Anyone who hasn’t read the Odyssey and the Iliad, the two great Greek epics attributed to Homer that form the basis of Western literature, doesn’t know what they’re missing out on. And those who have read them may have missed, undoubtedly, a curious detail: despite the constant interference of the gods in the characters’ lives, […]
Literature
Posted inCulture
An Antarctic Mystery: How Jules Verne wrote the Sequel to an Edgar Allan Poe Novel
Along with Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, and some others, An Antarctic Mystery has always been one of my favorite novels by Jules Verne; partly because of the work itself and partly due to the magnificent comic book adaptation by artist José Duarte Minarro in 1973 for that […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture, Middle Ages
When the Codex Overtook the Scroll as the Format for Books
Recently, following the article we published about the origins of the books in the Library of Alexandria, a somewhat finicky (and indeed quite mistaken) reader confronted us on a social media platform, asserting that those were not books but rather handwritten scrolls. What he evidently didn’t know is that scrolls are simply one form of […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture
The oldest surviving text of Latin prose is a manual of agriculture and recipes, including the placenta cake
As we mentioned in a previous article, only one percent of all the literature produced by the Romans in Antiquity has survived to our days. The oldest surviving text in Latin is a hymn recited by the priests of Mars during their annual festival, which was found inscribed on a stone in Rome in 1777. […]
Posted inCulture
Delia Bacon, the writer who proposed the first theory about Shakespeare’s true identity
The debate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works is not recent; it began about a century and a half after his death, when Herbert Lawrence suggested it in 1771, and it has continued ever since, with people like the famous poets John Milton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the historian J. Thomas Looney or the journalist […]
Posted inCulture
5 literary works, lost in the last 5 centuries, which could have been exceptional
In many articles we have mentioned lost works of antiquity, only known today by the fragments cited by later authors. This is the case of the works of Onesycritus, Megasthenes or Euhemerus of Messina, but also some works of Aristotle, Diodorus of Sicily, Archimedes, Julius Caesar, Eratosthenes, Titus Livius, Pliny the Elder or Suetonius, among […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
Christine de Pizan, the first professional female writer in the Late Middle Ages and a forerunner of feminism
The honor of being a pioneer, of paving the way to something, is usually much disputed. Today we are going to see a female case, that of the considered first female professional writer in the western world, an honour that tradition bestows on the Venetian Christine de Pizan. Her legacy would have a considerable influence […]
Posted inCulture
The Russian novel that inverts the roles in The Lord of the Rings: Sauron and the orcs are the good ones
It is doubtful that there is anyone who has not heard, even by minimal references, of The Lord of the Rings; some by his literary version, others by the cinematographic ones, many by both. The work of J.R.R. Tolkien is a fantastic story of epic tone that has captivated generation after generation with the heroic […]
Posted inAncient Greece
The Iliad and the Odyssey are just two of the eight poems from the Epic Cycle that narrate the Trojan War.
The Epic Cycle, also called the Trojan Cycle because it narrates events related to the Trojan War, is a collection of eight poems composed in dactylic hexameter, the traditional type of verse of the Greco-Latin epic. The two most famous, for having been preserved complete, are The Iliad and The Odyssey, both attributed to Homer. […]
