By the beard of Zeus!

Auburn’s English department offers a course in Ancient Mythology.

Professor Dan Latimer teaches the course this semester and said the course covers a lot of mythological texts.

“It’s mostly the classical background,” Latimer said. “Stories from Homer up through the tragidean: Sophocles, Euripides, Escalus.”

Mythology, the word, is defined as a set of stories.

“That’s what myth means, ‘mythos’ means story,” Latimer said.

The course, however, isn’t limited to the classics. “The novels that we have are from the ancient world, Daphnis and Chloe and ‘The Golden Ass,’ which is a really good novel,” Latimer said. Latimer said the class spends three weeks going over Homer’s “The Odyssey” and spends just about as much time on “The Iliad.”

“‘The Iliad’ is 15,000 lines and ‘The Odyssey’ is around 12,000 lines,”

Latimer said. “It’s quite a chore to get through all of it.”

Tim Ramsey, senior in English, said he enjoys reading “The Odyssey.”

“This was probably my fifth time through,” Ramsey said. “It has to be one of my favorite books,”

Latimer said students take the class as a change of pace from their everyday class load.

“Because this is my last semester, I thought I might as well just sign up for classes that I genuinely wanted to take,” Ramsey said.

Latimer said he uses the class to look further into the classics than just character development and plot line. “The Odyssey,” for example, shows the differences between men and women in ancient society. “‘The Odyssey’ seems to be about domesticity on the one hand and adventures on the other,” Latimer said.

He said the students enjoy all the battles and crusades they read in the novels and epics.

“It’s a lot about heroes and monsters, heroes killing monsters,” Latimer said. “‘The Odyssey’ is about Odysseus slaying a lot of monsters, getting free of them and escaping them when they want to eat him.”

In recent years, Latimer said, many works the class discusses have been made into movies.

Movies like “Troy,” “Helen of Troy” and even “O Brother Where Art Thou?” are some of the more recent Hollywood renditions based on classic mythology.

“A lot of these stories have been made into film recently and its interesting to see how Hollywood portrays characters,” Latimer said.

Ancient Mythology is a three-hour credit course and is open to anyone interested in taking it. The course is open to “anybody who’s looking for an extra course, something entertaining to take besides their requirements,” Latimer said. “I have students come in from the graduate school who take it just to entertain themselves to read something aside from their work.”