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Achilles, the main character of the Iliad, remains one of the emblematic heroes of Greek mythology and modern literature for his bravery and fierceness in avenging the death of his best friend, Patroclus. Homer’s epic poem, along with The Odyssey, has retained enormous influence on Western literature to this very day, and this is also true for Achilles, the fearless warrior who became the very symbol of gallantry. “Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” is the opening line of the Iliad, the poem that describes a few weeks of the ten-year Trojan War, mainly the many feats...

The need for control is a reaction to fear. On the eve of the indictment of President Donald J Trump, Google, the parent company of YouTube, suspends Right Side Broadcasting Network from its broadcast platform. Let there be NO DOUBT, the coordinated Big Tech effort to control U.S. politics continues…. AUBURN, Ala. — Just one day before RSBN was set to cover President Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, YouTube has resumed its censorship practices and suspended RSBN’s channel, blocking our ability to livestream for seven days. On Monday, RSBN received a notice from YouTube informing us that due to content violating...

Homer was one of the most important figures in ancient Greece. His contribution to ancient Greek culture was immense, due to his two most famous poems – the Iliad and the Odyssey. To the ancient Greeks, the works of Homer were as important as the Bible is today. It’s ironic, then, that many scholars actually question whether or not Homer was real. What does the evidence show? Reasons for doubting Homer’s existence The main reason some scholars doubt that Homer ever existed is because of a lack of contemporary evidence. Most scholars believe that Homer was supposed to have lived...

Witches have had a long and elaborate history, even back to ancient Greece. Thanks to Homer and his epic adventure tale the Odyssey, we met Circe, who has often been identified as the first witch in Greek mythology. Circe was one of the most dangerous women a man could come across. She was known for seducing men, luring them to her island, and never letting them go. When men, driven mad by their desire to touch her, visited the island, she caught them off guard and used a spell to transform them into pigs, trapping them forever in their ignominious...

Mycenae -- the ancient city of the legendary King Agamemnon, best known from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and its iconic Lion Gate and cyclopean defensive walls, has long fascinated scholars and site visitors alike with the epic proportions of its imposing citadel remains... But there is another Mycenae -- one known for centuries from ancient historical documents -- which has nevertheless eluded the eyes of archaeologists, historians, and tourists. One might call it "Greater Mycenae", the Lower Town. It is invisible because most of it still lies undetected, unexcavated, below the surface. In its heyday it was a second millenium...

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss. Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived...

On Thursday, NASA released a stunning photo of a sea of dunes on Mars. It also shows wind-sculpted lines surrounding Mars' frosty northern polar cap. The section captured in the shot represents an area that is 31 kilometers (19 miles) wide, NASA said. The sea of dunes, however, actually covers an area as large as Texas. The photo is a false color image, meaning that the colors are representative of temperatures. Blue represents cooler climes, and the shades of yellow mark out "sun-warmed dunes," the US space agency wrote. The photo is made of a combination of images captured by...

Reason #9: HUMAN CONDITION When it comes to the human condition, we may think that Scripture is all we need. After all, Scripture does show us our true human condition in a way that the Greeks did not and could not: our relationship to God, that we are sinners, that we are a fallen race in need of redemption, that sin separates us from God, that God loves us and offers us grace and salvation. This is the good news that has been revealed by God in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ and nowhere else. Indeed, the...

In December 1978, a bizarre theater company headed by an actress from the “Slaughterhouse-Five” film was run out of San Francisco. Members of Sharon Gans’ so-called Theater of All Possibilities had come forward to claim they were pressured into arranged marriages, beaten if they didn’t sell tickets and had gone broke paying for classes — while Gans and her husband lived in a tony home in the posh neighborhood of Pacific Heights. With the police asking questions and the ex-members’ claims splashed across the pages of local papers, the actress and her theater group closed up shop and seemingly disappeared...

When Spanish civil servants got wind that someone was sweeping up the priceless treasure of a 200-year-old frigate from the ocean floor, it triggered a real-life escapade full of naval pursuits and secret airlifts - like something from a comic book adventure. And that is what it has now become, after one of those suit-and-tie sleuths convinced Spain's best-known graphic novelist that together they should tell the tale of the modern-day treasure hunt. In 1804, a British fleet opened fire on the Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, causing the death of 250 people of the 300 on board...

