The Iliad is famously the great epic of war; it is also the epic of the human condition--our mortal fates, our struggle to make and preserve community, our attempts at love, our capacity for violence, lust, affection, grief. The Iliad continues to speak to us, but it is not always or only about "us": its gods, its vision of the human, of war, of family, and of love, are both very strange and deeply familiar. In her lecture, "Gods, Warriors, Women: Exploring Identities in the Iliad," Professor Laura Slatkin will introduce the Page and Stage discussion series with an inquiry into the richness and strangeness of the Iliad. Further meetings will take up these motifs, exploring more fully the relations of and impasses between gods and mortals; the bonds among warriors; the status of women in the Iliadic universe. Our program will feature some forays into the modern world, including 20th C. responses to the Iliad by Simone Weil W.H. Auden, and Christopher Logue, as well as contemporary American reckonings with core Iliadic concerns, such as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.


Reverend Elsie Smith Room