Course Syllabus

ENGLISH 339: MYTHOLOGY AND LITERATURE
Syllabus #1369
5 credits

 

Dr. Nicholas Margaritis
Senior Instructor, English Department
HU 281 | 360-650-2537
Email:  Nicholas.Margaritis@wwu.edu

Full Course Syllabus:   English 339 syl 1369.doc

DEPARTMENT INFORMATION:

ENGLISH MAJOR/MINOR CREDITS:

WWU English majors/minors may apply up to 10 credits earned through distance learning to their major/minor course of study. Contact the English Department for guidelines.

COURSE PRE-REQUISITE: English 202

GOALS OF THE COURSE:

I have chosen to focus on Greek and Roman mythology not only because of the intrinsic quality of its literature, but also because it is so central to Western culture, with obvious parallels both to the Judeo-Christian nature of this culture as well as to other famous mythologies.

Precedence inevitably goes to the Greek poems since the Romans by and large inherited their mythology, like almost everything else, from the Greeks, with occasional modifications and only a few, on the whole far less interesting, myths of their own concoction.  Since studies of myth as a type of mentality are vastly available (and since a study of that sort shades over into anthropology), I have restricted our reading to literary works which give you direct access to the myths themselves in their oldest extant forms.  Their prehistoric origin was of course oral and popular long before the stories were conscientiously reshaped by individual poets into works of art.  Walter Pater, in a lovely essay written in 1876, talks about how out of the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct of poetry and art, came the little pictures, the idylls of the Homeric hymn, and the gracious imagery of Praxiteles.  The myth has now entered its second or poetical phase, then, in which more definite fancies are grouped about the primitive stock, in a conscious literary temper, and the whole interest settles round the images of the beautiful girl going down in the darkness, and the weary woman who seeks her lost daughter -- divine persons, then sincerely believed in by the majority of the Greeks.

We begin accordingly not with Homer (though the greatest of ancient poets, only secondary in the study of myth), but with his slightly later contemporary, Hesiod (also 8th century B.C.).  Traditionally he is regarded as the star of the Boeotian epic, and to him are ascribed (as the Iliad and Odyssey are to Homer) two major poems: the tough-minded, pragmatic, and occasionally didactic praise of hard work in a hard life, known as the Works and Days; and the Theogony, a genealogical poem about the origin of the gods.  I will have you read both of these.

From here we continue with what have come to be called, quite misleadingly, the Homeric Hymns.  There are thirty-three of them, all paeans to particular gods, each one recounting a major incident (or interrelated incidents) in the famous biography of that god.  The indisputable gem of the collection is the second hymn, devoted to the poignant portrayal of Demeter’s sorrow as she searches pathetically for her abducted daughter Persephone.  It was to become, says Pater, “the central and most popular subject of their [the Greeks’] national worship.”  In addition, I’m having you read the hymns to Hermes (delightfully charming), Aphrodite, and Dionysus.

Mythology has had, over time, many uses; we see this especially with our next two poets.  Aeschylus is by far the greatest of the ancient playwrights (as the English poets Milton and, centuries later, Shelley were the first to appreciate) -- clearly superior to Sophocles and to the universally overrated favorite, Euripides.  His greatest play is the Agamemnon (the first part of his Oresteia trilogy); but his Prometheus is nearly as great, and far more pertinent to this course.  Aeschylus takes the self-sacrificial Titan and portrays his obstinate suffering when he is chained, for insubordination to Zeus, head of the gods, to a mountain in the Caucasus, where Zeus’s eagle is fated to eat his liver as it grows back each day.  Obviously this archetypal figure of a god undergoing volitional martyrdom for the benefit of humanity is the prototype for Dionysus and Christ.  Much later, in the English Renaissance, Prometheus was the model for Milton’s blinded Samson, the enchained hero of his eponymous tragedy; and when you get to the 19th century English romantics, Prometheus becomes, particularly for Byron and Shelley, the noble representative of freedom from tyranny.  To Aeschylus he represented something more complex; granted, he is actuated by compassionate impulse to help miserable humanity climb out of its darkness and ignorance; but still he is guilty of going against the grain of reality in doing so, of defying the hard facts of reality.  What is also interesting is the way Aeschylus adapts to his own purposes (and richly expands) the famous myth we first encounter in Hesiod.

