Details
Keats compared discovering Homer to "finding a new planet." ? What is it in Homer's great works?and especially the Odyssey?that so enthralled him? ? Why have readers before and since reacted the same way? By joining award-winning classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver for these lectures on the Odyssey, you can get answers to these and hundreds of other questions. At first glance, those first two questions indeed seem troubling. For the Odyssey tells of a long-dead epoch that seems utterly alien to us. Indeed, the Bronze Age Aegean was a distant memory even to the original audiences of these works. But age seems only to have burnished the luster of this epic. It may be precisely because of its very strangeness and distance that generation after generation of readers have come to love it so much. This strangeness and distance throw sharply into focus the timeless human issues that ride along on Odysseus?s journey, voyaging to strange lands on the shores of wine-dark seas, dealing face-to-face with gods and monsters.
