Classics Commons^™

Poor, Pitiful Monsters From Homer To Borges, Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

This article reviews famous monsters in Western literature that reveal a hidden humanity or affinity with the hero that elicits compassion or emphasizes their bestiality in surprising ways. Their monstrosity is often a distorted mirror image of the hero’s humanity. Shakespeare’s Caliban is a famous example of the affinity between monster and protagonist. Homer’s Polyphemus, the first monster in Western tradition establishes certain traits that persist through later literature: lawless, barbarian, cannibal, and giant. Polyphemus hates men, but loves his old ram. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon in Beowulf are giants, lawless, cannibals. The dragon Beowulf dies fighting anticipates …

Insight Into The Community: Bee Similes In The Iliad And The Aeneid, Sara Heist

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the bee similes in Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid to demonstrate that there are significant thematic connections between the similes in the two epics. In both works, bee similes illustrate the structure of the ideal society, as a close reading of each simile reveals. This paper demonstrates that both Homeric and Virgilian bee similes focus on the concept of community. In the Iliad, Homer’s first extended simile compares the Greek forces to a colony of bees. This prominent placement foreshadows the significance of bee similes in the Homeric epic. As a Greek poet, …

Homeric Reciprocities, Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

A modified version of Marshall Sahlins’s model of reciprocity, which maps the modes of reciprocity across kinship distance, helps elucidate reciprocity in Homer. With important qualifications, Homeric reciprocity can also elucidate the social realities of Archaic Greece. There are three primary modes of Homeric reciprocity: general, or altruistic giving, balanced exchange, and negative taking. The model for general reciprocity is family relationships, and it characterizes a ruler’s relationship with the community, where it masks the reality that the upward flow of chiefly tribute exceeds the downward flow of the ruler’s largesse. Balanced reciprocity is practiced between peers within the same …

Mourning Lions And Penelope’S Revenge, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

This paper focuses on the simile comparing Penelope to a lion encircled by men in Odyssey 4.791–94. Lion similes in Homeric poetry typically depict warriors in combat situations and so the description of Penelope as a trapped predator facing battle is surprising. The encircled beast of the simile is in a dangerous situation, but the lion’s plight is left unresolved as Penelope falls asleep. Many critics note the connection between Penelope the lion and Odysseus, who is compared to the same animal on five occasions in the poem, most notably in Books 22 and 23 after he slaughters the suitors. …

The Treatment Of Women By Achilles And Agamemnon, Erica M. Cosgrove

Student Research

No abstract provided.

The Natures Of Monsters And Heroes, Vanessa Nikolovska

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Around the late eighth or early seventh century B.C., a poet, known to later ages as Homer, composed two epic poems that tell the tales of the Trojan War, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad tells the story of the rage of Achilles, the great Greek warrior, while The Odyssey tells the story of the coming home of Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, from the Trojan War. A study of both epics reveals that constructs portraying various values, such as the characteristics of heroes, have remained the same from the times of ancient Greece to the present day. …

All Shall Fade: Homer's Foreshadowing Of The End Of The Heroic Age In The Iliad, Sabrina Hardy

The Kabod

Homer's epic poems are filled with demi-gods and great heroes. However, in The Iliad, Homer undermines the triumph of these heroes by foreshadowing the end of their age and the forthcoming time of mortals. This essay examines how Achilleus' shield, Nestor's longevity, Paris' effeminate nature, and Odysseus' reliance on craftiness rather than physical prowess all indicate the rapid advance of the age of mortal men.

Theban Walls In Homeric Epic, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

Throughout the Iliad, the Greeks at Troy often refer to the wars at Thebes in their speeches, and several important warriors fighting on the Greek side at Troy also fought at Thebes and are related to Theban heroes who besieged the Boeotian city a generation earlier. The Theban wars thus stand in the shadow of the story of war at Troy, another city surrounded by walls supposed to be impregnable. In the Odyssey, the Theban connections are less central, but nevertheless significant as one of our few sources concerning the building of the Theban walls. In this essay, …

Women After War: Weaving Nostos In Homeric Epic And In The Twenty-First Century, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

While women play a circumscribed role in ancient epic, Homer's Odyssey depicts both Helen and Penelope as undergoing their own forms of homecoming, or nostos, after the Trojan War: Helen returns to her husband Menelaus after experiencing the war firsthand at Troy and a ten-year separation; Penelope stays home, but Odysseus' return is in many ways as much a challenge for her as it is for him and the Odyssey portrays her domestic ordeal as a form of heroic nostos. In this essay, I explore female ways of homecoming in the Odyssey and draw connections between Homeric heroines …

Review Of Homer In Print: A Catalogue Of The Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana At The University Of Chicago Library, Edited By Glenn W. Most And Alice Schreyer, Fred W. Jenkins

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Herakles And The Idea Of The Hero, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

The son of a divine father, Zeus, and a mortal mother, Alkmene, Herakles is often described by ancient sources as the greatest of the Greek heroes. When we think of Herakles (or Hercules, as the Romans called him) in the modern world, we remember primarily his labors, and perhaps a few other legends surrounding him, such as the one about how his supernatural strength allowed him, even as a baby, to strangle the two massive snakes sent to kill him in the cradle by the ever- jealous goddess Hera. The ancient Greeks also thought of Herakles primarily in terms of …

Grief In The Iliad, Patrick R. Stickley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper addresses the causes and effects of grief within Homer's Iliad. In addition, this paper argues that error, both committed and suffered, is the primary cause of grief, and that grief is particularly transformative in regard to Achilles, both in his motivations and his physicality.

