FirstDay2018Questions

A.L. had no question for today but is excited to get started. M.F. handed in a piece of paper with just a name and a date.

That brings up a point I must emphasize: this is an assignment, not just attendance. You must have a thought. A question. I am forcing you to have one, because I want you to think about the class. Your daily comment won't count if it has no thought.
I should have made that clearer and am doing so now.
From now on, a comment like these won't get credit.
These are an important way for me to hear from you, and I want to hear from every one of you.
I certainly won't hold it against Alexander or Meghan this time!
But in the future, I'll just quietly throw those sorts of things away and you'll never know it happened until later on when you ask how many daily comments you have handed in. It's not just attendance: it is more: and there are no makeups.

Hailey I worries about how hard it will be to take all this in and whether that is a good first comment.

It's an honest and real worry, and I want to help you with it if I can.
I agree that it's not the best first comment, because it is not about content, but it is a comment that reflects something real and worrisome about the class. I very much want you to make such comments about your fears and worries, because they help me teach in a way that addresses your needs.
But you should also make an additional comment that has more to do with the class content.

Autumn A asks why study something that might be total fiction.

Interesting question.
What is fiction?
The Ancient Greeks had no category of thought or literature that we can translate as "fiction." That category was just not a thing for them. "Fiction" hadn't been invented.
They thought the events of the Trojan War actually happened in the same way that many peoples believe that long ago, prior to the times they live in, humans were different, or heros were alive, or giants walked the earth, etc.
Why study modern fiction? Because it entertains, but more than that, it helps shape one's world view. It helps one to think about the world and all aspects of it. Fiction is a way of thinking that is neither rational nor irrational. It is perhaps "narrative." There are people who think that narrative is the (one) very most basic category of human thought. You can't have a thought without it somehow being temporally linear: you think of this part, then that part. And "story" or "narrative" is just the sequencing, the structural relation.
Or maybe Autumn is asking why, given that Homer and the Trojan War may never have actually existed or happened as an author or a historical event, should we care about it? That's easy: because it has had a tremendous afterlife culturally in a culture that is important for what we are as human beings. Also, because it's compelling once you get into it.

Zoe L asks whether these epics are based more on mythology or written/documented history.

This brings up an interesting point. Just as it is extremely hard to imagine what happens after we die in any way that does not involve us being aware of it, so too with writing and its invention. It's hard to imagine a world where there is no writing.
These epics were the very first things written down when the Greeks acquired the alphabet. The very first thing. There were no written documents to base the stories on. There was only oral "history" and tradition.
Mythology in its truest form is an oral thing: it is a tradition that occurs in a culture without writing.
The Greeks thought these epics reported things that actually happened. They didn't make any difference between history and mythology until Thucydides and others began to reflect on that issue hundreds of years later.

Noah S wants to know if I believe in the historicity of Homer or do I think he is legendary.

I am agnostic: I don't know and don't have any strong evidence one way or the other.
The fact that Ancient Greeks from an early time believed that Homer was an individual is just about all the evidence we have for the claim that he is a historical figure. That is good strong evidence and usually would be enough to believe it.
But we also know that the Homeric epics are the product of orality, of a large network of bards who sang these and many other related songs. AND what is more, we know that the ancient Greeks had no real clue about orality: by the time the Greeks started thinking about authorship of the epics, they had a traditionally named author, Homer. Writing those thoughts down, they thought these were personal compositions of one person. They were already literate when they started wondering about the epics in that way. They had no clue about orality.
We know that those Greeks who started wondering such things did not hesitate at all to make things up: we have caught them in the act in many ways just making things up, especially about authors. If they knew nothing outside of the author's work, they would assume that the work somehow contained clues, a hidden autobiography if you will. Not a horrible assumption, but not a really good one either.
So we have good reason to suspect that Homer was an individual who lived, but we have good reason to doubt it, AND we know that if he did live, he was part of a much larger network that is lost and was lost by the time of mass literacy in Ancient Greece.

Julia H asks what prior knowledge of mythology would be helpful to have in this class.

While any and all such knowledge (whether it be about Greek or other mythology) is helpful, none is needed.

Will J wants to know whether the war between Greece and Troy was based on trade relations, and the bards turned it into the Iliad and Odyssey.

That is what the dramatic Netflix miniseries Troy suggests, no? Well, it adds in international relations in a way.
I think that such a question is unanswerable, because we have no evidence from the time to back up or dispute it.
But surely it stands to reason that when a prince of one people visits another, that is not just about a fun time, some travel memories, and a gift or two exchanged. When a princess is kidnapped or runs away, that too might be more than it seems. There must have been some international relations/trade relations component to such things: even if it wasn't caused by trade concerns, it surely had trade repercussions. Look for this in the epics. I don't think it's really there in a way that's easy to detect.
Not sure what to say more than that.
We'll read a bit of Herodotus and Thucydides, the world's first historians, who start their histories out with the Trojan War. They thought trade played a role, but they were hundreds of years after the fact and had knowledge of the relevant period of history that is far less detailed than ours. I suspect they are just using the old "it stands to reason" argument to speculate.

Xin Luo want to know more facts about the Trojan War.

I do too.
The "Trojan War" is a war the we know about thru Iliad and Odyssey and later texts. We would not know about it at all if we didn't have these poems and the literature they influenced.
We would have archaeological sites, some with layers of destruction that were clearly caused by fire, some by earthquake, some by gradual shrinkage. We would have no documents to explain the particulars of that fire, that earthquake, etc. We would have no stories, no names, no human thought element.
It is irresistable to try to match up the two.
Which has "facts"? I think you mean something by "facts" that I am not understanding, and you need to clarify that and explain it to me.

Eadoin M noticed that I said Homer was in the iron age "or thinks he is" but he writes about the bronze age. That was confusing.

If I said exactly that, I apologize. The situation is that the stories told in the Iliad and Odyssey are set in a time when bronze was the metal for just about everything metal. There is at least one mention of iron/steel in the epics, however, but it is only a mention. Iron/steel was barely a thing at the time.
Homer, on the other hand, if we think of "Homer" as the author of the version we have now, lived probably in the 9th century (notice "the version" and "probably": this is speculative), at the end of the iron age (roughly 1100-800 BCE).

Wayne S wants to know:

What was the time difference between when our best guess is as to when the events recounted in the epics happened and the time when they were sung about.

The Ancient Greeks thought of the events of the Trojan war as happening in the 12th century BCE, which is a reasonable guess as far as modern archaeology is concerned, because it matches the heyday of Mycenaean culture and a destruction level of Troy.
But the text we have of the epics was probably written down in the 8th-9th century CE.
So let's say there were 400 years between the two.
That is a lot of time when you don't have writing to record history.

Why were the epics popular to Ancient Greeks.

Good question.
Can't answer except by speculation.
We know that they were important, because they were the first things written down and it was not easy to write down that many lines of poetry. So they must have been important to at least the people who wrote them down.
We also know that later ages treated Homer as an authority, a venerable source of wisdom.
We know that Plato, for instance, in the 4th century, railed against Homer and banished reading of Homer from the society he describes in his Republic. You don't do that if Homer is not worth railing against.

Will this course examine the relevance of these texts to more modern texts such as Joyce's Ulysses,

Briefly, no. But if you want to make a presentation on that, we can talk.
We will occasionally notice such influences and mention them, but we won't focus on them.
The task would be endless, and most importantly, the subject of a completely different course. I'd love to take that course.
Angeline Chiu, my colleague, teaches about the Classics and Shakespeare, on a related note.
If you know about such things, please point them out in class!

Natalya H wants to know when the Trojan War supposedly took place.

There is no evidence internal to the Homeric epics to help us date it precisely, but later Greeks reckoned Troy must have been sacked in 1184. They had very unreliable evidence and reasoning, but didn't fall far from our better guesses based on trying to triangulate between the epics and archaeology.

Ryan S wants to know what main role the epics played in society?

