An incredibly ambitious book-length poem taking on the modern problem of war. The poem's great achievement is that it situates today's world not as a golden age, but as one notable for its harshness and brutality. Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid allow readers, two and a half millennia later, to experience the complexities and traditions of the ancient world, and so La Riche allows today's readers to observe and judge contemporary events and humankind's relationship to war.