“Wine-bibber,” he cried, “with the face of a dog and the heart of a hind, you never dare to go out with the host in fight, nor yet with our chosen men in ambuscade. You shun this as you do death itself. You had rather go round and rob his prizes from any man who contradicts you. You devour your people, for you are king over a feeble folk; otherwise, son of Atreus, henceforward you would insult no man.”
~ The Iliad - Book 1 (Samuel Butler Translation) p5 / v223
I’ve started reading “The Great Books of the Western World” inspired by RV. When I read Adler’s “How to Read a Book”, I’d come across the list of books but didn’t pay much attention to it. But when I spoke to RV sometime ago, he said he bought the complete set of books and was pretty excited to read them. It was like going back to the basics and starting from the foundation. He sent a pdf of ‘The Great Conversation’ and it was super inspiring. It made the case to read the originals of the books in the list of Great Books. Also, there is something satisfying about reading books in a chronological fashion. He also had a full set of Harvard Classics and gifted me an older set. I thought I’d read Harvard Classics because there were a few reading plans online (similar to Bible reading plans). The first book in that collection was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He does make a lot of references to older texts that he and his ‘junto’ club friends used to read and discuss. So I thought it made sense to read the Great Books list since they are in chronological order.
I’m reading it slowly, so it might take more than a decade to finish all the books. I’ve been asking questions to chatGPT and Bard to either confirm some hypothesis or some idea that I get while reading. It is not an analysis of the text per se but just some casual conversation that I’d have with someone.