Chapter 11-14 PDF

- Aeneas seeks an alliance with King Latinus of the Latins and is engaged to Latinus’s daughter Lavinia - Juno sens Allecto to inflame Latinus’s wife Amata and Turnus, king of the Rutulians, who’s also a suitor for Lavinia’s hand - Allecto...

- Aeneas seeks an alliance with King Latinus of the Latins and is engaged to Latinus’s daughter Lavinia - Juno sens Allecto to inflame Latinus’s wife Amata and Turnus, king of the Rutulians, who’s also a suitor for Lavinia’s hand - Allecto’s intervention blocks an alliance between the Latins and the Trojans and Lavinia’s marriage with Aeneas - When war breaks out between the Trojans and the Rutulians, Aeneas seeks military aid from Evander, king of the Arcadians, and agrees to take Evander’s son Pallas under his protection - Pallas is killed in battle by Turnus, and his death provokes Aeneas’s wrath - Aeneas’s drive to found Rome becomes wedded to his desire for revenge - The final scene: Aeneas kills Turnus - Turnus is wounded and begs Aeneas for clemency; Turnus asks to be spares and reminds Aeneas of their fathers, but Aeneas sees the belt Turnus stripped from Pallas as a trophy and kills him - The moral imperatives of empire and violence - Vergil’s epic asks whether the moral imperative to administer an empire with clemency can succeed if the men who govern are unable to restrain their use of force and their appetite for revenge Chapter 11: Heroes at the Ends of the Earth November 28 & 30 Readings: CMiC Chapter 11 Heroic Quests and Monstrous Encounters - Monsters and the boundaries of communities - They identify the political, economic, sexual, and cultural boundaries a community is organized around because they violate them - A hero’s defeat of a monster reinforces cultural norms - Hercules and the Nemean lion - Theseus and the Minotaur - Perseus and Medusa - Hercules as the idealized Greek (male) paragon Hercules - Vast number of myths - Alcmene, Zeus, and Amphitryon - Hercules = son of Zeus - Zeus isn’t the reason for the large number of myths devotes to Hercules; Hera’s anger at Zeus’s liaison with Alcmene, Hercules’s mother, stands behind it - Zeus disguises himself as Alcmene’s husband Amphitryon and seduces her, becoming pregnant with Hercules and Amphityon’s son Iphicles - Zeus announces that a child born that day descendant from him will be a king among men, but Hera had discovered his infidelity and not only delays Alcmene’s labor but causes the early birth of another baby Eurystheus (distantly descended from Zeus) - Eurystheus fulfills Zeus’s prophecy and becomes king of Tiryns - Hera’s prosecution - She drives him mad and causes him to hill his wife Megara and their two sons - Eurystheus and the twelve labors (athloi)  - A Delphic oracle bids him to serve Eurystheus, who demands he performs various deeds as punishment for killing his family - Twelve deeds were sculpted on the temple of Zeus in Olympia and have become the labors Hercules is best known for - Enters Olympus after death, after surviving the trials Hera has imposed - He married Hebe (“youth”) - Worshiped throughout Mediterranean world - More cult shrines than any other hero and considered both a hero and god - Hera’s hostility towards him created the opportunity for him to become divine - Harcles = “glory of Hera”, indicates his identity is more bound to her than to Zeus Hercules, Master of Animals - Confronts animals more than any other hero - As an infant, he wrestles and defeats snakes that Hera places in his cribs - Origins in common “master of animals” figure; mythic figure facilitates the relationship between humans and animals - Stories about the master of animals develop and change as their society changes - In most, the human dominates, but sometimes extraordinary deference can be paid to different kinds of animals - Walter Burkert and story origins and patterns - Connects Hercules to Mesopotamian cylinder seals from third millennium BCE - Argues that the link between the master of animals and heroic tales can be understood by examining story patterns - Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) - List of events in a hero’s tale detailing his quest for a sacred object/villain also described a hunter’s chase for an animal - Both depart and go to an uninhabited realm, receive help or face difficulties, find a desired object, obtain it, and return home - In his book, Propp studied Russian fairy tales to understand why so many fairy/folk tales were similar to