'The Aeneid': Combat evolved?

Arma virumque cano?

(Credit: Bungie Studios)

Forget 300. The real way to make ancient history and literature cool is...Halo?

We've already seen World of Warcraft used as a way to bring The Canterbury Tales into the digital age. But that was a student project--this interesting story, which we read on Joystiq, is the project of a professor at the University of Connecticut who's looking to better connect his students with the literature they're assigned in class. This would be Robert Travis, an associate professor of modern and classical languages, who has gone so far as to take an Xbox to class into the lecture hall to prove that Halo has its roots in ancient epic poetry like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil's Aeneid.

"Both Halo and the Aeneid tell a story about a more-than-human hero defeating enemies who would be too much for ordinary people like us; enemies who nevertheless bear an important resemblance to the ones we and the Romans face in our respective presents," Travis is quoted as saying in the UConn Advance article. The idea of interactivity, he said, is also something that the two have in common--Homer's tales were told orally, and the audience wouldn't know what to expect. "Like today's gamers, the bards' audiences didn?t know what was going to happen next, so they were immersed in the story and were interactive with it in a very real way," Travis explained.

Um, okay. I think it's a bit of a stretch, but hey, if it makes the UConn kids do their homework...

[SbFF]

Yes it does seem like a bit of a stretch

to say they have the same level of interactivity or whatever.
But the similarities of the stories are pretty obvious.
I found that out in 10th grade not in college.