ENG 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Iliad
17 May 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Different versions which relate to: the narrator, time period. Wrote somewhere between 800-1000bc about events that happened two hundred years before. They found that troy was a true city that was ransacked around 1200 bc. Both are thought to be the first texts of western civilization. Around 1000 bc some myths (such as jason and the argonauts) are from earlier than the trojan war. The anthropomorphized gods express human emotions and feelings, albeit in a grander scale. Philosophical ideas: the meaning of life and death, afterlife, what it is to be a wife or husband, should there be war, what is love, what it means to live in a community, etc. Human being is the centre of myths; no other mythology has such a great focus on humans and the human condition, magnified by the fact that the gods were almost human themselves.