one another - Divided tales into the “component parts” of characters and actions - Grouped characters into types - Seven character types: - The hero - The false hero - The princess (or the prize) - The villain - The dispatcher - The donor - The helper - 31 functions 1. A family member of the hero departs from home 2. The hero is warned not to do something 3. The hero violates this warning 4. The villain attempts to gain information about his victim 5. The villain gains information about his victim 6. The villain attempts to deceive his victim to get his possessions or his person 7. The victim unknowingly submits to the villain’s deception 8. The villain causes harm to a family member, and/or a family member lacks or wants something 9. The hero responds to a request or command and departs or is dispatched  10. A seeker (who is sometimes the hero) decides on an action 11. The hero departs 12. The hero is tested to see if he is worthy of help 13. The hero reacts to the actions of a donor 14. The hero acquires use of a magical agent 15. The hero is led to the location of a desired object 16. The hero and villain join in combat 17. The hero is branded 18. The villain is defeated 19. The initial lack is resolved 20. The hero returns 21. The hero is pursued 22. The hero is rescued from pursuit 23. The hero, unrecognized, arrives home or in another country 24. A false hero presents false claims 25. A difficult task is presented to the hero 26. The task is completed 27. The hero is recognized 28. The false hero or villain is exposed 29. The hero is given a new appearance 30. The villain is punished 31. The hero ascends the throne Hercules’s Labors - Many involve animals - First labor: Nemean Lion and its skin - Maintains an intimate connection with the lion: impenetrable skin protects him and its jaws enclose his head - Five labors: captures or relocates, but doesn’t kill, noxious animals - Ceryneian hind, Erymanthian boar, Cretan bull, Stymphalian birds, and man-eating mares of King Diomedes - Suggest Hercules’s commonalities with these beasts because his strength and endurance match theirs - Establishes spatial boundaries between cities and their surrounding uninhabited lands - Important cultural institutions - Athletic games at Olympia - Hercules’s wrestling match with the Nemean lion provides a model for a wrestling and boxing competition and a foundation story for its establishment - Hercules becomes a role model for athletes - Some labors affirm social norms - Defeat of the Lernaean hydra reinforces the boundary between human and beast as well as male and female - Resembles Zeus’s defeat of Typhoeus - Both have many heads - Both associated with unruly female reproduction and resistance to Zeus’s rule - Hydra challenges Hercules as the behest of a female: Hera - Victory over the Amazons - Hercules must obtain the belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons - Success signals that they’re vulnerable to the military/sexual prowess of Greek men and reasserts the hierarchy of male over female  - Affirms the important hierarchy of Greek over non-Greek - Greeks and non-Greeks: the defeat of Geryon, a three-headed and three-bodied monster - Explores contested boundaries between Greeks and non-Greeks in foreign lands - Hercules travels to Erytheia near Sicily to steal Geryon’s red cattle - Geryon’s red skin is like the the color of his island’s soil, linking him to its indigenous population - Three bodies and heads are a combination of disparate parts and symbolically represent the blurring of boundaries between Greeks and non-Greeks through marriage in Greek colonies - Geryon’s death symbolizes the reestablishment of these boundaries as well as Greek dominance over indigenous populations in Italy - The Underworld: boundaries between human and divine; mortality and immortality - Apples of the Hesperides - Hercules must obtain three golden apples guarded by the Hesperides (nymphs) and a snake - Apples = immortality bc they’re gold and can’t die - Cerberus - Hercules must enter the Underworld and capture Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards its entrance - Hercules conquers death by obtaining the apples and Cerberus (which are eventually both returned) Hercules in the City - Domestic settings and the dangers of Hercules’s strength - Threatens his family and doesn’t benefit society - Euripides’s The Madness of Hercules - Hercules as murderer and would-be suicide - Returns from his labors and