Ubisoft has issued a new patch for Assassin's Creed Odyssey on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The 1.0.5 patch weighs in at 0.16 GB on PS4 and 0.1 GB on Xbox One, and focuses on squashing bugs--including fixing one issue that only appeared after a previous patch. According to the patch notes, it improves stability and fixes an issue that would make the game crash to the dashboard after the release of update v1.0.3. That update itself was aimed at quality-of-life improvements and fixing game-breaking bugs. The two updates were only days apart, though, so Ubisoft is seeing to these...

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) - A 2,500-year-old stone coffin with well-preserved colour illustrations from Homer's epics has been discovered in western Cyprus, archeologists said Monday. "It is a very important find," said Pavlos Flourentzos, director of the island's antiquities department. "The style of the decoration is unique, not so much from an artistic point of view, but for the subject and the colours used." Only two other similar sarcophagi have ever been discovered in Cyprus. Both are housed in New York's Metropolitan Museum, but their colour decoration is more faded. The limestone sarcophagus was accidentally found by construction workers last week...

Found near the ruined Temple of Zeus in the ancient city of Olympia, the tablet has been dated to Roman times. It is engraved with 13 verses from the poem recounting the adventures of the hero Odysseus after the fall of Troy. The tale was probably composed by Homer in the late 8th Century BC. It would have been handed down in an oral tradition for hundreds of years before the tablet was inscribed. The exact date of the tablet still needed to be confirmed, but its discovery was "a great archaeological, epigraphic, literary and historical exhibit", the Greek culture...

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The trials of Odysseus are really not that different from the struggles of those learning to readjust after wars of today, modern veterans are finding. A small group of military veterans has been meeting weekly in a classroom at the University of Vermont to discuss "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" for college credit — and to give meaning to their own experiences, equating the close-order discipline of men who fought with spears, swords and shields to that of men and women who do battle these days with laser-guided munitions. Homer isn't just for student veterans. Discussion groups...

Attempting a new translation of “The Odyssey” is like directing “Hamlet.” Much of your audience knows the work well, and they take their seats with entrenched expectations and the intonations of favorite performances reverberating in their heads. At the same time, though, you will have audience members who have never seen the play, for whom you provide the introduction to a giant of Western literature. And let us not forget those who are there under duress, dreading the upcoming hours of boredom. You must find a way to speak to all these disparate groups, sneaking past the defenses of the...

When it comes to picking a translation of the Iliad or the Odyssey, readers of Homer sometimes feel as if they are being forced to choose between the beautiful and the good. The most popular translations of Homer are either praised for their poetry or for their accuracy, but not for both. Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles’ translations are known for their lovely verses, but also for taking liberties with the text. Meanwhile, Richard Lattimore’s translation is known for being line-by-line accurate to the Greek, but also for being convoluted and difficult to read. However, his fidelity to the text...

In a recent meeting of the Board of Education in the city of Artichoke, Alabama, it was decided to ban the reading of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey in the classroom. The grounds given for the exclusion of these towering masterpieces of ancient literature is that reading them in a public school violated the first amendment's guarantee of the separation of church and state. Wallace Nobrainer, the attorney for the Artichoke school system, explained that "the Homeric texts are obviously designed to promote the polytheistic view of the Greeks," and hence they should be looked upon in the same light as...

In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed. Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways... About ten years ago, I set off sailing...

Hillary Clinton(s) ... current frenetic speaking career is consistent with the ethics that allowed Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, to freelance as a six-figure private “consultant” while simultaneously working as Hillary’s aide ... (snip)Hillary voted for the Iraq War. In October 2002, she gave a fine speech explaining why we had to remove Saddam Hussein — fulfilling the pledge of Bill’s Iraq Liberation Act and his incomplete 1998 Desert Fox bombing — only to become a fierce critic of her 2002 position when the polls went south on the war and she started eyeing the presidency. The complete pullout from...

Odyssey has safely landed on Mars and is transmitting photos.