Men of the Same Name

Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2026

Men of the Same Name is satirical, elegiac and memorable, bringing together lost books, burned libraries, Goethe, the lives and deaths of Presocratic philosophers, Paris, statues of Niobe, patterns in history, war, displacement, the evils of ambition, and Pachynian tuna.

What if, Jones asks, instead of using the ancient world as a metaphor for modern life, the poet uses modern life as a metaphor for the ancient world? Working in thi...