discovers that King Lycus believes he’s died and plans to kill Hercules’s wife Megara, their two sons, and his father Amphitryon - Hercules kills Lycus, then Hera drives him mad and he kills his wife and children - Athena causes him to fall asleep and stops his rage before killing Amphitryon - Theseus persuades him to live when Hercules wants to commit suicide after his actions - Suggests Hercules is dangerous to human communities - Sophocles’s Trachiniae - Last few hours of Hercules’s life; breaking boundaries rather than establishing them - Nessos the centaur and Deianira - Nessus attempted to rape Deianira who was ferrying across a river on his back; Hercules shoots Nesuss with a poisonous arrow - Nessus told Deianira his blood was a love potion before he dies - Deianira awaits Hercules’s return years later - Hercules, Iole, and Hyllus - Hercules returns with his lover Iole; Deianira drenches Hercules’s clothes with Nessus’s blood out of jealousy to win his affections back; but the blood is poisonous bc it was mixed with poison from the arrow Hercules used - Hercules’s clothing burns and tears at his skin; he learns Deianira accidentally poisoned him and killed herself in grief as he endures the pain - Hercules curses deianira and demands his son Hyllus marries Iole - Hercules builds himself a pure on Mount Oeta, where he laments that his pain has made him cry like a little girl - Athena arrives to escort him to Olympus, where he’ll live as a god - Hercules as monstrous boundary-breaker  - Self-proclaimed transformation into a girl and apotheosis into a god blur differences between male and female and mortal and immortal - He is both man and god, woman and man, savage and civilized Theseus - Resembles Hercules; both slay beasts and noxious men and win princesses - A distinctly Athenian, democratic hero - Athenian oral traditions credit him with accomplishments that match historical events critical to the development of Athenian democracy - Invented coinage and the “crane dance” = warlike exercise on Delos - Established the cult of Aphrodite Pandemos (Of All the People) in Athens - Expanded the Panathenaic festival in honor of Athena - Pyanopsia festival - Young boys imitated Theseus and his companions as they set out to Crete to destroy the Minotaur - Story of the Minotuar– adapted to demonstrate Theseus’s commitment to Athens– was recounted over a festival meal - Taught young boys to imitate Theseus’s willingness to serve Athens through military and political skill - Theseion: hero shire believed to contain Theseus’s bones - Theseus’s journey from Troezen to Athens - Some myths claim Theseus is the son of Poseidon; most describe him as the son of King Aegeus of Athens - Aegeus and Aethra - Aegeus slept with and Impregnated Aethra and left his sandals and sword under a rock - Aegeus instructs Aethra to send the child to him when/if he’s strong enough to lift the rock and retrieve the items - Theseus succeeds when he reaches maturity - Theseus defeats bandits and thieves on his way to Athens - Theseus defeats thieves and bandits, not animals - His victory over them foreshadows that he’ll become king in Athens and establish law amongst its people - Embodiment of Athens’s reason and hospitality even in the face of irrational violence - Euripides’s Suppliants - Theseus agrees to meet the request of some Argive women who beg him for help - Theseus travels to Thebes and uses rhetorical persuasion and military might to convince the Thebans to release the bodies of the Argive war dead so the women can bury them; he succeeds and prepares them for burial himself - Gesture characterizes Theseus as a leader who’s open to persuasion, respectful of cultural and religious norms, and militarily strong Theseus and the Minotaur - Theseus sets out to free Athens of its debt to Crete - Athens must send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be sacrifices to the Minotaur because the Athenians lost a war with the Cretans - Some myths: it’s recompense for the murder of King Minos’s son in Athens - Theseus volunteers to be one of the seven boys with two (sometimes seven) boys dressed as girls to help - Minotaur - Offspring of Cretan Queen Pasiphae and Cretan bull  - Bull was a gift from Poseidon to Minos; Minos refused to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon, so the god filled Pasiphae with desire for it - Hidden in a maze in the king’s palace - Body manifests a fear of miscegenation - Human body