This Week in Books: My 10-Year-Old Adores<em> The Iliad</em>

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At my small liberal-arts college, the freshmen were taught on the first day to chant in ancient Greek the opening line of . A few hundred awkward new students, shifting in their lecture-hall seats, slowly belted out, “ …” This was the late 1990s, so there was little concern among us about our unabashed immersion in Western civilization: The required Humanities 110 course took us through Greece in the fall, Rome in the spring (I should add that Hum 110 at Reed College, where I went, has since become the subject of protest for its Eurocentrism, entirely). Personally, I loved the class, and that first-day ritual was indicative of the spirit of it: We chanted in unison so that we could recapture, in some small way, a sense of the communal and oral origins of the epic poem. This impulse to connect somehow with the ancient world in which was written—a violent, honor-bound society—is at the center of Graeme Wood’s of in our November issue. I’ve actually been thinking a lot lately about the attractions and limits of reentering that Homeric universe, because my 10-year-old daughter has herself become obsessed with .