Homer Classics

[Raina Giorno]

Thevery notion of creating a retelling of these classics perverts the nature of their intent. This is because most fail to understand the true purpose of these stories. Classics professors bare more than their fair share of guilt in this respect.

(As an aside, Haynes appears to have written the characters in her story, the Greek gods and heroes, using modern vernacular. Yet another demonstration that there is nothing less timeless than feminism.)

In The Odyssey, Penelope represents the ideal woman. She is the standard bearer for feminine virtues like loyalty and patience. Her maids, on the other hand, display none of those virtues. They are included in the story solely to contrast the virtues of a good woman with the behaviors of bad women.

Feminists, because they perceive that Western men are the sources of all evil, actively want to change the stories that mold men. To do that, they reframe heroes as rapists and traitors as victims. This is precisely what the Hollywood blockbuster Troy tried to do when it glorified the weak pacifists of Troy and villainized the heroic Greeks.

Ian Johnston's new translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey make the epic tales more accessible to an audience less grounded in the classics. But the translations remain true to his poetry. Elaine Fantham and Scott Simon turn the pages.

Expertly traces how the Greek and Roman classics were used in constructing images of the East...This brisk and intelligent study shows the extent to which the classics created many of the presumptions (and prejudices) of the modern political world.

In this erudite work of survey, synthesis, and analysis, Toner examines the ways in which English historians and travel writers used the classics as a scaffold for understanding and constructing images of the East through allusion and analogy. His scope is both broad and deep, exploring English notions of Islam, Arabs, and Turks, from the first forays into the Orient through the decline of British imperial might in the postwar period. The real strength of this work is the framework Toner establishes, arguing the flexibility of the classics, and their utility as a mechanism for British social cohesion and as a tool to separate Britain from the East...This is an excellent piece of scholarship.

[Homer's Turk] gently chips away at modern scholarship about Western writing about the Orient...The merit of Toner's book lies in disabusing ideas generated by 'Orientalism.' Homer's Turk explores the world of early Western travel writing and observations about the Middle East and India. The question he tries to answer is how Europeans, who lacked any frame of reference except ancient Greece and Rome, tried to represent the East to their readers. This was a simple enterprise of making sense of a different world. A reading of the book makes clear that links between power and knowledge were more imagined than real. In this, he is among a new generation of writers who have taken a skeptical look at the issue...A splendid effort.

In this stimulating study, Jerry Toner guides us through an extensive body of English political works, historiography, and travel literature dating from medieval times through to the present that draw upon classical Greek and Roman authors to create images of Islam and the East.

Writing for a general readership, [Toner] covers in an accessible style a great deal of material from the Byzantine age to the present day, showing numerous ways in which allusions to classical authors have been used to express western (and particularly English) ideas of the East.

This is my entire cyberface pack. You'll find hundreds of faces from all generations in here. This is not intended to be installed as is. Modders need to know how to sort through the ones they want and know how to install them separately. Too many names to list here, so just take a peek. All previous versions of my cyberfaces are obsolete now. This is the all of them in one. Notes are below:

this will be the first of my face releases. i've decided to get away

from the gimick faces and start hitting some classics, as they aren't

being done too much anymore. as of now, i have 20 faces and counting.

lastly, like i said before, i would love to keep this thing going, but

who knows how long i'll do this for. read my thread for the list of

faces i wanna do. if you wanna make requests, feel free to, but i only

ask a few things: provide some decent pics, and if possible suggest

a good face model to start with. otherwise keep checking this for

updates.

i don't know how to emphasize this anymore, but use kraw's installer

to install the portraits and faces. simple as that. also don't

forget to use MvPedit to change the face Id and if it's an 04

model or not.

Wow! This looks awesome! I haven't forgotten about trying to add cyberfaces throughout the 1987 Classics Mod that was posted late last year, and this series of files will hopefully get me there if I can ever carve out out the time around work and family obligations. Thanks for posting!

Thank you for the gift of so many faces. They are especially useful to people such as me, working on older Classical mods. I particularly appreciate how for some players, you've added older and younger versions.

ROBERT WOOD: Congratulations on the fabulous success of the Odyssey, and a personal thanks for providing one of my favorite reading experiences in a very long time. You have written and spoken about the Odyssey at length since its release. What do you make of its coverage by reviewers, critics, readers, journalists, and scholars?

The book is an entry point for many people, not only to Homer but also to your other work. What are some of the themes, ideas, and interests that have mattered to you since you started working in classics?

Robert Wood is a Malayali writer living on Whadjuk country. The author of three books, he is interested in dream, language, enlightenment, joy, and ethics. At present, Robert is Creative Director of the Centre for Stories and Chair of PEN Perth.

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For centuries, The Iliad passed from generation to generation by spoken word. Homer lived in the eighth century B.C. and told a story that dated from the 12th century B.C., Bourgeois said. It wasn’t until the third or fourth century B.C. that scholars in Alexandria committed the sprawling epic to the page.

Bourgeois believes that the oral tradition that kept The Iliad alive bears remarkable similarities to modern rap. Both tell tales of everyday life, hardship, violence, love lost and gained. Both are histories.

Bourgeois arrived this summer at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences as a freshly minted assistant professor of classics. His primary area of research focuses on Roman political tradition.

Bourgeois acknowledges that the classics have long been considered the domain of white scholars. The glory of Greece and Rome have even been invoked by white supremacists to allege their superiority. But he notes that the classics have also been used as a tool for emancipation.

Frederick Douglass was inspired and informed by a primer on classical oratory that he spirited from the room of his owner’s son. Enslaved Africans across America in the 18th century absorbed the classics to promote insurgency.

It’s hard to imagine that Bourgeois would end up as a classics professor, much less an accomplished rapper, based on his early academic aspirations. The son of a nurse and a pharmaceutical executive, Bourgeois headed to the University of Chicago as an economics major.

Bourgeois’ ability to translate The Iliad into rap lyrics comes from more than his knowledge of ancient tomes. He was an avid actor in high school, even becoming the national president of the Junior Thespian Society. He also plays guitar and plinks the piano when he visits his parents.

Melissa Mueller, professor of classics, has written a new book on the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. Published by Cambridge University Press on Dec. 21, 2023, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading offers a new approach to the relationship between lyric and epic poetry in ancient Greece. The book will be featured during a book symposium on Sappho and Homer at Yale this April, as well as in a colloquium hosted by the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley in May, "Sappho, Homer, and Tragedy: Reading with Sedgwick, Bespaloff, and Butler."

Bourgeois believes that the oral tradition that kept The Iliad alive bears remarkable similarities to modern rap. Both tell tales of everyday life, hardship, violence, love lost and gained. Both are histories.

Bourgeois arrived this summer at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science as freshly minted assistant professor of classics. His primary area of research focuses on Roman political tradition.

His path began to change thanks to an influential friend in his fraternity who spoke 16 languages and dabbled in classics, which led Bourgeois to courses in the same and, ultimately, a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

The connection between ancient literature and its diverse readers informs my public engagement, broadcasting, and writing for general audiences. The Gods of Olympus: A History (London, 2013), shortlisted for the Criticos prize and translated into several languages, traces the travels and transformations of the Olympian gods from antiquity to the Renaissance, exploring how they evolved from deities to secular symbols of human creativity. Several programmes for BBC television and radio, as well as for French and Italian television and the US History Channel, relate antiquity to the present. My reviews on both classics and contemporary fiction have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Higher Education, and The London Review of Books.

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