One Homer but many Socrateses.  Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues, plus Xenophon.  Ordering of the dialogues, ordering of Socrates's life.  Mention of the Parmenides, purported to have occurred about a century before Plato wrote it.  Zeno's paradoxes.  Galileo's.  Diogenes the Cynic's refutation of Zeno. Quick exposition of the Forms or Ideas.

First class on Rochester: Range of his poetry, his songs, his satire against reason and mankind; reflections on libertinage and philosophy; reflections on the skills that make a poem great: line, transition; architectonic.  Dryden great at all three; Rochester extremely good at the first two.

Last class on The Odyssey: address between husband and wife.  Lattimore's translation of the exchanged address between Odysseus and Penelope as δαιμονίη as "You are so strange."  Homer (though Lattimore doesn't indicate this), has Hektor and Andromache also address each other this way.  Address as well to strangers -- range from an affectionate "Silly" to a more existential "daimon-haunted."  The two greatest similes in the Odyssey.  Penelope's trick.  Life defeats death.

This is the first lecture on Absalom and Achitophel, given on September 7.  I just managed to recover it.  It's largely about the meaning of and the political views evidenced by Dryden's claim that history repeats itself -- first in Biblical days, then in the late seventeenth century.  Some context for the poem is given.  We spend a fair amount of time exploring the anti-perfectibilian implications of historical repetition.

I figured out how to recover the file containing the first part of the first class on the Odyssey. Really this is about funeral games and why they had 'em.  This introduces the theme of gift-giving and the potlatch which is explored in the later Odyssey classes.

DIgressive lecture focusing on Dryden's digressions and divigations about Chaucer and his openness to all the mores he writes and translates from.  His beautiful translations of Horace.  Alexander's Feast, and then the Secular Masque, written in the last fortnight of his life: his personal and the political farewell.

Odysseus as a different kind of hero from Achilleus: the trickster is not "character isolated by a deed," but someone who's character is elusive.  How can he be a hero in epic circumstances?  Homer and Shakespeare take on this problem respectively in Odysseus and Hamlet.  The Ουτιs / Odysseus pun -- as a trickster he is no man, the reverse of Achilleus.  His meeting with Aias in hell, and Aias's silence; Odysseus's meeting with his mother, who sends him home knowing what he knows about the dead, to his wife: the three phantom embraces, recollecting Achilleus's dream of the dead Patroklos.

The subtlety of Dryden's verse, especially in forms other than the heroic couplet, particularly the Pindaric or irregular ode.  His praise of Milton, his elegy on Anne Killegrew, his St. Cecilia's day poems.  The novelty of the organ. Poetry and her subordinate sisters, viz. painting and music.

Difference between Iliad and Odyssey continued: the latter is about life and praises mortality; the former about death and laments it.  Odysseus's preference for the mortal Penelope over Kalypso.  Different views of hospitality as necessary, in the Iliad, and as life-affirming, in the Odyssey.  Observations about the structure of oral verse, with respect to the research of Milman Parry.  Formulae and multi-tasking.  The connections they make possible: echoes and repetitions between different characters.  Those connections compared to similes where characters are compared to their complements, not their parallels.

Conclusion of the classes on Absalom and Achitophel and Religio Laici.  The difficulty of the middle way.  Monarchy compared to Anglicanism.  The idea of a center of perspective and understanding which comprehends all the different possibilities: how this belongs both to Anglicanism and monarchy, neither of which makes the part greater than the whole.  Contrast with Lucretius, but acknowledgment of Dryden's appreciation of Lucretius, who is also part of the whole philosophical discourse.