Western literature begins with a quarrel over a woman and an angry man sulking in his tent. The Iliad, attributed to Homer and composed perhaps around 750 BCE from centuries of oral tradition, opens with the word mēnin — “wrath” — the wrath of Achilles; its companion, the Odyssey, follows the cunning Odysseus on his ten-year voyage home. Together they gave Greece its gods, heroes and moral imagination, and gave the West the epic, the hero, and the journey home.
In fifth-century Athens, at the festival of Dionysus, tragedy was born: Aeschylus (the Oresteia), Sophocles (Oedipus the King, Antigone), Euripides (Medea, The Bacchae). Aristotle‘s Poetics analysed it; Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Birth of Tragedy tried to explain its power; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel read Antigone as the collision of two rights. Aristophanes’ comedies mocked everyone, including Socrates.
Rome inherited and transformed it: Virgil’s Aeneid (the founding epic of Rome), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the great storehouse of myth for every later poet, Shakespeare included), Horace’s odes (carpe diem), Lucretius‘s philosophical poem, Seneca‘s blood-soaked tragedies.
These pages are being written. Start with The Apology of Socrates — Plato’s dramatic masterpiece — and Lucretius.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomThinkers & Authors
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Homer
The legendary blind poet of Greece to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed — the founding works of Western literature, and for the Greeks the “educator of Hellas”.
Parmenides
The stern pre-Socratic of Elea who argued that only what-is can be thought, that nothing comes from nothing, and that change and plurality are illusions.
Sophocles
The Athenian tragedian of Oedipus and Antigone — the poet of human blindness, unbending will and the collision of laws — whom Aristotle took as the model of tragedy.
Lucretius
Roman poet whose single masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, set Epicurean atomism to hexameter verse — and, rediscovered in 1417, helped kindle modernity.
Seneca
Roman Stoic, playwright and statesman — tutor and adviser to Nero — whose letters on time, death, anger and friendship are among the most readable works of ancient philosophy.
Works
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The Iliad
Homer’s epic of the wrath of Achilles in the tenth year of the Trojan War — the founding poem of Western literature, and its greatest poem of war, grief and mortality.
The Odyssey
Homer’s epic of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from Troy — monsters, witches, the underworld and a household besieged — the archetype of every adventure, every homecoming and every clever hero.
Antigone
Sophocles’ tragedy of the young woman who buries her brother against the king’s decree — the founding drama of conscience against the state, which Hegel read as the collision of two rights.
Oedipus the King
Sophocles’ tragedy of the king who hunts down the murderer of his predecessor — and discovers that he himself killed his father and married his mother. Aristotle’s model of the perfect tragedy.
Great Scenes
2The Death of Socrates
In prison, on his last day, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul, drinks the hemlock calmly, and asks that a cock be offered to Asclepius.
The Allegory of the Cave
Prisoners chained since birth see only shadows on a cave wall; one is freed, dragged into the sunlight, and returns to tell the others — who would kill him if they could.
Coming to the Library
15 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionFor it is the same thing to think and to be.
τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι
Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing.
nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam
So great the evils that religion could prompt.
tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the forest buds and puts forth more when spring comes round.
οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.
Come, friend, you too must die. Why weep about it? Patroclus died, who was far better than you.
I would rather be a hired labourer on earth, serving a poor man with no land, than be king over all the perished dead.
Bear up, my heart; you have endured worse than this.
How terrible it is to know, when knowledge brings no profit to the knower.
Count no one happy until he has crossed the boundary of life without suffering pain.
Nor did I think your decrees so strong that you, a mortal, could override the unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods. They are not of today or yesterday; they live forever.
Many things are wonderful, but nothing is more wonderful than man.
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει