SECTION 112 Thursday 10-11 242 Dwinelle
samsung changer imeSECTION 113 Thursday 11-12 175 Barrows
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Dear Fellow Devotees of the Muses,
Here are the themes I’d like you to keep in mind—and the questions I’d like you to address—while reading Homer’s Odyssey for our next section meeting.
Some of the questions are quite specific, and can be answered in a sentence, perhaps even a word. Others will probably need a good paragraph or so. Trust your instincts.
Very roughly, I hope you’ll end up with somewhere around two hand-written pages, or a single-spaced typed page. But don’t worry too much about length. I will most certainly not be counting words, and to a certain extent I hardly care whether you answer the questions “correctly” or not (some of them, especially the thematic ones, may have no “correct” answer). You should approach the assignments simply as a way to demonstrate that you’ve read the text at hand, and have engaged with the material. I will be grading them on a simple “check/check-minus” system.
For the same reason, you need not turn these things into cohesive miniature essays or anything of the kind, nor address the questions in any particular order. Even a bulleted list of your sentences and paragraphs would be fine. Many students in the past have simply cut the questions directly out of my e-mail message, pasted them into a word processing document, and then typed in their answers underneath each question. Again, I’m simply looking for evidence that you’ve read the texts and are actually thinking about the material.
A note: when addressing a question, include in your response the relevant PAGE NUMBERS from the text (you can simply put them in parentheses). This will allow us to quickly turn to the germane pages during our class discussion. I’d also recommend that you underline or highlight the relevant passages in the text, so they’ll stand out on the page when we flip to them during our discussion (and when you return to them for future reference).
And if you’re finding all this a bit daunting, please don’t worry: I assure you from previous experience that you’ll quickly become an acclimated veteran.
The assignment follows. (And please remember that we are reading the oldest text of the Western tradition, a book roughly 2800 years old, a book penned at least 500 years before the Old Testament and 900 before the New. I hope you allow the awe of this to sink in.)
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For our next section meeting (Thursday, February 5), please read books 1 - 8 (in Roman numerals: I - VIII) of the Odyssey, and address the following questions:
1) Both Judaism and Christianity hold their gods to be present at all places at all times (hence they are said to be able to hear and see all things). Does the same hold for the Greek gods?--are they also omnipresent? You might consider the example of Poseidon from our text.
2) What is an example from our text of the existence of conflict, tension, or strife between gods?
3) Who is the father of Polyphemos the Cyclops?
4) Who is Odysseus’s divine patron? What are some of the guises which this patron assumes? This in turn leads to another, more general, question: how can one ever know for sure that one is not talking to a god?
5) At one point, Menelaos relates how he managed to capture Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. What other famous capture already presented in lecture might this remind us of?
6) When someone (usually a host) wants to know the identity of another (usually his guest), when does he ask? And, more importantly, what questions does he ask?--that is to say, what is it important to know about another person when trying to understand his identity or who he is? Cite several examples of these questions from our text.
7) Menelaos lives with Helen in a blissful yet removed and benumbed existence, thanks to his beautiful wife and her drug of forgetfulness called ‘nepenthe’ (Lattimore translates it as “hearts-ease”). Compare and contrast this with the situation faced by Odysseus on Kalypso’s island. Will Odysseus choose as Menelaos did?
Finally, A NOTE ON TERMS when reading both Odyssey and Iliad: “Achaians”=Greeks. “Danaans”=Greeks. “Argives”=Greeks. “Ilion”=Troy (hence the story of the Trojan War is called the Iliad). “Achilleus”=Achilles. “Aias”=Ajax (Ajax is the Roman spelling for the Greek Aias, just as Hercules is the Roman spelling of Heracles). “Pallas”=Athena. “Phoibos”=Apollo. “Kronos”=father of Zeus. And finally, the ending “-ides” on a name means “son of” (thus Agamemnon and Menelaos, the sons of Atreus, can both be called “Atreides”).
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