HON-H 303 – Epic: Heroes, Gods, and Rebels

Why did the architects of the World Trade Center memorial choose a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, a two-thousand-year-old Latin poem, for its walls? Epic has lain at the heart of the Western literary tradition for 2700 years. The most prestigious and the most ambitious of literary genres, epic explores human nature, promotes and questions political ideals and social principles, defines nations and communities, and examines the nature of heroism. Through stories of human heroism and super-human adventures, epic poems ask what it means to be human, how to find meaning in mortality, and how to live within—or overturn—power structures and the rulers who manipulate them. Epic endures because it offers its readers tools for living.

We will read four of the greatest European epics, poems that have shaped Western literature: Homer’s Odyssey, the twin stories of the Greek hero Odysseus’s ten-year struggle to return home after the Trojan War and his wife Penelope’s battle to preserve that home against the men who would seize Odysseus’s throne; Virgil’s Aeneid, which narrates the founding of the Roman Empire in order to celebrate and question the sacrifices made for imperial values; Dante’s Inferno, an allegorical journey through Hell that marries epic values and Christian ethics while reveling in the revenge it takes on Dante’s political enemies; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic retelling of Genesis that finds heroism in the human condition, and in Milton’s own failed political rebellion.