The Mozart of Polemicists

Homer’s masterpiece, The Iliad, begins with these portentous lines that I used to make my students in a Greek class translate:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

:οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκεν,

(Sing, oh goddess, of the destructive anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought grief to tens of thousands of Achaeans.)

The implacable wrath of the semi-divine Achilles drives Homer’s ancient narrative; and among the consequences of Achilles’s anger, according to this epic, is “dragging...