Students read The Iliad, The Odyssey and other examples of epic poetry about heroes and gods that are part of an oral tradition. The oldest narratives in the western tradition have been powerfully influential on literary and historical genres and continue to move readers as different as contemplatives wishing to know the roots of their intellectual heritage, poets and writers tackling the journey as an adventure of the human spirit, and soldier traumatized by their experiences in war and return.  Students engage these poems from all perspectives, while also studying the nature of an oral tradition: what does it means to say a poem is "oral" and "traditional"? What are the poetics of oral poetry: how is it composed and what makes the poet's job easy or hard?

Students begin with the Epic of Gilgamesh, a narrative known from the Near East and the oldest known construction of the mortal hero in Western civilization. This epic introduces major themes that preoccupy work throughout the semester, especially the relationship of the mortal hero and the gods and to death, and the hero and his companion. We then read four short Greek narratives, Hesiod’s Theogony and the Homeric Hymns to Demeter, to Hermes and to Apollo, as an introduction to the archaic understanding of immortality and to fundamental narrative structures, especially anger, mourning, and withdrawal, and the journey and return. In turning to The Iliad and The Odyssey, students consider a fundamental dichotomy: the poetics and the trauma both of a “beautiful death,” which permeate the Iliad, and of return, which infuse the Odyssey. Why must violence, both physical and psychic, undergird great heroic poetry? Students read the Iliad with the focus upon its representation of good and bad leadership, and on the individual quest for immortal glory. Achilles as the pattern for Western heroism stands in sharp contrast to other great heroes whose leadership and heroism provide a counterpoint to him. We consider the poem’s representation of the enemy, which has had a profound impact on Western narratives, and students also reflect on the Iliad as an inspiration for recent generations of war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress, who have found the poem’s meditation on violence and duty a source of comfort and challenge. 

In reading the Odyssey, students confront the poetics, the trauma and the inevitable violence of returning home. Through the theme of hospitality, students studying contrasting patterns of restored households amidst others, especially that of the long-absent Odysseus, that are broken and chaotic. Within this heroic world, so very different from that of the Iliad, we also hear the dangerous voices of women in a man’s world. Once again, students find, as they finish reading the Odyssey that they must once again confront overwhelming violence, and we ask to what degree this violent quality to Homeric heroism is a function of its archaic Greek context and to what degree it speaks to something more universal.

As both epics are read, students continue to examine their technical features in order to understand what it means to say that a text has originated in an oral tradition, especially the epic simile, the type scene, the brilliant flexibility and economy of the Homeric formula within the dactylic hexameter.

In closing the students reading two tragedies of Sophocles, the fifth-century Athenian playwright, Ajax and Philoctetes. These plays dramatize the suffering of heroes who are in some sense abandoned by their fellow warriors and are forced to come to terms with a (heroic) world in which they can no longer live. Sophocles’ plays dramatize the violence and alienation that classicists have recently begun to study in the archaic epic themselves, and the plays are now performed in a collaboration of war veterans and actors across the country. This phenomenon invites students to consider how the ancient epics speak to later generations. At the same time, since Odysseus is a character in both plays, but with a very different representation in each, students can consider how later generations begin and adapt ancient patterns of heroism.