Although the texts of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged more than 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece, classics professor Roberta Stewart believes Homer has never been more relevant. Since 2007 she has led Homer reading groups for veterans in the Upper Valley area, affording them an opportunity to discuss military issues including deployment, combat and reintegration. Group members reflect on how the soldiers in Homer’s epic poems—and soldiers more generally—left for war, how they got home and who they saw upon their return. 

“The Iliad is a poem of war,” says Stewart, whose Dartmouth courses focus on Roman history and culture, ancient slavery and Greek and Latin literature. “The life-and-death struggle resonates with veterans profoundly. The Odyssey is a poem of reintegration and shows how the veteran returned home. The Greeks knew that both combat and homecoming presented heroic struggles.”

Stewart, who came to the College in 1990 after completing a postdoc in Germany—she earned her Ph.D. at Duke—got the idea for her groups while on sabbatical from Dartmouth in Italy during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. She started reading military blogs for information about the war and was drawn to the site of one soldier in particular. “He was a great writer, and I was fascinated,” she says. Then the soldier went silent. Stewart thought perhaps he had been killed or was too wounded to write, but then he started blogging from a hospital. “I wrote to him and said, ‘Read Homer,’ ” Stewart says. “Then this light bulb went on, and I wrote to the local Veterans Affairs [VA] and offered to start reading groups with veterans.”

After Stewart presented at a conference on war trauma in 2010, the Maine humanities council approached her about developing a handbook for small book groups that were being launched across 13 states. Stewart works privately with established or budding reading groups in Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Closer to home, she will be working with the New Hampshire Humanities Council to train facilitators for Homer groups in the state, pending funding approval. She has spoken about reading groups to general audiences for the state humanities councils of Vermont and Maine, and presented the concept of reading groups to hospitals in Connecticut, Vermont and Pennsylvania. 

“The Iliad is fiction to a certain extent,” says Brendan Higgins, a member of one of Stewart’s reading groups who served as an officer in the Marine Corps during Operation Iraqi Freedom and now works as an orthopedic surgeon. “But its description of combat and interpersonal relationships and situations of hierarchy within the military hold true and are pretty consistent 3,000 years later. We’re dealing with problems that people have been experiencing for thousands of years.”

Stewart has led six 12- to 14-week sessions for veterans in the Upper Valley. One group wrote an insert for a Denis O’Hare production of An Iliad, which played at the Hopkins Center in 2014. “It’s a little idea that’s growing from the ground up,” Stewart says. “Which is great, because it’s at the micro level that you can change people’s lives.”

The reading groups are small discussion-based sessions with never more than a dozen people. The members, both officers and enlisted men, range from 25-year-old veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan through older vets of Vietnam, Korea and World War II. “We had representatives from every combat this country has been involved in over the last 70 years,” Higgins says. “There are a lot of commonalities. It makes you realize that this is not just a problem that you deal with as an individual, but that this is a problem people have been trying to deal with for thousands and thousands of years.”

Stewart is eager for increased student-veteran engagement. The group meets in the Hanover public library and Stewart leads the 90-minute sessions with a clinician and a veteran. “We tried the VA offices, but it didn’t work,” Stewart says. “It felt like we were being scrutinized.” Just as in a Dartmouth class, veterans might not open up immediately, but by the fourth week of the term the group has gotten to know each other. “We become friendly, we joke and we read Homer.”

Reading the ancient Greeks can be difficult. “It’s a big commitment to engage with Homer, but some vets really take to it,” Stewart says. There is no predictable takeaway. “The reading groups are just like the classroom,” Stewart says. “The minute you tell somebody what to think about a passage, all thinking stops. My role is to allow individuals to really make this text their own. It’s just me sharing Homer. It’s about what Homer can give the veterans.” 

Discussions in the group often catch Stewart by surprise. In The Iliad Achilles has a blatant disregard for chain of command. “The veterans don’t have a lot of patience with him,” Stewart says. As an academic, Stewart often looks for patterns across literature. The veterans bring a vastly different perspective, she says. For example, in The Odyssey, Odysseus falls asleep at inopportune moments. “For me, as an academic, I say, ‘Look at Odysseus, he falls asleep three times,’ ” she says. “Yes, that’s there in Homer. But there’s something else that’s much deeper.” One of the veterans said, “Of course he fell asleep! He’s going home. Nobody’s trying to kill him anymore!” Odysseus is safe for the first time in a year, the veteran pointed out. “What that vet taught me at that moment is an experience in Homer that I have to be attuned to,” Stewart says. 

Discussions rarely address veterans’ combat experiences directly, Stewart says, but their personal experiences do influence the discussion. “The Odyssey looks back at war and watches people look back at war as a memory,” she says. “There are always tears. War is never a happy memory.” 

In addition to bringing the classroom to veterans through Homer reading groups, Stewart is interested in bringing veterans into her Dartmouth classrooms, as both speakers and students. Five members of the Dartmouth Undergraduate Veterans Association have participated in the groups, and two have participated regularly, but because veteran students have so many commitments, she says, it can be difficult for them to find time for the Homer groups. 

In a comparative literature course titled “War Stories” planned for the 2016-17 academic year, Stewart will give veteran students an opportunity to think about their experiences through an academic lens of world history and literature. “For the veteran, Homer offers insight into the effects of war and the difficulties of homecoming across cultures and across time,” she says. The course will put the text of Homer within a larger frame of world literature on war and homecoming and allow Stewart to bring community work to the classroom.

“The military used to be a family experience,” Stewart says. “It is quickly disappearing as a personal experience, and that can have very bad consequences. How do we understand the military? How do we understand the experiences that our soldiers have had? I think literature can help us think about that.”

“The idea is to bring it home,” she says, “to become aware of how deeply the military influences the daily lives of Americans, whether they know it or not. In the classroom my goal is to allow Dartmouth students to have the civics lesson that I’ve been having through these reading groups for seven years.”                                                         

Rianna P. Starheim is a former DAM intern.