This prose translation of the Odyssey is so successful that it has taken its place as one of the few really outstanding versions of Homer's famous epic poem. It is the story of the return of Odysseus from the siege of Troy to his home in Ithaca, and of the vengeance he takes on the suitors of his wife Penelope. Odysseus's account of his adventures since leaving Troy includes his encounter with the enchantress Circe, his visit to the Underworld, and (...) the lure of the Sirens. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even (...) in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse. (shrink)

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that theIliadand theOdysseyare very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of theOdysseysat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers (...) sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse. (shrink)

A number of scholars have discussed the difficulty of preserving accurately—or at all—information about the past1 in the Greek Dark Ages when the literacy of Minoan/Mycenean Greece had been lost. Such preservation necessarily depended on the memories of the members of the society, especially those of the professional ‘rememberers’, the bards of the oral tradition: in such a society, if knowledge of an event is to be available to future generations, it must not be forgotten.

A number of scholars have discussed the difficulty of preserving accurately—or at all—information about the past1 in the Greek Dark Ages when the literacy of Minoan/Mycenean Greece had been lost. Such preservation necessarily depended on the memories of the members of the society, especially those of the professional ‘rememberers’, the bards of the oral tradition: in such a society, if knowledge of an event is to be available to future generations, it must not be forgotten.

The Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς, the first work written by John Tzetzes, consists of 1.676 hexameters and numerous scholia. It narrates the events of the Trojan war from the conception of Paris to the fall of the city. This paper analyses the poem and its structure. In his later Exegesis to the Iliad, Tzetzes states that the Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς allows to “learn thoroughly, in every detail” the history of the war. Following this evidence, the macro- and the microstructure of the poem are (...) analysed in order to understand how Tzetzes structured his literary work and to what end. The last paragraph deals with the title Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς. (shrink)

This chapter provides interpretations of Homeric poems. Homer reflects a view of the nature of human beings and their place in the world, and their reasons for living and acting in that world, but exactly what that view is has been debated for centuries. In the early to mid-twentieth century, Bruno Snell and other classical scholars proposed a developmental view known as ‘progressivism’, according to which the Homeric understanding of the human mind, and consequently morality, is in (...) certain important ways ‘primitive’. There was disagreement about exactly when development took place after Homer, but it was generally agreed that the modern position on such issues was superior. The debate about progressivism led to the adoption of various positions, some more antagonistic to progressivism than others, on the nature of virtue in the poems, the role of shame in Homeric morality, and justice. The chapter discusses each of these positions and debates. It then focuses on shame and guilt, and concludes with a section on virtue, including a sub-section on pity – a highly salient emotion and virtue in Homer that appears not to have received the attention in the literature it might have. (shrink)

By moving on from the findings of literature concerning the connections between the Leviathan and the Hobbesian translations of the Homeric poems, this article aims to problematize these relationships further with regard to the Behemoth. Three principal issues will be taken into account – the prophecy, the ruling over the Militia, and the mixed monarchy – given that, although themes typical of the philosopher’s political thought, their peculiarities in the Behemoth enable us to draw attention to possible significant (...) political connections between Hobbes’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and his narrative of the English Civil War. (shrink)

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are made for them rather than by them; in some cases the instigators of action (...) are gods, in other cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich , sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there is some difference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy ; but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not. (shrink)

It has been known for many years that inscriptions in the Arcadian dialect contain a considerable number of words which occur commonly in the Homeric poems and rarely, if at all, elsewhere. The first attempt at a complete list was made by Otto Hoffmann in Die grieckischen Dialekte, I. pp. 276–278. He gives as Homeric ασα , βóλομαι νυ πυέσΘω, ρτύω σκηΘές, δεάτοι, δμα, 'Eκατόνβοια and 'Eκατόμβοια, hίκοντα, κελεύθω, μέστ', πληθύς, and πλός. Buck, in Greek Dialects, p. (...) 132, added εùΧωλά and ἆμαρ and we might with as much justification add ρπειν λεύσοντες and λεύσοντες. In each case a Homeric word, unusual in later Greek except in verse, is used in ordinary Arcadian epigraphic prose. (shrink)

