Beowulf Is One of the Oldest Heroic
The story of Beowulf is summarized, from the reader's personal point of view. This is a reaction paper that reflects on themes of heroism in the saga and Beowulf's sense of 'specialness,' apart from the other warriors of his time and era. It also examines how Beowulf affirms cultural values, such as the need for charity and the need for a special, noble figure to sacrifice himself for others.
Book the Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark
Dennis McDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) is a book that was always guaranteed to upset orthodox Christian theologians and biblical literalists and fundamentalists everywhere, since its main thesis held that the author of the first gospel used the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary models. He compares Mark to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a Gnostic book, and describes it as a "hypotext" that "relies somehow on a written antecedent" (McDonald, p. 2). Specifically, Mark used Books 22 and 24 of the Iliad as models for the death and burial of Jesus, in which Achilles brutally kills Hector and then releases the body to his father, King Priam of Troy. Hector's soul went to Hades and never returned, but of course Jesus was resurrected on the third day, even if his rather dim disciples in Mark failed to recognize him initially.
Aristotle: Virtue Aristotle Is Considered to Be
Aristotle is considered to be the philosopher of philosophers, he virtually wrote about everything, he pioneered most of the disciplines like psychology, biology, meteorology and political science.