{"id":3437,"date":"2011-11-06T19:42:51","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T02:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3437"},"modified":"2018-11-02T14:50:42","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T20:50:42","slug":"on-the-necessity-of-the-iliad-for-modern-polytheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3437","title":{"rendered":"On the Necessity of the Iliad for Modern Polytheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In this week’s New Yorker<\/em>, Daniel Mendelsohn<\/a> reviews a new, compressed translation of the Iliad by Stephen Mitchell<\/a>. (The whole article is behind the paywall\u2014the link is to an abstract.)<\/p>\n

Discussing other recent translations, he describes Stanley Lombardo’s<\/a> as having “a tight-lipped soldierly toughness.” I own that one \u2014 I saw its cover while walking through the book exhibits at the 2005 American Academy of Religion annual meeting and almost wept \u2014\u00a0 it was such an emotionally powerful design.<\/a><\/p>\n

Mendelsohn, meanwhile, strikes gold at the end of his review:<\/p>\n

The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern \u2014 indeed, existentialist \u2014 one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22nd issue of Time<\/em> featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL<\/a>, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:<\/p>\n

He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a chance to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.<\/p>\n

Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is the polytheistic view of life. The world is a mess. The world is beautiful. The gods are eternal (or as good as). The gods work at cross-purposes, and sometimes humans are caught between them.<\/p>\n

If you try to change the world in the name of some grand, sweeping, utopian vision, you will just make it worse. The most you can do is to give Achilles and\u00a0 Kevin Houston a good cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week’s New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews a new, compressed translation of the Iliad by Stephen Mitchell. (The whole article is behind the paywall\u2014the link is to an abstract.) Discussing other recent translations, he describes Stanley Lombardo’s as having “a tight-lipped soldierly toughness.” I own that one \u2014 I saw its cover while walking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,40],"class_list":["post-3437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-greece","tag-polytheism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-Tr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1883,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1883","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":0},"title":"Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 19, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say \"All honor to Durga,\" but isn't this a bit much? The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Hinduism\"","block_context":{"text":"Hinduism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=hinduism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":562,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=562","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":1},"title":"More on Book Design: The Best Iliad Cover Ever","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Walking through the enormous book exhibition at the AAR-SBL, I stopped at the booth of Parmenides Publishing, publisher of Classical philosophy and literature. In conjunction with Stanley Lombardo's audio recordings of his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, they had the print edition which I had not seen before.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Greece\"","block_context":{"text":"Greece","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=greece"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0872203522","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13970,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13970","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":2},"title":"The Power and Sorrow of Gododdin","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 27, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Two things arrived together in a package from Amazon: a new Bluetooth mouse, currently in use, and leading Welsh poet Gillian Clarke's new version of Y Gododdin, titled The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen. I first encountered the poem in my early twenties -- was it while shelving books in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Anglo-Saxon England\"","block_context":{"text":"Anglo-Saxon England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anglo-saxon-england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/gododdin-mouse.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/gododdin-mouse.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/gododdin-mouse.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/gododdin-mouse.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":472,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=472","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":3},"title":"Historic preservation leads to .\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Historic preservation leads to . . . polytheism?Those fun-loving Wahabi Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia fear that preserving historic buildings in their holy city of Mecca--even sites associated with the prophet Muhammed himself--might lead to polytheism.Their reasoning is so convoluted that I cannot easily summarize it. But an Arab architectural\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10181,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10181","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":4},"title":"Pentagram Pizza with Milky Devotion and Unlikely Polytheism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 24, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"\u2022 Is this a case of misplaced devotional offerings? The Tamil Nadu Milk Dealers Association says yes. \u2022 The Live Science news site is not the place where you expect tor read about Norse (or any other) polytheism, but this article strikes a reasonable note. \u2022 Icelandic elves again, this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"elves\"","block_context":{"text":"elves","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=elves"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/pentagrampizza.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":841,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=841","url_meta":{"origin":3437,"position":5},"title":"Polytheism, not Tradition","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 24, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Keep an eye on the International Year of Polytheism Web project.This is really more of a conceptual art piece than any sort of reconstructionism (definitely not reconstructionism or capital-T Tradition), although it has been mentioned earlier in the Pagan blogosphere.Still, if anyone wants to \"wants to overcome the epoch of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"polytheism\"","block_context":{"text":"polytheism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=polytheism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3437"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9947,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437\/revisions\/9947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}