I might be slightly biased, as the author is my uncle and I love the ancient epics. Mills threads the depiction of watery chaos in epic narratives and modern ideas about chaos theory, entropy and fractal geometry. The bottom line is that, throughout our history, man has been trying to make sense of the chaos in the universe around him. What we learn from reading ancient heroic texts is that the liminal nature of man, stuck between cosmos and chaos, or the sacred and the profane, cannot be reconciled. Man cannot explain the ways of God. But we are compelled to try, and these attempts provide important insights into the patterns found in the way we interact with the chaos. My own example involves Poseidon's punishment of the Phaeaicians for assisting Odysseus; they were merely following the divine law of xenia. What the ancients learned is that, regardless of how many sacrifices are made or how strictly one adheres to divine law, the gods are often capricious and their actions unjust. Poseidon's revenge can be explained by the butterfly effect - Odysseus' blinding of Polyphemus years before leads to the destruction of the Phaecian seaport. Two seemingly unrelated events, but woven together in the pattern of the narrative. ( )