Classical Literature and Philology Commons^™

Desire In The Iliad: The Force That Moves The Epic And Its Audience, Rachel H. Lesser

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

This book is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way and to explain its relationship to the epic’s narrative structure and audience reception. It offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters’ desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters’ desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, …

Woven Words In The Iliad: Gender, Narrative, And Textile Production In The Scholia Of The Venetus A Manuscript, Anne-Catherine Schaaf

College Honors Program

The work of previous scholars has established powerful connections between the process of creating textiles and process of epic oral composition. I build on disparte sources from the fields of archaeology and philology and analyze how the scholia in one epic manuscript of the Iliad, the Venetus A, treat this issue and with a focus on how it interplays with gender, specifically the female characters in the Iliad who produce textiles. I focus on a few major sections of scholia and important scenes of weaving in the Iliad. The key female characters in the novel, both divine and human nearly …

Ἔπος: A Musical Concept Album Adaptation Of Homer’S Iliad, Blaike Cheramie

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis project is a musical concept album adaptation of Homer’s classical epic the Iliad. Inspired by musicals like Hadestown, Les Miserables, and Hamilton as well as movies like O Brother Where Art Thou and musicians like Bob Dylan, this album seeks to enter the genre of Classical Reception Studies. The album consists of seven tracks all referencing moments within the poem, written from the perspective of the characters to inspire empathy within the audience. The content of this thesis includes detailed chord charts and audio demos of each song, as well as analyses of the lyrical, musical, and thematic …

Helen Of Troy? A Reexamination Of Helen's Speech In The Iliad, Erin A. Robichaud

Senior Independent Study Theses

In most interpretations, Helen of Troy’s beauty makes her a vain, promiscuous, and dangerous woman. This is the Helen that patriarchal societies have written into existence and passed on to later generations, but it is not the Helen that appears in the Iliad. This thesis argues that Helen’s voice makes her a perceptive and powerful strategist. On different occasions, Helen adopts the speech patterns of various social groups represented in Homeric society in order to assume their identity. She builds a Trojan and a Greek persona as a means to protect herself from the trauma she experiences during the …

The Fabric Of Gifts: Culture And Politics Of Giving And Exchange In Archaic Greece, Beate Wagner-Hasel

Zea E-Books Collection

When the Greek leader Agamemnon took for himself the woman awarded to Achilles as his spoils of battle, the warrior’s resulting anger and outrage nearly cost his side the war. Beyond the woman herself was what she symbolised — a matter of esteem rather than material value. In Archaic Greece the practices of gift giving existed alongside an economy of market relations. The value of gifts and the meanings of exchange in ancient societies are fundamental to the debates of 19th-century economists, to Marcel Mauss’s famous Essai sur le don (1923-4), and to the definition of experiential value by modern …

Homer’S Thebes: Epic Rivalries And The Appropriation Of Mythical Pasts, Elton T. E. Barker, Joel P. Christensen

Publications and Research

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the only early Greek heroic epics to have survived the transition to writing, even though extant evidence indicates that they emerged from a thriving oral culture. Among the missing are the songs of Boeotian Thebes.

Homer’s Thebes examines moments in the Iliad and Odyssey where Theban characters and thematic engagements come to the fore. Rather than sifting through these appearances to reconstruct lost poems, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen argue that the Homeric poems borrow heroes from Thebes to address key ideas—about politics, time, and genre—that set out the unique superiority of these texts in …

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, …

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

Student Research

No abstract provided.

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.

Whip, Whipped, And Doctors: Homer's Illiad And Camus' The Plague, Paula Saffire

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Albert Camus in The Plague gives a pressing, pitilessly clear description of plague conditions:' We are all locked in a city. The gates are closed. The plague rages inside. The only question is, who will die first? This is the situation in Camus' town of Oran; it is also the situation of the Trojans in Homer's Illiad. And finally, it is the situation of human life.'