Greek and Roman Epic

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Humans have told stories about sprawling battles, voyages across the world, and larger-than-life heroes for thousands of years. Why are tales of such gigantic proportion so impactful for the individual? What about the human experience is captured so thrillingly by myths spanning years and miles? In this introductory-level class, we will read excerpts from the epic literature of ancient Greece and Rome in order to explore these questions and many more. We will encounter cosmic creation and political foundation through Hesiod's Theogony and Virgil's Aeneid, the enormity of war and its aftermath in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and stories of quests, magic, and transformation in the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses. We will also take a look outside Greece and Rome to compare large-scale storytelling in different cultures, and outside the conventional examples of epic to compare the traditions of the genre to authors who play with those traditions. In all of our readings, we will collaboratively confront what the genre of ‘epic' means, the cultural contexts of its production, and the profound impact it still has on audiences today.