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My 2026 journey along the spine of Western literature — what I’m calling The Literary Spine — got off to an exhilarating start earlier this year. Immediately, Homer’s epic, The Iliad, drew me into its ancient world with a gravitational pull I hadn’t anticipated. The challenge is real—gods, demigods, unfamiliar cities, and a dizzying cast of warriors swirl through these opening books—but I began discovering that the struggle itself is part of the reward.
Book 1 announced its theme in its very first word: mēnin—rage. In the entire Greek literary tradition, the first word of a poem was considered its soul. The wrath of Achilles becomes the engine that drives the entire epic, and Homer wastes no time establishing why this matters. When Agamemnon dishonors the proud warrior by seizing his war prize, Briseis, the clash reveals something fundamental about the ancient Greek value system: personal honor outweighs everything, even the collective good. Both men prioritize individual glory over the welfare of their entire army, a choice that will cost countless lives.
Yet beneath the rage, I found something more haunting—a second theme that lingers long after I set the book down. Achilles, in his fury, articulated a radical proposition: no war, no prize of honor or glory, is worth the value of his own life. He acknowledged the choice before him: a short life of everlasting glory at Troy, or a long life of quiet obscurity at home. This moment, this philosophical declaration from a warrior-hero, left me with thoughts of my own decisions in life when I made decisions to pursue my own path over the pursuit of lingering praise. Leaning back in my chair while sipping my morning coffee on a cold winter morning revealed to me that I have travelled both roads in my winding journey. Here is a man who understands mortality with startling clarity, even as he will ultimately choose fame over survival.
Book 2 presented a different kind of challenge. The Catalog of Ships—that exhaustive roll call of Greek contingents, their leaders, and the number of vessels each contributed—can feel like mustering through dense fog. My modern reader’s instinct was to skim, to hurry past the lists toward the action. But then I remembered its purpose and value.
Just as genealogies in the Old Testament offered assurances and identity to the Hebrew people, confirming lineages and fulfilling prophecies that mattered deeply to that audience, the Catalog served a vital role for Homer’s listeners. This wasn’t tedious filler; it was a Panhellenic roll call, a reminder of unity and shared purpose, a restoration of order to an army that had nearly abandoned the war altogether. The catalog transforms the conflict from a quagmire into the proud and optimistic undertaking it was in the beginning.
And I thought of Melville. Just as readers feel the vastness of the ocean while rowing through Moby-Dick’s expansive chapters on cetology—those seemingly digressive explorations of whale anatomy and classification that ground the cosmic speculation in material reality—the Catalog of Ships grounds the epic in the real geography and politics of ancient Greece. Both remind us that great literature sometimes demands we slow down, that comprehensiveness has its own rewards.
These opening books leave us with an overarching thematic understanding as we continue the journey: this is a story about the terrible cost of glory, about rage that consumes both self and community, and about the fragile order that holds human enterprise together. The journey is just beginning.
This was my first peek inside the opened door to this epic. Having already completed The Iliad, I would invite you to join me back here at this table to consider my full retrospective thoughts on this great epic poem with some surprising contextual insights even into our personal lives today.
The Curious Table 