They were educational: the first stories youngsters learned included the epics.
They were a bank for cultural knowledge and defaults: for hundreds of years, writers and thinkers in all disciplines quote snippets of Homer for support of customs, norms, and ideas.
They were entertainment: still are.
They were moral: I have a lot to say about the morality of the epics, and not much of it good, but in many ways, it is an ethic that is still commonly found in our world.
They were sort of religious: the gods were worshiped, and these are the stories told about them. The worship and the stories are barely connected, however, unlike, say, how the story that Jesus ate with disciples at the last supper is connected with the various denominations' of Christianity's communion rituals.That disconnect between mythology and religion is interesting in itself. I wish I knew more about it.

Miona F wants to know what reference style is used at UVM?

Depends on the professor. I have a radically simple one.
Mostly, I require consistency and verifiability and don't worry about whether you use MLA, Harvard, or something else.
I am enthusiastically happy to learn that you care about such things, however!

Jeremiah E wants to know if the texts in the bookstore and listed on line are the ones I prefer and what are other translations worth noting?

I do prefer those texts, but there are other good ones. Chapman's Homer, for instance, is a noted one. There are many many translations. In fact, it's a huge area to cover. Honestly, my favorite translation of Iliad is in German, by Schadewaldt.
Translation studies is something we should/might find time to talk about in class.

Brunn M expressed interest in the motivations and consequences of the characters' actions and whether there is foreshadowing.

Great things to keep track of. Once in a while, a possible future is described, perhaps in a character's speech, but it is followed by "but that was not to be." There is a lot of foreshadowing.
Perhaps the most interesting case is Achilles, whose "choice" to enter the battle again seals his fate, and he knows it.

Sadie T wants to know how much we owe our modern poetic techniques to the ancient techniques of the epic poems.

Well, I think, for example, that "in medias res" (starting out a story in the middle of events) would have been invented anyway, but Iliad is both the first and one of the best examples and uses. So do we owe it to Iliad? Yes, and maybe no: some authors surely use it who have never even read Iliad.
Meter: poetry has rhythm, and before modernism hit, much poetry in English was in meters that go back to Greek and Roman times. Each language has different ways to fit meter and must adapt it to suit its needs. But sometimes poets take a foreign form and take it as a challenge to fit their language to it. There is a lot of English literature that owes its form and meter, etc. to ancient literature. I'm not an expert on that.
Oral composition techniques: these are foreign to out ways. We will talk a fair bit about verbal formulae such as epithets, type-scenes such as warrior-prowess scenes, repetition, and other things which are much more prominent in the oral poetry of the epics than they are in written composition. I think that the Aeneid will show that rather well when contrasted with the Homeric epics.

Ani H wants to know how I know which translations are the most accurate/trustworthy and have I personally picked the translations we read in this class.

Frankly, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about accuracy, because just about all published translations have been scrutinized by scholars for accuracy. Every translation has to interpret the original in various ways: you can call that inaccuracy, but it's inevitable. You can't translate without changing somehow. We use only translations that have been scrutinized by a process of peer review and bear the imprimatur of reputable publishing houses.
Readability, on the other hand, is something I look for: whatever translation you use, it ought not to be the case that it is hard to read because of the English it uses, whether that is its vocabulary, its grammar, or any other quality. Some translations are more readable than others. I've tried to choose ones that are readable.
I also look at price, frankly.
But I can read these epics in Ancient Greek, so a translation is not the best or only way I can encounter the text. Please take Ancient Greek. It's wonderful.

Callum and Aoife and Alex R want to know why the translations differ so much?

Partly because in Greek, word order is very different and not fixed, so when you translate into English, you have to choose a word order, but it's not clear which one to choose.
Partly because for almost every word, you have to choose a register of speech: do you say "happen" or "transpire" or "occur" or "go down" or "take place"? each one is synonymous, but they are slightly different and when you do a whole translation, those little differences, those constant choices, add up to significant difference.
Partly because those translations were done at different times and English changes over time.
Partly because different translators think different things are important and so they emphasize certain aspects.
Do you want to make the Iliad sound normal, everyday? highfallutin'? Serious? Dignified? Terse? You have to choose when you translate, and each choice is slightly different from the original.