Although the influence of Homer on Western literature has long commanded critical attention, little has been written on how various generations of readers have found menaing in his texts. These seven essays explore the ways in which the Illiad and the Odyssey have been read from the time of Homer through the Renaissance. By asking what questions early readers expected the texts to answer and looking at how these expectations changed over time, the authors clarify the position of the Illiad (...) and the Odyssey in the intellectual world of antiqueity while offering historical insight into the nature of reading. The collection surveys the entire field of preserved ancient interpretations of Homer, beginning with the fictional audiences portrayed within the poems themselves, proceedings to readings by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Aristarchus and Crates, and culminating in the spritiualized allegorical reading current among Platonists of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The influence of these ancient interpretations is then examined in Byzantium and in the Latin West during the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Robert Browning, Anthony Grafton, Robert Lamberton, A.A. Long, James Porter, Nicholas Richardson, and Charles Segal. Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics and John J. Keaney is Professor of Classics, both at Princeton University. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are made for them rather than by them; in some cases the instigators of action (...) are gods, in other cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich, sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there is some difference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy ; but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not. (shrink)

The discoveries and work of Parry and Lord have turned the old battleground of the Homeric Question and its many side issues into a scene of fruitful tillage if not of complete harmony. The exploration in Yugoslav epic songs of the nature of oral narrative, with its identification of the moment of reciting and the moment of composing, has met with wide approval in its application to the Homeric poems. Some scholars, however, feel that the difference in (...) literary merit between the Homeric poems and the Yugoslav epic songs, fine as many of these are, is still too great to allow us to apply to Homer without reserve the conclusions which may be valid for the Yugoslav tradition. (shrink)

In this paper I consider ways in which seawater––both on its surface and in its depths––opens up alternative forms of thought and expression in Homer, especially with respect to the body. By tracking the relationship between body and simile as it is mediated by the surface of the sea, I argue that water emerges as an especially mobile and adaptive medium for expressing the transformation that takes place between self and simile in Homer. In the Iliad, similes are well-known for (...) bringing weather, waves, and other aspects of the natural environment into the poem, whereas in the Odyssey those aspects more often introduce similes of their own. I offer a reading of the shipwreck scene in Odyssey 5 to suggest that the body’s struggle to stay afloat is matched there, on a formal level, by the role of waves in drawing simile and body to the sea’s surface. I then address a different kind of figurative language (closer to metaphor and associated with grief) that takes place in the depths, through readings of scenes in Books 18 and 24 of the Iliad and Archilochus fragment 13. (shrink)

A generation ago Moses Finley said that the councils and the assemblies in the Homeric poems were not genuine deliberative bodies but looser, less productive gatherings. Finley and others regarded these bodies as transitional, so that regular councils and assemblies appear only later, in systems like those identified with Lycurgus and Solon. In recent years scholars have returned to an older view that Homeric deliberative bodies were well enough organized to make decisions, even if leaders or dissenters (...) could undermine these decisions. Differences between councils, on the one hand, and assemblies, on the other, have not been prominent in this scholarship. The noteworthy exception is Fabian Schulz's 2011 dissertation on parallels between Homeric councils and the Spartan Gerousia, in which he draws several comparisons between βουλαί and ἀγοραί. (shrink)

