Abstract

This article examines the range of meaning of Homeric first-person futures and proposes a genealogy for the "performative" future in later authors. After presenting modern evaluations of the modality of the future and its overlap with the subjunctive, I offer a Homeric typology and focus on hard-to-categorize instances. Several future uses depend on modal values to convey performative senses: some prefatory futures structure speeches and communicate the speaker's intention while sociolinguistic factors (hierarchy or context) condition the use of others. In closing, I present a series of verbs (betting, yielding, giving, praying) that convey an autoprescriptive performative force.