IMAGING THE ILIAD: A DIGITAL RENAISSANCE
60 minutes.

The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about Achilles and the Trojan War, is the center of this story about an international team of Classicists and Scientists who work together using state-of-the-art technologies focused on revealing the mysteries of the Venetus A, the oldest existing complete text of the Homeric Iliad.
Meticulously crafted in Byzantium, the Venetus A has been stored for 500 years in the Marciana Library in Venice, Italy. Its thousand-year-old pages contain handwritten notes recording a tradition of scholarship going back to the Ptolemaic scholars of the second century BCE. Two thousand years after the start of that tradition, technology brings scholars and lovers of Homer a new opportunity to rediscover the intricacies of this precious manuscript. The interdisciplinary research team struggles to reconcile old and new and overcome technical challenges as they press toward the goal of preserving for all time one of the most valuable artifacts of the Byzantine Empire.

The researchers in this documentary are from the University of Houston (Houston, TX), College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA), Furman University (Greenville, SC), Brandeis University (Waltham, MA), the University of Kentucky, and London, England. The dream of saving and making available the treasures of Hellenic civilization is now at last coming to fruition in the digital age. It all comes together at the Marciana Library in Venice, a city that has been at the crossroads between the cultural traditions of East and West since the Middle Ages.