This article investigates concepts of masculinity in the Homeric poems by focusing on two words: "énorén" and "ágenorín". We argue that whereas "énorén" is a positive quality best understood as 'manliness', "agenorín" denotes 'excessive manliness' in a pejorative sense. By comparing the use of these two terms we c1aim that it is possible to explore what constitutes proper, as opposed to excessive, masculinity in the Homeric poems. Our analysis of "énorén" and "ágenorín" suggests that some current (...) views of Homeric masculinity need to be reconsidered. Whereas much recent scholarship has emphasized the individualism of 'the Homeric hero', we suggest that individualistic behaviour on the part of men is presented as a serious problem in the Homeric poems. As well as the use of the terms "énorén" and "ágenorín", the frequent injunctions to 'be men' found in the poems confirm that solidarity with other men is an important aspect of Homeric masculinity. Our analysis also shows that the language of masculinity is employed very differently in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, excessive manliness is typically displayed by an individual who fails to show solidarity with other men on the battlefield. In the Odyssey, the suitors are standardly designated as 'excessively manly' for coveting another man's wife. In both poems, normative definitions of masculinity seek to regulate proper relationships among men. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish the existence of a significant difference, in a number of respects, between the style of the narrated portions of Homer and that of the speeches which are recorded in the two epics; and to offer some explanations for this fact. It will require the presentation of some statistics: I suspect that not all of the figures are absolutely accurate, but I feel confident that such inaccuracies as they may contain will not affect (...) the validity of the inferences drawn from them. The mere fact of differences in vocabulary, while not without interest, is not extremely interesting or surprising. The hope of this paper is that patterns will appear, and that the ‘reticence’ or ‘objectivity’ of Homer, more often praised than investigated, will be illuminated by them; that particular passages in the poems will be shown to be stylistically interesting or unusual; and that some general considerations will emerge which suggest that the difficulties confronting the oral theory of Homer are rather more complex than is often supposed. (shrink)

Seven mentions of Homer, Homeric characters or passages are contained in Fronto’s De orationibus and his five letters known as De eloquentia. Although these references might seem surprising in rhetorical texts, they form in fact a rather coherent corpus which features the famous epic poet in a singular fashion. His poems are however neither quoted nor commented upon at length. On the contrary the references are closely related to Fronto’s aims and thoughts and the poet as represented is (...) different from both the actual and the traditional Homer. He is deprived of his own characteristics and becomes a rhetor and one of the most important orators. He is thus to be considered and followed by someone trying to define which is the best oratorical style in general and the best type of eloquence for an emperor in particular. Even if this sort of metamorphosis is not without precedent in Latin literature and oratory, the Frontonian Homer, whose perfect style is a model of purity and naturalness, is a new Homer reflecting a second-century rhetorician’s thinking. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to elucidate the senses in which this place-name is used in Homer; to assign meanings to the Homeric terms Achaean, Iason and Pelasgic Arge, to ‘Argive’ as a synonym for Greek, and to establish the nature of the Argos over which Agamemnon ruled. I take the Homeric poems as the unity which they profess to be, and which they must be for historical enquiry. Whatever liberties Homer took with his materials it is (...) plain he was careful to respect events. The effort to distinguish between old and new in the Iliad and Odyssey has caused needless and fruitless encumbrance to the official historians, such as Busolt; the Unitarian position has given us the remarkable results of Professor Myres' . The consistency of Mr. Myres' account, and I venture to hope of mine, allows a fresh inference back to the homogeneity of the poems which are their source. (shrink)

This article examines ancient depictions of the death of Troilus in art and literature and challenges the widespread belief that the Iliad implies an alternative version of the myth in which Troilus dies in battle. In particular, it argues that the death-in-battle interpretation is both insufficiently supported by the internal evidence and incompatible with the external evidence. Given the evident popularity of the story of Achilles’ ambush of Troilus in the Archaic period, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that (...) the poet of the Iliad knew the story of Troilus’ death by ambush. That the poem's only reference to Troilus does not contradict this story, and possibly even alludes to it, should persuade critics of the strong likelihood that the popular story of Troilus’ ambush at the fountain was also the one in the poet's mind. (shrink)

