Favorite classical literature?

Okay, here I'm talking about the stories written from ancient times to the Renissance that still have value and significance in our time. The ones I'm aiming for here are things like the Odyssey, the Iliad, and Beowulf, but feel free to expand to things like Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's plays, et cetera. This literature can come from any part of the world.
Personally, I'd have to say the One Thousand and One Nights is my favorite. I love all the legends in them so much more than any of the ones found in the Bible. My favorites are the tale of Shahrazhad (sp?) and Sinbad the Sailor, now sadly commercialized into a terrible Disney movie.

amazingly interesting! You'll love it.

The thing I remember most about it was that part of it sounded extremely similar to Noah and the Ark. That started me down the path of rejecting the Genesis myths.

though it's only one of the adventures described.

and so I think it's amazing I even remember that. I'll have to read it in full, of course.
Wasn't Gilgamesh the king of the Sumerians?

We read it in high school latin, and i loved it; far better than the odyssey, IMHO

The only thing I remember is something about Dido and an arrow in her hindquarters.

I haven't read it myself, but I do remember hearing the the Aeneid was strongly influenced by Homer.

tells the story of Aeneas, a trojan who flees the fall of troy, and ends up in italy to eventually form rome. he goes by way of carthage, slighting the queen and setting off the Punic Wars. so basically, it's a parallel story, in time at least

I thought it was something like that. Thanks.

Virgil was trying consciously to create a Roman foundation myth equal to the Odyssey, with all the spiritual and nationalistic connotations.

It reads much tighter than the Odyssey, and a bit more vivid and understandable, because it was a story created by Virgil, whereas the Odyssey seems to be Homer's attempt to put into poetry a series of myths and legends. Also, Virgil wrote from a more sophisticated literary tradition than Homer, who was sort of a backwater poet half a millenium earlier. So Virgil is more readable.

I like the Odyssey better. Just my taste. It's less crafted, like Beowulf or the Niebelungleid, and my medieval background draws me to that style of writing, for some reason.

And about the Iliad/Odyssey- most historians think that they were authored by several poets, over a period of time, not just by Homer as it is traditionally said. What's your take on that?

I've read him a few times but I don't know all the theories on the origins of the poems. In general, most ancient cultures have a period when oral histories and stories begin to be written down. Before that, authorship is not important, because a poem or song is recited by several people, and altered and changed as memory and creativity require.

Most estimates of when the older books of the Bible began to be written down is around the sixth century, BC, and some estimates claim the same thing for the Homeric poems. Others say that both were older, dating them back to 8th century. A lot of times before stories are written down they are considered the works of some great historical figure, and so when they are written, often as faithfully as anyone can remember, the old attribution sticks, even though the language will have evolved over time.

For instance, the first five books of the Old Testament are attributed by some to Moses, though he dies in one of them. Clearly they weren't written by Moses. I have a theory that when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt (I don't believe it was one giant exodus, I think it was probably a slower migration) that Moses or someone else developed a written language for Hebrew. There was a community at the foot of Mount Sinai which wrote in Phoenician-style script, like Hebrew, and some speculate that a group of Hebrew immigrants lived here for a while, probably led by someone named Moses, and learned to read. Moses then had the Ten Commandments written down, as an early law code, and the legend developed that they were written by the hand of God on Sinai. Often when a culture first learns to write and read, writing has an almost magical reputation. Perhaps Moses did start to have some of the Israelite history written down, and those writings and traditions grew into what was finally recorded in its final form in the 6th century, and Moses was given credit for all the writings, since he had been linked to the stories and traditions for so long.

The Qur'an, too, was an oral recitation (Qur'an means Recitation) until it was written down, theoretically by order of Uthman, twenty years or so after Muhammad's death, though there aren't surviving written copies until later.

Something like that may have happened with Homer. The Odyssey and the Iliad were oral songs finally written down. Although in oral cultures, long poems do seem to survive largely intact and unaltered for decades or centuries. So maybe Homer was the man who wrote the poems (a lot of people say they were written by different authors, though), or maybe Homer was a title based on some great poet so that many poems wound up inhis name, or maybe it was even the name of a writing community. Or maybe, on the other hand, they were long oral traditions finally written down and edited by Homer. There's no real way to tell, and if the argument was ever settled, a lot of scholars would have to find new jobs.

Literate culture and oral culture treat stories and authorship very differently.

The Lord of The Rings.

Refer to the original post, but just briefly, I was talking about stories that have been around for a REALLY long time, like the Odyssey, Beowulf and Inferno. I'm sure that in 300 years or so, Dickens and Tolkein will be right up there with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare et al, but for right now, they're still fairly new.
On edit: Welcome to DU! :hi:

of Bilbo Baggins, I think maybe LOTR predates anything YOU mentioned!

