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

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The Iliad (a song about Ilium, or Troy) along with its companion epic the Odyssey form the foundation of ancient Greek culture and address the extremes of human experience through war and peace. Both epics are primary, or oral, epics that draw on an enormous wealth of cultural stories in unified structures that we attribute to the poet Homer, in eighth century B.C.E. The epics are written in an unsentimental style: the Iliad depicts the ambivalence of war in meticulously accurate details. Both the nightmare of war and its excitement find expression in the Iliad, just as the Odyssey’s pages quest for a home, or a peace that seems hard-won after the devastation of war.

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While composed nearly five thousand years ago (2500-1500 BCE), Gilgamesh strikes me as very contemporary in its thematic concerns as it is alien in many of its cultural practices. Many of these themes emerge from a lost mythological tradition and a culture that is equally non-extant, the bonds of friendship, fear of death, and the quest for worldly renown still strike chords with us even in the twenty-first century.

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I have always been curious as to why that damn flood episode is in Gilgamesh. I mean, it seems so out of place and disrupts the unity of the narrative. I know that Utnapishtim’s immortality and wisdom has to be explained (it does, right?) in some way, but do we really need the whole flood narrative that links the epic to its Hebrew neighbors? I seem to have been on to something in an earlier entry, but it took an email form a colleague to crystallize it.

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For in my heart and soul I know this well:
the day will come when sacred Troy must die, [. . .]
That is nothing, nothing beside your agony
when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears,
wrenching away your day of light and freedom!
–Hector to Andromache, the Iliad, VI.396-97, 405-07

Book VI of Homer’s Iliad shows the contention in the heart of Hector, Ilium’s champion, but also a husband and new father: he is torn between his responsibilities as a hero to his people and as a the head of the household. Like so many soldiers going off to battle today, Hector is a new father who must risk his life to maintain his people’s way of life. Hector knows that Troy is doomed, but he must do his duty as champion and prince, even though it means the enslavement of his wife and child. In Hector’s plight, we see what is perhaps the utmost position of humanity in war: to lose does not mean just the death of the hero, but his death precipitates the death of the society that he protects.

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Book 16 of the Iliad epitomizes the height of the chaotic struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans as each try desperately to gain the upper hand. Lost in the rage of battle and spurred on by Zeus, Patroclus gains the upper hand after killing Sarpedon, the adopted son of Troy, yet only to be taken down by Apollo, then killed by Hector. In this battle, there is a contention between desire and fate, the gods’ and man’s struggle for they want placed beside that of inexorable fate. Here, Patroclus is the warrior fighting beyond his fate, not great enough to level the walls of Troy, but just a soldier who, like many young men, is fated to die outside the walls of Ilium.

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While the epic of Gilgamesh is best known for its themes of friendship, worldly renown, and quest for immortality, it also seems to be concerned with the inexorable spread of humanity on this planet. While the epic upholds and even advocates the pioneering and trailblazing spirit of humanity, there seems to live within the lines of the text a sort of lament for the nature that is lost when civilization encroaches on the forests, the seas, and the mountains. And even while Enkidu and Gilgamesh are punished by their killing of Humbaba and subsequent slaying of the Bull of Heaven, humanity’s progress seems to take the forefront in this epic of heroic endeavors. Yet, the these ecological concerns seem to be linked to the greater fate of the heroes and the people that they represent, and sounds a note of caution about overstepping our bounds.

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Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” . . . “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.” (Genesis 1:26 and 1:28)

Since the beginning, humans (why do I want to write “man” here?) have had divine sanction to do whatever it is they desire to the flora and fauna (“creeping things”) of the earth. Many have taken this to heart and continue to use the word of the God of Genesis as authority to rape, pillage, and squander all that the natural world has to offer. Indeed, much of what humanity has taken from the earth has directly led to our continued evolution through superior technological developments, but what is lost by a careless and prodigal waste of these god-given resources? The Judeo-Christian Old Testament is not the only work of literature that addresses the ecology; the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh also looks at humanity’s progress, but perhaps not so wantonly.

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Odysseus finally returns home in Book XIII of the Odyssey, but “could not tell what land it was / after so many years away … The landscape looked strange, unearthly strange / to the Lord Odysseus” (XIII. 238-39, 245-46). Odysseus spends the next seven books carefully making his way around Ithaka, making allegiances, and practicing his trademark dissembling and contending in order to insinuate himself into the presence of the suitors to make them eventually “atone in blood!” (XI.132). The lessons of the voyage must come into play if Odysseus is to reclaim his house and kingdom so that he may set his lands in order and finally put the chaos of this wanderings behind him. Book XXI sets the stage for the slaughter of Book XXII. Telemachus has finally accepted Odysseus as his true father and now stands beside the returned king at the end of Book XXI: Odysseus has cast aside his beggar’s rags and now stands regally before the doomed suitors, bow in hand, son by his side, and electrical effects from the gods themselves. You couldn’t ask for anything better out of Hollywood.

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Book XI of the Odyssey shows Odysseus’ symbolic death and rebirth: a journey into the psyche of Odysseus in which he learns both about his past and future and comes to terms with his responsibilities as a leader, a father, a husband, and a hero. Perhaps most importantly Odysseus learns from the shades of his past the wisdom he needs to return home safely — to defeat his own selfish desires and those of his enemies. This descent is a personal one for Odysseus; though his crew joins him, they do not make it home, and they seem to represent an aspect of Odysseus’ psyche that he cannot control — free radicals that will eventually have to be dealt with in one way or another. While Odysseus meets many figures from his past and his culture, there are a few that hold key lessons for Odysseus.

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