Much effort has been invested by scholars in defining the specific character of the Homeric values as against those that obtained at later periods of Greek history. The distinction between the ‘shame-culture’ and the ‘guilt-culture’ introduced by E. R. Dodds, and that between the ‘competitive’ and the ‘cooperative’ values advocated by A. W. H. Adkins, are among the more influential ones. Although Adkins's taxonomy encountered some acute criticism, notably from A. A. Long, it has become generally adopted both in (...) the scholarly literature and in general philosophical discussions of Greek ethics. Objections to Adkins's approach have mainly concentrated on demonstrating that his denial of the cooperative values to Homer is untenable on general grounds and is not supported by Homeric evidence. Characteristically, Adkins's thesis concerning the centrality to Homer's ethics of the so-called ‘competitive values‘ has never received similar attention, probably owing to the fact that this is the point at which his picture of the Homeric society concurs with the influential reconstructions by W Jaeger and M. I. Finley. The present study oftimēandaretē, generally held to be the two competitive values central to the Homeric poems, purports to address this issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Poems MICHAEL TROCCHIA SEE FOR YOURSELF The gods, in effect, have given Euenius the gift of inner vision…because he has lost his outer vision. —Michael Attyah Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece Come to a field of stones baking in the late sun. Drop your knee to the groundup earth and feel the warmth climb your thigh. Run your finger across a palm-sized stone, as if inspecting (...) the liver of the shegoat, the white one who follows you everywhere, always. Follow that old vision of yourself, its light dying in your eye as you look and look for one last rock one last time, its edge weathered into a fine and deadly thing. Hold the stone high—a red sun sinking behind you— and count down to the day’s complete darkness and in that completion between you and what will be arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 64 two poems a darker endlessness, carve out the gift of sight, hearing only shivers of your own body, hooves running off. YOUNG CALCHAS SLEEPS And down he sat again as Calchas rose among them, Thestor’s son, the clearest by far of all the seers. —Homer, The Iliad Calchas, you dream of children dreaming of the sparrow’s head, of the bird’s eye deadened into view, of flutter and firelight, of the nest shredded at your feet and then spring again, berry, and leaf-meal and petalwind and whole glossaries of bone and egg bloodied in the hollow of your hand. But never a sure sign, no second sight clear and bright within the first order of things. No opening widening out of wing or song. Just the nearness of living, a feather suspended by a string, the halfmeaning of seeing the whole world suffer and sway— youth divined and past and forecast into the fray and saying this ruin and sacrifice again, this blueness sailing back in with the breeze. The world circles outside our window and light gives way to more light and you sleep soundly in a bed of down. Rise, Calchas, rise and walk out of the god’s mouth and see image after image fall away. See this life lifting out of one dream and into no other. Michael Trocchia 65... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Poems Ancient and Contemporary HELAINE L. SMITH On the cover of Like: Poems by A. E. Stallings is a double photograph of a double image: two ancient carved heads, in profile and facing each other, of the pole horses of a quadriga, a four-horse chariot, dated about 570 BC, and currently in the collection of The Acropolis Museum. The marble horse in profile on the right side (...) of the cover, looking to the left, has a longer neck and face, and is undamaged except for a hairline crack at the neck. Its counterpart has a broader cheek, with light chipping above the nostril and an ear broken off. But they so mirror each other, they are so “like,” that at first glance one might suppose the photographs to be the right and left sides of the same horse. The bottom half of the cover of Like is an exact replica of the top, but the tinting is different, the heads in the top band cream-colored, in the arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Like: Poems by A. E. Stallings was published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Stallings’s earlier books of poetry include Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), and a verse translation of Lucretius’ The Nature of Things (2007). bottom a delicate ochre or sand. There is, then, on the very cover of Like a promise of complex correspondence and subtle variation within the volume itself. Stallings’s title suggests poetry as the art of locating and articulating likeness or as the act of finding one thing in another. And in Stallings’s delicate, robust, witty, and humane use of the past, “like” also and most significantly means that they—the figures of ancient myth—and we are alike in our shared experience and shared humanity. Stallings sometimes presents classical and mythological references glancingly, and that is part of the delight—catching the joke in Hermes’ epithet, “lord of florists,”1 finding in “The Rosehead Nail” that the local blacksmith in Monteagle, Tennessee, “was a god / Before... the tasks / That had been craft were jobbed out to machine.” Likeness is, of course, the mode of Homeric simile, and in “Selvage” Stallings turns the simile of Odyssey 22.468–73, in which Homer compares the hanged maids to thrushes caught in a net, into a different but contextually relevant parallel: “they hang... From the warp like a dozen ancient loom weights,” a likeness that evolves from Stallings’s double entendre in line seven describing the maids as “spinsters of their own doom,” an allusion both to the task, properly theirs, of weaving and to their disclosure to their lovers of Penelope’s secret unravelling. Stallings can expand as well as adapt Homeric similes. At Iliad 2.87–2.90 Homer likens the Achaians’ assembly at Agamemnon’s command to arm and attack Troy to bees leaving the hive: Like the swarm of clustering bees that issue forever in fresh bursts from the hollow in the stone, and hang like bunched grapes as they hover beneath the flowers in springtime fluttering in swarms together this way and that way so the many nations of men from the ships and the shelters along the front of the deep sea beach marched in order by companies to the assembly2 178 poems ancient and contemporary Homer finds likeness in the orderly setting forth—of bees, of men—to do what is required. This, on the other hand, is what Stallings does: Colony Collapse Disorder (Iliad, 2.87–2.90) Just as a swarm pours from a hollow rock In one long beeline for the wild thyme, Alighting in clusters on this purple and that, But is stricken with a mass amnesia That disorients the compass of the sun, And they forget the steps to traditional dances, And each helicopters into a different dimness Taking their saddlebags of sweetness with them, And the hive goes dark, the queen is left to starve, And the drones humbug the whimper of the world, And the palace falls to ruins, broken into By vandals who would loot the golden stores Left in the brittle wax hexameters, Just so... And “so” her... (shrink)

