Features
NEW Slow Reading Pathway: Homer’s Iliad
Starting Date: Tuesday, April 9th
Finishes: Tuesday, September 24th
Time: 8 pm ET | 7 pm CT | 6 pm MT | 5 pm PT
Duration of sessions: 1.5 hours
Leader/Facilitator: Eric Stull
Duration: Weekly meetings, for 2 Quarters (6 months, April – September.)
Recordings available for those who miss sessions.
Recommended Editions: E. Wilson, C. Alexander, or R. Lattimore translations.
Cost: $500 total ($250 X 2 Quarters) To join this seminar, sign up for Q2 (April-June), to the slow reading program. If you would like to continue in July (July-September), you may renew your subscription at that time. Subscriber benefits include open access to all reading groups, as well as monthly one-on-one liberal arts consultations.
Description:
Homer’s poem has many successors — excellent, eminently worthy, most of them probably inspired by it – but nothing can take its place.
The Iliad is not only the fountainhead of poetry; it is probably its greatest summit. It is not only like a great mountain river rushing on with irresistible strength and unbearable beauty, staying in
the mountains for a long time before making its spectacular descent through a world almost too rugged to be lived in yet impossible not to dwell with once visited, its water
bearing all before it through the shining plain; it is also like the mountain itself and the sea toward which its waters tend.
The poem is thus a world about a world. Is this world simply the world as such: elemental, profound, brutal, fecund, brilliant, terrible, filled with women and men, love and hate, gods, animals, plants, earth, sun, air, sky, sea?
What else is there, really? One thing, perhaps: words that have wings, pteroenta. A reader keeping her ear to the poem’s ground may hear them alighting within the range
of her hearing.
There is nothing else like it under the sun — this sun to the sea of song that has followed it. We will read The Iliad slowly: a book a week, an hour and a half at a time, for 24 meetings — and then we will meet one final time to wonder at what we just
did.