Logan B points out that Homer could have been a group, an organization.

Exactly: we know that there were many rhapsodes/bards/singers of these stories found in the HOmeric epics We know that there were local variants, and many other stories. We'll talk about how we know that soon.
I like the idea that "Homer" was just one individual who sang the wrath of Achilles and chose how to tell it particularly well. Perhaps he innovated, but I don't think we'll ever really know. I like the idea that the Odyssey might have been by another particularly talented individual. But it could have been by the same person. I find the questions fascinating, but the evidence slender, and so the matter is speculative. I have to admit that it is not my area of scholarly specialty and it is not what interests me most about the poems.

Max S realized that if there were many bards, there may have been many versions of the poems.

Yes.
We look, for instance, at book 2 of Iliad: the catalog of ships does not match the description of the army elsewhere. One good explanation of that, the best one I've seen, is that a version of the catalog of ships found its way into the written version that was not from the same tradition as the rest of the poem.
We also know that there were local variants, from descriptions of them, even though the poems themselves didn't survive.
We have a set of poems called "the epic cycle," which is later than, shorter than, and not as good as, the Homeric epics. But it tells the story of all sorts of things that are connected to the stories in Homer. We have other later poems which do the same thing.
So we have ANcient Greek reports and paraphrases of other versions, but we don't have any of those other versions from as early as the Homeric epics, and we don't have any of similarly high quality that are the first offspring of exclusively oral tradition.
Those mentions, reports, paraphrases: you can read some of them in the Loeb series if you like. Look for the Epic Cycle.

Tyler G wants to know if the stories of the Iliad etc. were lost during the dark ages.

No, they absolutely were not. How do I know? Because the Iliad exists, and we know that many things in the Iliad do fit previous times very well. But we know that there was no writing in the dark ages: so how else could it have been transmitted other than thru poems like the Iliad?

Diana B asked if there are more examples of how the epic writings differ from history?

Many. For instance, look at the "Catalog of ships" in book 2 of Iliad. It does not match the army that is described elsewhere in the Iliad! It seems to be centered around a different area: that is evidence that even Homer is not historically consistent with Homer!
But mostly, the differences are between what archaeology has found and what the epic poems say, and that is not so much "history" as it is material remains that need a historian to interpret them. We have no written history of Greece until a few hundred years after Homer, and that's not just because it was lost and doesn't survive, but did exist. Rather, it's because "history" was invented in the Aegean basin in Greek by Greeks of the late 6th and early 5th century BCE, namely Herodotus and Thucydides (and Hecataeus and a few others whose works are lost, but we have scraps and reports about them).

Bryan W, Sophia C, and several others, are marveling at how many names they will have to get used to.

Start small. Agamemnon leads the Greeks. Priam leads the Trojans. Menelaus is Agamemnon's brother.
One step at a time, and before you know it, you'll have a huge network.

Paige V was interested and stimulated to hear that we will never experience these poems as the Ancient Greeks did and wants to know how we know that these were performances if we have no evidence of the music, the costumes, the props.

SO, first, about Homer. We can read Plato's Ion, which is a conversation between Socrates and an epic singer, a performer of the epic poems. Of course, it wasn't recorded and transcribed by a court stenographer, but by Plato, who did whatever he wanted to with Socrates and the bard. BUT, it's clear that he is showing us a bard like the bards that existed, a person within a large tradition, a person who knows the epics by heart and performs them for a living. That is 300 years or so after Homer.
We have drawings on vases: they show us pictures of bards and of instruments. We have lots of references to epic singers. What we don't have is a sound recording. No extensive musical notation has survived either, but some has, and we have mentions of these things as being sung and always accompanied by the lyre.
NOW, tragedy: same as for Homer. We have lots of mentions of the music, mentions of the dancing, mentions of the costumes. We just don't have much of any musical notation, no surviving ancient instruments, no surviving ancient costumes (not much fabric at all: too damp in Greece).
WIthin Homer, you will meet Demodocus, a bard, who sings about the Trojan War! to a lyre! at a banquet! Sure reminds us of a Homeric bard.
So, we have lots of words about these things, but words are not the things themselves, not the songs, not the particular way he held the lyre, not the way the audience reacted, not the tempo, not the intonation. We have good reason to know those things existed, but only descriptions of them in words.

