April 11, 2025: Thinking About The Iliad

My mind has been on ancient Greece a lot lately. It started with the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad (both truly phenomenal and powerful reads), followed by the novels Song of Achilles and Wrath Goddess Sing, along with a valiant attempt to enjoy the Percy Jackson TV Show (before being put off by how it fumbles the last episode's pacing).

Ancient Greece is a fascinating historical period, and an even more fascinating mythological period. It's been valorized in western society for hundreds of years, from Raphael to the founding fathers. It contains echoes of many of our greatest triumphs and our primordial sins, all wrapped up in a culture that is now so distant from our own that we cannot help but project our own values back in time. Some TTRPGs touch on this period (GURPS, of course, has some fantastic rules for historical gaming, and Agon is an indie game from Evil Hat that hits some of those same notes). 

To me, the greatest appeal of ancient Greece is that alien quality – though we can equivocate and debate endlessly about which parts of Greece are virtuous and which are monstrous, it is ultimately a different society and a different world, with a fundamentally different relationship to what it means to be alive.

-- Jay Dragon