The assumption that a particular object mentioned in the Iliad or Odyssey must be described by epithets which are consistent with each other and with the narrative has complicated every attempt to relate the evidence of archaeology to the poems. It may fairly be assumed that a modern writer wants to be consistent and that, apart from oversights, he will not use an epithet unless it is directly appropriate to the object which he is creating for his immediate purpose; (...) but this is not necessarily true of a poet who had ready to hand a rich store of phrases in meaning appropriate to the various furnishings of his heroic world, and in form adapted to the needs of his verses. As within the Kunstsprache there is a group of epithets describing the moral and physical characteristics common to all heroes and used to suit not the race or actions of individuals but the scansion of their names and the place in the hexameter, so it is natural to suppose that descriptions of things in common use will include at least some similar stock phrases appropriate to types rather than to units. Once the existence of such phrases is established, there is no difficulty in their combination, as metrical convenience requires, in composite descriptions made up of elements each of which has its own real counterpart, but which need never all have existed together in the same object or even in the same age. The following tabulations of the descriptive words and phrases applied to a few familiar objects show that such metrical clausulae are always present, though they vary in prevalence and behaviour. (shrink)

The religious value which we are entitled to attach to instances of purification in the Homeric poems is extremely small. It is important at the outset of the inquiry to get away from pre-conceived ideas founded on later religious practice, in the light of which the Homeric examples are instinctively interpreted. Chapter and verse from fifth century and later parallels is not necessarily authority for reading a religious significance into the account of an apparently secular act in (...) Homer. (shrink)

From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations…[that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1, a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and deliberate journey, (...) so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement begins here that will run throughout the poem.It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader something different from anything the material itself seems to say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument; not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate.· 1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition chap. 6, for another view of the ways that formula and image combine.James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and culture, from which the present article is drawn. (shrink)

Le mot « héroïne » en grec apparaît assez tardivement dans la littérature comme dans les inscriptions. Il s’agit de réévaluer l’apport des épopées homériques à la question de la définition d’un héros au féminin. Jusqu’ici, la problématique historique s’était orientée autour de la question de l’attestation chez Homère de cultes héroïques, phénomène particulièrement florissants au viiie s. av. J.-C., souvent associé à la diffusion des poèmes épiques. Une autre approche consistait à chercher dans l’Iliade et l’Odyssée des traces de (...) cultes rendus à des héros morts ou des preuves de l’existence chez Homère de la catégorie religieuse des demi-dieux. Le problème est ici renversé : partant des caractéristiques du héros homérique, l’objectif est de vérifier l’existence d’un héroïsme au féminin et de souligner les liens entre héroïnes et héros dans les épopées. (shrink)