Cassia wants to know if we will be revisiting what we covered the first day.

Yes. All of it. Some several times.
Learning is iterative: you get the general idea into your head the first time. You sleep on it. You come back with gaps, questions, curiosity. You hear about it again, maybe only part, but in greater detail, maybe from a different perspective.
This class is iterative, but not repetitive.

Raphael R wants to know more about Zeus and fate.

So, Zeus can't change fate, but he occasionally has to enforce it, and occasionally despite his will abide by it.
He's both a bad actor, philandering disaster of a super-human ...
... and the source of justice and enforcer of the causal nexus.
That sets his different functions in tension, but interestingly.
Mythology does NOT have to be logical. But it is illogical in certain ways, not in every way. It's not absurd or fully random.
The three Fates are abstract forces, not characters one can talk to and negotiate with. Zeus is a person and at the same time a force.

Eggy G wants to know how these stories have influences both Greek and other cultures.

They are the baseline for Greek "history": they are the rebirth of writing, and hence history, for Greece. But they are mythological/legendary. but the Greeks viewed them as historical.
The influence has been huge: the Romans adopted Greek mythology whole hog, but adapted it. Then later on in the Renaissance (and the middle ages), pagan culture was a huge source of cultural and artistic ideas and phenomena.

Matt H wants to know how we will divide the class time between the literal meaning of the text and the figurative meaning.

Mostly, we'll deal with what I imagine you mean by "literal" meaning. Occasionally, we'll look at allegorical interpretations.
We'll also look at how the texts relate to their historical context quite a bit.

Ethan wants to know where Achilles came from and was he subject to Agamemnon.

Achilles is from Phthia in Thessaly, which is north of the Peloponnese. Agamemnon is simply the one who brings the most forces to Troy and hence the leader of the Greeks. He has no real dominion over Achilles except as chosen general. If Achilles leaves, for instance, Agamemnon has no authority over him.
The Greeks were from a bunch of independent cities to which surrounding land belonged (called "city-states"). There was no Greece, no central authority. There was the Greek language, some religious institutions, some games (Olympic, etc.) that Greek participated in, and that is why they were called 'Greeks." They are unlike the empires to the east and south. They are also unlike other, more nomadic peoples who had no large settlements.

Henry D asks what language the Trojans spoke.

Great question. We don't know, really. In the area at the time, it seems that Luwian was the language: that is definitely not Greek. The Trojan allies are occasionally said to speak different lagnauges too, but it seems that there is a narrative convention of just making everyone speak Greek and not mentioning it much and not worrying about it.

Natalie L is interested in the unknowns of when the stories were formed into epics and how they were passed down.

Yeah. We can and do speculate a lot, but there are no sources to really tell us.

Lucas H asks what percent of the epic stories actually happened?

Can't answer that question directly.
We don't really know if any of it actually happened.
But we find archaeological sites with various weapons, jewelry, pottery, etc. that match what Homer describes well enough, and many are thus convinced that Homer's Troy is Hissarlik.

Rebecca R asks:

if Homer may not have existed, isn't there still some sort of documentation marking when the first publication was produced.

Lots of interesting stuff here.
"Publication": everything had to be copied by hand. In a sense, each copy is a copy of a copy. So "publication" is different from today, when each copy is the same as every other, and print runs in the thousands are common. Also, what counts as "publication."
Fact: we have no record of the Homeric poems that dates from the time we think they were written down: all of our texts are copies of copies from later times. We have some descriptions of various aspects of the epics (also found on copies of copies of copies), but ALL of them were composed much later than when we think the epics were written down.
So no, there is no contemporary documentation: Homeric epics are the FIRST written documents in Greek that we know of. There just are not contemporary documents at all. The next texts we know of are also poems (Hesiod and the lyric poets), not discussions of HOmer or how Homeric epics were performed or produced or recorded. By the time we have such discussions, it is a full 500 years after when we think the Homeric poems were written down.

