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Great Topics Seminars

Studies in the Humanities and Sciences

Spring 2012 Great Topics Seminar

Homer's Iliad and Greek Tragedy

Homer's Iliad, which recounts fifty-three days of the Trojan War, is a profound meditation on human mortality. The Homeric hero so lived his life in the crisis situation of war and death that life became ever more precious. The book is full of intense pain and suffering but also of the deep joy and beauty of everyday life. 

Homer's epic, as the earliest literary work in Europe, was seminal in all subsequent literature. Aeschylus, the Greek tragic poet, is alleged to have said, "We are all beggars at the great banquet of Homer." Greek tragedy takes from the Iliad its understanding of the hard realities of human life and the necessity for compassion. It also transforms and expands how to understand the characters and the situations found in the Iliad.

This course will begin with a reading of Homer's Iliad, and then turn to a selection of Greek tragedies about the Trojan War and its aftermath. First, we will read Aeschylus' monumental trilogy, the Oresteia, which tells of the doomed homecoming of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Trojan War. In this trilogy, Aeschylus thrillingly depicts the change in human history from revenge killing to court justice. Then we will turn to Aeschylus' younger contemporary, Sophocles, who in two of his extant plays (Ajax and Philoctetes), offers divergent views of Homeric heroism and the character of Odysseus. And finally, we will turn to Euripides, the youngest of the Greek tragedians, and his two scathing indictments of war in The Trojan Women and Hecuba. Greek tragedy, which is so closely connected to the Athenian city-state and its rise to greatness and its fall, offers such a penetrating understanding of human life that it will always be relevant. Because the readings of the course embrace Greek history from the Mycenaean age to the close of fifth century Greece, participants should emerge from the course with a basic understanding of the historical flow of this influential culture. 

Following the seminar, participants and their friends and family are invited to join an optional tour of Greece in May, which will focus on Athens and its relationship to the tragedies we have read and those sites and museums which are associated with the Trojan War and the homecomings of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, and Odysseus. After the group tour, additional extensions to Turkey (and the archeological site of Troy) or to Crete are possible. If you are interested in the tour, call Catherine Freis at 601-519-6524 for further information.

Established in 1988 and made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leadership Seminars in the Humanities bring together Millsaps professors in the humanities with corporate, volunteer and professional leaders in the community. To better reflect the current philosophy of these seminars, the name has been changed to Millsaps Great Topics Seminars: Studies in the Humanities and Sciences. These seminars offer an opportunity for serious engagement with intellectual issues affecting society and the individual.

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For more information on the Great Topics Seminars, contact the Millsaps College Office of Continuing Education at 601-974-1130.