Reading Homer is like Prayer

Moving Forward with Painful Signs

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page. I am happy to talk about this book in person or over zoom.

As of last week, this substack completed another tour of the Iliad, ending with the beginning of book 24. There’s more to be said, of course, but I will probably wait until September to start yet another tour of the Iliad from beginning to end. But don’t fear! The ‘stack must go on. I am going to try to continue posting weekly (at least), returning to highlighting scholarship on Homer in general, commenting on passages as they grab my interest, and returning to the Iliad as much as I can in a really mad and maddening world.

Why, might one fairly ask, continue reading the Iliad when the world seems to be spiraling out of control? I have two answers. First, Elton Barker and I just signed a contract to write an introduction to the Iliad for Routledge (due in June 2026). The chapters from the proposal are as follows:

Introduction: The Iliad through Time

Chapter 1: Zeus' Plan--Gods, and Mortals, Agency and Fate

Chapter 2: Heroic Pain--Violence and Mortality

Chapter 3: Heroic Coalitions, Politics

Chapter 4: The Human City--Families, Women, Children, and Enslaved People

Chapter 5: Immortal Stories--narrative traditions and the message of the poem

Conclusion: Homeric Afterlives

As Elton and I start working on this, some of the posts will likely be “overflow” material or offshoots of investigations.

The second answer to why read Homer when the world is burning is this: it brings me peace. I have returned to the Iliad and the Odyssey throughout my life both as a touchstone for world events and as a type of therapy. I started grad school in NYC right before 9/11 and turned away from all my school work just to work on Homer. There’s no accident that my dissertation ended up being on Rhetoric and Politics in the Iliad–I was only dimly aware of responding to world events through my work. Similarly, following my father’s sudden death at 61, I immersed myself in the Odyssey. When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, I teamed up with Lanah Koelle and Paul O’Mahony to start Reading Greek Tragedy Online, which culminated in a 24 hour, round the world reading of the Odyssey.

I used to think of these responses as escapist, at best providing some indirect ways of working through the challenge of ‘real’ life. But a conversation with one of the founders of the Sportula, Stefani Echeverria-Fenn, helped me understand that there is more going on than that. As Stefani wrote at the time, the slow reading of Greek or Latin can help rearrange reality, providing a therapeutic method of reasserting agency on the world. The slow reading of philology, of communing with the dead through their languages, can help produce what psychologists call a “flow state”.

There are important neurobiological aspects to such a state: when we are fully engaged on a task that takes us outside of ourselves, it can have positive effects on mental and physical health. It can slow down the heart-rate and calm a racing mind. There are studies that show similarities with the neurophysiology of prayer or other meditative practices. The deliberative practice of reading intensely creates space outside of time and the daily self. The space and the process can be therapeutic.

Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied poetry with the translator and poet Olga Broumas. I distinctly remember a meeting when I told her I was an atheist and she calmly responded that I was not. How, I asked, could she say that? She told me I just hadn’t learned the words to talk about the universe in a way that made sense yet and that I was too spiritual to be an atheist. I can’t say that this much has changed in a quarter century, but I can say that when the world gets dark, I somehow find light in Homer. And that’s a pretty good start.

“Just like a prayer, / *Homer* can take me there”

New Book Alert!

Homer’s not just useful for mental health! Greek epic also provides a way to think about how humanity got where it is and what we need to do to survive. In addition to the resurgence of fascism, the stupidity of modern technology and its claims to intelligence, the horrors of ongoing conflicts, and rising income inequality, we may be facing an extinction level event from climate change over the next century. Not to be an alarmist–there is hope! But the hope diminishes with each passing year of inaction.

Ecocriticism is a cross--disciplinary theoretical approach to literature. While the term was first coined in the 1970s, the approach has seen slow adoption in past-focused disciplines like Classics. Ecocriticism can characterize a lot of work that looks at the interaction between human beings and the environment, and it can also apply to individual works like Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory that speaks directly to ecological concerns and humankind’s relationship with nature.

When it comes to classical studies and Homer, ecocritical approaches can have an important historicizing contribution. Just as post-colonial studies of Homer can help us understand the systems of values that have shaped Homeric reception and help us to understand epic’s fundamental relationship to enslavement, misogyny, political power, etc, and how these values have influenced later cultures and Homer’s appeal, so too can ecocritical studies help us understand how our modern relationship to the natural world draws on ancient beliefs.

