Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FX
In The Iliad, war is a game marked by fate and fury. Writing of the epic’s fall in “Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange,” Karl Marx asks, “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is The Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press bar the singing and the telling and the muse cease, that is the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?”
Episode five…
