How much longer should they wait?: How Homer Became Great Art – The Iliad

The Course offers Art History Lectures, Guided Museum Visits and London Walks.

In this series on Homer’s Iliad, we will examine its charmed life in the midst of battle and a god’s eye-view of the action, the city, the plain, the fields and mountains. The Greek ships at anchor, and the cast of thousands. This is a massively impressive and moving epic poem of the legendary city of Troy and everything that is said to have happened there. Small wonder that art has taken the story to its heart. From Botticelli to Tiepolo their imaginings of the epic’s drama stand beside fine translations of Homer’s Iliad in English.

In this lecture, HOW MUCH LONGER SHOULD THEY WAIT? BOOKS 1-2 we will explore the opening drama on the vast plain in front of Troy where the massed Greek army waits for the word to attack the city. Autocratic Agamemnon steals Achilles’s woman, Achilles embarks on one of the most famous rages in all literature, and then Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream that now is the moment to join battle. Should he?