World of the hero

• Odysseus is a James Bond for the ancient world - Edith Hall
• By the end, all good xenia has been rewarded and all bad punished - Edith Hall
• Ithaca is where real life goes on - Edith Hall
• Female intelligence is prized in the Odyssey - Edith Hall
• Homer is careful to establish the ethical pattern at the start, with Zeus’s speech that humans bring disaster on themselves by ignoring divine intervention - Peter Jones
• Demonstrations of good hospitality are a show of moral values - Peter Jones
• Penelope is the equal of Odysseus as suggested in a reverse simile - Peter Jones
• Penelope is mired in conflict, even with herself - Peter Jones
• No Greek would have argued that Odysseus did not have a right to take revenge - Peter Jones
• The Polyphemus episode shows Odysseus’s key quality of metis - Peter Jones
• Homer makes the household the centre of the world, not the battlefield - Peter Jones
• By disguising himself in Ithaca, Odysseus delays a fulfilling homecoming - Peter Jones
• The relationship between Athene and Odysseus is unlike any other mortal god friendship in its intimacy - Peter Jones
• Eating the lotus flowers and not returning home is a much darker threat than dying in battle - James Morrison
• There are costs to revealing your name, choosing to conceal it might have benefits - James Morrison
• Odysseus wants to win glory by being able to live to tell his achievements - Jaspar Griffin
• By her self -command and guile, Penelope shows herself to be like Odysseus - Jaspar Griffin
• Homer tells the stories of non-noble characters with care and attention - Jaspar Griffin
• The Phaeacian’s are transitional characters between fantasy and Ithaca - Jaspar Griffin
• Justice is both done and seen to be done - Jaspar Griffin
• Telemachus is in the process of achieving adult status, asserting himself for the first time to the suitors and his mother - Jaspar Griffin
• The Phaeacian episode is the crucial point of transition between the war at Troy and Ithaca - Charles Segal
• Homeric heroes are essentially cattle-raiding barbarians - Oliver Dickinson
• Homer was actually a woman and put herself into the poem as Nausicaa - Samuel Butler
• Homer wants us to realise that, above all, Odysseus’s desire is to get home to Ithaca - Graziosi
• The Odyssey traces deep male fears about female power - Emily Wilson
• The resumption of marriage provides closure to each of their tales - Felson and Slatkin
• The concept of fate dominates the Aeneid - K.W. Gransden
• Aeneas is no more than a puppet without a character of his own - K.W. Gransden
• Most of the plot is generated by Juno - K.W. Gransden
• Aeneas could be seen as a prefiguration of Augustus - K.W. Gransden
• Furor dominates the last four books - K.W. Gransden
• Book four is like a tragedy, with scenes between protagonists, divine messengers and interventions, with the author as chorus, narrating and commenting on action - K.W. Gransden
• Virgil created a new type of stoic hero, willing to subordinate his will to that of destiny, the commonwealth and the future, reluctant to fight, not really interested in victory - K.W. Gransden
• What is often perceived as the colourless quality of Aeneas’s character is largely the result of the roles forced on him by the plot. Rather than being strongly driven by desire or ambition, he is forced into a mission by circumstances beyond his control - Philip Hardie
• Book six is the crucial book in the development of Aeneas’s character and resolution - R.D. Williams
• Aeneas has to be the social man - R.D. Williams
• Virgil has to create his hero as a prototype of the Roman character - R.D. Williams
• The Aeneid is a nation poem, to explore what Romans were like - R.D. Williams
• We see the heroic bravery of the Homeric warrior set against the Roman qualities of family life, social virtues and deep religious piety - R.D. Williams