The Homeric Hymns are commonly taken to be religious poems in some general sense but they are often said to contrast with cult hymns in that the latter have a definite ritual function, whereas "literary" hymns do not. This paper argues that despite the difficulty in establishing a precise occasion of performance for the Homeric Hymns, we are nevertheless in a position to identify their ritual function: by intoning a Hymn of this kind, the singer achieves the (...) presence of a god before participants in a public festival. The key mechanism by which the hymnist does this is the evocation of a god via the elaboration of a typical unit of traditional hymnic discourse, what I call the "theme of recognition ." The pragmatic operation of narrative such as this is similar to the device known in the study of magical texts as the historiola, or short narrative that serves as a verbal model for a desired outcome in the patient's world. This kind of operation is called, in this paper, "symbolic action," a term borrowed from the rhetorician Kenneth Burke. The theme of recognition is traced in the fabric of the expansive Hymns , and the paper further argues that an important generic marker in the Hymns, the greeting of the god , discloses their pragmatic function, the hymnist's skillful deliverance of the god before his hearers. (shrink)

An infamous Byzantine scholion about Pisistratus and Homer (Anecd. Gr. II 767–768 Bekker) includes the wildly anachronistic comment that Pisistratus tasked seventy-two scholars, including Zenodotus and Aristarchus, with editing the Homeric poems. The scholion is therefore rightly impugned in modern scholarship. It has however been overlooked that a ninth century Arabic version of the scholion exists in a letter by the Syrian scholar Qusṭā ibn Lūqā (d. 912 ad), which omits mention of the seventy-two scholars and Zenodotus and (...) Aristarchus. As the Arabic version is the earliest precisely dated testimonium for the scholion, it allows for a reconsideration of the textual tradition of this legend about the editorial activity of Pisistratus. (shrink)

Taking a critical perspective more political than that usually adopted by classicists, John Alvis demonstrates in this study that the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid each present a distinct political teaching regarding human ends and the form of civil society most conducive to the realization of those ends. Referring to the mysterious "plan of Zeus" announced in the opening lines of the Iliad but never explained, Alvis argues that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter guide their heroes to embody principles of (...) natural justice that in turn found political constitutions. The Political Plan of Zeus represents the first comprehensive theory of the meaning of Zeus's providence in both Homeric poems, a new interpretation of the muse in Homer, and the first attempt to compare the Aeneid with Platonic-Aristotelian teaching on the nature of man and the problem of empire. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and scholars of politics, philosophy, and the classics. (shrink)

Introduction The Odyssey is a poem of paradox. On the one hand, it is the "most teleologi- cal of epics,"' a story of a man's desire, long frustrated but ...

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, (...) ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι. (shrink)

