Homeric Hymn to Eurydice

This project was the final assignment of my classical mythology course in the fall of my sophomore year. The goal of the project was to produce a creative assignment pertaining to anything we had learned about within the course. Everything we had talked about was fair game, and the only stipulations were that it had to be well thought out and as imaginative as possible.

In the course, I remember being taken by the idea of Homeric Hymns. What struck me about them was that they felt like a shortened, digestible form of myth that could be consumed in a short period of time. We read many of these Homeric Hymns about famous Greek figures, and I decided that for my final I wanted to write my own in the style of the originals. To go along with the hymn, I also drew a portrait of Eurydice that I had planned on getting as a tattoo. I did not end up getting the tattoo for a handful of reasons, the biggest one being that while I liked the drawing, I did not feel that my artistic capabilities should be engrained on my body forever.

Truthfully, this course was the first Classics course I had taken at Skidmore that was not a language course, even though I was already declared. When I look at this assignment nearly two years after I submitted it, I think about how far I have come. It was a simple project, and if I could do it all over again I would probably make a series of Homeric Hymns to various mythological figures who do not already have one. Overall, however, I do appreciate the symbolism that this project holds as the true beginning of my college classics journey, beyond my efforts in language classes.