How could people understand Homer if the language of the epics wasn't used as a language?

Good question. I think I should have explained more.
The words of the poems are all Greek, and we have many many written sources in Greek, all from later ages, but still Greek, and still Greek that would have been understood in Homeric times.
What I meant by "language" is the same thing we mean when we speak of "the language in Shakespeare's plays" or "Hemingway's language": the particular words and ways of speaking, all English, that SHakespeare or Hemingway used. WIth Homer, we find a mix of dialects: it's as if someone used both "Y'all," the Canadian "eh," and some Englishism like "rubbers" (meaning galoshes) in the same text: no one person really uses those things in the normal way language develops. In the time of Homer, no one person could do that as part of their normal everyday language.
So why is HOmer like that? Because it's a tradition that has its own language: some words stick around for a couple hundred years even though no one knows what they mean (there are many words like taht in Homer), while others are from the Greek dialect spoken on the islands and others are from the Greek spoken elsewhere. It's a bit of a mash-up.

Ella is enamored of the fact that it was sung, then written, and that Homer may not be any particular individual.

I'm with you on that: but wrapping your head around what it means is sometimes hard.

Caroline D asks if there were different variants of the same story? variant endings?

Yes. Yes. Yes. We'll see some in tragedy.

Meghan K wants to know if we will go into the pre-war tradition of the Trojan War and what is known about Troy outside of the Iliad.

Yes we will!
The Trojan Horse is not part of the Iliad, but we will hear about it in the Aeneid and Odyssey, for instance.
How Helen got back to Menelaus' palace is not covered, but we'll read Euripides' Helen.
Greeks of later ages know many many variants and some of them made literature using those variants.
Also, later Greeks tried to explain their own mythology, and reported both the backsotry of the war and variants. The LIbrary of Apollodorus is well worth reading for this.

Thomas C wants to know about the perspective of the Iliad and whether Homer reports their thoughts.

It is told by a narrator who is mostly never mentioned, a third person. Occasionally, however, the narrator is mentioned. Watch for it.
The thoughts of characters is mostly shown by speeches.

Lauren wants to know if Iliad was composed before Odyssey.

No way to know. SOme people speculate anyway: they mostly think Odyssey is later. I don't think it's an answerable question, and the way one would even try to answer it would involve knowing Ancient Greek.

Brian A asks if this story was passed on thru word of mouth, why was it transcribed?

Excellent question. Not sure.
Maybe, just maybe, because there was this really really good bard named Homer whose virtuoso performance was not so much musical as narrative, and maybe, just maybe, people wanted to preserve that version.
Or maybe it was because this new technology, writing, seemed to be a great way to aid memory, and some bard decided it would be a good idea, just as we now make books on tape because we can.

Maddie wants to know why the muses were mentioned.

Because the Iliad starts out with a prayer to the muse asking her to inspire the singer to sing the tale.
In Hesiod, we find the first explanation of the muses: there are 9, says Hesiod, and their mother is Mnemosyne (a word for "memory"). Each one is responsible for inspiring different arts and artists. Dance, music, epic, etc.

Nathan wants to know how different the translations are from the original.

Infinitely and not at all. They are each accurate in their own way, but none of them is Ancient Greek.

Jack K wants to know if there is a standard class structure? how interactive? will we talk about Between the world and me.

The standard class structure is that it will be a mix of:

I will try to cover some aspect of epic, whether that be ethics, Greek dialects, the catalog of ships, or something else, in a short informative lecture with notes online.
Reading and discussing.
Your questions and my attempt to answer them.
These will be mixed together in a fairly unpredictable fashion: I like to react to the class' interest. If I feel you are getting bored, I might cut my lecture short. If a topic is really interesting to you and there are lots of questions, I'll stick with it.

