Companions to teaching Homer and Hesiod

One topic that did not come up during the seminar was the use of modern fiction as a companion to classical texts in the curriculum. I can think of two interesting texts, and I'd love to hear what others might use.

First, there is Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist (1986), a highly allusive account of a mercenary soldier in the army of the great king, after the defeat of the Persians at Plataea (479 BCE). The hero has a received a wound that renders him partially amnesiac and a highly unreliable narrator. His disability lets him sometimes see the gods, however, and his quest to recover his identity (or at least his ethnic origin) becomes an epic nostos as he travels through Greece as prisoner and then slave. Wolfe has clearly read Hesiod and the Homeric hymns carefully, and he works in classical myth and ritual as they were lived and understood. It felt like a good attempt to imagine living in a world of "serial monotheism" (Nagy) set in a carefully imagined world of political tension following the defeat of the Persian forces. Wolfe's prose is complex enough that students could get a lot simply from trying to sort out the multiple divinities, avatars, etc. and the people and places. It also is excerptable if you're moving quickly through lots of material.

Next is Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, a post-apocalyptic feminist dystopia in which a group of survivors decide to model their emergent civilization on the Greek polis, with a sardonic twist designed to achieve peace by eliminating the desire to wage war. I could say more, but I'd spoil the plot which depends on gradual discovery. There are many implicit references to the cult of the hero and to Greek myth and literature in general. I've used it in part as a bookend to the Iliad in part of a first-year seminar on "Peace & War."

Wolfe's book is available in print only as a two-volume set with the sequel, Soldier of Arete, added (I have not read the sequel).

Tepper's book is still in print.

I would love to hear what other contemporary fiction everyone has used in teaching the classics.