much as the burning of the Amazon rain forests, often called the “lungs of the world.” As National Geographic reports The Amazon rainforest—home to one in 10 species on Earth—is on fire. As of last week, 9,000 wildfires were raging simultaneously across the vast rainforest […]

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Through Lit, We Learn Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2019

Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]

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