A divinely beautiful woman who becomes the cause of a terrible war in which the gods themselves take sides. Valor and villainy, sacrifices and betrayals, triumphs and tragedies play their part in this three thousand year old saga.
The Iliad throws us right into the thick of battle. It opens when the Trojan War has already been raging for nine long years. An uneasy truce has been declared between the Trojans and the Greeks (Achaeans as they're called in The Iliad.) In the Greek camp, Agamemnon the King of Mycenae and Achilles the proud and valiant warrior of Phthia are locked in a fierce contest to claim the spoils of war. The gods in Olympus watch horrified as t...
Krasavitse, Kotoraya Niuhala Tabak (To a Beautiful woman, Who Was Smelling Tobacco)is a small poem written by Alexander Pushkin, a famous Russian poet well known outside the Russia. The author describes in a fun and artistc way the conflict between an image inside of his head of the beautiful and lovely women on the one hand, and her action – smelling tobacco – on the other hand! Can anyone imagine two more incompatible things than a clean and bright woman and a dirty toy of alcoholics and sailors – tobacco! This conflict hit the author straight into his heart, so he couldn’t ignore it and wrote this amazing poem upon such a revelational theme.
The Aeneid is a Latin epic written by Virgil in the 1st century BC that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. The first six of the poem’s twelve books tell the story of Aeneas’ wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem’s second half treats the Trojans’ ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed. The poem was commissioned from Vergil by the Emperor Augustus to glorify Rome. Several critics think that the hero Aeneas’ abandonment of the Cartheginian Queen Dido, is meant as a statement of how Augustus’ enemy, Mark Anthony, should have be...