Classical Mythology and the Western Tradition

Catalog description

Reads classical texts that expound the fundamental mythological stories and elements of the Western tradition, then will read selected texts from the Renaissance through the twentieth century that utilize these myths. Ancient texts covered will include the Epic of Gilgamesh , Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days , Ovid's Metamorphoses , and plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Later texts will include Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece , Milton's "Lycidas," and lyric poetry by Keats, Shelley, Browning, Swinburne, Rilke, Auden, and Yeats. This course is suitable for anyone wishing to understand the classical background to Western literature.