The Aeneid, Canterbury Tales And Don Quixote

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer consists of frame narratives were a group of pilgrims that are traveling from Southwark to the shire of St. Becker in the Canterbury Cathedral, tell each other to pass time until they arrive at their destination. During The Canterbury Tales the reader is exposed to many characters that represent all of the social classes of medieval England and the reader gets to know them from the general prologue to each individual tale. One of these characters is the Pardoner, when the Pardoners is introduced he is described as the stereotypical pardoner of the Fourteen Century. The pardoner is describe as a crafty and a corrupt individual that will do anything to sell his pardons and relics. Nevertheless one of the most important characteristics that the Pardoner exhibits is his frankness about his own hypocrisy and sins. The pardoner accuses himself of fraud, avarice, and gluttony (the very things that he preaches against). During the Pardoners prologue, but most noticeable during his tale, the pardoners preach about how “Greed is the root of all evil”, and how our sins can lead cause our dismay.

Rationality affects the way we behave, but emotions change our behavior and drive us to behave the way we do. People are driven by emotions, yet we can not allow them to be the only thing that controls our actions and behaviors. Rationality helps control our emotions and prevents them from getting too out of hand. There are three texts from seminar that demonstrate this idea of emotional power: The Aeneid by Virgil, The Oresteia by Aeschylus, and Sappho by Sappho. In The Aeneid, the text discusses Aeneas’ journey to Italy and the many encounters he had. It was in this text that the females displayed emotional power. The Oresteia is a play about murder, revenge, and justice within the royal family of Argos. Emotion is what drives this play

Literature utilizes the readers’ need to connect with a character. More often than not, with authors making their characters relatable in one sense or another that could be transferred into multiple stories. This idea of relatability is the core of the tragic hero, a trope used often in literature including in stories such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Shakespeare's Othello, and August Wilson’s Fences. Each from different years, authors, and genres, yet each utilizing the tragic hero to further their individual themes through depicting the greatness of a godlike man and his fall to lowest points within humanity.

It is important to make wise decisions. Failure to do so can lead to irreversibly idiotic outcomes, such as in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Other decisions that can lead to awful outcomes can be explained in books such as To Kill A Mockingbird and The Odyssey.

The Canterbury Tales, written by Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by an anonymous author, are both sophisticated fourteenth-century examples of medieval romance. Medieval romances captured the heart of their audiences as narratives and stories that featured a protagonist, often a knight, and dealt with religious allegories, chivalry, courtly love, and heroic epics. The concept of the knight emerged from the remnants of the Anglo-saxon literature and ideals and influence of the Christian religion and church. There is a distinct difference between the famous pagan heroic like Beowulf and the romantic medieval tales like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight of the Canterbury Tale. The Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf exemplified

Many protagonists in ancient Roman and Medieval works face some sort of dilemma that makes achieving their goal much more challenging. Works such as Virgil’s Roman epic poem, The Aeneid, and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy: Inferno of the medieval period in Europe demonstrates prime examples of the central characters’ difficulties. Both problems themselves differ greatly in the sense of the types of trials the character’s face and what their confrontations say about the priorities and values of each protagonist’s culture. Nevertheless, the characters still have valuable lessons to learn as they try to overcome their dilemmas.

In The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, the stereotypes and roles in society are reexamined and made new through the characters in the book. Chaucer discusses different stereotypes and separates his characters from the social norm by giving them highly ironic and/or unusual characteristics. Specifically, in the stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer examines stereotypes of women and men and attempts to define their basic wants and needs.

Oedipus the King was written by Sophocles and was is titled Oedipus Rex in Latin. It is one of the most well-known Greek tragedies. As is the case with Greek tragedies—or roughly most tragedies that make their way to stage—fate plays a key role in the events in Oedipus Rex. Oedipus discovers there is a plague on his city. The only way to lift the plague is by slaying the former king’s killer. As the play’s acts unfold one discovers about the prophecy concerning Oedipus. The prophecy states that Oedipus is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. But was this just by chance or his predetermined fate.

