The Iliad by Homer is an epic of poem over 15,000 lines that recounts the conflict between Agamemnon, the man of power, and Achilles, the genius of war, over a period of several weeks. Their contretemps is set within the larger tale of the ten year Trojan War, and is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards; by the end the poem has told a more or less complete story of the war. No television min-series has anything on this epic poem. The story is utterly human and has resonated down the centuries. There’s the ugly man of power, selfish, greedy, entitled and obsessed. There’s the young, beautiful star, burdened with greatness and by the false power of a man without merit. The authentic versus the phony - the same old story.

The Iliad was composed sometime between 760 and 710 B.C., and together with The Odyssey is considered the first great work of western literature. “Composed” is the correct word because The Iliad was passed down by oral tradition. The teacher recited it, the students repeated it and memorized it – all of it. There’s a story, apocryphal or not, that around 700 B.C., a virtual riot broke out when some upstart in the Academy proposed to write it all down, because the older, wiser men believed transcription would destroy the Greek facility for memorization, not to mention the silencing of the sound of the poetry itself. This reading returns this epic to the manner of presentation in force at the time. (Summary by Michael Hogan)