With Apollonius we come to the Hellenistic period of Greek literature, i.e. the three centuries before Christ, when the cultural capital of the Greek world shifted to the city of Alexandria, Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. and laid out along very modern and very luxurious lines by his Rhodian architect Deinarchos.  Dates are uncertain and highly disputed, but Apollonius seems to have been born sometime around 300 B.C. and to have died sometime around the mid-3rd century.  He might have been born in Rhodes, but most probably was born in Alexandria and lived for a time in Rhodes.  He is something of an anachronism: at a time when his great contemporaries Callimachus and Theocritus were devoting themselves to short forms of poetry - epigrams and idylls and highly subjective, personal lyrics - Apollonius tried to resurrect the old heroic narrative epic, and the Argonautika is the result.  As you will see, he redefines it significantly from its models, the great Homeric epics of five centuries earlier, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

This brings us to the end of the Greek authors.  We now skip several centuries and take up with the Romans, who first achieve real excellence in the first century B.C.  Without question the single most important work that is concerned with mythology is Ovid’s delightful Metamorphoses -- an addictive and charming compendium of over 200 stories, running from the creation of the universe to Ovid’s own time under Augustus Caesar.  The work was written some time in the early years of the first century A.D. (c. 3-8).  As a late writer, Ovid works by a kind of syncretism, plundering from many sources (often lost to us), combining and selecting between conflicting variants, where these exist.  For instance, he suppressed the version in which Narcissus commits suicide with a dagger (once given to him by a spurned lover), and prefers instead to show Narcissus pining away of unavailing erotic desire for himself.  Or another instance: Ovid’s Atlas, hearing that his garden is going to be ransacked by a son of Jove, refuses to admit Perseus when the latter identifies himself as a son of Jove.  In return, Perseus lifts up the petrifying head of Medusa and turns Atlas into the famous mountain.  To tell his version, Ovid had to discard the more common one that has Hercules (the most famous son of Jove) trick Atlas into getting him the golden apples from his garden.  One version precludes the other, though it’s obvious why Ovid opted for the one he did: his theme throughout the collection is metamorphosis, the transformation of humans into other forms.

You’ll also notice from the start evidence of what is commonly termed “polygenesis”: the independent appearance, in various cultures, of certain basic archetypal myths.  The idea of a progressive corruption from an idyllic golden age is something that Ovid undoubtedly got from Hesiod, but it’s also similar to the Biblical notion of a lost Eden; and both obviously were originally intended to explain the fundamental fact that life is hard.  Other Biblical parallels are the creation of man in God’s image; the attack of the giants on Olympus, by the piling up of Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa, a kind of Tower of Babel configuration; and, most obviously, the flood, with pious old Deucalion as a Greek version of Noah.  Deucalion’s son Amphictyon was the first, incidentally, to mix water in wine (the traditional Greek practice), which links him to Noah, who first planted the grape and made wine.  It is not inconceivable that Ovid, a superbly read poet, had seen a copy of the Septuagint -- the Greek translation of the Old Testament, made by a committee of Alexandrian scholars in the third century B.C.

Also as in the Old Testament, some of the stories seem to be a sort of poeticized history, where the names of individual heroes correspond to entire tribes or nations.  Agenor, the father of Europa, seems to correspond to the Phoenician hero Chnaas (better know by his Semitic name, Canaan).  His sons, setting out to search for their sister, disperse into various lands: Phoenix goes west into North Africa (Carthage) and gives his name to the so-called Punic civilization, but later returns to the seacoast of Canaan, renamed Phoenicia in his honor; Cilix goes into Asia Minor, into the land named Cilicia in his honor; and Cadmus goes to Boeotia (mainland Greece) and settles the magnificently ill-fated city of Thebes -- and there are confirmatory indications that this region was settled by people migrating from Palestine.

There were those who, like the ancient philosopher Euhemerus of Messene (c. 300 B.C.), believed that the gods had once existed as real people and had been posthumously deified on account of their fabulous deeds.  Ovid comes closest to this notion in his treatment of the death of Hercules.  Fatally poisoned by the centaur’s cloak, Hercules commands a pyre to be built for him, and in a kind of anticipation of Hindu suttee is gloriously immolated and subsequently immortalized as a god on Olympus, sitting at the right hand of his father Zeus, and ousting the goddess Hestia in the process, who descends to earth and sits by the hearths of humans (her name means “hearth”), becoming, as a result, the goddess of hospitality.

