“Plutarch reports in his Life of Alexander that the Macedonian conquerer carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, which he kept under his pillow, together with a dagger; later he placed the poem in a precious casket that had been captured from the defeated Persian king Darius.”
from David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton UP, 1993)
I don’t know why exactly this blows my mind. Probably because, like, I read that, and Alexander the Great read that, and we could have chatted about it over steaming cups of tea our enemies’ blood. I think I just came to understand the point of all of my first two years of college.
