Meet Homer...and Tremble

Assignments for the Week of October 17-21

The Father of Epic Poetry

Seven cities warred for Homer, being dead,
Who, living, had no roof to shroud his head.

Thomas Heywood in The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, 1635.

Monday
Book Reviews and Updates
Leitharts and Heavy Thoughts on Hesiod's Theogony
The Search for the Trojan War
A Visitor from our extension campus--Wheaton College

Readings: 
Student's Guide and Hesiod are now past due.
Get Leithart's introduction finished tonight.
Background materials for The Iliad

Tuesday
Guest Lecturer:  Martin Rizley
Genesis 10 and Background to the Nations
Read Book 1 of The Iliad for Thursday

Wednesday
No School Today in Honor of Veritas 2000 Graduate Zachary Ramsey
"Mr. House, how are you going to teach literature after we graduate?"
I have been trying to answer that question since 2000.

Thursday
Book One of The Iliad

wRATH!

Friday
Further efforts to unpack Book One of The Iliad

Read Books Two and Three by Tuesday of Next Week

But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only, and not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak of the same themes which all other poets handle? Is not war his great argument? and does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad, skilled and unskilled, and of the gods conversing with one another and with mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the generations of gods and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer sings?

Socrates, quoted in The Dialoges of Plato