Week Three

Homer, The Odyssey

How are gods and humans alike?

What is fate?

How much power do we have over our lives?

The fountainhead of the classical (Greek and Roman) literary cultures are the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems in dactylic hexameter presumably fashioned from preexisting oral traditions by Homer, a blind bard writing in perhaps the late 700s B.C., soon after Greeks repurposed an alphabet taken from the Phoenicians, a Semitic seafaring people. This restored literacy to Greece after its Dark Ages, which followed upon the end of the Mycenaean palatial civilization, the first advanced Greek culture. In the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C., there was a catastrophic collapse of civilization across the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece, this meant massive depopulation, regression to village culture, breakdown of trade, and loss of literacy. It is in this timeframe that the Trojan War would presumably have occurred (the traditional dating of the sack of Troy being 1184 B.C.)

Troy was probably a city on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, thus presiding over the only sea route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and occupying a pivotal point between Europe and Asia. The Greeks may have been seeking to gain control of a crucial trading position. In any case, Homer’s poems have as their subject the Trojan War and its aftermath. The Iliad takes place during the last year of a ten-year conflict, its great themes being war, mortality, and kleos (renown or glory). The Odyssey recounts ten more years of wandering by Odysseus as he tries to reach home after the war, its great themes being the quest for knowledge and nostos (homecoming). What are the ultimate effects of the heroic honor code? What is life like after war? Both begin in medias res, in the middle of the action, with the Odyssey displaying a quite complicated narrative structure.

- David Franks