This course will feature a detailed examination of the Iliad and Odyssey as two great poems of the ancient world, with a focus on oral poetry as the wider context of their creation. Topics will include the historicity of the Trojan war, orality and literacy in archaic Greece, the question of one or many Homer(s), the structure of the poems, representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the degree to which Homeric concepts (of mind, time, speech, glory, and justice, among others) match our own.
