This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by visiting Professor (and candidate) Hannah Silverblank on the characterization and subversive power of the goddess Thetis in the Iliad. In the interest of complete honesty, I have never read the Iliad– my exposure to both the Iliad and the Odyssey came from my Grandmother, who retold the stories to me (with her own spin, I am increasingly learning) over the course of long walks and car rides. After
several years in the department (and in my majors at BMC), I have come to read parts of each epic, but they have been largely restricted to the “big ticket” events like the creation of the wooden horse, the murder of Polyxena, the fleeing of Aeneas, and the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope.
I feel that my exposure to the bits and pieces of the Homeric epics is relevant because it leads me to (and possibly explains) the fact that I have never encountered Thetis before. Even when my Grandma told me about the “deification” of Achilles, Thetis was identified simply as “his mother.” Professor Silverblank’s talk, therefore, was absolutely enlightening, even to someone with no prior exposure to Thetis as a character in her own right. More than anything else, I admired the way in which Prof. Silverblank was able to weave together textual, thematic, and even visual evidence to craft her argument. She was equally adept in walking through the rhythm of the original text as she was in discussing iconography and, more impressively, she was equally adept in explaining all kinds of evidence in a way that was exciting and novel to experienced listeners and clear and welcoming to new ones. As someone
with experience in the visual side of things, but with less experience in the textual analysis or in Greek itself, I very much appreciated the pacing and organization of her lecture.