The last decade has seen increasing interest in the depiction of the environment Homer. William Brockliss’ book on Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment is a great resource for thinking through the presentation of the environment in Homer. Wayne Mark Rimmer has suggested that Homeric warriors function as an index of humanity’s ‘precarious place in a delicate natural world”. Julio Vega Payne does a great job in his dissertation of developing the way that Homer uses the natural world as a character to explore human-environmental dynamics. In her blog post “Bring Timber Into The City”: Reading The Iliad Against The Grain” Lindsay Davies concludes

“A human ecological reading of the Iliad requires us to recognize that in the world of the poem, humans, in their mobility of mind and body—remember swift-footed Achilles—are greater than trees and beasts. They transcend the earth through their imagination and ingenuity, if not in their bodies. Their eyes are cast upwards to the sky for meaning, not downwards to the earth. In this context, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues in his great study of the meaning of forests in culture, it becomes imperative to clear the trees, for “Where divinity has been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with ‘heaven,’ the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of god” (6, italics in original). This association of the sky with transcendence also explains the significance of Homer’s poor pigeon whose death causes warriors to wonder. For the bird struck down while striving to fly skyward potently symbolizes the quest for heroic glory, that which appeared to turn a man into a god yet simultaneously guaranteed that he would bite the dust.”

A little earlier, Jason Bell argued for a reading of the Odyssey that centered environmental ethics (see Elizabeth Schulz’s article on the Odyssey and ecocriticism too); and Sam Cooper’s article on “Speculative Fiction, Ecocriticism, and the Wanderings of Odysseus” shows how “Ecocritical readings of the Odyssey that wander purposefully between that epic and its receptions (let it be clear that the one I offer is by no means exhaustive) may help us to stay with its ecological troubles, and with those of later periods, and with our own.”

I think there is definitely more work to be done on the Odyssey’s relationship with the natural world, especially if we position the Odyssey in cosmic history as a text moving from a world of fantastic abundance (consider the endless feasting of the Iliad or the meals in the early part of the epic itself) to one of comparative scarcity (the suitors’ unchecked eating is a major concern). Given current interest in abundance and inequity, epic’s arc from the zero-sum game of Achaean honor in Iliad 1 to the premise that “wealth and peace should be enough” to avoid conflicts in book 24 of the Iliad is worth tracing. But I have been thinking about ecocriticism and Homer because I finally received a copy of Edith Hall’s most recent book Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World.

I am going to say very little about this book right now, except that I think it should be one of the most important books written about Greek poetry of the year, if not the decade. I hosted Edith for a talk at Brandeis last year where she presented some of the research for this book and I immediately recognized its importance. It forces us to reconsider the natural world presented in Homer and to think as well about how the heroic world and its values contain the seeds of our own destructive relationship with the planet.

The book unfolds in part by looking at the poetics and the contents of the Iliad, following chapters about interpreting the poem, historical contexts, and ecocritical approaches. Hall traces the work of Loggers, Farmers, and Smiths, through chapters that blend history, archaeology, and philology to ask readers to confront the consumptive deforestation that Homeric epic presupposes as a necessity for heroic (if not Human) life. In the Epilogue, she notes that “central to the ideology of the Iliad is the idiom of infinitude, an assumption that the physical Earth, its contents, and the resources needed by humans, somehow limitless” (202). Homeric culture, as it were, is founded upon a need to continually expand to add new resources to fuel the machine of human war and politics. As Hall continues, “The Iliad shows that the seeds of environmental capacity were already sown by warfare at the dawn of human civilizations less than ten thousand years ago” (203). The military industrial complex is the largest driver of climate change today; and this has always been the case.

And, yet, Hall does not with total despair. She reads the Iliad as a record and a lament. It is “not only the poem of the Anthropocene; it has the potential to become the epic of the Earth–the poem for the Anthropocene” (205). By bearing witness, the Iliad advocates for all that has been lost to the blades of war; by learning from this witness, modern audiences have a chance to contemplate the nature of things in truth.

The world burning is not inevitable. It is a product of the way human beings choose to live. According to Hall, epic can help us choose to live a bit longer.