Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Zeus begins fulfilling his promise to Thetis to make the Achaeans lose. Giant Ajax helps prevent a complete rout, fighting a battle with Hector. Anachronisms in the text show the changing methods of warfare between the time of the Trojan War and Homer’s own time. Zeus warns the other deities not to interfere: the famous simile of the golden chain. Three times he curbs the attempt of Diomedes, who...

The difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of judging Paris and Helen, in Book 6 and elsewhere. Are they selfish and manipulative, self-deluding—or genuinely compelled by the will of the gods and fate? They seem as contradictory and enigmatic as people often do in real life. In Book 7, Big Ajax (contrasted with Little Ajax), a major figure in the Iliad , fights a duel with Hector, but inconclusive...

Zeus procrastinates fulfilling his promise to make the Greeks temporarily lose, and due to the leadership of Diomedes the Trojans are driven back against their own walls and are in danger of losing the war. Diomedes, the quiet team player, a contrast to the difficult Achilles. Hector comes inside the walls of Troy, and, as he is leaving meets his wife Andromache and their small son. Andromache beg...

Hand to hand combat between Paris and Menelaus to settle the issue of who gets Helen. Paris, the beautiful lover who wears a leopard skin, is badly outmatched but rescued by Aphrodite, who orders Helen to join him in the bedroom and threatens her when Helen tries to refuse. The mystery of Helen’s character, complex, ambiguous. Another complex question: the role of the gods in the Iliad . Sometimes...

The society of the Iliad as an example of what some social scientists have called a “shame culture,” in which men are driven by the need for status in a peer group. Failing to achieve it, they are “shamed.” We are ostensibly a “guilt culture,” driven by individual conscience rather than outward social pressure, but in fact there are many similar tendencies in our culture. The rage of Achilles spre...

The explosively dramatic opening of the Iliad , starting with its first word, “Rage!” Two men fighting over a woman, who is a “war prize.” And yet, according to what scholars call the heroic code of honor, neither man can back down, for fear of public shame, for fear of looking weak. Being “reasonable” is not permitted by their culture’s value system, and that is the tragedy.

What is still relevant about the Iliad today: the rich, complex characterization and the theme of anger, revenge, and justice. The many mysteries: Was there a “Homer”? Was there a Trojan War? The real Troy, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. The plot background: Helen of Troy.

Diomedes’ speech admitting that the Trojan War had been wrong. The tragedy of Camilla, the great woman warrior. The suicide of Queen Amata. Jupiter forbids Juno and Turnus’s sister Juturna from interfering further. The final showdown between Turnus and Aeneas.  Turnus, wounded, begs for mercy—but Aeneas sees the belt of young Pallas, worn by Turnus as a war prize, and in the last four lines o...

The theme of the Aeneid , explicitly announced in crucial passages, is the hope of escaping from history as an ironic cycle, the hope that the tragedy of the fall of Troy does not have to become the model for all of human history. Virgil hoped that Augustus could establish not just a more just society but one that would bring justice and civilization to the whole world, that history might become p...

Aeneas is in one way an imperialist, establishing his people in a foreign land despite the resistance of its native peoples. Yet he longs for a just war and a just peace, wishing that this conflict might be a war to end war, renouncing any intention of dominating the Italian peoples. Virgil clearly intends a parallel with Augustus, who conquered his own version of Turnus, Mark Antony, and wished t...

Aeneas and the Sibyl leave the Underworld by the Gate of Ivory. The new world of Italy, and the native people there. Aeneas forms an alliance with King Latinus, to be sealed by marriage with Lavinia, but Juno sends the Fury Allecto to demonically possess Queen Amata and Turnus. Against the progressive vision of history that Anchises spoke of in the Underworld, Juno represents the vision of history...

Aeneas meets with his father Anchises in Elysium in the Underworld. Anchises’s speech expands the Aeneid into a cosmic dimension, with a World Soul instead of a creator deity, a system of rewards for the good and punishments of evildoers, then reincarnation in this world. The mystery of where Virgil derived this imagery. Finally, a vision of Aeneas’s descendants, culminating in Augustus Caesar.

The struggle to reach the goal. Funeral games for Anchises. The women set fire to the ships because they don’t want to go on. The death of Palinurus, “one life given for many.” The mysterious imagery of the entrance to the underworld, created by Daedalus. The Cumaean Sibyl, Aeneas’s guide, and the golden bough, talisman that Aeneas needs to take with him on his journey.

The famous tragic love affair between the passionate, impulsive Dido and the restrained, disciplined, responsible Aeneas. Dido’s madness and suicide. The Aeneid ’s greatness lies in its double vision: cyclical pessimism and progressive optimism held in creative tension.

Aeneas loses his loving wife Creusa at the end of Book 2, and wanders with his people for seven years, comparable to the Wanderings of Odysseus, for the entirety of Book 3. His father Anchises dies at the end of Book 3.

Aeneas, taken in by Queen Dido of Carthage, recounts his adventures, beginning with a vivid, book-length account of the fall of Troy.

Jupiter’s long speech to Venus about the glorious destiny of the line descending from her son Aeneas, the future history of Rome. Aeneas and his people land and are taken in by Dido, Queen of Carthage, in what should be a happy ending—but which the audience knows will end in tragedy. The happy ending is for a future Rome, not for Aeneas personally, who knows only self-sacrifice and loss.

A new type of hero, “duty-bound” Aeneas, sacrificing himself for a higher cause, not merely for a future home for his people but for the cause of law, order, and higher civilization. The unique organization of the Aeneid through a series of parallels with Homer’s epics.

Virgil’s life and career. The Aeneid influenced by Virgil’s experience of anarchy and civil war as the Roman Republic crumbles. The rise of Caesar Augustus, first Roman Emperor: the promise of law, order, and civilization. But at what cost? The “Virgilian melancholy.”

Is Book 24 by another, and inferior poet? Is there any artistic necessity for it? Is there a total thematic pattern to the Odyssey that draws together all the various themes we have been tracing? The fascinating character of Odysseus in later literature, up to our own time.

The suitors’ self-humiliation, unable even to draw Odysseus’ bow. Odysseus shoots through 12 axe heads. The battle with the suitors and its aftermath. The hanging of the 12 treacherous maids, and the disposal of Melanthios. Penelope tricks Odysseus but proves he is really her husband. The joyful reunion.

The famous episode telling how Odysseus was given his significant name by his grandfather Autolycus, a thief. Setting up strategies ahead of time to even the odds against the suitors. The bow contest.

The moving and yet psychologically complex reunion of father and son in the hut of Eumaios. Devising strategies to make up for being greatly outnumbered. Odysseus meets his old dog Argos, a wonderful tearjerker in the midst of a heroic epic.

Athena, in a famous scene, puts Odysseus on a level of equality with herself—as storyteller, liar, trickster. The power of stories that shape people’s view of reality. Eumaios the swineherd as a genuinely good man of lower-class origins. The return of Telemachus to Ithaca.

The Wanderings, Books 9-12, suggest an underlying pattern of symbolic death to an old identity and birth of a new, often at a point of crisis in mid-life, as is true of both Odysseus and Dante in the Divine Comedy . For Odysseus, this involves a coming to terms with the feminine, portrayed by a remarkable spectrum of female figures ranging from the ideal to the ambiguous to the evil. The landing o...