with a bull head; suggests bestial side dominates - Theseus encounters three foreign women: Ariadne, Phaedra and Hippolyta; Ariadne betrays her parents to help Theseus (Minotaur is her half-brother) - She gives Theseus a silver thread so he can find his way out of the maze - Theseus abandons her on Naxos, then he marries her sister Phaedra - Phaedra and Hippolytus - She’s filled with a desire for her stepson (child of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta) - Hippolytus refuses to respond to her solicitations so she falsely accuses him of rape, causing him to die in a gruesome way; Phaedra commits suicide in shame - Theseus, foreign women, and Greek marriage with non-Greeks - Warns against marriage between Greeks and non-Greeks which the Athenians prohibited in a law that restricted Athenian citizenship to those who had two Athenian parents - Prohibition protected the Athenian democracy from political alliances between elites in different Greek communities Perseus - Defining encounter with the gorgon Medusa; her power and reputation eclipse his - Protective function of the gorgon head; frequently depicted on temples and shields - Shields: frighten enemies and make them stop in their tracks - Temples: ward away anyone approaching in an impious way - Distant ancestor of Hercules; son of Zeus and Danae; grandfather = Acrisius, king of Argos - Acrisius imprisons Danae in a room; Zeus visits Danae in a shower of gold and impregnates her - Acrisius locks Danae and Perseus in a trunk and sets it out to sea in order to avoid putting them to death directly and incurring the wrath of the gods; Perseus and Danae arrive on Seriphos - Dictys, brother of Polydectes, finds them and shelters them - Polydectes is rebuffed as a suitor, so he imprisons Danae in his house and send Perseus to the temple of Athenafor his youth - Polydectes sends Perseus to recover head of Medusa as a way to dispense with the young man so he might marry Danae - Perseus visits the Graeae or the Phorcydes, who are Medusa’s sisters and know where she may be found - Graeae share one eye and one tooth; Perseus takes them and promises to return them in exchange for the info he needs - The gifts of the Graeae: winged sandals to fly, a bag to hide Medusa’s head from view, and a cap to make him invisible - Perseus finds the Gorgons and decapitates Medusa, stowing her head in the bag - Medusa: - Gorgon sisters = daughters of Phorcys (sea deity) and Ceto (Sea creature) - Medusa is the only mortal and especially dangerous to mortal men - If a man looks at her, they turn to stone - Depicted as winged, wearing a short tunic and boots - Snakes instead of hair - Several adventures on the return to Seriphus that Perseus uses Medusa’s head to protect himself - The Titan Atlas threatens him; turns into a large mountain - Perseus rescues Andromeda in Ethiopia, who was tied to a rock and left to be eaten by a sea monster; punishment by the Nereids who were angry at her mother Cassiopeia for bragging that Andromeda was more beautiful  - Andromeda’s father Cepheus promises Perseus he can marry her if he saves her; plots with Andromeda’s betrothed Phineus to kill him so Phineus can marry her - Perseus turns Phineus and his men to stone; marries Andromeda and has seven sons and two daughters - On Seriphos, Polydectes turned to stone and Perseus rescues Danae; Dictys is established as the new king - Death of Acrisius: he learns of Danae and Perseus’s survival; killed after being hit by a disc Perseus threw in an athletic contest - Delphic oracle predicting Acrisius would be killed by his grandson is fulfilled Medusa the Monster - Originally depicted as a beautiful, winged maiden; sleeping posture emphasizes vulnerability to Perseus’s attack - Poseidon, Medusa, and Athena - Poseidon sexually violates Medusa in Athena’s temple; Athena punishes Medusa by turning her hair into snakes - Medusa can now only frighten men, not attract them - Medusa gives birth to Chrysaor (mortal man) and Pegasus (winged horse) from her neck upon her death - Rarely seen in visual sources - Sarcophagus from Cyprus: shows how Chrysaor and Pegasus struggle to free themselves from her neck; Medusa pulls them out - Emphasizes Medusa’s maternity - Athena’s invention of the flute to imitate the sound of her or her sisters’ beautiful wailing - Fascination and repulsion provoked by her gruesome death bringing beautiful music and Pegasus into the world - Medusa and the powers of procreation and