"Go Back To Your Loom Dad": Weaving Nostos In The Twenty-First Century, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

For centuries writers and artists have adapted and transformed Homer's Odyssey in endlessly inventive and surprising ways. Yet the disposition of genders in the poem is seldom altered from its ancient pattern: a man leaves, a woman stays at home and waits until he returns. In her 2007 play, Current Nobody, Melissa Gibson departs from this conventional fidelity to the ancient narrative by rewriting the Odyssey as a twenty-first century family story with a wandering wife and a husband who is left behind. In Gibson's playful tragicomedy, Pen, a female war photographer, leaves her husband, Od, and daughter Tel …

Canonical Heroes Redefined For Postmodern Readership, Catey Bayse

Senior Theses

"The 'hero' has figured as an important archetypal construction throughout literary history that has evolved over centuries. Instead of tracing the evolution of the hero chronologically, this essay will present a postmodern reading of the hero in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Homer’s Iliad by rereading those texts through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through this retrospective reading, heroic construction comes to mean something different than it does to classicists or Romanticists. In his construction of Leopold Bloom as the everyman, modern hero, Joyce is unconcerned with physical strength, youth, honor, virtue, lineage, or glory. Rather, Joyce constructs Bloom as a hero …

Literature, The Humanities, And Humanity, Theodore L. Steinberg

Milne Open Textbooks

Literature, the Humanities, and Humanity attempts to make the study of literature more than simply another school subject that students have to take. At a time when all subjects seem to be valued only for their testability, this book tries to show the value of reading and studying literature, even earlier literature. It shows students, some of whom will themselves become teachers, that literature actually has something to say to them. Furthermore, it shows that literature is meant to be enjoyed, that, as the Roman poet Horace (and his Renaissance disciple Sir Philip Sidney) said, the functions of literature are …

The Contemporary Relevance Of The Iliad, Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

I initially balked at the request to talk about the contemporary relevance of Homeric poetry. I did so because I am of the camp that maintains great art does not need to be defended on these terms, which is to say its skill, beauty, and profundity give it all the relevance it needs to be of lasting relevance. But I do recognize that my justification, which also keeps me from studying ancient graffiti and medieval doorknockers, assumes that at some level of remove there are enduring qualities to these works that do indeed, and will always, give them contemporary relevance. …

Review Of The Iliad In A Nutshell: Visualizing Epic On The Tabulae Iliacae, By Michael Squire, Fred W. Jenkins

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Woman Trouble: True Love And Homecoming In Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (2006), Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

A meditation on the notion of return, Pedro Almodóvar's 2006 Volver focuses on the modern experience of love, memory, and identity in a manner that is at once indebted to the past and resolutely contemporary. Some films represent the ancient world directly, drawing on historical or literary sources, but many that focus on contemporary narratives can be shown to be inspired—directly or not—by ancient myths whose history is so influential that they pervade many of our notions about the human experience. In particular, insofar as Homer's poem is the foundational text in Western culture of the very idea of homecoming—or …

On Nietzsche’S Judgment Of Style And Hume’S Quixotic Taste: On The Science Of Aesthetics And ‘Playing’ The Satyr, Babette Babich

Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Introduction To The Iliad, Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

Sing of rage, Goddess, that bane of Akhilleus,Peleus' son, which caused untold pain for Akhaians,sent down throngs of powerful spirits to Aides, war-chiefs rendered the prize of dogs and everysort of bird.

Edward McCrorie’s new translation of Homer’s classic epic of the Trojan War captures the falling rhythms of a doomed Troy. McCrorie presents the sundry epithets and resonant symbols of Homer's verse style and remains as close to the Greek's meaning as research allows.

The work is an epic with a flexible contemporary feel to it, capturing the wide-ranging tempos of the original. It underscores the honor of soldiers …

Epiphany In The Homeric Hymn To Demeter And The Odyssey, Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

In the following essay I investigate the Odyssey’s sustained engagement with the theme of epiphany. Within the poem’s own narrative, the central epiphanic moment is the recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope, and it resonates powerfully with a series of other such moments throughout the poem, beginning with Athene’s epiphany to Telemakhos in Book 1. But I also hope to show that these Odyssean scenes resonate just as powerfully with Demeter’s epiphanies in the Homeric hymn to the goddess.