This article focuses on those Iliadic characters who fall in battle to the poem’s major heroes. Homer has various ways to make these characters minor, such as through processes of obscuring or typification or by focusing on a specific body part. By making a character minor, the poet signals that we need not attend to him. After he makes a character minor, the poet can suggest that in the process of being made minor a character paradoxically ends up diverting attention (...) from another character, or he can portray minorness as marked by an inability to divert attention from another. The poet can present in one episode these two different visions of minorness and can make one character depict another as minor by using the tactics deployed by the narrator. This study accentuates the narratological complexities that arise in the poet’s depiction of minor characters. That complexity shapes our understanding of the Iliad’s concern with the distribution of narrative attention among all its characters. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate the existence of a parataxic mentality both in Homeric works and in the Old Testament, establishing a parallel to show that the body, as a living organic unit, which is shown through its parts that express not only the whole but also the individual. Therefore, there is a possible relationship between what Giovanni Reale understood as the “parataxic mentality” of Homeric poems, and what Hans Walter Wolff indicates as the “stereometric-synthetic thinking” of (...) the Old Testament. By attesting this relation and similarity between the mentalities of the Old Testament and the Homeric works, it’s shown not only the importance of a comparative study but also a renewal of both the anthropological grammar of these texts and the history of the anthropological concepts in Ancient Greece and even in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the similarities between Aphrodite's ascent to Olympus and Ishtar's ascent to heaven inIliadBook 5 and the Standard BabylonianGilgameshTablet VI respectively. The widely accepted hypothesis of an Iliadic reception of the Mesopotamian poem is questioned, and the consonance explained as part of a vast stream of tradition encompassing ancient Near Eastern and early Greek narrative poetry. Compositional and conceptual patterns common to the two scenes are first analyzed in a broader early Greek context, and then across further Sumerian, (...) Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hurro-Hittite sources. The shared compositional techniques at work in Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean can be seen as a function of the largely performative nature of narrative poetry. This contributes to explaining literary transmission within the Near East and onto Greece. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the behaviour of and in the Homeric poems. These words are allotted a variety of different ‘meanings’ by the lexicographers. For example, LSJ s.v. I. pray, II. vow, III. profess loudly, boast, vaunt; s.v. I. prayer, II. boast, vaunt, or object of boasting, glory; s.v. I. thing prayed for, object of prayer, II. boast, vaunt. I shall, of course, discuss the whole range of these words; but I begin with some observations on ‘prayer’. It (...) may appear at first sight that ‘prayer’ is a simple word, with only one conceivable ‘meaning’, which must have that ‘meaning’ in any language. We might suggest that ‘request addressed to a god’ is an adequate representation of that ‘meaning’, and that when we have rendered by ‘pray’ in what appear to us to be appropriate contexts we have conveyed the full sense of the original. (shrink)

The interesting thing about the word for ‘palace’ in Homer is that there is no such word. All the words that mean ‘house’ may be applied to a royal palace, but all of them may equally well be used of the house of an ordinary citizen, μέγαρον is often translated ‘palace’, or some other word with connotations of kingly majesty. But it too, when it is not more narrowly localised to the living-room, means just a house in general.Just as there (...) is no separate word to designate a palace in Homer, so a qualifying adjective is never used to indicate that a particular house is ‘royal’. In fact, to Homer there is no sharp distinction between a palace and a house, except that a king is likely to have a bigger and better home, more sumptuously furnished.The Iliad and the Odyssey are much concerned with kings. So it is odd that no word serves to designate the king's palace and no other dwelling, especially when the poet so delights in describing the splendour of royal homes. The major archaeological sites of the Mycenaean period, in which the main stories of the poems are set, all contain a palace which is easily recognised, even in its ruinous state. Can one imagine a new arrival at a great Mycenaean site needing to be shown which was the palace, as Odysseus was shown at Phaeacia? It seems highly unlikely that the Mycenaeans should have had no special word for a palace, though there is so far no firm evidence for the existence of such a word in Linear B. If a ‘palace’ word existed, its special significance, if not the word itself, must have been forgotten by Homer's time, when a great many houses might be found within the city wall, as at Smyrna. There may, however, be traces of the ‘palace’ meaning still detectable.In Table 1, which has been compiled from the concordances of Prendergast and Dunbar, I have tabulated the frequency with which each of the regular words for ‘house’ is used to denote a dwelling occupied by gods, lesser divinities, mortals or animals. Various interesting points arise from this table.It is apparent that there is a far higher proportion of gods' houses mentioned in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. The figures for δόμος and δῶμα show this particularly clearly. But the difference is probably due entirely to the subject-matter: far more of the action is taken up with scenes among the gods in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. (shrink)

