For love of Ajax
Nine words, three sentences, and you see Ajax before you and how he is seen by thousands of Greek soldiers....
To charm, to change …
Odysseus is a tricky hero, part noble, upstanding and brave, part slippery, trickery, too-clever-by-half. He is a compelling orator, and...
The icy scabs of the earth
A depiction of the north and south ice caps, as 'icy scabs at either end of the earth'. And then...
Solti’s stick
In a tick, you are taken from ancient Troy to a contemporary concert hall, and the magical, electrifying instant when...
Tar-dark hair
A surprising rendition of blackness, until you think of pitch-black. And here is Zeus again having to balance the requests...
From Troy to Chicago
Some of the Greek warriors occasionally behave like gangsters, so I liked this 1920s image of a gangster in a...
As quiet as…
Elsewhere Logue uses light as the simile for silence – ‘as quiet as air’ – but I also loved this...
Lake-eyed queen
Beautiful description of the limpid, seductive eyes of the gorgeous-ghastly goddess Hera, wife of God, with whom she tussles and...
Zeus dispenses with practicalities
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene's requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their...
Stunt-hoop tambourines
The timbre and beat of martial music as the Greek states gather behind Agamemnon for an almighty war.
‘Immediately
...
As quiet as…
Christopher Logue’s vivid, muscular version of some episodes in the Iliad abounds with striking metaphors – I noted about 60...
Sunlight like birds
This conveys the distant wink and sparkle of sun glancing off a choppy sea surface and appearing, at a distance,...
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