Incredible interview, thank you so much. Robin would definitely be on my fantasy dinner party guest list !

Wow what a guest to have on. Very well done to you.

Just bought his Classical World book and typed his name into KZfaq and stumbled across this delightful channel. Subscribed!

Just wonderful. I had to pause the video and laugh out loud when he said "I am sure everyone remembers, and if they don't they have lived for nothing..." wow

What an interesting interview! I agree that Diomedes is a striking character. The scene where Athena removes the darkness from his eyes, allowing him to distinguish gods from men, is my absolute favorite. In fact, I changed my former name to Diomedes after decades of pondering it.

What an unbelievable gentleman!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How lucky are we to be able to have a true lecture or class from him all to ourselves! OMG Please send Robin a special handwritten THANK YOU note from me and from all of us who were able to sit and be so completely surrounded by Homer and Iliad and HIM !! I am going to make a special note to myself so I can read Iliad again and them come back and listen to this lecture again. I have his book pre-ordered and he will probably be my very first order of Audible. I can't wait for it all to arrive. Just plain WOW !!!! and THANK YOU to both of you again and again !

I have a great respect for him for mentioning Emily Wilson's deliberate mistranslations, though he is incredibly polite about it.

Great interview

This was a great talk, especially as I'm in the middle of reading the Iliad for the first time and I love it.

I bought Robin's book on audible when i cane out as every time my local bookshop got it in it flew out again. Amazing speaker, his emotional reactions to sections of the text were really heartfelt. This is man who loves Homer's Iliad and wants to spread his knowledge to a wide audience. A great interview from you both. I hope you both get the readers and viewers you deserve

Well, this interview made me emotional. Thank you. Robin Lane Fox is phenomenal.

A wonderful interview, Robins passion for and knowledge of the Iliad is inspiring, showing the emotion he does over Hector and Andromache in Book 6 is totally valid and was my reaction on my first read through, maybe I’m due a re-read soon! Thank you for your amazing interviews!!

Great interview thanks 👍

Such a hero!! You can see that he loves Homer with his whole heart. It was an absolute pleasure to watch. Thank you so so much for introducing me to this amazing scholar. I will order his book right now.

This was such a fascinating interview. I went ahead and preordered his book on Audible before I even got through the interview. I can't wait to get it!

Amazing interview! Very insightful

Thank you for this amazing interview ❤

Hello, a very rich resource speaker to dialogue with and discuss the atleast once in a life time before we die experience the genius of homer epic poem illiad. A very insightful conversation with the emeritus Robin lane that help us to unpack some brilliant ideas about the iliad..God bless your utube podcast.❤

Thank you for this amazing interview!The Iliad is one of my favorite books and I cannot wait to read Homer and His Iliad.

The Greek tragic worldview is incredible. How they wafer from extreme brutality (spears entering the back of a beautiful young man's head and passing through his mouth) and scenes like Hector's tender moments with his family. One of the most striking scenes is Homer's introduction of Pandarus and describing the reason he didn't take his father's horses for a chariot (life saving tech / key to battlefield supremacy) because Pandarus didn't want the horses to suffer the stress of war / to want for food and then moments later Diomedes kills the sensitive youth Pandarus easily and mercilessly and it is not portrayed as something good or bad. Homer just depicts everything as it is and makes no moral impositions on the reader, the reader can make up his own mind. The text both exalts war but depicts it in its horrifying brutality. Incredible artistry. No literature fully captures this in my opinion.

Well that was touching... absolutely great!

Love your channel. 😺

The works of the great poet, Homer, are filled with words that not only survive in Albanian but continue to be used. From Homer, you can get not only words but also phrases that possess all the signs of a typical Albanian expression. If someone were to interpret Homer from the Albanian language perspective, much light would be shed on the works of that famous poet. Between Homeric and Albanian sentences, there is a striking resemblance in expression, phraseology, and sentence structure. A study of this nature would help interpret Homer, since the Albanian language is older than that of Greece (Science Magazine 2023), much can be learned about the influence of this [Albanian] on Homeric and later Greek. Title: Unconquerable Albania Author : Christ Anton Lepon Publisher: Chicago, Albanian Liberation Committee, 1944 Zeus was a Pelasgian, not a Helen. After Illyad the language of Gods was Gheg - North Albanian Dialect. (Herodotus)

