CLST 5 The Heroic Vision: Epics of Greece and Rome
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses are among the best known and most influential works to survive from the ancient world. Yet as products of societies vastly different from our own, they remain challengingly unfamiliar. This course offers the chance to study these four epics in their entirety, together with the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and extensive selections from Lucrfetius' De Rerum Natura. Emphasis will be placed on the historical and cultural contexts in which the poems were produced and on how each poet uses the works of his predecessors to define his own place in the epic tradition.