The Iliad may be almost 3,000 years old, but it can still captivate an audience. That was the case this Spring in ENGL 211 Ancient Literature, which focused on the topic of Troy. In addition to Homer's Iliad (c. 8th century BCE), which covers a few weeks near the end of the famous Trojan War, we read plays by three different authors (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) from 5th century BCE Athens, and Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica (c. 4th century CE), an epic poem that picks up where the Iliad leaves off. Our goal was to understand how an author's historical and cultural contexts affect their telling of a story. We learned about the contested history of Troy (did it actually exist?) and how the Athenians' experiments in democracy influenced playwrights' explorations of the story of the Trojan War. We debated whether the Iliad is a stitched-together collection of oral stories or a clearly plotted narrative poem, and whether there are Christian influe
