Homer and the Civil War

The following video features the reading of a letter that a U-M alumnus, Capt. William Wirt Wheeler of the 6th Michigan Volunteers, wrote to his former professor of Greek, James Robinson Boise, on 29 September 1862. While in a camp near New Orleans, Wheeler wrote that he “was able to save from the flames of a gentleman’s library a copy of the Odyssea and another of the Iliad” and that he was sending these two volumes to Professor Boise as a “very small tribute of respectful remembrance from a former pupil who had need of all your indulgence blundering through his Greek at college.” The books in question are seventeenth-century editions of each of the poems, currently held at the Special Collections Library. Capt. Wheeler's letter was found inside the copy of the Iliad.