The Homer Encyclopedia

[Ailene Goldhirsh]

Ilove YouTube. It has some funny videos and also has just plain old stupid videos but it also has a weird side. One day I was browsing YouTube looking for any videos to watch and I found a video called "Simpson Homer". I thought it was one of those videos with Simpson clips in it so I clicked on it.

The video started with a picture of Homer staring at the screen. The background was gray and Homer's eyes had no pupils and he was frowning. Then the audio started. The audio was a sound of somebody laughing, but reversed. Then homer said without opening his mouth, "Hello Hello hello hello hello." I started to get confused. I moved my mouse to pause the video, but then a high pitch sound came out of my speakers. I covered my ears and it cut to the Simpsons' house. The house looked abandoned and had scratch marks everywhere.

It then showed Bart who was outside of the house. He looked like he was annoyed, then text appeared that said "you are a mistake." Then it cut to something I will never forget. It showed Homer who had his arms chopped off, his legs were also chopped off, and he was screaming. Then a deep scratchy voice said "He died because you clicked on the video." Then the person who was laughing at Homer showed up, and looked like a normal live-action man inserted in the video. He said in a deep voice "I was the one who killed him."

Then it showed Lisa who was walking on the sidewalk. She had a blank look. Then she stopped at the house and went inside. Then the video cut to black and played the sound of Bart laughing and Lisa screaming. It then cut to Bart moving towards the screen and when he was close to the screen, he said in the deep scratchy voice, "Anyone who watched this video will know what I did."

Then the video ended and I thought to myself, "What was that?!" I noticed it was close to 10 PM and went to bed. The next morning, I got up and logged onto my computer. I went onto YouTube and I saw a video called BART_SIMPSON in my recommend section. I clicked on it. It started with Bart walking towards Krusty Land. He went towards Krusty the clown, who said, "Hey kiddo!" Bart then walked towards him and it cut to black and Bart said "Goodbye stupid clown!" The video ended and as I shut off my computer, I heard a deep voice behind me say "Hello."

It was the man from the video. He asked me, "Do you know what I did?" and I said "No." He looked sad, and stared at me for five minutes. Maybe he was trying to figure out if I was lying, but I wasn't. In the end, he sighed, walked out of my line of sight, and disappeared. I don't know what that was about, but I've never seen either of those videos or that man again.

Below are links to the Blackwell and Wiley online encyclopedia titles that we own on humanities and social sciences topics followed by the year of publication. An open year (2015- ) indicates an encyclopedia with a continuing subscription to new articles and article updates.

In Greek mythology, Achilles was the strongest, swiftest, and most competent of the Greek heroes who fought in the Trojan War. He was the son of the nymph Thetis, who dipped him as an infant into the River Styx and thus made every part of his body invulnerable--except the heel by which she held him. Knowing that Achilles would die at Troy, Thetis sought to prevent his going by hiding him among the women of the court of King Lycomedes. He was found there by Odysseus, however, and persuaded to join the Greek army before Troy.

According to Homer's Iliad, in the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles withdrew from the fighting after Agamemnon seized Briseis, his favorite slave girl. He sulked in his tent until the death of his close friend Patroclus stirred him to return to battle. The smith-god Hephaestus forged him a fine set of arms, including a famous shield on which was depicted the whole range of the human condition. Thus equipped, he avenged Patroclus's death in a celebrated duel with the great Trojan hero Hector. After dragging Hector's body seven times around the walls of Troy behind his chariot, Achilles was persuaded to allow the slain Trojan hero a proper funeral.