Virgil’s Aeneid was written in a time of political and social transition in Rome, which influenced the epic poem in a political way. Aeneid was written only a couple years after the civil war where a lot of people had started to lose faith in the greatness of Rome. Virgil’s intensely political poem concentrates on the theme of Rome’s greatness and particularly with the reign of the new emperor Augustus Caesar as the re-founder of glorious Rome. Throughout the poem Virgil used prophecies to make connections between the founding of the settlement (later to be Rome) by Aeneas and Rome’s culminating point with Augustus, who, according to Virgil, descends from Aeneas. Virgil uses this poem as propaganda for the new emperor by creating a parallelism between Aeneas, destiny, and Augustus at the same time that it uses a hidden ironic critique of the new regime.

Humans can attempt to avoid a certain fate but if destinies are fixed they cannot be altered. Sophocles supports the notion that free will eludes us in works such as Oedipus the King and Antigone. Oedipus, Creon, Antigone, and Tiresias are characters in these epics whose lives represented the battle of truth and wisdom. Oedipus attempted to escape the prophecy in which he killed his own father and married his mother. He hastily discovered his past while trying to cure his city, and his efforts to change his fate fail when the prophecy is realized. His daughter Antigone wanted revenge after Oedipus’ death. Creon would not bury her brother so she did it herself and then allowed Creon to punish her by enclosing her in a tomb. She believed in

In the two great Greek theater plays, Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Jocasta and Medea are two important female characters that both have similarities and differences, but Medea is the stronger character both physically and emotionally. Medea and Jocasta both are extremely important in their stories and for the outcomes of their stories. They are two women that have power in male dominated societies.

The Aeneid, written by Virgil, was written in Rome between 30 and 19 B.C. Virgil wrote many of his writings during the time of Octavian, the estranged nephew to Caeser. During the beginning of the times of Octavian and the time of these writings Rome was in a state of civil war, which later turned into the most peaceful place in the world. Many people were torn from their homes and new boundaries were created. It is important to know the culture and gender roles of the people, the person in power, and the system of government in place at the time of the writing.

Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King, has risen many questions concerning the main character and whether or not he acts on free will or if his future is predestined by the gods. I am going to test the theory that although Oedipus believes he is acting on his own free will, he is in fact a victim of the gods. I will analyze several different sources that discuss fate and human agency in Oedipus the King and then proceed to build my original argument on the archaic debate.

Virgil was Rome’s unwilling epic poet, he gave the Roman people a cohesive narrative that tied them to the past and propelled them towards the future. This narrative, The Aeneid, had its basis in local lore as well as ties to the older Greek epics of Homer. The Aeneid almost functions as an extension of The Iliad and Odyssey, with its protagonist, Aeneas, being a minor figure in the earlier poems, and the work itself academically divided into “Odyssean” and “Iliadic” parts. In this relationship Virgil owes a creative debt to Homer, and there is a resemblance that can be seen with striking clarity when the experiences of Homers’ Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas are examined side by side. Odysseus and Aeneas are both honour bound to reach the destinations of their respective journeys, Odysseus to rule Ithaca and Aeneas to found Rome, and while ones journey often mirrors the others, there are significant differences between the two. The major differences that can be observed lie in their characters and forms of heroism and these variations shape the course of their narratives, yet the similarities of their internal journeys and ultimate fates remain intact.

The connection created between Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Last Man by Mary Shelley permits the readers to increase their thoughts about the nature of the society, especially its importance in the lives of women and how social class works in society during the romanticism era. Moreover, these novels increase our imagination about how different people at different times have particular clarifications of what it means to be human. It is essential to understand how different social and historical backgrounds interpret the world in certain ways. This is specifically significant if someone’s wants to know how and why a particular novelist held the ideas and