The Old Schoolhouse - March 2012

Fast forward around four hundred years to find Homer, a blind Greek-speaking poet living in Ionia (Turkey), earning his keep by reciting a larger-than-life poem about heroes and fair Helen at ill-fated Troy. After the city falls, the Greeks make their way back home. Odysseus has so much misfortune that the poet composes a second epic to cover his ten-year trip back to Ithaca. While Homer included some very reliable details, he also filled in the gaps with tidbits from his own time and a big dash of imagination. He was, after all, making a living in the storytelling trade.

By the 1800s most scholars dismissed Homer, Troy, and the whole gang as pure poppycock, asserting that all of it had been invented by some ancient committee. Pu;ng their scholarly pipes, they wrote o; a lot of ancient literature as a ;gment of antique imagination. Luckily Heinrich Schliemann, a German publicity-loving entrepreneur, got in touch with Frank Calvert, who ;rmly believed he was living at the actual site of Troy. ;ese two began the tradition of using archaeology to vindicate ancient literature while pipe-pu;ng scholars ate crow.

;e Romans believed the Trojan War was their starting point. According to tradition, Rome was founded exactly 438 years a;er the fall of Troy (Velleius

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With a little background
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Paterculus 8. 5). One of her founding fathers, Aeneas, would lead a gang of Trojan refugees from the burning city and settle them near what would eventually become a point of argument for Rome’s namesake, Romulus and brother Remus. Be sure to add Virgil’s Aeneid to your reading list if you want the whole epic picture.

;e heroes of Homer’s epics lived by a code that would guide behavior from Homer to Alexander the Great. Uninformed readers might conclude the Trojan War was about stolen Helen or lost love, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was the heroic code that would drive hundreds of Greek ships against Troy, compel Achilles to sit angrily in his tent, force best friend Patroclus to take Achilles’ place on the battle;eld and push an army to blockade a city for a full decade.

C. M. Bowra summarized the heroic code this way: “;e great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no e;ort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gi;s and to surpass other men in his exercise of them.” 1

;e Romans would add their own ;air to the heroic code. Virgil’s Aeneas, for example, embodied Roman pietas, a virtue which admonished each of us to put God, community, and family ;rst.

While monsters and swashbuckling adventures keep the reader happy, Homer’s Odyssey is teaching the big life lesson that we are each de;ned by our generosity to strangers. From prince to farmhand the rule is the same: if you treat strangers with kindness, you’ll be remembered well. Hero Odysseus also teaches us to handle trouble with long-su;ering patience so that we’ll eventually make it home safely.

Ancient epics are an important addition to your reading list. ;ey are a gold mine for further thought and discussion if we don’t insist our kids start on them too young. I recommend waiting until your reader is in the critical thinking stage ( 13+) because of the weighty issues presented in these stories. Parents will enjoy reading the epics with your junior or senior high student. My favorite translations are by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo.

Originally performed from memory and accompanied by a stringed instrument, these tales were the blockbusters of the ancient world and the backbone of ancient Classical education. I leave you with the important words of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, spurring us on to generosity: “For how would you ever ;nd out, stranger, whether or not I surpass all other women in presence of mind, if you sit down to dinner squalid and disheveled here in my hall? Our lives are short. A hard-hearted man is cursed while he lives and reviled in death. But a good-hearted man has his fame spread far and wide by the guests he has honored, and men speak well of him all over the earth.” 2

Amy Barr is a homeschool mother of three and a full-time instructor of other home-educated students as co-founder of ;e Lukeion Project, www.lukeion.org. As an archaeologist, she spent more than a decade excavating sites throughout the Mediterranean and teaching Classics at the college level. Now she and her husband, Regan Barr, o;er their expertise through live on-line workshops and college preparatory high school courses about the Classical world, Latin, and Greek. ;e two of them lead annual family tours to the Mediterranean and invite you to join them for a tour of the best sites in Greece, May 2012.