I’m so happy to see that someone in Classics finally seems to get the concept of a podcast. (Briefly, a recording of a poem is not a podcast. It’s a recording of a poem.)
The Warwick classics department has followed its previous effort with a 22 minute discussion of Homer and Vergil (though I notice they use the traditional spelling, Virgil). I’ve just begun to have a listen, and so far the audio quality seems much-improved. Sound quality plagues many an academic podcast without the resources of, say, the BBC which does an excellent job with In Our Time (which occasionally touches on the Classics with fantastic results).
I’ll reproduce the intro here to entice you to download and perhaps, as I have, to subscribe to the feed:
David Fearn and Andrew Laird of Warwick’s Classics department discuss the vagaries of epic poetry.
War and peace, love and longing, and a hero’s home-coming—these are epic themes. We have all encountered them somewhere: on the big or small screen, in books, or perhaps even ourselves. Epics tell great tales of immortal gods and mortal men, of whole civilisations rising and falling. And yet, they also team with the many facets of the human condition, with grief and guilt, bereavement and betrayal, passion and persecution, death and desire.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey mark both the end of oral poetry and the beginning of literature. In the Aeneid, Virgil continues the tale of Troy and recounts the epic events leading to the foundation of Rome.
But what are these epics really about? How is the ambient social and political order reflected in these great classics? And how do small people feature in these grant narratives?
KUDOS to Warwick for not only getting it right, but for giving me something to listen to and to recommend.