Gods, Monsters and Windmills

 Statue of Gilgamesh

Map of Mesopotamia

“The History Files” on Uruk

The Flood Tablet

(From Nineveh, northern Iraq, Neo-Assyrian, 7th century BC)

Michael Sugrue on “The Epic of Gilgamesh”  (this Youtube presentation shows some nice images throughout)

Why do we read the Odyssey in a Great Works of Literature class?

Please keep the length of your response paper to one double-spaced page, which means only tell me the most essential reasons why we read the epic. Your response paper should not be a criticism or a glowing review, but a thoughtful response that shows me you have read the work with a critical eye and participated in our class discussions.

From A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham

Epic similes are formal, sustained similes in which the secondary subject, or vehicle, is elaborated far beyond its point of close parallel to the primary subject, or tenor.

For example, when Odysseus returns to his men after having been to Circe’s home, they are described thus:

When they saw me they were like farmyard calves

Around a herd of cows returning to the yard.

The calves bolt from their pens and run friskily

Around their mothers, lowing and mooing. (10.434-7)

Mnemosyne

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1881)

The following link is to an amusing article written in The Wall Street Journal about the Muses.

Where Have All the Muses Gone?

The Muses:

• Kalliope (Epic Poetry)
• Kleio (History)
• Erato (Love Poetry)
• Euterpe (Music)
• Melpomene (Tragedy)
• Polymnia (Hymns)
• Terpsichore (Dance)
• Thaleia (Comedy)
• Ourania (Astronomy)

The Vestibule of Hell and Souls Mustering to Cross the Acheron

By William Blake (1824-7)

From Homer’s Iliad:

The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is full of sorrow; on the floor of Zeus’ palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Zeus the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Zeus sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men. (24.527)

The Nine Muses

Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania

Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

Homer (8^th century), the blind bard from Chios, was recognized by Plato and Aristotle, as well as the historian Herodotus (5^th/4^th century BCE) as the poet who composed the Iliad and Odyssey.

Zeus starts the Trojan War to bring an end to the race of heroes by having Helen kidnapped. The judgment of Paris (son of King Priam of Troy) at Thetis and Peleus’s wedding. The Odyssey describes the war’s aftermath and the Greek heroes’ return home, especially Odysseus’s wanderings. The Odyssey is, therefore, among other things, a nostos, or homecoming. Nostalgia, or a longing for the past, is a cognate of the word. 

Epic or epikos (Greek) comes from the Greek word epos, ‘word, song,’ and is related to eipein ‘say.’ This oral expression of song is about the feeling and ethical intent of the speaker rather than the form or subject matter. It is an emotive experience. An epic poem tells a story of deep feeling and ethical significance. You may see this in the stock epithets and traditional phrases. For instance, to speak of Dawn (bk. 5, 1-3) personified, as Homer often does, instead of saying, “the sun came up,” charges the natural world with personality, suggesting its involvement in human affairs.

Elements of the Odyssey’s narrative structure:

• oral tradition, it is being sung
• it has repetitive elements
• a set meter
• uses epithets
• begins in medias res
• common themes, such as revenge, recklessness, belly & consumption, hospitality, sacrifice to the gods, singers and bards (storytellers), homecoming, battle, deception, loyalty, fate, metis (cunning, wisdom, skill and craft), family, kingship, and restoration of power.

Homer’s epics were sung for entertainment and in poetry contests. They were works of memory and spoken aloud even after the papyrus scroll was used and these poems were first written down.

The Odyssey (1.1-34)

In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these rules:

• A foot can be made up of two long syllables (– –), a spondee; or a long and two short syllables, a dactyl (– υ υ).
• The first four feet can contain either one of them.
• The fifth is almost always a dactyl, and last must be a spondee. 

I begin | my song with | the Heli | konian | Muses whose | domain

dactyl |         dactyl         |   dactyl    | dactyl  |       dactyl          | spondee

Greek mythology has gradations of credibility. For instance, the myths about the Trojan War are not historically factual, even though a city called Troy (Ilium) existed and a war is believed to have taken place at its location. It was regarded as a purely legendary city until Heinrich Schliemann identified the mound of Hissarlik on the northeast Aegean coast of Turkey as the site of Troy. The city was apparently sacked and destroyed by fire in the mid 13th century BCE, a period coinciding with the Mycenaean civilization of Greece (Bronze Age of Greece).

• Mycenaean Age (1500-1200 BCE)
• Dark Age of Greece (1100-750 BCE)
• Archaic Age of Greece (700-500 BCE)
• Classical Age of Greece (490-323 BCE) Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes
• Hellenistic Age (323-31 BCE) from the death of Alexander the Great, who conquered all of Greece and much of the Middle East, to the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian. (this is when Greek culture flourishes through the Mediterranean, Near East and Asia)

We study these myths because they are not completely true and neither are they completely false. This is the paradox of myth. We draw our analysis of myth from a total system, Greek Mythology, which incorporates every broken shard of pottery and burnt piece of papyrus.

In The Uses of Greek Mythology, Ken Dowden writes:

In fact Greek Mythology is a shared fund of motifs and ideas ordered into a shared repertoire of stories. These stories link with, compare and contrast with, and are understood in the light of, other stories in the system. Greek Mythology is an ‘intertext,’ because it is constituted by all the representations of myth ever experienced by its audience and because every new representation gains its sense from how it is positioned in relation to this totality of previous presentations.

Mythology is like a large tapestry.