Really curious to know where the C.S.Lewis passage on the Iliad can be found (which he talks about in 6:15) - I have tried to find it but haven't been able to

First, I'll say I'm very impressed by the people you've interviewed on your channel: Barry Strauss and Gregory Nagy as well as Robin Lane Fox. That right there is an all-star line-up (even though I have my issues with Gregory Nagy's evolutionary model). This was a quite illuminating video. A few points: I also have the impression that the Iliad being composed using writing as tool is the current consensus. Caroline Alexander makes a good argument for this, which my own experience supports. Further, although this has not been sufficiently remarked (or remarked at all?): as an Ionian Greek, Homer must have known the Anatolian (Trojan) versions of the legend; his audience, which included Ionian Greeks, Greco-Anatolians, and Anatolians, would have also known them. This probably accounts for much of the knowledge of Troy and the Trojans' portrayal in the Iliad. Homer may have visited the site of Troy, as Robin says, but what is more important is that the Anatolian versions of the legend would almost certainly been written (in Luwian). Even if Homer could not read them (likely?), he would have had access to them through his Anatolia colleagues. So while the comments about "composition in performance" are well-taken, it seems likely that Homer was aware of written versions of the legend and could have appreciated the utility of writing to compose an epic, allowing him to address his subject in a new way, which does not conform to the modes of songs/poems that are composed just orally (the methods would have been combined). So the Iliad, while composed to be presented orally , I think can be said to the be the birth of Western literature because it was literature and has been recognized as such ever since. I was also very glad to hear Robin emphatically defends that Homer, whoever he was, was a singular genius. Works such as the Iliad are not composed by "committee" -- that is, not by an organic process taking centuries. The examples presented in defense of that "evolutionary" view (including those be Gregory Nagy) are not the Iliad, and are not much like the Iliad. I wish there had been more time to hear his thoughts on Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad, as I'm about to read it. I loved Caroline Alexander's and while I liked Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, I think she has a high bar to clear. Robin's comment about her mistranslation of "rage" is telling. I've understood the word used to mean "supernatural rage" or "rage of the gods" as opposed to the rage of mortals. It would have nice to hear more of his thoughts on that (I found some of Emily Wilson's word choice in the Odyssey unsatisfying -- calling Odysseus a "complex man" doesn't really cut it -- although I like other things she's written about, especially in regards to some of the more misogynistic phraseology that has been put in, when the ancient Greek would seem to say something else). I was also glad to hear Robin's comments on Homer's use of "flashbacks". That's very instructive since not only does it happen with Helen, but also when Hector chews out Paris and Paris go out to fight Menelaus. We know Helen has been in Troy for 20 years -- Hector certainly did not wait 19+ years to get snippy with his "little brother" over the whole affair, and a duel of over Helen should have happened at the start of the war, not near the end of it. Homer apparently inserted these "flashbacks" because they are crucial to the story and could not be left out of his vignetted version. I don't think I quite agree with Robin about what Zeus was thinking when Thetis prevailed upon him -- it wasn't any "stinger"; that view depends on our current understanding of the legend, which my research suggests was not Homer's understanding. Rather, he was thinking (more prosaically) of how pissed Hera was going to be and how that was likely going to blow back on him (which it did). Lastly, C.S. Lewis' phrase "ruthless poignancy" is the best description of Homer and the Iliad I've heard. I hadn't heard it before and I'm glad I now have! Thank you for the video!

The best "war" books (or films) contain a deeply anti-war message. (Think "All Quiet on the Western Front").

I haven’t read the Iliad yet (bad I know but I just have sooo much on my TBR!), so I’m interested to know whether I should read The Iliad first, before reading Robin’s book?

Alexander the Great read the exact same words 2,300 years ago.

Homer hi who's not plaint check whot means omiros in greek

Oh man i got to make genetics haplogroup video about greek macedonians and macedonians who are autosmal the same people just to shut up that scammer

Who is this pseudo historian sayin Macedonia is greece hahahah