Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Spencer Klavan, host of the classics podcast “Young Heretics,” reflects on the “Iliad,” a story about finding shared humanity in an age of great division.
If you were going to write an epic poem about American politics in 2025, you might begin with the same word that the ancient Greek poet Homer used to begin the Iliad, 2,700 years ago: rage. “Rage!” cried Homer to the goddess of inspiration, the Muse. “Sing the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus.”
Sing the rage, we might say to our own grim muse, that sent a bullet through the neck of Charlie Kirk. Sing the rage of the madmen who blamed Kirk’s death on the Jews. Sing of shootouts in schools and riots in Portland, Oregon; in Charlottesville, Virginia; in Washington, D.C.; sing of fury answering fury and no escape in sight. Sing the rage that Homer calls oulomenē: “the dealer of death.”