In Greek mythology, Agamemnon, a son of ATREUS, was the commander in chief of the Greeks in the Trojan War. He was the king of Mycenae and a brother of Menelaus, whose kidnapped wife, Helen of Troy, was the immediate cause of the conflict. On his way to Troy, Agamemnon agreed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to ensure a fair wind for his ships. Upon Agamemnon's return from the war, his wife Clytemnestra, who had betrayed him with Aegisthus, resolved to avenge her daughter's sacrifice. When her husband was at ease in the bath, she and her lover murdered him. Agamemnon's death was later avenged by his son Orestes. These tragic events are the subject of a trilogy, the Oresteia, written by the 5th-century BC dramatist Aeschylus. [s.v. “Agamemnon,” C. Scott Littleton The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, (Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. 1993).]

The legendary Palamedes was the subject of several lost tragedies. Gorgias…wrote an Apology [`Defense'] of Palamedes which has been compared to the Apology of Socrates. Palamedes' famous cleverness brought him into conflict with Odysseus, either because Odysseus was jealous of him or because Palamedes shrewdly foiled Odysseus' scheme to avoid serving in the Trojan War. (The story has several variants.) Odysseus implicated Palamedes in a plot to betray the Greeks to the Trojans, and Palamedes was stoned to death by the army. Ajax, one of the foremost Greek warriors at Troy, was outwitted and tricked by Odysseus in a contest over the arms of Achilles, which had been set for a prize after Achilles' death. Odysseus apparently won the contest by some underhanded device. Ajax sought to avenge the defeat by killing Odysseus and Agamemnon, but instead, in a fit of madness visited on him by the goddess Athena, he slaughtered a flock of sheep. When he came to his senses, Ajax committed suicide from shame and humiliation. (Odyssey XI.541-562; Sophocles, Ajax.) [Plato and Aristophanes, Four Texts on Socrates, translated with notes by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, introduction by Thomas G. West (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), n. 82, p. 96].

Socrates refers obliquely to the claim that several of his students later became prominent in anti-democratic politics. According to Xenophon, Socrates' alleged corruption of Alcibiades and Critias was a leading concern of his prosecutors [(Memorabilia I.2.12-48]. This claim probably could not be raised explicitly because the amnesty of 403, proclaimed when the democracy was reestablished, prohibited prosecutions for crimes committed before that date.

Alcibiades, a brilliant and ambitious man who had associated with Socrates as a youth, was involved in several scandalous actions that contributed to popular suspicion of Socrates. On the night before an Athenian naval expedition departed on its disastrous attempt to conquer Sicily (415), many of the statues of Hermes in Athens were mutilated. As the investigation of this incident proceeded, it was alleged or discovered that certain wealthy and educated men had privately made mockery of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a venerable Athenian rite whose details were supposed to be kept secret from all except those formally initiated. The people of Athens feared that these incidents portended a conspiracy against the democracy and evil for the Sicilian venture. Among those implicated in the profanation of the Mysteries was Alcibiades, who had meanwhile departed for Sicily as one of the commanders chosen by the Athenians for the expedition. His political enemies arranged for him to be tried in absentia for impiety, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. Alcibiades then fled to Sparta, where he successfully aided the Spartans in their war efforts against Athens. He was permitted to return to Athens for a short period later in the war, after he had changed sides again and won several naval victories for the Athenians. However, soon afterwards, suspected of anti-democratic intrigue, he was exiled for the last time. In sum, Alcibiades was said to be “the most unrestrained and hubristic and violent of all those in the democracy” (Memorabilia I.2.12).

analogy n. [pl. analogies(-jis)], [Fr. analogie; L. analogia; Gr. analogia, proportion“Anytus was one of the most powerful democratic politicians, a leader int he fight against the Thirty, and Plato represents him in the Meno as abusing the Sophists and uttering dark hints of what the city might do to Socrates himself. His objections to Socrates's behaviour will have been largely political, but to bring political charges against him, or mention his earlier associations with Critias or Charmides, would have been contrary to the amnesty declared by the restored democracy, to which Anytus was conspicuously loyal. The accusation therefore confined itself to offences against the state religion and the vaguely worded `corruption of youth'. [W. K. C. Gutherie, Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 61-2].

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