artistic creation, alluring properties that threaten to transform men in ways they can’t control - Monsters define the heroes who pursue and destroy them - Perseus becomes the monster he sought to defeat by using Medusa’s head to turn his enemies to stone - Hercules becomes invulnerable like the Nemean lion skin he wears - Theseus joins his and the Minotaur’s families together by courting one of the Minotaur’s sisters (Ariadne) and marrying another (Phaedra) Euripides, The Madness of Hercules - Hercules returns from Thebes after his labors - Kills wicked King Lycus - Hera sense Lyssa to drive Hercules mad - Hercules murders his family - Theseus and refuge in Athens - Excerpt Chapter 12: Heroes at Home November 28 & 30 Readings: CMiC Chapter 12 The Homecoming Husband - After leaving home and having many adventures, heroes return - Most Greek heroes don’t have a successful return home  - Odysseus, Jason, and Oedipus - Nostos and Nostalgia - Nostos: “return (home)”, especially from Troy - Algos: “pain or sufferings of either mind or body” - Nostalgia: coined by Johannes Hofer to describe a disease; symptoms: fever, stomach pain, and fainting; resolves when mercenaries returned home - The importance of the hero’s wife at home - “The Homecoming Husband” tale-type; life and livelihood depends on reunion with wife - Woman is forced to choose another husband - First husband returns (disguised) on the wedding day and discloses his identity to his wife, is recognized by her domestic animals, or answers the woman’s questions correctly - Revenge on the rival Odysseus - In the Iliad, contrasted with Achilles - Embassy to Achilles in Book 9 - Agamemnon commissions Odysseus to lead an embassy to Achilles’s tent to offer him gifts and persuade him to rejoin the battle against the Trojans - Achilles implies that Odysseus is deceitful and that his eloquent words don’t express his true thoughts and intention - Zeus is a distant ancestor of Odysseus’s father Laertes; his mother Anticleia is the daughter of Autolycus, the son of Hermes - Autolycus named Odysseus = odussasthai “to be angry with” or “to cause suffering” - Autolycus suffered at the hands of men and women and asks that his grandson’s name commemorate his own life as well as Odysseus’s maternal heritage - Odysseus’s scar - Attacked by a wild boar; scar on his leg - Identifies Odysseus but also symbolizes the suffering Odysseus causes and endures Cunning Intelligence and Passive Heroics - Metis and Odysseus’s epithets - Metis = cleverness or cunning intelligence - Polumetis = “very clever” - Polutropos = “very tricky” - Descendant of Hermes = labeled as a trickster hero - Endlessly resourceful and talented like Athena and Hermes - Shapeshifter like Hermes - Man of many crafts and talents (shipbuilder, farmer, athlete, warrior) like Athena - Cunning intelligence (easily slips into deceitfulness) defines his character in tragedies - Ajax - Odysseus persuaded the Greeks to give him Achilles’s arms by speaking more artfully than Ajax - Odysseus claims his Trojan Horse has secured victory over Troy - Persuasive rhetoric leads to his acquisition of Achilles’s arms and to Ajax’s decision to kill himself after failing in an attempt to seek revenge on the Greeks - Odysseus mediates a dispute about whether Ajax should be buried as a traitor or soldier; skillful and compassionate speaking argues that Ajax should be buried with honors - Philoctetes  - Odysseus is a self-serving mentor to Neoptolemus (son of Achilles); counsels Neoptolemus that gaining one’s objective outweighs all other considerations, including ethical ones - Iphigenia at Aulis: Odysseus = a cutthroat politician - Hecuba: Odysseus = a man who must ba;ance his moral inclinations against the necessities of the situation he finds himself in - Described as “passive” because of his willingness to maneuver around hardship, to lie in ambush, and to keep what’s on his mind silent - Skills of planning, thinking, and stillness - Sirens - Odysseus plans strategically to defend his crew against their enchantments while allowing him to listen and learn from their songs without succumbing to the dangers they present - Gives beeswax to his men to plug their ears and has himself tied to the ship’s mast so he won’t abandon the boat and crew - Ensures he’ll be physically incapable of taking any action - Odysseus learns from female characters - Circe, Calypso, the ghosts of his mother and other women, and his wife Penelope Polyphemus