Given the fact that Odyssey is an essential text of classical studies, Trinity College’s Vincent Tomasso has been teaching the epic poem by Homer his entire career.
The associate professor and chair of the Department of Classical Studies recently shared his knowledge and strategies with counterparts at Columbia University who will be teaching the Odyssey to their students this semester.
“The Odyssey is challenging to teach, because it’s an old poem, from the eighth century, B.C.,” said Tomasso. “Even though the Odyssey is from a very different time and place, we can connect it to us and our contemporary experiences.”
Tomasso is currently teaching the Odyssey in two courses at Trinity. In “Greek Civilization,” students read passages in translation and discuss them in the context of ancient Greek culture; in “Thought World of Ancient Greece,” a course in the Humanities Gateway sequence, they read the entire poem in translation.
In another course Tomasso created, “Songs of War,” Trinity students delve into how the ancient Greeks understood the struggles of being a veteran returning home after two decades away. On Veterans Day, Tomasso shares his observations about the timeless narrative.
What lessons does that narrative provide?
We have to remember the in the audience for this poem, there were veterans of real, historical wars in ancient Greece. And there were a bunch of these, since Greek cities fought each other almost every summer!
So the audience would’ve been looking not only for their experiences in war to be expressed, but also for their experiences to be interpreted, for a greater understanding. From that point of view, the Odyssey teaches non-veterans to be compassionate towards the challenging experiences that veterans face, even after they have endured armed conflicts. It also reminds us that returns change veterans, as well as the people who want them to return.
In the Odyssey, what is the experience of the veterans returning from war?
The Odyssey features a number of returning veterans sailing to their homes in Greece after the Trojan War. The central one is Odysseus, who’s trying to return to his wife Penelope and their son Telemachus in their island kingdom of Ithaca. He infamously takes 20 years to do that—10 at war and 10 trying to return—but he eventually does it. Other Greek veterans are more successful—Nestor and Menelaus, for instance, who return to their homes almost immediately. Odysseus is the one who takes the longest. And he deals with many obstacles along the way, including monsters like the Cyclops and humans like the hundred of suitors trying to take his place.
Odysseus’ crew, who fought with him and began the return voyage to Ithaca with him, aren’t so lucky. One particularly unlucky fellow, Elpenor, has too much to drink at a party, forgets that he was sleeping on a roof, and plummets to his death. Many others die from poor leadership and from their own foolishness.
How does that inform the experience of veterans?
Homer’s epic allows those who encounter war after they have experienced the poem to understand their wartime through the lens of the Odyssey. Some ancient Greek audience members might soon [after reading the poem] become veterans themselves, and would process their wartime experiences through those portrayed by the poem.
