CLASSIC 30 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Odysseus, Silenus, In Medias Res
Document Summary
Introduce homer"s epic poem the odyssey and its protagonist odysseus, the man on many turns (polytropos) Strong and a good warrior; uses his intelligence to achieve his goals. His epithet re ects this instead of his physical attributes. People think there was a little historical truth in the iliad- however a war in this area happened at this time; thus there is some historical truth. Iliad also has descriptions of things that exited in the time of the iliad but not homer"s time i. e. boar"s tusk helmet. Didn"t exist anymore in homer"s time but they did in the iliad and during that time period. There must be elements within the story that were preserved in the oral tradition. The stories were passed down from bard to bard over the centuries- till they get to homer. The iliad preserves details about the culture of a time period long before homer wrote down the iliad.
