Word: iliad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ANGER OF ACHILLES: HOMER'S ILIAD (383 pp.)-Translated by Robert Graves-Doubleday...
What has been overlooked by most classicists as well as by the grammarians of ancient Greece. Translator Graves theorizes, is that the Iliad was meant to be entertainment, not solemn tragedy. In Graves's view, the poem is a satirical work in which Homer lampooned the princelings at whose courts he recited, while pretending to hymn the heroes of the past. In this view, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, is the prize buffoon. And when Hector, the Trojan leader, offers to stake the whole war on a single combat, the Greeks respond at first with resounding silence. Then Menelaus...
...even Agamemnon is transformed for a few lines into a ferocious slaughterer of Trojans. Homer found this a necessary dodge, Graves believes, because powerful men in the poet's time considered themselves descendants of Troy's besiegers. While Homer composed in verse, presumably because it made the Iliad easier for court singers to memorize. Graves uses a combination of jogging, rhymed verse-for invocations, hymns and similes-and clear, unornamented, semicolloquial prose. His opening invocation suggests the rhymed couplets of Alexander Pope's Iliad: Sing, MOUNTAIN GODDESS, sing
...them out of the trap: Xenophon, a 30-year-old Athenian, who was a friend of Socrates and the world's first war correspondent; he accompanied the expedition as a curious observer, not a soldier. This modern translation by the late Professor William H. D. Rouse (the Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan's Pharsalia), Rolfe Humphries (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Moses Hadas (An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus), Dudley Fitts...
...creative staff," which will include such Omnibus regulars as Cultural Headwaiter Alistair Cooke, Drama Critic Walter Kerr. But the question remains: Can Omnibus maintain the courage of past conceits, the venturesomeness of past successes, the educational luxury of such occasional failures as its go-minute The Iliad, without special subsidy? The signs are encouraging: both current sponsors (Union Carbide and Carbon Corp., Aluminium Ltd.) have committed themselves to sponsor part of Omnibus for a new season, and Saudek says there are other potential sponsors, and that all three networks want the show. CBS appareritly wants Saudek more than it wants...