The Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad

This book is a sustained interpretative essay addressed to the Greekless reader. It does not digress into speculations about the many historical questions common to such introductions but directs the reader’s attention to the central issue of interpreting the epic with his modern imagination. The author seeks to give the Greekless reader the confidence to enter Homer’s poem without a sense that he lacks the necessary historical discipline. The central interpretative thrust of this work stresses that the central issue in a study of the Iliad is the picture of warfare, an eternally present way human beings think about one aspect of their condition. Contents: include: An Introduction, Homer’s Vision of War; War, Nature, and the Gods; The Heroic Code; Arms and the Men; The Iliad as a Tragedy: The Warrior, the Victim, and the Tragic Hero; and Homer and the Modern Imagination.