Read the Classics: Greece and Rome

Printable Read the Classics: Greece and Rome flyer (pdf)

Meet your professor

Walter Englert is the Hoskins Professor of Classical Studies at Reed College, where he has taught since 1981. He received his MA at UC Santa Barbara, and Ph.D. at Stanford University. He has also taught at the Univ. of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy. He has published on Greek and Roman philosophy and oratory, and translated Lucretius' epic poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), into English. He teaches Homer, Virgil, and Ovid regularly in his Classics and Humanities courses at Reed College.

Overview

Ancient Greek and Roman Epic

Epic poetry is the earliest Greek and Roman literature. It has its origins in songs chanted thousands of years ago by bards at festivals and in the halls of the great nobles in ancient Greece. These bards passed on stories and myths of the legendary heroes and heroines of an earlier age, shaping the tales for their contemporary audience. Epic poetry functioned as a kind of cultural memory for Greece in a time before the widespread use of writing, passing down stories in oral form from generation to generation.

From the beginning, Greek epic poetry addressed some of the most important issues facing human beings: Where did we come from? What are the gods like? Why do the gods act the way they do, and how should we act in response? Why is there war? What were the great heroes and heroines of long ago like, and how do their actions relate to actions in my own life? Why is there suffering and death in the world? What makes human life worth living? What is the nature of happiness?

As Greek epic poems were told and retold, they were constantly refashioned until they reached a form that was particularly effective and memorable. At some point between 800–650 BC two of these epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, took final shape, and were written down. Exactly how this process happened is uncertain, but ancient Greeks later gave the name Homer to the author of the two epics. We know nothing about who Homer was. We are even unsure a single author named "Homer" ever existed, but according to Greek tradition he was a blind bard who had recited his poems while others wrote them down. The Iliad and The Odyssey were influential in ancient Greece, and performed and read throughout antiquity. All ancient Greeks knew the poems and often memorized large portions of them by heart. They were so influential that they transcended Greek culture, influencing Roman authors like Virgil and Ovid who wrote in Latin many centuries later.

Homer's The Iliad

The Iliad (ca. 800 B.C.) is a stunning and powerful poem. Set in the final year of the Trojan War, it tells the story of the wrath of the great Greek hero Achilles and its terrible consequences for the Greeks and Trojans. It features the great heroes of Greek myth, including King Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Ajax on the Greek side, and Hector, King Priam, Queen Hecuba, Paris, and Helen of Troy on the Trojan side. The story begins with an argument between Achilles and King Agamemnon that results in Achilles withdrawing in anger from the fighting, and then follows the terrible outcome of this decision through the violence and deaths of warriors on both sides. Played out against the background of the tragic fall of Troy and Achilles' own imminent death, it raises issues of honor, courage, rage, the nature of forgiveness, and ultimately, the meaning of life in the face of death. It is an unforgettable poem.

Professor Englert's Iliad page Homeric Geography, timeline, outline of the Iliad, English and Greek texts of the Iliad for word searching, Homer and art, archaeological sites of interest to the Iliad, and some commonly asked questions when reading the Iliad for the first time.

Homer's The Odyssey

The Odyssey (ca. 800 B.C.) is the tale of what happens to a great hero, Odysseus, after the apocalypse of Troy. The poem opens 10 years after the end of the war, when Odysseus is still trying to find his way home to Ithaca. The story shifts back and forth between Odysseus being cast adrift at sea, facing mythic dangers beyond measure, and the efforts of his wife Penelope and son Telemachus to ward off violent suitors and keep their home together until Odysseus' return. Eventually Odysseus returns home in the guise of a beggar, and plots the deaths of the suitors who are destroying his house. The poem portrays a world very different from that of the Iliad, and a hero, Odysseus, who is very different than Achilles. The Odyssey focuses more on issues of cunning intelligence, justice, endurance, home, and family. It is the perfect counterpart to the Iliad, both reflecting and criticizing the values portrayed in the other poem.

Virgil's The Aeneid

With Virgil's The Aeneid (29?–19 B.C.) we move to the epic of another world. Virgil was a poet who lived in ancient Rome in the first century BC, about 700 hundred years after Homer. When he wrote, Rome had conquered most of the Mediterranean world, including Greece, but had nearly imploded in a series of bloody civil wars under the strain. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, was just beginning to stabilize the Roman Empire when Virgil wrote his poem. The Aeneid goes back to the time of the Trojan War, but takes a very different perspective than Homer had. It tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped from Troy as it fell to the Greeks, led a group of Trojans to the Italian peninsula, and with them founded a city that would, centuries later, lead to the founding of Rome. Virgil, writing in Latin, adapted Homeric Greek epic to explore crucial issues facing Romans of his time. He uses the figure of Aeneas to explore a conception of heroism different than Homer's, and to explore the themes of civilization, violence, and humanitas, a word coined by the Romans of Virgil's time to capture the qualities most essential to being deeply human and humane. He also uses the epic to help his readers reflect on what it means to be Roman.

Ovid's The Metamorphoses

Ovid, writing at Rome only a generation after Virgil, creates an epic world entirely different from his predecessors. The Metamorphoses or "Transformations" (8 A.D.) is an epic that is truly "epic" in scope, beginning with the creation of the universe and ending with the world of contemporary Rome. It is composed of a series of stories, Greek and Roman myths that Ovid shapes and weaves together into a continuous history of gods and humans. As the title announces, the central theme is one of constant change, and we see gods and humans amazingly transformed from one shape to another. The poem recasts and preserves most of the major Greek and Roman myths that are familiar to us, often in surprising ways. Ovid was known for his wit and cleverness, and in the poem he explores the nature of love, power, change, deception, the nature of art, and personal identity. He, like Virgil, also explores what it means to be Roman, but in a much more subversive way. Ovid's poetry was seen as so subversive, in fact, that the emperor Augustus exiled him to the town of Tomis on the Black Sea, where he continued to write, never to return to his beloved Rome

Suggested readings

Made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities Fund of The Library Foundation.

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