:-)

I'd forgoten that!

I translated Caeser's Gallic Campaign in Latin when I was in High School. Good stuff. I hope this meets the parameters of your request.:toast:

Like I said, Dickens and Tolkein just have to wait a couple hundred years to meet my parameters.
All of Gaul is divided into three parts... That's all I remember.

The Euripides play has so many levels and dimensions. To modern readers it is a tale of a crazed witch bent on revenge against the husband abandoning her for a trophy wife. To a Greek audience, who would have viewed Medea as part goddess, and Jason as an arrogant human, it is a tale of hubris and of mocking the gods, or the fates. Digging deeper, everything Jason possessed he gained because of Medea's magic and her cunning, and Medea had even killed her unjust father to save the life of Jason, so his betrayal of her called for an ultimate vengence. Both characters can be portrayed from a dozen angle, and every angle for each character makes the story into something completely different.

I hoped someone would bring them up. I don't really know much of anything about tales such as Medea, but thanks for the info, and I'll add it to my list!

Is it Funking Cold......?

and Goddesses. Dionysus and Loki always appealed to me.

I've always loved the Greek, Egyptian and Norse mythology too. Those tales are others I'd say are a lot better than the rather uninteresting myths you'll find in the old Testament.
Dionysus and Loki appealed to you? That's kind of scary- unless, of course, you like getting really drunk and ripping people to pieces, or playing pranks that end up in the death of the pretty boy of the gods, and leading the armies of evil at Ragnarok.
Don't worry, I'm just yanking your chain.

through the filter of Christianity. They seemed to want to equate him/her/it with the devil.

Before Christianity, Loki was considered the equivalent of the coyote in Native American mythology. He was a trickster and pulled a lot of pranks with not-so-great results, but mostly he wasn't considered evil until Christian influence made it necessary for the Aesir to have a devil. As he had killed Bragi, Loki was the obvious choice.

Oedipus Rex, Antigone; beautifully sad masterpieces.

n/t

When reading them, you see how people haven't changed much in all this time.

Oh, and "The Tale of Genji", the opposite of the Canterbury Tales, for me, in that it is alien in it's distance in time and it's depiction of the culture of the Japanese court.

(with the Canterbury Tales that is; never even heard of 'The Tale of Genji'). My pre-Elizabethan reading is almost non-existant. I've read most of the Old Testament & all of the New, and that's pretty much it. At uni, I read 'The Faerie Queen' and 'Morte d'Arthur', both of which I hated.

I also liked "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim.

Like Medea, it deals with a lot of cultural assumptions, in typical violent, bloody fashion. Who says Hollywood is violent? :-)

The Iliad by Homer, for its beauty, excitement, and tragedy. It is a very curious work in that while Homer (or whoever Homer really was or were) was a Hellene, to the modern reader the Trojans generally emerge as much more sympathetic and noble, while the Greek heroes come off as bullies, clowns, and thugs. I've often wondered whether this was noticed by the Greeks themselves or if they endorsed and identified with the behavior of men like Achilles and Agamemnon.

Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, which captivates because of the sympathetic horror you feel for Oedipus, a good, noble, and decent man who in his desire to do the right thing uncovers a truth that almost destroys him.

The plays of Aristophanes, which seem so bawdily modern that it's hard to imagine they were written almost 2500 years ago. My favorite of them all is The Frogs, in which Dionysus goes down to Hades to retrieve one of the great playwrights to save Athens from destruction in the Peloponnesian War. The opening scenes of Dionysus and his slave traveling through hell will make you laugh out loud.

Among the Romans, I enjoy The Satyricon by Petronius (an associate of Nero) because it is so snarky and obscene. At the other end of the scale, Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe, which attempts to explain all of nature through the lens of Epicurean philosophy, is beautiful and, despite the fact that we now know so much of Lucretius' science to be wrong (although the Epicurean concept of atomic particles is freakishly prescient) is strangely comforting.

The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius is not only entertaining because of its "National Enquirer" approach to imperial biography, but Suetonius had access to the imperial archives when writing about Julius and Augustus. He found many details there which really bring those long-dead men back to life, especially Augustus, who for all his legendary greatness is revealed to have had as many quirks and idiosyncracies as anyone. Suetonius manages almost to part the curtain of time and distance so that you seem to catch a glimpse of the actual man behind the imperial trappings and the marble busts.

It was an amazing experience to me to read The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and learn that such a sensitive and introspective person existed back then ("You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before"). I know it shouldn't surprise me to learn that Western men and women are in many ways exactly the same now as they were two millennia ago, but somehow it always does. And I kind of like it that way.