by William Remski

Created on: August 27, 2007

I was seven years old when I first read the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The language was thick, but I could use a dictionary when necessary. If Poe is classic literature, I was hooked. His stories gave me nightmares, but they were very entertaining and not boring. I never managed to get far in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the story bored me.

In college freshman year I took a class in great books. We started on The Illiad. I read The Illiad in the summer before classes started. I was not impressed. There is a lot of killing in this book, a lot of violence, a lot of blood draining into the ground, and a lot of hero genealogy. Homer wants you to know all about the family history of each fighter that gets speared. I was interested in the complex relationships going on between the gods, and how their arguments took mortal form in the conflicts of men. This book not only describes war in all it's steely brutality, but it also ascribes the causes of war to conflicts in the supernatural world. Not bad for a piece of epic poetry that was passed on for hundreds of years only by word of mouth. Still, I was young, and the constant battles in this book bored me. Even today I find it hard to get through this long litany of death.

The Odyssey was a bit more interesting to me. I read a lot of the classics for this one class. In The Odyssey there are lots of little stories about exploration and adventure and romance and it is more a story of the long journey home from a long war and what happens to family that is left behind when people engage in armed conflict. I found The Odyssey to be far more interesting than The Illiad, still, the formal tone in Homer did not appeal to me with his invocations to the gods and muses to guide him in his tale. I thought the works a bit to contrived for my taste at the time.

I read some of the plays of Sophocles and Euripedes, Thucydides' Peloponesian Wars, the Histories of Herodatus, the Aeneid by Vergil, the Divine Comedy by Dante, and many other books in this one year course. The truth is, for the most part, classical literature bored me. I could not find interest in literature so old it had no idea of the modern world. I was more a fan of science fiction. Still, it was a good experience to be exposed to the ideas and styles of these old writers.

After I graduated college I somehow became more interested in the ancient writers. I had a prose translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. As I read this long and convoluted exposition of ancient

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>