Hollywood Help Wanted: Classicists With Style

"They need to know, for example, that 'Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles ' is the opening of 'The Iliad,' even if they choose to reject it for being too poetic and oblique. In 'Troy,' the line the screenwriter David Benioff came up with instead - Odysseus, speaking in voice-over: 'Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity' - is an exquisite specimen of contemporary popspeak, so overpowering in its empty profundity that virtually everyone can pretend to understand it."