Alexander and Roxanne - The Iliad and the Dagger

According to legend, Alexander the Great kept two things under his pillow: a dagger and a copy of Homer’s Iliad. The warrior prince Achilles had been his idol since boyhood. Appian of Alexandria tells that when Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage, he quoted a line from the Iliad (“the day shall come in which our sacred Troy shall perish“, ; Punic War, 132). The Iliad was represented on works of art, found in Bactria, Egypt, or Germania Inferior. The poem was everywhere. The Iliad is hard to date, but the depicted society seems to be datable to the late eighth, early seventh century BCE, when the Greek cities started to grow and old ideas and values were no longer self-evident. The Iliad is essentially about the question what it means to be an aristocrat: one has to be a brave warrior, one has to be pious, one has to be generous, and most of all, a ’s so we’ll stand in the Lycian front ranks and meet head on the blazing fires of battle, so then some well-ar