Quiz

Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to recover his equilibrium.”  Through his experience, he is “brought face to face with issues of life and death, railing against mortality but coming to understand and accept it.”

Achilles?  Yes, but as M.L. West points out ( The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth ), also Gilgamesh.  West argues that “the Gilgamesh complex . . . accounts for major elements in the Iliad ‘s plot, structure, and ethos.”

Did Homer read Gilgamesh?  Did Plato read Moses?