#heads up op there are english lit degrees that include the Iliad as a foundational text you have to at least read in translation #but not the odyssey #so that is probably part of your UK bias findings (via @distressednoise)
well yeah, that's exactly what i'm saying. the idea that the odyssey is the default first text that everybody is expected to read is not a universal one! in some countries, if people study classical texts at all, it might be the iliad they do instead, or the aeneid; my own studies at secondary school did not involve the odyssey
my poll currently is very dominated by americans (based on the wording of their tags / how they describe their schooling), because i posted it late last night so most of the votes were in their timezone so far. so i am not currently finding any uk bias in the poll. i am hypothesising that there is US bias in the poll, and that this is not universal. there's no way to prove that with this poll, of course, i'm just interested to see the combinations of texts
i have no cultural conception of the odyssey as more iconic or commonly read than the iliad, but this poll suggests many people do. i would not have expected the aeneid to be read so much less than the others, because most of the classicists i know have done a lot of latin even if it's not their main specialism, and a lot of the non-classicists i know haven't read any of them in full, just know them vaguely from retellings or adaptations. so the greek dominance is slightly surprising but bears out the conversations that prompted the poll in the first place. (i'd also be interested to know whether new translations like emily wilson have changed this balance significantly, and if the picture would've been different ten years ago, but there are too many other factors in that window even if i could go back and poll people in 2016)
i have been interested also by people who did classics degrees in the UK/in england (education is devolved) saying that they didn't dedicate much or any time to the odyssey during their degree. this supports my vague impression that, overall, it has slightly less cultural power here. i couldn't tell you why it's the most popular one in the US but not in england, though i would expect a latin bias in english educations historically to be a small factor -- while latin is a minority subject in state schools, greek is vanishingly rare outside of private schools and uncommon even there, and if you go back a few decades you'd get more latin in grammar schools and so on. and we didn't do ancient texts in "english" classes in england; in my school, we didn't go further back than shakespeare, though i've heard rumour that a few schools (usually private schools, not exclusively) dabble in chaucer. after all, these texts are not in english originally, and i don't think we read anything else that was in translation.
obviously, the education system doesn't account for what people do with themselves independently and as adults. but it does shape what they might be prompted to seek out. in recent years there's this been this whole rash of greek myth pop culture, but i feel like that wasn't as strong when i was young. for kids, we had books like the Roman Mysteries series (i'm ever so slightly too old for Percy Jackson, though it was starting to catch on among some weaker readers in my age group when i was a teenager), and various roman britain-set adventures, like Eagle of the Ninth and other rosemary sutcliff. i remember in primary school we had a Roman Day where we all dressed up as romans and they taught us about roman food and reclining at the table and stuff like that lol. the cultural background knowledge in my area of england when i was a child was roman-focused! so, although we did have some greek myth retellings around, that felt like a niche interest, not something that was expected of a significant proportion of children (i do think that's shifted somewhat, partly bc of things like percy jackson)
anyway, not @ you, but in general the tags that really frustrate me on this poll are the ones that say "i did these in middle school, i can't believe how many people haven't read any of them". one of the things the poll is intended to explore and demonstrate is that education systems are different. people who went through a different education system will read different combinations of texts, or none, because their culture and country values different material and has different priorities. so for those people, here's another poll. how many of these classical authors that i read in state school (that's public school to americans) as a teenager in the course of one module have you read? did your school put these on the curriculum? have you been prompted to seek these out independently? why or why not? what might this tell you about how different education systems work and how they shape people's knowledge?
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
areudirty
origamiaround
gracieabrams
vaporwave
kianamaiart
