The sources of this essay (originally posted April 8, 2017) are an earlier one, written as an email in 2009, and a conversation that ensued it, on the theme of what Homer may mean in one’s life, and whether an application to one’s life involves an abuse of the original text. I wrote on this blog, in July 2016, on analogies in Homer and elsewhere, in “Thinking & Feeling.” My last post considered an apparent instance of abuse of the Hebrew Bible.
At the end of the Iliad, to retrieve the body of Hector from its killer, King Priam of Troy visits Achilles in his tent in the evening, in the camp of the hostile Greeks. The scene may recall two political enemies from the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Congressman Thomas O’Neill, Speaker of the House: these two were able to be on friendly terms “after 6 PM.”
Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov
“King Priam begging Achilles for the Return of Hector’s Body,” 1824
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Polytropy 