For the most part the Romans, as I say, took their mythology from the Greeks.  The names of many of the gods and heroes change in this adoption process.  Zeus becomes Roman Jove (a corruption of the Greek possessive genitive “Dios”) or Jupiter (a corruption of “Zeus pater” or “Father Zeus”).  His consort Hera becomes the Roman Juno, being apparently conflated with one of Zeus’s divine mistresses, Dione, mother (according to Homer in Iliad 5) of Aphrodite -- this being a variant of the more common myth that Aphrodite (whose name means “brought forth by the foam”) was born when the sky-god Uranus”s testicles were thrown into the sea by his usurper-son Kronos (the Roman Saturn, father of Zeus).  And so on.  The back of our edition of the Metamorphoses gives the Greek equivalents for the Roman names of the text.  Sometimes the Romans give their borrowed deities transformed personalities.  Vergil, for instance, in his vastly overrated Aeneid, makes them almost unrecognizable in their decorous dignity, so different from their pungently anthropomorphic counterparts in Homer.  But this process of making them pious objects of reverence (rather than psychological explanations for erratic events or human shortcomings) had long before been set in motion by none other than Aeschylus.  Ovid, to the contrary, delights in portraying the male gods as libidinous playboys and the female gods as spiteful bitches of vengeance.

In the last three books of the Metamorphoses you get finally a rundown of the most important purely Roman myths.  These are the stories of Aeneas, Pomona and Vertumnus, the section on early Roman history (actually legend), the story of Numa Pompilius, and the last bit about Caesar.  It is not only that Ovid, it seems, is getting a little tired by this point; the myths themselves are hardly as interesting as what the Romans got from the Greeks; and this is true for a very good reason.  Unlike the Greek myths, the Roman ones did not originate from the soil, so to speak; they were not outgrowths of a prehistoric mythic imagination that was fascinated with and terrified of the world of nature.  Instead the stories were deliberately concocted by poets like Vergil and his predecessors (Ennius, Naevius, and others now lost) to retroactively legitimize the course of Roman history.  The closest equivalent I can think of might be something like an official version of history invented by the one-true-party of the now-defunct, in a sense, Soviet Union.  It’s worth mentioning that there is one other main source of Roman myth, and it is also by Ovid: the collection of tales known as the Fasti.  The stories are selected to explain what occurred on a given day in the legendary past to account for the fact that that particular day is a feast-day, to be celebrated as a holiday, in the Roman calendar year.  On the whole it is a disappointing collection: the tales themselves are largely dull, and there is something a little too fastidiously arcane about them.  Only a handful stand out -- the stories of Hercules and Omphale; of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome; of Ariadne; of Phrixus and Helle; of Cybele; of Hippolytus -- while two of them, the stories of Lucretia and of Ceres (the Roman name for Demeter), are absolute masterpieces, the latter being, if possible, even more poignant than the version first told in the great Homeric Hymn.  But I think it is counterproductive to order a whole expensive collection in order to pick out the two dozen small pages that contain this handful of tales, particularly as there is some overlap (as in the case of the Demeter story) with what we are doing in the other texts.  If the subject catches your fancy, however, I would urge you to consult the Fasti; there is a serviceable prose translation of it by the famous scholar of mythology James G. Frazer in the Loeb Classics editions, made even more valuable by his copious and fascinating explanatory notes.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Please use only the following translations:

  • Hesiod: Theogony; The Works and Days (tr. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Johns Hopkins U. Press)  ISBN: 9780801879845
  • Homer: The Homeric Hymns (tr. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Johns Hopkins U. Press) ISBN: 9780801879838
  • Aeschylus: The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus II (tr. Richmond Lattimore and David Grene, Univ of Chicago Press)  ISBN:  9780226307947
  • Apollonios Rhodios: The Argonautika (tr. Peter Green, Ucal Press, 1997)  ISBN: 9780520076877
  • Ovid: The Metamorphoses (tr. Rolfe Humphries, Indiana UP)  ISBN: 9780253200013

The textbooks may be obtained online through a price comparison website such as www.AddAll.com.  Plan on purchasing your textbooks early and always be sure you are purchasing the correct edition of the book for this syllabus.

