Written by Elizabeth Vandiver
Read by Elizabeth Vandiver
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

Odyssey of Homer

Taught By Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin,
Whitman College

12 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture

Heroes' Homecomings (info)
Guests and Hosts (info)
A Goddess and a Princess (info)
Odysseus among the Phaiakians (info)
Odysseus Tells His Own Story (info)
From Persephone's Land to the Island of Helios (info)
The Goddess, the Swineherd, and the Beggar (info)
Reunion and Return (info)
Odysseus and Penelope (info)
Recognitions and Revenge (info)
Reunion and Resolution (info)
The Trojan War and the Archaeologists (info)


By joining award-winning classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver for these lectures on the Odyssey, you can get answers to these and hundreds of other questions.

At first glance, those first two questions indeed seem troubling.

For the Odyssey tells of a long-dead epoch that seems utterly alien to us. Indeed, the Bronze Age Aegean was a distant memory even to the original audiences of these works.

But age seems only to have burnished the luster of this epic.

It may be precisely because of its very strangeness and distance that generation after generation of readers have come to love it so much.

This strangeness and distance throw sharply into focus the timeless human issues that ride along on Odysseus’s journey, voyaging to strange lands on the shores of wine-dark seas, dealing face-to-face with gods and monsters.

A Single Riveting Question... and the Others It Raises

The epic’s exploration centers around a single question about the protagonist, and the two related questions it immediately suggests:

Why does Odysseus long so powerfully to go home?
What holds people together and keeps them going in extreme situations such as war or shipwreck?
Why do we love our own so strongly?

It is this universal theme that seems of paramount importance. What does it mean to live?

Professor Vandiver builds her analyses skillfully around meticulous, insightful examinations of the most important episodes in the Odyssey.

She explains the cultural assumptions that lie behind Homer’s lines, and you join her in weighing the basic critical and interpretive issues.

Just as knowledge of the Trojan War legend is necessary for understanding the Iliad—available as a companion course—the Odyssey assumes that its audience knows how the war ended and what happened next.

Learn the Story between the Epics