SECTION 112 Thursday 10-11 242 Dwinelle
BattleLAN cs downloadSECTION 113 Thursday 11-12 175 Barrows
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Hello, All!
Having seen Odysseus safely home to Ithaca and the suitors slain, it is with fond heart that we take our leave now of Homer and turn to other stories.
The assignment for next week follows.
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For our next section meeting (Thursday, Feb 19), please read Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis (found on pages 315-354 in our Ten Plays by Euripides volume) and address the following five prompts in writing as before:
1) You already know from reading the Odyssey: what will happen to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes after Agamemnon returns from Troy?
2) Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaos, is the son of Pelops. Please read the story of Pelops in Robert Graves (chapter 109): what is Myrtilus’s response to Pelops’s treacherous kick? How does this help us understand the tortured fates of his descendants?
3) What is the pretext Agamemnon employs to lure his daughter to Aulis?
4) Our English word “hero” comes directly from the Greek. But how are the ‘heroic’ figures of Greek myth (Agamemnon, Menelaos, Achilles, Odysseus, etc.) portrayed here? Do their natures and actions match up with what our culture would conceive to be heroic or ideal? What, then, do you think makes a Greek hero?--i.e., what warrants being labelled a hero, what constitutes herodom, what does it refer to? (This is a broad topic, and the last part especially may seem opaque or intractable, but it is worth grappling with. You’ll probably want to devote a few paragraphs to this set of questions.)
5) Why do you think Artemis, divine patroness of maidens, would demand that an apparently innocent maiden be sacrificed in her name? Does this seem contradictory? Can you think of any sense in which it might be justified, or even appropriate?
[A note on possibly strange names and terms encountered in this play: “Hellas”=Greece, “Hellene”=Greek. “Achaeans”=Greeks. “Danaans”=Greeks. “Ilium”=Troy. “Phrygia”=a region in Turkey/Asia Minor not too far from Troy, used here to mean the city and region of Troy itself. “Ida”=a mountain near Troy (where Paris was tending his flocks when Hermes showed up leading the three goddesses to be judged). “Lacedaemon”=another word for Sparta (hence “Laconia” is the region around Sparta). “Cypris” and “the Cyprian”=Aphrodite (because she was born on Cyprus). “Alexander” (not the Great)=another name for Paris.]
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