The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature

Epic's foundational role in Greek and Latin literature places the heroic journey at the center of numerous literary and historical contexts. This volume showcases in a wide-ranging fashion the various functions of the journey from Homer's Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid to NASA's Apollo 11 mission.

This volume explores journeys across time and space in Greek and Latin literature, taking as its starting point the paradigm of travel offered by the epic genre. The epic journey is central to the dynamics of classical literature, offering a powerful lens through which characters, authors, and readers experience their real and imaginary worlds. The journey informs questions of identity formation, narrative development, historical emplotment, and constructions of heroism - topics that move through and beyond the story itself. The act of moving to and from 'home' - both a fixed point of spatial orientation and a transportable set of cultural values - thus represents a physical journey and an intellectual process. In exploring its many manifestations, the chapters in this collection reconceive the centrality of the epic journey across a wide variety of genres and historical contexts, from Homer to the moon.