Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on The Iliad

Six one-hour sessions: January 15, 22, 29; February 5, 12, and 19. All sessions will start at 7pm EST.

Homer’s epic about the consequences of a single incident in the final year of the Trojan War magnificently established the terms for the “idea of the tragic” and its accoutrements: the tragic hero, tragic irony, the tragic “flaw.” Confronted with a devastating insult to his honor, the Greek’s greatest warrior, Achilles, withdraws from the fighting as he struggles with the meaning of the choices he has made—not least, the choice to die young in return for everlasting glory. But his withdrawal sets in motion a sequence of events that will result in a loss far greater than the one that spurred his original crisis, precipitating the hero’s climactic confrontation with mortality.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

Event Venue

Online