Word: iliad
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some 3,100 years ago, the Aegean island of Chryse (pronounced Cry-see) soared rocketlike into brief prominence in the Mediterranean world. According to Homer's Iliad, what made the mighty Achilles sulk in his tent before Troy was the aftermath of a quarrel over the daughter of Chryses, high priest of the tiny island's temple of Apollo. Another famed Greek warrior, the archer Philoctetes, never got beyond Chryse; stopping off there on his way to Troy, Philoctetes was fatally bitten by a viper loosed on him, according to legend, by a local nymph whose advances...
...materialized as a result. This is a legion that threatens to destroy any highbrow culture that remains in this country; for the middlebrow ruthlessly appropriates highbrow literature and cuts it to fit the well-worn grooves of his own mind. The middlebrow belongs to book clubs that describe the Iliad as "Homer's immortal masterpiece"; he thinks in terms of "truth" and "universals"; he reads The Saturday Review...
...Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad, translated by Robert Graves. The bad boy of the classicists brilliantly carries out an engaging idea: that the Iliad was intended to be a satire of gods, kings and heroes...