Day Eight

Lecture: Homer and the Epic
By: Charles Burton Gulick, Professor of Greek at Harvard University

Prior to this chapter, I could only tell you that Homer wrote The Odyssey and The Iliad -- though after reading Day Six's lecture on the history of poetry, works from that time are likely a collaborative effort by many people. Gulick acknowledges that there is some question about the authorship of the Homeric poems because not much is known about Homer (trivia time - he may have been blind according to a bust being housed in the Naples Museum -- click here for picture; Rembrandt also painted a picture of "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer").

Homer's works are "epic poems" - what defines this genre? I went outside the Harvard Classics (HC) to find out. Per The Humanities Index, an epic poem has three components:
1) it is epic in length;
2) it is epic in subject matter; and,
3) the protagonist is a heroic figure or "quasi-divine" figure who is on a mission that if unsuccessful, would injure the state or the tribe or all of humanity. Yikes!

There are other characteristics of an epic poem but for an introduction, I think this will suit my purposes.

Profesor Gulick opines that Homer, Virgil and Milton are the only epic poets who were successful in producing a worthy epic poem; I guess that means his net had pretty larges holes in the mesh to let all the others through. I can't disagree with him yet but something tells me he's being overly critical. Going beyond liking only three, he has to declare one to be the best. He says that "Homer emerges as the one supreme and incomparable master of them all." He takes a few jabs at Virgil's Aeneid and Milton's Paradise Lost to knock them down a peg -- this guy is brutal. I guess he just loves Homer.

Homer's Odyssey tells the story of "a bold sailor" who goes through a series of encounters with monsters, witches, giants and pirates, in both our world and the underworld. It is not a battle or siege story.

Homer's poems would have been orally composed and orally shared. It is not known when they were first committed to writing.

Cool word: Hellenism - polytheism, especially associated with ancient Greece.

Lecture: Dante
By: Professor Charles Hall Grandgent, Professor of Romantic Languages at Harvard University

Dante's Divine Comedies is a famous writing we've all heard of. It was written by Dante (first name, not last name - full name is Dante Alighieri) in the Middle Ages. The story is about "the whole progress of a soul from sin, through remorse, meditation, and discipline, to the state of purity that enables it to see God." That sounds like a pretty epic journey.

Professor Grandgent contextualizes Dante's writing against the common beliefs about God and the known universe during the Middle Ages: beyond the Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets is the next layer where God and his angels resides. The celestial bodies are controlled by the angels, resulting in control over us (a deterministic view). Little history was recorded at that time, which meant that progress was difficult to see.

I'll get a chance to read the first volume of his Divine Comedies in a later volume.