Please ask if you have any questions.
Please let me know which topic you are going to choose once you decide.
The book used for this essay is: Homer, The Iliad of Homer ISBN: 0226470490.
Please write about one of the following topics:
1. Write an essay on two father-son relationships in the Iliad. Focus on themes such as care, duty, respect and masculinity. How does it differ from maternal love?
2. Write an essay about lamentations in the Iliad. Use Andromache lament in Book 6 and one other example of lament.
3. In several passages, Homer describes the gods as stealing the wits away from mortals in ways that lead them to behave foolishly (such as in Agamemnon apology for taking Bruise from Achilles in book 19). What do these rhetorical phrases essentially blaming the gods reveal about how Homer conceived of human agency and fate? Is Agamemnon deflecting blame from himself or does he really attribute his behavior to divine interference?
4. Many characters, both gods and mortals, tell stories in the Iliad. Choose one internal story and analyze the story itself, the context in which it is told, and its effect (or lack thereof) on its listeners. On the basis of your example, consider the purpose of storytelling within the Iliad. Why and in what circumstances do people tell stories? What
do they hope to achieve? How successful are they in achieving their aims? In your conclusion, take a step back to consider what your example can tell us about Homers purpose as a storyteller.
5. Consider the artistry of Homeric similes, their beauty and pathos but also their occasionally grotesque humor. Choose a simile that you find especially striking, evocative and/or significant to the poem as a whole. Analyze the simile itself (both sides!) and the context in which it appears, in order to consider both the specific function
of this simile and the broader purpose of similes within Homers poem. You may wish to address how your particular simile resonates with imagery from other moments in the poem.
Please keep the following guidelines in mind:
Your paper should be approximately 2 pages, typed and double-spaced. Please use Times New Roman and 1-inch margins. Your paper should be a well-corrected final version, without spelling
or grammatical errors. Please submit your document in Word and leave yourself enough time for a separate editing phase after writing (preferably with a nights sleep between writing and editing). Spelling of names should be consistent with Lattimores translation. Please check quotations carefully for accuracy!
Give your paper a brief title that attracts the readers attention and gives him or her some sense of your central claims. Whenever possible, support your claims with specific textual evidence.
Provide book and line numbers when citing or referring to specific passages, using the following format: For short quotations of one or two lines, integrate the quotation into your sentence, using / for
line breaks if necessary. Include final punctuation within the quotation marks except in the case of a comma, which should be dropped, or a period, which goes after the page reference as
follows:
The first line of the poem is: Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus son Achilleus (Book I.1).
For longer quotations of three or more lines, indent, respect line breaks, do not include quotation marks, include final punctuation and put page number(s) in parentheses as follows: The last four lines of the poem are:
They piled up the grave-barrow and went away, and thereafter
assembled in a fair gathering and held a glorious
feast within the house of Priam, king under Gods hand.
Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses. (Book XIV.801-804)
Make sure you have a claim, or in other words, a thesis statement. Be sure to write a substantial and satisfying conclusion that builds upon the analyses presented in the body of the paper and offers the most sophisticated and nuanced expression of your claims you can provide.
Just because the assignment is only two pages does not mean you should not spend time refining and polishing your work. In many ways, it is harder to write both elegantly and compactly than
