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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Hey everyone,</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">I look forward to discussing the Iliad with you this Monday night, January 9, 2012 at 8pm ET!</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:13pt;color:#000000;">+1 (888) 298-1699</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:13pt;color:#000000;">Conference Code: 8473566#</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">As a reminder, we are discussing Books 1 - 8 in the Stanley Lombardo edition of Iliad.</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Below are the overall questions - take a quick look at those. But it's not homework. You don't have to prepare anything. There are no grades here. It's all about learning and connecting with each other and these great classics. </font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Bring your questions, confusion, reactions, frustration, passion - we'll use all of it to create our conversation. </font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Thanks,</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Andre</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">---------- </font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">General questions</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Every reader should read through these first three questions.</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">1. Oral poetry</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Homer’s poems come out of an oral tradition that was hundreds of years old before it was written down. Homer himself, if he really existed, may have lived on the cusp of the era of literacy, perhaps in the first generation of poets who had the means to write down, and reshape with writing, these oral songs.</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Consider these questions:</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- What was surprising to you about the language and style of Homer? Was there anything that was initially difficult that became enjoyable?</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- Jot down one or two examples of your favorite passages or phrases.</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- How do you think oral poetry, or oral culture, may be different from written?</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- Modern readers also live at the cusp of a new media era, the dawn of the digital age. How do you think the means of transmission (the "media") affect styles of literature? </font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">2. The gods</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">To read Homer for a modern reader is to grapple with the gods. </font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Consider these questions:</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- Are the gods merely puppet masters or is something else going on?</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- The first scene on Olympus (pp. 16-19) gives an early opportunity to understand the gods and their role in the poem. What's going on here? What do we learn?</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- What does the appearance of lame Hephaestus (p. 19) show us about the world of the immortals, where injuries and torments end up as jokes in the course of centuries, and that of humans, which is bounded by death?</font></div>
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<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">3. Achilles and the heart of the Iliad</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Homer jumps right in with the stunningly forceful depiction of the angry Achilles: those first few lines of Iliad are gripping. Readers may be tempted to see Achilles as spoiled or whiny, or to regard his fight with Agamemnon as a jealous scrap over a girl.</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">Consider these questions:</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- Did it annoy you that the great poem seemed to be driven by something so banal or, depending on your perspective, such a tired (and "sexist") cliché as men fighting over a woman? (Note: we write this with some irony knowing that the whole Trojan was, of course, a fight over a woman)</font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- As you read through the first books did you find yourself grappling with whether there is something deeper going on? Or something more relevant? What did you decide? </font></div>
<div align="left" style="text-align:left;"><font face="Geneva" size="+0" color="#000000" style="font-family:Geneva;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;">- And did the answer to that question inform the other question that most every reader has: why has this poem lasted so long?</font></div>
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