Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox

In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are. One of them, however, has always inspired a faint measure of perplexity. Describing the impact of the Greek troops’ feet on the earth, Homer compares it to ‘the anger of Zeus who delights in thunder, whenever he lashes the ground around Typhoeus in Arima…’ Zeus, of course, was the king of the gods, and Typhoeus his deadliest rival, a colossal and snake-headed monster — but what or where was Arima? ‘Even the ancients,’ as Robin Lane Fox puts it in his new book, ‘were uncertain.’

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Julie Burchill

Neil Gaiman and the misogyny of the geeks

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