Some Homeric Hymns [Review], Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

R. offers a new edition of Hymns 3, 4 and 5. The volume follows the typical Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics format and includes a broad discussion of the Homeric Hymns, individual introductions for each hymn discussed, a section on the Homeric Hymns and Hellenistic poetry, a chapter on the transmission of the text, and three maps. R.’s text is based on previous editions, and he uses Càssola’s apparatus criticus as his ‘base’ (p. 33). In his general introduction, R. elegantly deals with questions of dating, authorship, the order of the poems and their function as preludes. The individual …

Death Ante Ora Parentum In Virgil’S Aeneid, Timothy M. O'Sullivan

Classical Studies Faculty Research

Virgil's Aeneid includes a number of scenes in which children die in front of their parents. While the motif has a Homeric precedent, Virgil's invention of a formula (ante ora parentum: "before the faces of one's parents") suggests a particular interest in the theme. An analysis of scenes where the formula recurs (such as Aeneas's shipwreck, the fall of Troy, and the lusus Troiae) reveals a metapoetic resonance behind the motif, with the parent-child relationship acting as a metaphor for authorial influence and artistic creation. Thus the threat that Aeneas might die as Anchises looks on, for …

The Archaeology And Translation Of Greek Tragedy : Tragedy And The Emotions, Daniel Edward Gremmler

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The history of interpreting Greek tragedy and the emotions is a history of logos. Tragedy, however, is poiēsis and speaks the language of muthos. This project approaches popular interpretations of tragedy and the emotions as problems of translation between various discourses: between Greek and English, past and present, historical and transhistorical, logos and muthos. After identifying the ways in which logos clashes with logos from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and modern classicists, we suggest a new framework through which the emotional effect of tragedy, the tragic pleasure, can be understood: the thaumon and the deinon (wondrous and terrible).

"What Makes A Man To Wander?": The Searchers As A Western Odyssey, Kirsten Day

Classics: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

This paper looks at John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers as a literary, cultural, and ideological heir to Homer's Odyssey. Each work centers on a morally ambiguous protagonist on a mission to preserve the integrity of his household and his own honor, a quest made urgent by the sexual threat posed by a woman. While Homer's story explores issues of Greek identity and the ethnic anxieties generated by trade and colonization, Ford's film addresses racial and Cold War tensions prevalent in1950s America. Both works ultimately destabilize the categories of "us" and "them," encouraging audiences to reconsider this dichotomy.

The Portrait Of Homer In Strabo's Geography, Lawrence Kim

Classical Studies Faculty Research

Strabo’s Geography, as anyone who has perused it will know, is suffused with a profound, nearly obsessive, interest in Homer. The desire to demonstrate Homer’s knowledge of geographical information at every turn (even where it seems prima facie unlikely) is matched only by the determination with which Strabo “solves” notorious problems of Homeric geography such as the location of Nestor’s Pylos or the identity of the “Ethiopians divided in twain” visited by Poseidon. Strabo’s concentration on such arcana, often to the exclusion of more properly “geographical” material, has understandably exasperated many modern readers with different ideas about what constitutes …

Frazier Polymetis: Cold Mountain And The Odyssey, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Ever since its appearance in 1997, Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, has been billed as a latter-day Odyssey. Separate unattributed book notes on the world wide web speak of its protagonist’s “dangerous odyssey” and his “odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South.” One reviewer styles the novel "a Confederate deserter's homeward odyssey"; another characterizes it as having “reset much of the 'Odyssey' in 19th-century America.” While such assertion of parallelism between the novel and Homer’s epic is widespread, it also tends to remain general and relatively unadorned. It evidently rests on such typically odyssean plot elements …

Barbarian Bond: Thracian Bendis Among The Athenians, Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

In this chapter, I gather the evidence for the Athenian cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis, who was officially worshipped both by Thracians and by Athenian citizens from the end of the fifth century B.C. on. I also compare the historical record with the literary characterizations of the Thracians, and I examine the connection between religious, political, and ethnic identity and the ways in which the cult of Bendis reflects ambivalent Athenian attitudes toward their northern neighbors. The cult of Bendis in Athens reproduces on the level of ritual the polarity of Greeks versus barbarians that exists on the level …

The Returns Of Odysseus: Colonization And Ethnicity [Review], Erwin F. Cook

Classical Studies Faculty Research

The Returns of Odysseus will be essential reading for specialists in Homer, early Greek history, and ancient ethnology. They and others willing to expend the time and energy necessary to read this densely argued and worded book will win a perspective on Greek (pre)colonization and its mythology unavailable from any other source. I myself required a full week for a careful reading, after which I noted to my surprise that I had taken over 50 pages of notes, many of which now belong to my permanent files. If, in what follows, I concentrate on some illustrative problems with Malkin's (M.) …

Every Man's An Odysseus: An Analysis Of The Nostos-Theme In Corelli's Mandolin, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

In the sparkling first chapter of Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin, the world of Homer's Odysseus is explicitly invoked. This is hardly surprising in a historical novel which will detail the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia, near neighbor of Odysseus's Ithaca, during World War II. What is less immediately apparent is that the novel contains a further pattern of inexplicit allusion to the Odyssey, along with a pervasive theme of nostos. Emphasis on "homecoming" helps create the novel's ardent encomium to the Greek homeland that inspires such fierce love of place in its people …