Dear Mythologists,
On Wednesday, September 25, we begin to explore heroism as articulated in the
Iliad of Homer, our oldest surviving work of literature from the ancient world. As I noted in class, the story of the Trojan War is one of the largest clusters of Greek myth, and it would in theory require many works the size of the
Iliad to tell the whole thing, from origins to the war itself to the aftermath.
Homer solves that problem by directing our attention to a series of events during a few significant weeks in the tenth year of Trojan War, primarily an argument between the Greek warriors Agamemnon and Achilles. So long as the argument persists, the poem continues. When it is resolved, the poem begins to end.
Please do the following:
(1) Watch the following suite of Classical world videos for background on Homer, his methods, and the Trojan War:
(2) Read the Apollodorus handout on the Trojan War, distributed in class today, in order to appreciate the hugeness of this event within the corpus of Greek myth. Note that A. includes a handy summary of Homer's epic, a kind of ancient SparkNotes: useful as it might be, it is NOT a substitute for reading the actual
Iliad.
(3) Read books 1, 3, and 5 of the
Iliad (use your Apollodorus to fill in the gaps).
(4) Finally, bear the following questions in mind as you peruse this material:
- What was the cause of the Trojan War? Is this an easy question to answer? Why or why not?
- How does Homer remind us that he is making myth in the Iliad?
- What principles guide Homeric notions of heroism?
- Are you entertained by this poem about war? Why or why not?
DC
