“Where do the old gods go?”

There is a lonesome wail bellowing from within the Oriental Institute’s dark and cavernous Mesopotamia Gallery. Surrounded on two sides by the carved wall reliefs from an Assyrian palace and casting shadows across the imposing winged bull in the Khorsabad Court, you first hear Timothy Edward Kane as The Poet, singing a haunting song of war. As “An Iliad” written by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from a translation by Robert Fagles begins, the storyteller finds himself very much in the present, compelled by the gods to repeat the story of the Trojan War—that raged nine years with “nothing to show for it but exhaustion, poverty, and loneliness”—and recount the heroic exploits of its two great fighters—Achilles and Hector.