Alyson is excited for the class, and has been fond of Greek stories as long as she can remember. Also, she wants to know why Paris wasn't on the map.

Priam had 50 sons: they only listed Hector. Not sure why not Paris. But all 50 would be too much. Maps present and so distort "reality," just as translations re-present and so distort originals. I'm really interested in taht sort of thing.

Melody Xiao wants to know whether it is more important to learn the characters of about the war itself.

I am unsure how to answer that. I guess I'll say the characters for now, but that doesn't mean it isn't important to know what is happening in the war.

Juliette wants to know if these texts follow the Hero's Journey.

Look up Hero's Journey in the source of all known true verifiable accurate facts (Wikipedia).
Yes, they do, and no they don't. Not every aspect works for each story. And it depends on whose version of the Hero's Journey one uses.
The Hero's Journey is an effort to fit all stories/myths into one single pattern.
I've heard it said that every story is either "Going on a journey" or "Stranger comes to town."
Such one-size fits all ideas of narrative are fascinating. I am not going to get into them, but if you want to, you can use them. Also, you could present them to the class if that is a passion of yours.

Tori wants to know why Iliad before Odyssey.

Partly because the Iliad is set in the 10th year of the war, and the Odyssey is set after the war.
Partly because people tend to like the Odyssey more, and so I set the more difficult one first.
Partly because you can't read them both at the same time.

Teddy L asks about Achilles, son of Peleus: will the fathers be characters or just lineage?

Sometimes the fathers are characters, but more often they are just lineage.

Connor O signed his daily comment as "Nobody."

Cute.

Ian F-B asks if Achilles' heel will be exposed during the Trojan War?

I think that part of the story is found in Statius, a much later writer, and also in Apollonius' Argonautica, another much later epic. We won't be covering those works. You can, however, volunteer to read it and present about it to the class. Interesting topic.

Broden M asks if Achilles upset apollo by attacking priests.

Broden is talking about the version in which Apollo kills Achilles via Paris: I don't right off hand remember enough about it. It is not found in the Iliad or Odyssey as far as I can remember.
I don't remember where that is reported: Apollonius? Apollodorus? I could find it, but it might take a while.

Otto S-S asks if there are many other things like Homer being perhaps not even a historical individual?

Depends what you mean by "like": I was surprised to learn, if I have it right, that there is no evidence of the exile to Egypt that figures in the Old Testament.
There are fictional things that have no basis in history: I think that the "king's right to the first night with the bride" is one. I sure hope it is, and wonder about the men who made it up and perpetuated it. But it works as a hell of a dramatic tension device. I could be wrong about that.

Griffin A too was fascinated to learn about the tenuous relation between history and the Trojan War.
Haley B wants to know if everything we will read was originally sung.

No, but Homer and the tragedies were sung (well, some parts of a tragedy weren't).

Cole E wants to know how I know the proper pronunciation of the names.

I can't claim that the way I pronounce them is the way an Ancient Greek would say them, but it's basically close in a certain sense.
I cannot possibly know their accent in the sense of "accent" that is used to speak of a French accent or a Russian accent or an Indian accent.
I can know that certain letters were pronounced with certain parts of the mouth because comparative linguists tell us that is the case.
But in the end, the way I pronounce the names is an American way that I inherited from my teachers. It's not so much "correct" or "accurate" as it is "standard." A standard is important, but don't mistake it for truth, accuracy, or some ur-correctness.

Logan L asks if we have any document about the Trojan side of the war? the story from their perspective.

No. You should write it!

Katie S asks if we will discuss the Trojan Horse in this class.

Maybe. What about it?

Liam M-D asks about the trade routes, in particular why they have certain bends and curves here and there.

I wish I could say that it was because of prevailing winds or something equally interesting, but I suspect it is just because the mapmaker found that more pleasing than straight lines.
I do know that navigators hugged the coasts during all of the times referred to as "Ancient Greece," because they had no reliable way to pinpoint location at sea. The open sea was a source of great fear and was only crossed if it was necessary or much shorter.