Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
A Little Iliad
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Troy
a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Who, contemplating the vast catalog of vanished works of literature from the ancient world, really regrets the lost epics about the Trojan War known as the Cypria and the Little Iliad? To have just one more complete poem by Sappho (bringing the grand total to two); to have any of the seventy-five lost plays of Aeschylus, the 116 by Sophocles, the seventy by Euripides; to recover Ovid's lost Medea, or even a single one of the much-admired love elegies of Vergil's friend Cornelius Gallus, which once comprised four whole books and of which a single line now survives; to have the crucial missing books of Tacitus' Annals—for any one of these, there is very little that even the most upstanding classicist wouldn't do. Any one of them, after all, would add immeasurably to our understanding of classical civilization; any one of them would, indeed, add unimaginably to the treasure house of world literature.
Review, 4954 words
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