Homer’s Iliad

Dr. Bella Vivante
Fall 2016
THURSDAYS |  
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
September 29 - December 15, 2016. No class on October 27 and November 24.
Course Format: Hybrid
Location: Main Campus
Tuition: $195

We initiate a year of exploring Homer by reading his scintillating epic poem presenting a few days near the Trojan War’s end: The Iliad. While the poem highlights battle and military matters, human complexities also emerge: conflict between military and domestic realms; women as war prizes or prized family members; the role of gods; concepts of heroism; ways of warfare; the oral tradition; creation of poetry; and more. The aim is to appreciate from multiple perspectives The Iliad’s exquisite poetry and its multilayered ideas about war, peace, and related themes. A greater understanding of Greek thinking, pivotal in the development of Western culture, provides valuable insights into our own views about these complex social issues and why this remarkable ancient poem continues to influence our contemporary ideas and creativity.

Required Reading

Homer. Iliad. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett Classics, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0-87720-352-5.

Meet Your Instructor

Professor Emerita

Honored to receive 2018’s Ted & Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Award, Bella brings her enthusiastic love of Ancient Greek poetry and culture to her HSP classes: Homer’s brilliant epics, select themes in Greek drama, Ancient Anatolia, more. See this dynamic antiquity in her Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean, translation of Euripides’s Helen in Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, or Women and Family in Ancient Greece DVD.

Location

POETRY CENTER
Dorothy Rubel Room
1508 E Helen
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States

Located on the SE corner of Helen Street and Vine Avenue, one block north of Speedway and three blocks west of Campbell Ave.

Street map image of Poetry Center

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