Classical Studies 218 - Gods and Mortals: Classical Mythology

The wrath of Achilles. The travels of Odysseus. The blinding of Oedipus. The myths of Greece and Rome continue to exert a hold on our collective imagination. But for the ancient Greeks and Romans who produced these stories about gods and demigods, myth was more than a source of entertainment, it offered insight into matters of more pressing concern, from political strife, to mental health, to the nature of humankind and its place in the cosmos. In this course, we will come to understand the social significance of myth through a survey of some foundational works of classical literature, including Homeric epic, Hesiod, Greek tragedy, Plato and Vergil. In the process, we will learn about modern approaches to the interpretation of myth, and conversely, how the study of mythology has affected other disciplines, from psychoanalysis to anthropology. We will adopt a transcultural perspective, studying how and why the mythologies of Greece-already indebted to those of the Hittites and Mesopotamians-were reconfigured as they passed into Roman literature and ultimately into our own popular media.