I recently read a poem about a fearsome warrior who brought a decade-old war away from city walls to a nearby riverbank. As the waters began to glut with bodies, the god that possessed it became enraged. Taking revenge for the damage humans had done to the great river, he almost drowned the warrior.
Trudging back through the city, corpses and discarded weapons all around him, the warrior was humbled. Acknowledging the error of his ways, he had learned that the forces of nature are inviolable and ultimately superior to the whims of man.
The story wasn’t a modern allegory for protecting our climate from the perils of human greed. It was part of Homer’s Iliad, written some 3,000 years ago. For Dr Wayne Rimmer, who has researched the epic poem and now works to make it as accessible as possible for modern readers, the scene offers a way to interpret Homer’s heroes as eco-warriors battling to protect nature from mutilation by man.
Read more: The heroes of Homer's Iliad are eco-warriors battling to protect nature
He’s written about this fresh perspective for the first instalment of a new series from The Conversation. Rethinking the Classics takes works of the literary and artistic canon that many of us first learned about in school, and offers a new way to understand them.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, becomes an allegory for the folly of human exceptionalism. The story of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses gets a post-Me-Too update. And Picasso’s famous depiction of the Guernica bombing is read as a comic strip.
Read more: Reading Picasso's Guernica like a comic strip offers a new way to understand the story it is telling
In the west, the writers and artists considered “classics” are almost always white, western and economically privileged. So, our Rethinking the Classics series also goes beyond the canon, to recommend artists and writers who haven’t received such acclaim, but speak to similar themes.
If you enjoyed E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, for example, you may also enjoy Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand. Love the paintings of James McNeill Whistler? You’ll likely delight in work of Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Čiurlionis.
Read more: A Passage to India: how global pandemics shaped E.M. Forster’s final novel
We hope that the stories in this series will bring you new and colourful ways to enjoy some of history’s greatest works of art and literature, and inspire you to bring your own interpretations to the stories you learned during your schooldays. This is the canon – with a twist.
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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