Very helpful for consultation and fuller background information:

Ovid: Fasti (tr. James G. Frazer, Loeb Classical Library).
Check a good university library.

Apollodorus: The Library (tr. James G. Frazer, two volumes, Loeb CL).
A good university library should have this also.  Apollodorus was a famous ancient mythographer, who collected in this compendium a plethora of facts and variants concerning the Greek myths.  Use the index to hunt up a given character.

Robert Graves: The Greek Myths.
Probably the best, most valuable resource for information.    Graves is a 20th century writer who has done on a vaster, more thorough scale what Apollodorus did.  You simply look up the name you want in the index: that directs you to the relevant chapter(s) and sub-sections.  The brief narrative in each chapter is followed by a list of ancient references where the various details of the narrative are to be found, and by a section discussing broader comparative analogues in world mythology.  There are many editions of the book, easily available at almost any large bookstore, new or used.  I highly recommend this.

Except for the above, I don’t expect you to do any outside critical reading; in fact, I discourage it.  At this point you ought to draw your own unpolluted insights from the artesian purity of the texts themselves.  However, I do recommend that - AFTER reading the given text - you read certain of the accompanying prefaces or notes on it.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Five papers, one on each ancient text: Hesiod, Aeschylus, Ovid, Rhodios, Homer.  Each paper will count for 20% of your course grade.  The papers may treat any topic dealing with theme, style, structure, characterization, etc.

Students often feel uncertain when asked to choose their own topic for a paper.  Don’t be hesitant.  Follow your instincts and trust yourself enough to create a pertinent, exciting subject.  The individual questions I list by way of study guide for each text might prove helpful in suggesting a topic to you.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the questions; they are meant merely to guide you as you progress bit by bit through each text.

Submit the papers ONE AT A TIME, as you complete each text, and wait for them to be returned with corrections before you submit the next.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

A Superlative 100-93   C Average 76-73
A- Excellent 92-90   C- Weak 72-70
B+ Very Good 89-87   D+ Minimal 69-67
B Good 86-83   D Minimal 66-63
B- Fairly Good 82-80   D- Minimal 62-60
C+ Fair 79-77   F Failure < 59

I give Fs only in exceptional circumstances, e.g., failure to submit assignment, failure to conform to format, plagiarism, etc.

I will give you both a letter and a number grade for each paper and then average these out for the course grade.  If the latter hinges on a few feeble points, I might, if circumstances warrant it - e.g., your papers show steady improvement or a consistent level marred by a unique instance of poorer work - award you a course grade higher than the strict numerical average.

SUBMITTING ASSIGNMENTS:

ALWAYS make a copy of your work BEFORE submitting it.  If lessons are lost, it is far easier to resubmit a copy than to rewrite an entire assignment.  All assignments must be completed in order to receive credit for the course.  All work must be submitted to the Western Online office.

Time Considerations - This course is not difficult to complete when the work is spread over 10 or 12 weeks as in a regular academic quarter.  Turn in your work early enough to receive feedback from the instructor to improve your next lesson.  Under no circumstances may you submit more than one lesson at a time.

Treat your Self-paced course as the serious learning experience that it is.  True learning takes time:  time for reading, time for processing new information, time for reflection.  When students get into trouble in a Self-paced course it is most often when they try to rush through a large part of the work at the end of the quarter or right before their own deadline.

Remember that grading takes time and instructors have other classes and students, other obligations.  Therefore, your instructor cannot grade assignments instantly to accommodate your deadline.  Allow time for mailing to and from the Western Online office and also back and forth between our office and your instructor.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Nicholas Margaritis received a B.A. in International Relations and European History and Diplomacy from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (1976).  He received an M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1982) in Medieval English Literature from the University of Virginia.  From 1982 until 1987 he taught literature at the American College of Greece in Athens, and then briefly directed programs at the British-Hellenic Language Institute in Athens.  Since the fall of 1989 he has taught at WWU in the English Department, and also, since 1991, in the University Honors Program.  His areas of special interest are ancient Greek and Roman literature, medieval English, French, and Italian literature, Shakespeare, 19th and 20th century French and Russian literature.  He has written articles on, and translations of, the modern Greek poetry of C.P. Cavafy.  He is the author of two plays and is currently at work on several novels.

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Course Summary:

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