Original translations of famous words from Ancient Greece and Rome
In this second of three classes on the Trojan War we move from the general background of the war to the conflict itself. We will cover the general events before the war as episodes–the gathering of the armies, the becalming at Aulis, the battle before Mysia–but we will spend the bulk of the class discussing … More Classical Mythology, Day 16
In this first class of three on the Trojan War narrative, we focus on establishing historical and mythical backgrounds for Trojan War myths with special attention on the sources that provide ‘the whole story’. While our best evidence for the Trojan War comes from the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, these epics actually only cover short periods … More Classical Mythology, Day 15
In this class we continue with our discussion of coalition narratives in the development of heroic myth. We start by focusing on destruction myths, a topic usually treated separately from heroic myth but treated here because at many places in the epic tradition the end of the race of Heroes is positioned as the destruction … More Classical Mythology Class, Day 14
The ‘heroic’ narratives explored in today’s class are united thematically in their use of ‘coalitions’ of heroes to meet the challenges of the world. From the perspective of cosmic history, this moves us away from a pre-political world in which heroes simply make the world safe for human beings by killing the dangerous parts of … More Classical Mythology Class, Day 13
In this class we return to individual heroes, Bellerophon and Theseus. These narratives return us to a more traditional heroic narrative with important developments. Bellerophon in particular invites us to think about the “hero’s fall” while Theseus offers the model of hero as law-maker and civilizing force. Both heroes also ask us to reflect more … More Classical Mythology, Day 12
This class takes a break from considering single heroes to take a multi-generational view of one family. Such a view can help us to understand (1) how motifs and stages from the so-called heroic pattern can be recycled from one generation to the next and how (2) the Greeks integrate a theme of ‘ritual pollution’ … More Classical Mythology Class, Day 11
In this class we move from the exceptional figures who follow the heroic pattern and receive immortality to the more ‘classic’ heroes who go through challenges, overcome them, and then live mortal lives. The narratives of Perseus and Oedipus exhibit two shared patterns: both are ‘exiled’ from their proper social positions because of prophecies and … More Classical Mythology, Day 10
This is our second class to examine the narrative patterns and cultural effects of the ‘hero’. In the first class, we take a broad overview of a range of interpretive approaches to what we will call the heroic pattern and discuss some problems presented by this pattern (primarily its limited view of human life and … More Classical Mythology, Day 9
In this class we continue a tour through cosmic history and land in our next stage, the race of ‘heroes’. As we will talk about in class, the word hero when used in the study of myth means several different things apart from the modern connotation. It points to a specific generation of people after the … More Classical Mythology, Day 8
In this class we consider two broad themes: the creation of human beings and the misogynistic heritage of stories about the bifurcation of the human race into two genders. In the first discussion, we will consider the multiform tales of the creation of human beings in the Greek tradition in comparison to tales from the … More Classical Mythology, Day 7
Classical Mythology 