the Cyclops - Odysseus’s intelligence triumphs over Polyphemus’s strength - More complex than brains vs brawn - The Cyclops’s island and Greek cultural values - Odysseus judges the Cyclopes as lawless and arrogant bc they don’t pursue activities Greeks consider to make a society civilized - Island’s harbor is well suited to protect ships and verdant and rich land supports agriculture; but the fields are uncultivated and the harbor doesn’t have any ships; also no public spaces for gatherings - Island’s inhabitants don’t engage in agricultural work or seafaring - Lack of public gathering spaces suggests those who live on the islands don’t pursue the kind of conversation that leads to self-government or cultural/social activities that are hallmarks of Greek civilization - Each Cyclops establishes rules over his family while being indifferent to his neighbors - Mutual violations of xenia (“hospitality”) - Religious and ethical demand involving more than good manners - Hosts were expected to provide food and lodging to guests as well as help them on their way in exchange for gifts and stories - Guests were expected to be courteous and honest - Odysseus and Polyphemus both violate these normative behaviors - Odysseus in Polyphemus’s cave - Cave is well ordered and brimming with food; gives evidence of owner’s successful animal husbandry - Odysseus and his men help themselves– uninvited– to all the food they want; his men beg him to leave with as much food and animals as they can get safely to their ships, but Odysseus isn’t persuaded - He hopes the cave’s owner will be generous and exchange gifts and food when he presents himself as a respectful guest - Polyphemus enters and is surprised and angry to see uninvited strangers eating his food; asks them if they’re pirates/uncivilized thieves - Polyphemus eats some of Odysseus’s men as revenge for violation of his cave  - Odysseus tricks the Cyclops into getting drunk and blinds him by driving a burning stake into Polyphemus’s eye; he and his men escape undetected by clinging to the wool under the bellies of Polyphemus’s sheep as they’re let out to pasture - Odysseus less than heroic - Polyphemus’s neighbors ask if he needs help when he screams in pain; Cyclops appear less isolated and brutish than Odysseus claims - Odysseus’s forays into foreign lands distantly represent Greek colonizing efforts in the Mediterranean - Cyclopes are similar to people who defended their property and families from Greek colonizers and whose languages and customs were different from the Greeks’ - Polyphemus represents Greek fears about non-Greeks, Odysseus represents the cunning and bravery of the colonizing Greeks Women’s Worlds and Odysseus’s Silence - Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and Nausicaa - Calypso delays Odysseus for years in her faraway island with promises of immortality - Circe offers him a life of indulgence and pleasure on another island - The sirens seduce him with their songs of praise - Nausicaa, daughter of the king of Phaeacia, promises he will become king if he marries her - Attentive listening/“passive heroics” replaces violence and action; experiences contribute to Odysseus’s transformation from a marauding hero set on obtaining goods while abroad to a returning hero set on remarrying his wife and regaining his house and land - Odysseus in the Underworld - Contribute to Odysseus’s transformation and his successful remarriage with Penelope in Ithaca - Teiresias provides him with info about his journey home, explaining that only ghosts who drink blood from the ram Odysseus slaughtered are able to speak - His mother reports that Penelope remained loyal to him despite his long absence - Companions at Troy tell him about their travails on their voyages back to Greece and what happened to them once they reached their cities and families - Odysseus realizes his past as an Iliadic hero has come to an endl makes the choice to spend his brief time in the Underworld with women he never knew while they were alive, who describe their experiences while their husbands were away at war - Odysseus listens to them like how he listens to the sirens - Underscores the high value Odysseus places on understanding/acquiring knowledge from and about women - Eight years with Calypso - Length of stay suggests Calypso’s importance - He says the goddess promised to make him immortal but never persuaded him to accept her offer - He drenched her garments in tears until she