Welcome back, now, in this orientation module, we're going to do a few more
little videos and exercises, just to get started, so we can all feel like we're
figuring out what's going on in this class.
This is of course an online class. So we'll be doing just about all of our
work here on Canvas, and so there are a few things we want to just
get through first of all.
But we wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing in this
class as well.
This is an introduction to classical mythology.
And so we probably want to make sure we're on the same page of what
classical mythology is.
It after all can mean a few different things to different people and so
there are things we can lay out definitionally.
Now, in particular, the idea of classical mythology tends to land
in the area of Greek and Roman antiquity.
So some students come into the class thinking that this is a broad eclectic
class that's going to touch on things like say Norse mythology, or Hindu
mythology, or various other mythological traditions that are of course very
important and exciting, but this really squares on Greco-Roman Mythology
of the period of classical antiquity.
Now, just as a helpful visualization, when we talk about Greece and Rome,
you might think of say the modern state of Greece or Rome, the city, the capitol
city of Italy.
When we use those terms, we're talking about much larger cultures that cover
enormous expanses.
Here's a map of the Roman Empire at its largest extent.
In 117 A.D. or C.E. that's 117 years after the date ascribed to the birth
of Jesus.
And this was the largest extent of conquests that the Romans achieved
during that period.
So you can see that the Romans pushed the boundaries of empire
all the way to northern Britain, where I'm from.
Actually, I'm from southern Britain, but that's my accent,
all the way down to the middle east
to Egypt in the south and over to what we would say is Morocco
in the west.
So a huge amount of area, and this is roughly speaking, the parts of the
world where these cultures have their greatest influence and exerted
various kinds of power.
And there are lots of different ways that historians and archaeologists and
literary critics have studied these cultures.
For example, Lizzie I know that you -- which - first of all,
which side do you, we usually split into two sides, you know, Roman
and Greek or Latin and Greek.
Do you have a particular one or the other?
>> I do, I do, I have a particular fondness for Latin, so--
>> Oh hey, me too!
>> Yeah, I tend to study Latin poetry in particular.
I'm really interested in how language reflects ideas of gender and of sexuality.
So really how language brings the cultural context into the forefront
of what people are saying.
>> And we've talked about this before, that you have a particular interest in
sort of Roman comedy. In Claudius and stuff like that?
>> I do, I do. I'm growing fonder of Claudius as I work more on Claudius,
um, I - right now I'm doing research on Roman wordplay generally.
So Claudius is involved because he has lots of puns and insults
and uh, yeah.
>> Cool. I wonder if there will be any puns or wordplay in this class?
Moving on. I've studied, as an intellectual historian, I've looked - I've
also looked at language, I've looked at the way that philosophies about
language can express various kinds of political or ideological commitments,
particularly as Rome was becoming a bigger and bigger empire.
But these are really sort of social linguistics, or say politics, or um,
you know cultural questions. Uh, lots of different kinds of ideas.
We can also study the ancient Greek and Romans for their
mythological legacy.
And that's really what we're doing in this class.
So we're going to be looking at figures, many of which you've
probably already heard of.
You've probably already heard of the king of the gods
in Greek and Roman mythology, that's Zeus for the Greeks,
or Jupiter for the Romans.
And here is a picture of that figure wielding his mighty thunderbolt.
That's one of his iconic weapons that we'll often see him depicted with.
You might also have heard of one of Jupiter or Zeus's
many hero sons.
The hero Hercules, that's his Latin name.
In fact, he's probably more commonly known by his Greek name, Heracles.
And here he is in the Disney movie that is actually more than 20 years old.
(laughter) Would you believe?
There are, of course, sagas that these heroes belong to,
that they participate in,
and Hercules wasn't at the Trojan War, he was slightly before that,
but it was descendants or people coming after Hercules
that fought at Troy and used the Trojan Horse
to deviously make their way into the city.
This is where fighters like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon and Hector
all fought, and we're going to be reading more of that as the course progresses.
So you can see that these stories, even if you have only a cursory knowledge
of classical antiquity, these are names that have filtered their way through
to modernity and are constantly being reevaluated, reconsidered,
criticized, reused.
A couple years ago, the movie Wonder Woman was a big hit in summer blockbusters,
and Wonder Woman is an Amazon, who is--
they're a tribe of women in classical mythology.
I don't want to give out any spoilers, but Diana's main rival
in the Wonder Woman comics is the god Ares, who is the Greek god of war.
Now, once we start to look more and more at this,
the idea of classical mythology starts to become a lot more clear.
We could just call this class
"Introduction to Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology,"
but for a long time, it's been called "classical" mythology.
And that might have something to do with the fact that
the idea of "classical" connotes something that's exemplary,
that is given a high kind of cultural value,
and that is considered enduring in a way that these stories still have
a kind of resonance, even 2,000 years after their retelling.
Is that what you think of when you think of the idea of "classical?"
>> Yeah, I mean, I do, I think there's definitely the element of classics as
very foundational, but I think there's also a problematic element to classics
in that calling something "foundational" or "ideal" and idealizing the past
really contributes to kind of othering the other cultures
that we're overlooking to look at these.
>> Absolutely. And that's, I think, something that we're going to look at
over the next couple of weeks, that-- in fact, the original use
of "classic," the word "classic" or "classicus" in Latin
to denote something of being high value
was precisely in opposition to the word "proletarian".
There was a sort of guy, and we'll look at this later,
called Aulus Gellius who was saying,
well you know the good authors, the classical authors because
they used language in this way, but the proletarian authors
use them this way.
And he was saying that-- making that distinction as a matter
not merely of aesthetic judgement, but also sort of social judgement.
And sure enough, throughout history people have used the idea of
a classical precisely as you say, to create in and out groups,
to say that some people belong and some people don't,
and also to draw lines of inheritance from antiquity to the present
that may not be justified when we look at the historical record.
So there's a lot that we can dig into there,
and we want to be able to use this idea of classical not simply to
investigate cultures that are long removed from us,
but cultures that are still-- that still have stakes today.
And we want to join in that discussion with you throughout the semester
and find out where classical mythology might show up in your lives.
So we'll be doing that in videos here, you're going to be seeing a lot of me
in videos that we've recorded before this semester.
As you're watching this video, I'll just say right now,
occasionally you will see a question show up, and that's one way that we can
see how you're getting on in the class.
We call those instapolls, and an example of that is showing up right now.
So that's not worth any credit, we want to make sure that everything's working.
For now we've got a few more things we want you to take a look at,
and we'll come back and talk some more about classical mythology.