The Human and Its Others: Nature (Unit 3) Zina Giannopoulou 104 HOB2 Office Hours: F. 9-10 Email: [email protected].

The Human and Its Others: Nature (Unit 3)

Zina Giannopoulou104 HOB2

Office Hours: F. 9-10Email: [email protected]

Unit 3 at a Glance

• The last unit of the cycle brings together the course’s three thematic components—divinity, society, and nature—and examines how they interrelate and how humans relate to each of them.

• It emphasizes the importance of close readings of texts that belong to different genres—epic poetry, tragedy, and philosophy—and span four centuries of the ancient Greek literary production (7th to 4th c. BCE).

• It introduces students to four major authors of Classical literature—Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato—and shows how their works may be read in conjunction with one another.

Who is Homer? The Homeric Question

The Iliad and the Odyssey: two epic poems set in dactylic

hexameterἄνδρα μοι ἔννεｹε, μοῦσα, ｹολύτροｹον, ὃς μάλα ｹολλὰｹλάγχθη, ἐｹεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν ｹτολίεθρον ἔｹερσεν:ｹολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώｹων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,ｹολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν ｹόντῳ ｹάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

Sing to me of the Man, Muse, the man of twists and turnsDriven time and again off course, once he had plunderedThe hallowed heights of Troy.Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,Many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,Fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home .

(Trans. R.Fagles)

Oral tradition

Aoidoi vs. rhapsodoi

Milman Perry

Albert Lord

Peisistratus

Homeric Similes• Metaphor vs. simile• Common sources of Homeric similes: living nature and

landscape• Sometimes, one part of the natural world is used to illustrate

another. Eumelus’ mares are ‘swift-moving like birds’ (Iliad

2.764). Hector will soon be praying that his horses ‘might be

swifter than hawks are’ (Iliad 13.819). • The gods are most often the agents of change by making one

thing look like anotherProteus metamorphoses into a lion, a serpent, a

boar. Circe can transform humans into beasts, and back again. Athena changes Odysseus’ form. The gods even transform themselves when they visit mortals.

Nature in Iliad: Achilles and his Horses, Roan Beauty and Charger

(Iliad 19.462-503)

• Achilles assigns to his horses the task of bringing him back alive by shaming them:– ‘Roan Beauty and Charger, illustrious foals of Lightfoot!

Try hard, do better this time—bring your charioteer back home alive to his waiting Argive comrades once we’re through with fighting. Don’t leave Achilles there on the battlefield as you left Patroclus—dead’ (473-7).

• Roan Beauty acquiesces with a gesture of submission (he ‘bows his head low’ 479) and speaks assisted by Hera. – Animals are given voice by the gods and are also ‘struck

dumb’ by them (495).

• Achilles’ response conveys his courage and superiority: he knows he will die, and yet he ‘will never stop till [he] drives the Trojans to their bloody fill of war’ (500-1).

Nature in Odyssey: Scylla and Charybdis (Odyssey

12.218-282)

Charybdis, the Whirlpool

her horrible whirlpool gulping the sea-surge down, downbut when she spewed it up—like a cauldron over a raging

fire—all her churning depths would seethe and heave—exploding

sprayshowering down to splatter the peaks of both crags at once!But when she swallowed the sea-surge down her gaping

mawthe whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared,terrible, deafening—bedrock shown down deep, boilingblack with sand—and ashen terror gripped the men. (255-265)

Scylla, the Six-headed Sea Monster

now Scylla snatched six men from our hollow ships.Just as an angler poised on a jutted rockflings his treacherous bait in the offshore swell,whips his long rod—hook sheathed in an oxhorn lure—and whisks up little fish he flips on the beach-break,writhing, gasping out their lives so now they writhed,gasping as Scylla swung them up her cliff and thereat her cavern’s mouth she bolted them down raw—screaming out, flinging their arms toward me,lost in that mortal struggle. Of all the pitiful things I’ve had to witness,Suffering, searching out the pathways of the sea,This wrenched my heart the most. (266-282)