This paper is primarily an attempt to study the Homeric evidence on houses, particularly on the , in relation to the relevant remains. The reverse procedure, illuminating the archaeological evidence by references to Homer, is a hazardous one, as we shall see. It is often unclear just what is represented by the descriptions in the poems, and what period, if any, the things described belong to. I shall be concerned with these questions here. Are the houses in the (...) poems Mycenaean: genuine traditions from the period in which the stories are set? Or are they Geometric: contemporary? Or a memory of some time in between? Or a mixture? We know so little about the development of the epic tradition that any possible source of information is worth pursuing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Achilles and Hector: The Homeric HeroBryan R. WarnickAchilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero, by Seth Benardete. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2005, 140 pp., $17.00 cloth, $10.00 paper.Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was one of the twentieth century's premiere scholars of the classical world. His prominence was largely due to his technical excellence in both ancient philosophy and classical philology, a rare combination that allowed him to (...) become, as Harvey Mansfield has written, "Our greatest student of the relation between poetry and philosophy."1 He wrote groundbreaking discussions of Greek literature (especially the tragedies) and the Platonic dialogues. His work culminated in his study of The Odyssey, The Bow and the Lyre (1997), a book that compared the plot of epic poetry to the development of a Platonic dialogue.Before Benardete achieved lasting fame, however, he was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, working with Leo Strauss and the Committee on Social Thought and developing friendships with people like Allan Bloom. The writing of his dissertation is the stuff of scholarly legend. According to the story, it developed from a pile of nonsensical notes on the Iliad to a work of budding genius in four weeks. This dissertation, "Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero," was published in St. John's Review in 1985, and it has now been reprinted so that we can examine for ourselves the significance of Benardete's early work.As the title suggests, Benardete's dissertation looks at the theme of heroism in Homer, focusing on the Iliad. He examines the relationships between the poem's smallest parts and its largest themes. The book is divided into two sections. In the first section, Benardete grapples with how the small components of the Iliad, the epithets and similes, work together meaningfully to inform the larger heroic themes of the epic. The second section examines Homer's view of the tragic hero through an analysis of the plot. The analytic skill exhibited in both sections is fascinating: some parts of the study are brilliant, others strained, but none are boring.Benardete's purpose in the first section, he says, is to "vindicate the epithets" (135). This vindication is necessary because, as scholarship on the oral nature of the Homeric epics has developed, the significance of the smaller components has seemed to diminish. The epithets and similes have come to be seen as mere crutches for the oral poet; they are linguistic tools whose characteristics allow them to be plugged into Homer's unrelenting dactylic hexameter whenever a particular rhythmic pattern is needed. The poet uses the epithet of "swift-footed" Achilles, then, not so much because he particularly wants to say something meaningful about Achilles' swiftness, but because the particular rhythmic pattern of the epithet is a handy way to complete a line of poetry. The meaning of things like the epithets in any particular moment, it has seemed to many, should therefore be taken with a grain [End Page 115] of salt. In contrast, Benardete wants to argue that each particular use of an epithet has a significant meaning that informs, and even constructs, the epic's larger themes (for Benardete's purposes, the theme of heroism).Benardete's success in this goal is somewhat uneven, as even he later came to realize. A few of his conclusions appear rather stretched and neglect to consider the whole in the analysis of the parts. For example, Benardete looks at the Trojan epithets megathymoi ("great spirited") and hippodamoi ("tamers of horses") and finds them to be two manifestations of a constant Trojan character. One epithet is for the activities of war (megathymoi), the other one for peace (hippodamoi). But for Benardete, they both say the same thing about the constantly emotional, almost animalistic nature of Homer's Trojans, who are perfectly defined by passionate warfare: "The Trojans are more readily affected than the Achaeans, who can remove their armor and be different in peace than in war: but the Trojans cannot so easily shake off their temper" (21). While certainly interesting, such an analysis neglects to take into account prominent scenes like the one in which Astyanax, Hector... (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the relation between mortal and immortal time in the Iliad as it is represented by the physical act of falling. I begin by arguing that falling serves as a point of reference throughout the poem for a concept of time that is specifically human. It is well known that mortals fall at the moment of death in the poem, but it has not been recognized that the movement of the fall is also connected with (...) the time of birth, aging, and generation. In light of the significance of falling for mortals, I then go on to examine the problematic case of two particular immortals who fall in the Iliad. When Hephaestus tumbles down to earth from Olympus, and when Ares is knocked flat on the battlefield, both gods, I argue, also “fall into” human time. This complicates their status as ageless and eternal beings, and draws into question the different temporal registers at work in the narrative . The single action of falling brings together several key concepts in the poem which hinge on the issue of the separation between the mortal and immortal spheres in the Iliad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the translator’s (...) own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)