The Iliad

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This episode of Hope is Kindled has been a long time coming—and one of the most difficult to prepare. How do you begin to approach a work as vast and formidable as Homer’s Iliad? Its sheer weight can feel overwhelming: an epic of rage, honor, grief, and mortality that has shaped our collective imagination for nearly three thousand years. Homer’s voice set the foundations of Western literature, echoing through Virgil and Shakespeare, through countless adaptations, and even into modern storytelling. To sit with this poem is to sit with the roots of so much that came after.

And yet, for all its magnitude, The Iliad is also strangely human. It’s a poem where warriors weep, where fathers mourn sons, where rage burns but compassion still flickers. It is also, at times, wryly funny—because the gods simply can’t keep their snoots out of anything. Hera meddling, Athena whispering in ears, Aphrodite dragging Paris off the battlefield—it all begins to feel less like lofty myth and more like a family reunion gone wrong. Even in tragedy, Homer knew how to show us that the divine is sometimes just as absurd as the human.

So no, this episode doesn’t try to “conquer” Homer. Instead, it’s about listening for the heartbeat beneath the battles, about asking that ever-present question: Where is the hope? From Achilles’ grief and Hector’s nobility to Helen’s lament and Priam’s courage, we find that even in a story of war, there is honor, love, resilience, and the enduring search for meaning. Come laugh at the meddling gods, reflect on fate and glory, and discover how The Iliad still speaks to our lives today.

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