CLAS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Polyphemus, Laestrygonians, Trojan War

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Classical Studies
• Course: CLAS 1000
• Professor: John Walsh

Document Summary

Takes odysseus 10 years to get home. Following the trojan war (ten years) he attempts to return home to greece where he wants to be reunited with penelope, his queen and wife. Island of the lotophagoi- the people who ate the lotus that essentially makes them high. While gone, men are trying to force her to marry them and they take odysseus" kingdom. Odysseus faces a number of challenges while trying to get home. Spiritual, emotional and physical challenges that he must overcome. He denies their request to join them. Then confronts laestrygonians- cannibals who eat a number of his men. He also encounters the sirens- who represent the female sexual power; they lure sailors to their death by singing to them, they crash into their island and then the sirens eat them. Then the island of the cyclopes- massive one eyed giants, they represent an earlier form of civilization, very brute.