'Kleos' in Book 1 of Homer's Iliad

A lecture on Book One of Homer's Iliad — the quarrel, the withdrawal, and the concept of kleos that makes both intelligible.

We begin with the Homeric Question: who wrote these poems, and does it matter? From there we move into the poem itself — the plague Apollo sends down on the Greek camp, Agamemnon's greed and what it reveals about him, and the confrontation with Achilles that sets the entire epic in motion. At the centre of it all is kleos: glory, fame, the thing spoken of you after you are gone. For Achilles, a man fated to die young, it is not a vanity. It is the only thing his short life can purchase. When Agamemnon threatens to take even that, the consequences reach all the way to Olympus. Along the way I look at ring composition, the architecture of Book One, and why the gods are both indispensable and deeply strange.

A lecture for anyone who has always meant to read Homer and never quite known where to start — and for anyone who already loves him and wants to go deeper.

Runtime: 22 min

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The Hallett Review — thehallettreview.com