Virgil’s life and career. The Aeneid influenced by Virgil’s experience of anarchy and civil war as the Roman Republic crumbles. The rise of Caesar Augustus, first Roman Emperor: the promise of law, order, and civilization. But at what cost? The “Virgilian melancholy.”

Is Book 24 by another, and inferior poet? Is there any artistic necessity for it? Is there a total thematic pattern to the Odyssey that draws together all the various themes we have been tracing? The fascinating character of Odysseus in later literature, up to our own time.

The suitors’ self-humiliation, unable even to draw Odysseus’ bow. Odysseus shoots through 12 axe heads. The battle with the suitors and its aftermath. The hanging of the 12 treacherous maids, and the disposal of Melanthios. Penelope tricks Odysseus but proves he is really her husband. The joyful reunion.

The famous episode telling how Odysseus was given his significant name by his grandfather Autolycus, a thief. Setting up strategies ahead of time to even the odds against the suitors. The bow contest.

The moving and yet psychologically complex reunion of father and son in the hut of Eumaios. Devising strategies to make up for being greatly outnumbered. Odysseus meets his old dog Argos, a wonderful tearjerker in the midst of a heroic epic.

Athena, in a famous scene, puts Odysseus on a level of equality with herself—as storyteller, liar, trickster. The power of stories that shape people’s view of reality. Eumaios the swineherd as a genuinely good man of lower-class origins. The return of Telemachus to Ithaca.

The Wanderings, Books 9-12, suggest an underlying pattern of symbolic death to an old identity and birth of a new, often at a point of crisis in mid-life, as is true of both Odysseus and Dante in the Divine Comedy. For Odysseus, this involves a coming to terms with the feminine, portrayed by a remarkable spectrum of female figures ranging from the ideal to the ambiguous to the evil. The landing on Ithaca: the sense of a nexus of realities, of Odysseus crossing from the mythlike, dreamlike world of the Wanderings to the realistic world of his home island.

Possible mythical patterns of death and rebirth to a new identity underlying the Odyssey, especially in the Wanderings, patterns that are universally human and not limited to exceptional heroes.

A brief recap of the first six episodes of the Wanderings: the Kikones, the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus (god of the winds), the Lestrygonians, Circe. The central episode of the Wanderings, the descent to Hades. Meetings with Elpenor, the seer Tiresias, Odysseus’ mother Antiklea, Agamemnon.

For the four books of the Wanderings, Odysseus acts as his own bard and recounts retroactively his ten years of trial and adventure since the fall of Troy. Recurrent themes tie together these seemingly disparate episodes, including resistance to temptation, the virtue of active striving, and the contrast between civilization and savagery.