XENITH

The latest book for Xenith’s Book-of-the-Month club has been chosen and we are going classic. June’s book is The Iliad by Homer and the discussion will be led by our resident expert, Hannah E. V. Culik, a Classics undergraduate at University of Oxford in England:

As most of you know I’m a Classics undergraduate at Oxford. Before I started doing anything particularly difficult with Latin or Greek at school I had to read the Odyssey, Iliad and Aeneid for exam purposes, and, let’s face it, the thought of tackling an epic poem is fairly daunting, and can be pretty unfruitful from a completely cold start.

I know, oh boy do I know, how hard it is to get some time for reading sometimes, and so I thought that I would suggest perhaps reading a book (let me clarify, a “book” in classical terms is, broadly speaking, a ‘chapter’ (actually it was the size of a scroll originally); thus the Iliad and Odyssey have 24, the Aeneid 12, etc.) or selected books together. I will write some brief, and hopefully helpful! (and hopefully interesting!) commentaries/guides for each book that we chose to do, and if you feel passionate enough to push that into a debate or discussion, that would be very cool.

At any rate, what I suggest is that this needn’t be interactive per se. I will very happily write with hopefully dependable regularity and clarity on what I think is important, perhaps with some added language aspects in there (as these are critically important, and obvious lost in translation). These canonical texts are essential reading for anyone interested in literature, as I’m sure you’ve heard, there is no story pattern that has not been covered by Homer alone. The depth and breadth, however, of your interaction with the text will always be up to you, but my hope is to supply you with some interesting commentary for you to do with whatever you like.

Alrighty, well I have chosen, as is appropriate, Homer’s Iliad as this month’s book.

I will be working from the Penguin translation by E. V. Rieu, but what you choose is up to you. I still consider his translation the best. I will be starting from Book 1, surprise surprise. So if you’re up for it? Meet me there.

Book-of-the-Month discussion board