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Poetic Catalogues and Sequences
How Many Ships Does It Take To Get To Troy? There is a section in the Iliad that is very easy to skim over, since for over four hundred lines of verse it simply lists the armies of the Achaeans and the armies of the Trojans. We read of the Boeotian units led by Leitus…
Virgil, The Aeneid
The Aeneid is about Rome, obviously. I think Virgil’s epic breaks the idea of Rome into two primary categories: power and love. First, let’s think about love. Virgil uses romantic love to show us the way our individual desires can be fickle. Aeneas loves his wife Creusa, but then he loves Dido, and then he…
Homer, The Odyssey
Reading Book 5, we get a sense of the erotic motivation for Odysseus’ journey home. We find elsewhere in The Odyssey other kinds of desires, like desire for civilization and for proper status. We see that civilized society is important to ancient Greek culture: Book 9 gives us Odysseus’ famous confrontation with the cyclops. When Odysseus and…
