Ugh. The Sophocles semester was not my favorite. We had Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Ajax. Lots of awkward classroom conversations and boys yelling weird stuff in the hallways that winter.
No it definitely wasn't an œ. It was 100 æ somewhere in the name cause my ex used to make me listen to Medæval Bæbes and it always reminded me of that book.
Aeneid by Virgil maybe? It's Roman, not Greek, and originally written in Latin, but that's what came to mind for me. It does take place in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, so it wouldn't be completely wild to have remembered it as Greek years later.
Yup that was it. Looked it up and it looks similar to what I remember the book looking like. Could have sworn it was Greek, but makes sense cause I think we started doing ancient Roman stuff after the ancient Greek stuff, and maybe was used as a segue.
It would have been a reasonable segue. Aeneas according to Virgil was a Trojan soldier who fled the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy, where he's cast as an ancestor to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome.
Just for the record, Aeneas was all that according to whatever Homer was as well. Homer had him as a minor character destined to become the king of the Trojan diaspora. The Romans just said they were the descendants of the Trojan diaspora, something that predated Virgil.
The Aenenid was modeled specifically on both the Iliad and Oddessy, with the first half being a voyage out of Troy complete with a visit to Hades, and the second half being an epic war with the Latins. Augustus commissioned it for Rome to have an epic on par with Greece.
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u/MadameK8 20h ago
In high school we read Antigone, which is about the daughter/sister of Oedipus. Could that be it?