Seth L. Schein is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of seven previous books, including The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad (1984), Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays (1996; edited), and Homeric Epic and its Reception: Interpretive Essays (2016). He has also edited Homer, Iliad: Book I (2022) and Sophocles: Philoctetes (2013) for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.