The Humanities Index

Like Euripides was for Athens, Ovid was for Rome: the iconoclast poet devoted to the education of Rome’s elite in the ways of love. He wrote satirical verse aimed at subverting what he saw as an authoritarian imposition of moral reform embodied by his contemporary, Virgil. Ovid’s major work, the Metamorphoses, makes pains to be anti-Aeneid [...]

Generally speaking, Augustine’s Confessions seems to be a reworking of Plato’s metaphysics in relation to a Christian cosmology. Augustine speaks of the dichotomy between the body and the soul, the falseness of rhetoric, memory, sublimity, and desire. In addressing oratory, Augustine recalls Plato’s Gorgias and its subject matter inspired by rhetoric: Truth and the human [...]

Virgil’s Aeneid is a story of return that is providentially ruled by the gods.

Difference in the condition of the composition leads to a difference in the character of the poetry. Because Homer composed for recitation, his composition is in some ways freer and looser than Virgil’s. Both of Homer’s poems have a majestic plan — less closely woven than the Aeneid; their episodes are more easily detached from the [...]

The following questions should help you begin thinking about the major themes, characters, and ideas in the primary text.