released him at Zeus’s command - Odysseus doesn’t say what happened during the eight years - The transformation of the lonely, wandering hero into someone determined to pursue a new course of action - Odysseus desire for travel and exploration is extinguished Homecoming - Second half of the Odyssey - Disguised reconnaissance in the palace - He must discover who remained loyal to him during his absence  - Disguised as a beggar; goes to his swineherd Eumaeus and his son Telemachus; tests their loyalty, then reveals his identity - Odysseus goes to the palace to test the loyalty of his servants, suitors, and his wife; his hound Argus recognizes him upon his arrival - Argus’s death upon seeing his long-lost owner conveys the suffering of those who remained loyal to him in hopes of his return - Odysseus soon meets Penelope, but doesn’t reveal his identity to her - Conversation with Penelope - Penelope’s dream of an eagle killing her geese; Odysseus interprets her dream as a prediction that he is the eagle and the suitors stationed in her house are the geese: he’ll return shortly and kill them - Penelope doesn’t accept this interpretation that doesn’t explain why the destruction of the geese upsets her - The bow contest - Penelope decided Odysseus is most likely dead and sets up a contest to determine who she’ll marry; she’ll marry whoever can string Odysseus’s bow - None of the suitors succeed; Odysseus asks to try and he succeeds, and he then kills the suitors with Telemachus and Eumaeus’s aid - The secret of the bed - Odysseus anticipates a warm embrace from Penelope when she enters the hall; she claims to be uncertain if he is really Odysseus and tricks him into revealing the secret of how their wedding bed was made - They reunite when he correctly explains the bed’s construction - The successful return of this “homecoming husband” - Recognition of the hero by an animal, social pressure on his wife to remarry, and his correct answer to his wife’s test concerning his identity - Penelope is important to Odysseus’s successful return; her actions preserve his land, name and family and makes their restoration possible upon his return Agamemnon and Menelaus in Greece - Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus & Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes - Frequently compared to each other - While Agamemnon was fighting at Troy, his wife Clytemnestra and his cousin Aegisthus become lovers; Aegisthus murders Agamemnon when he returns, despite Hermes’s warnings that he couldn’t court Clytemnestra or kill Agamemnon - Agamemnon’s son Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus - Agamemnon’s repeated story in the Odyssey - Telemachus’s mentors– Athena, Nestor, and Menelaus– remind him of Orestes’s choice to avenge Agamemnon’s death - Agamemnon’s ghost describes his return to Argos to Odysseus in the Underworld; emphasizes Clytemnestra’s betrayal rather than Orestes’s revenge - In his telling, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra killed him and his men during a celebratory dinner, transforming it into a battlefield - Clytemnestra killed his Trojan concubine Cassandra and later refused to provide the appropriate ministrations to his corpse - There’s nothing more shameful than a wife who plots her husband’s murder - Agamemnon offers to contradictory observations: - He assures Odysseus that Penelope is loyal - Advises him to return to Ithaca in disguise because all women are untrustworthy - Emphasizes the importance of a faithful wife for a successful homecoming - Aeschylus’s Oresteia: blame and responsibility  - Agamemnon consults the seer Calchas, who tells him he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis; Agamemnon agrees and hills her on an altar - Agamemnon’s unsuccessful return: Clytemnestra kills him and claims she’s avenging her daughter’s murder - Menelaus’s return with Helen - Sets Menelaus apart from the other returning Greeks - Telemachus in Sparta in the Odyssey - Telemachus visits them to gather info about his father - Menelaus tells Telemachus that his sorrows are greater than his wealth; he only has two children (Hermione with Helen and Megapenthes with a servant) - Menelaus and Telemachus weep; Helen drugs their wine so they stop - Menelaus has a seemingly interminable melancholic existence with his return - Their returns underscore the uncertainty of the hero’s return and the extraordinary nature of Odysseus’s achievement Excerpt from Homer’s Odyssey - Book 10: Odysseus and Circe The Quest Hero - Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaca” - The importance of the journey - Every person’s life is shaped by his or her desires and fears, as well as shared encounters along the way - Joseph Campbell’s monomyth - Monomyth: a narrative pattern - The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) - “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man” - The hero’s journey corresponds both to events in each person’s life and to the psychological maturation that transpires beneath the threshold of consciousness - The monomyth resonates with all people and appears in stories in all societies - The monomyth and Hollywood - George Lucas and Star Wars; worked closely with Campbell - Christopher Vogler (story analyst for Hollywood studios): believed monomyth offered a formula for selecting stories that would lead to successful movies; converted Campbell’s ideas into a “how to”manual, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Storytellers and Screenwriters - Monomyths are “true maps of the psyche” and “emotionally realistic even when they portray fantastic impossible, or unreal events” - Only applies to men’s journeys and is culturally specific Subjective Experience and the External Landscape - W.H. Auden’s “The Quest Hero” - Hero’s quest represents the internal reality of readers, not the heroes, but the readers of the hero’s adventures - Resonates with the reader’s subjective experience; reflects how individuals experience their own lives  - The hero’s landscape is very near; exploits acquire meaning because they represent and respond to desires, fears, and hopes the lie in the hero’s heart and the reader’s subconscious - Excerpt Rome: Aeneas - Gertrude Rachel Levy: “[Heroes] navigate the waters of death to learn their destiny from an ancestor or prophet, as Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Aeneas did. If they find what they seek, they are likely to lose it again” - The hero’s journey to the Underworld - Common - Corresponds to and gives literary expression to the second liminal stage of an initiation rite (Chapter 8.2) - An initiate or hero undergoes a radical transformation - Compelled to relinquish aspects of his identity in order to develop and adopt new ones, and attain a new status - Transformation is ritually accomplished through physical and mental trials as well as symbolic enactments of death and rebirth Aeneas in Avernus - Vergil’s Aeneid - Similarities to and differences from Homer - Both heroes narrate their journeys - Aeneas isn’t going home, he’s leaving home and doesn’t know where he’s going until he acquires an oracle that informs him he must found Rome with his band of surviving Trojans - Aeneas’s journey split into halves that correspond to the two aspects of his identity - Aeneas arrives in Cumae where the Cumaean Sibyl’s temple and opening to the Underworld (Avernus) is located - Aeneas sacrifices and buries a Trojan companion, Misenus, following Sibyl’s instructions before entering Tartarus - Entering Tartarus: he sees heroes who died at Troy and Dido, the Carthaginian queen who committed suicide when he left her kingdom to reach Italy - Dark and gloomy regions of Tartarus compels Aeneas to mourn the destruction of his city, recognizing his identity as a Trojan must change to forge a future for himself and his companions - Aeneas and the Sibyl enter the Elysian field where he meets his father Anchises, who explains the origins of the world and how souls are reborn before describing the future kings and ruler of rome - He advises Aeneas about the wars he must fight to secure his future - Anchises’s teachings and promises of glory enable Aeneas to look forward to the future and seek to fulfill his father’s words - Aeneas’s transformation is complete when he emerges from Avernus - Geographical markers/characters/objects in Avernus are liminal (mix of contradictory parts and are thus frightening and monstrous) - Aeneas’s liminality and the golden bough - Golden bough = liminality; both an inanimate metal and a living tree; it’s a plant, yet has agency because its fruit follows only some “willingly’; subject to change and death, but is also immortal because plucked fruit immediately grows back - Bough captures the beauty and potential of liminality and the capacity to change, while retaining vitality  - Symbolizes Aeneas’s own rebirth - Excerpt from Book 6 *FINAL: CH. 10-12 (DEC. 20 1:00pm-3:00pm)*