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)

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 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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Homeric Allusions at the Close of Thucydides' Sicilian NarrativeJune W. Allison.(Marcellinus Vita Thucydidis 37)When Thucydides composed his history, the inclusion of elements from epic was natural. Both the subjects and compositional techniques of epic were at home in this evolving genre.1 Herodotus' mighty prose epic, with its own debts to Homer, was the culmination of the process, successfully combining the mythic and epic with historical narrative.2 Thucydides' method, (...) however, was going to be different: the mythic was to be done away with and the epic made to serve the account of the most destructive war in historical memory.Thucydides in some places mentions Homer directly and in others makes artful allusions to Homeric epic.3 In his Archaeology he repeatedly [End Page 499] holds up the Trojan War as the first great naval expedition and records its failings. In his programmatic passages, moreover, Thucydides draws comparisons between Homer's methods and his own.4 Marcellinus, his biographer, reflects a tradition that attributed even individual features of Thucydides' style and language to Homer. Epic conventions abound: there are angry speeches between antagonists; there are catalogues of warriors, in particular, the fine example before the final battle at Syracuse (7.57–59); and there are splendid battle scenes, where individuals, such as Brasidas, are singled out.5 When Thucydides turns to compose the events of the Sicilian Expedition, he allows the reader to dwell on parallels between it and its ancestral expedition to Troy.6 The parallels with the Homeric poems on a thematic level are large and obvious: a monumental Greek naval expeditionary force travels far in order to besiege a city. The insistence in book 6 on heavy preparations for Sicily recalls Thucydides' criticism in book 1.9 of Agamemnon's effort. Unlike their poetic ancestors, who prolonged the siege because they had to spend valuable time gathering supplies by means of raids on nearby cities, the Athenians would take their necessities with them. Like the Iliad, the History has war as its pervading theme, but also like the Iliad, it is not simply about war; rather it is about the human motivations and reactions which that most dehumanizing phenomenon elicits. In depicting what is poignant Thucydides competes with Homer. He [End Page 500] does not fail to draw on the values of the Iliad to highlight his own narrative and to imbue his account with the powerful sensitivity to suffering found in both Homeric poems.My focus in these pages is Thucydides' use of Homeric words in his description of the final battle in the great harbor and the retreat of the Athenians from Sicily. In 1900 Smith collected some of these terms but made no claims for completeness: "A few terms and idioms borrowed from poetry and traceable directly or indirectly to Homer may give some idea of what might be found if one knew classical Greek usage thoroughly well and were perfectly familiar with Homer" (70).7 So it is not easy to pinpoint specific verbal allusions to Homer in the History. The historian may have used other works in the epic cycle or tragedies now lost that made use of epic.8 Moreover, the atmosphere of high poetry we encounter may result from the effect of a few words or even one word or a setting which will recall Homer without, however, alluding to a specific passage in the poems.9 The poetic influence upon prose was long and profound. Indeed, prose of the fifth century had not yet totally divorced itself from poetry. What I suggest here is that Thucydides created an atmosphere in the final chapters on the Sicilian disaster which derives its Homeric aura from a number of attributes, among these, words of epic coloring.In two places Thucydides seems to make conspicuous use of Homer: in the Funeral Oration, and at the end of book 7. The Funeral Oration deserves analysis, but because it is a formal, epideictic, state address over fallen warriors and is traditional (as Pericles says repeatedly), [End Page 501] it attracts epic forms, as it were, by nature. I shall concentrate on book 7, where Thucydides has employed Homeric echoes to enhance in... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 posits three categories of Homeric figures-similes, comparisons, and likenesses-in exploring the various implications of and goals behind saying "A (is) like B" in the Homeric poems. Attention to modern research in the field of psycholinguistics on the differences between simile and metaphor, as well as to Aristotle's discussions of metaphor, brings into focus the spectrum of degree of likeness between tenor and vehicle in the epics. The Odyssey poet in particular exploits the existence and nature (...) of this comparative spectrum for thematic and rhetorical effects. The spectrum emerges most clearly when one focuses on the words that introduce Homeric figures. (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)

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)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 524-526 [Access article in PDF] Frank Nisetich, trans. The Poems of Callimachus. With introduction, notes, and glossary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. lvi + 350 pp. Paper, $27.95. The front cover of this volume features the second century A.D. Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragment of the prologue to the Aetia, arguably the most influential programmatic piece in all Greek and Latin poetry. The back (...) cover announces an important new verse translation of the extant works of Callimachus, with a full introduction, notes that take up individual points of difficulty, a general index, an annotated index of all proper names and adjectives, comparative tables that reference translated fragments to the standard editions, and, as distinguishing this translation from others, a presentation of the translated fragments "as integral parts of the poetry books in which they originally figured, as these can be reconstructed in the light of modern research." The pages in between deliver everything that the front cover suggests and the back cover promises (with one qualification). On the whole, this is probably the most useful single volume available on Callimachus, certainly for the nonspecialist at whom it is aimed. [End Page 524]Nisetich's introduction leads the reader through the historical background, distinguishes what is known about Callimachus' life and literary career from what has been imputed, and, in the last two sections, surveys what has been recovered of his work and how it has been recovered. These last sections provide an excellent brief conspectus of Callimachean literary and textual criticism. The only thing lacking (this is the qualification mentioned above) in this otherwise admirably complete and up-to-date introduction is any significant communication of the nature and extent of Callimachus' influence, especially on Latin poetry. Surely it is tantalizing and a little unfair for the uninitiated to be told that Callimachus was "second to none but Homer in influence" (xv) but not to be told why or on whom or how. This omission is not corrected elsewhere in the book except, indirectly, for the necessary consideration of Catullus' translation of the Coma Berenices as possibly supplying omissions in the fragmentary Greek text.This brings us to what I see as the book's chief virtue, which lies in the presentation of the fragments, the disiecta membra poetae, as the constituents of lost organic wholes—not only of complete poems but also of poetry books artfully and deliberately arranged. Here, as throughout the entire book, Nisetich has taken good advantage of recent scholarship. His presentation of Callimachus' Hecale, which leads off the translations, has benefited from Hollis's study (Callimachus: Hecale [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990]). The remaining fragments presented here—the fragments of the Aetia and of the Iambi—are also well arranged and contextualized. The "Victory Song for Sosibios" rounds out the fragmentary poems. It is left freestanding, although its connections with the Aetia and the Coma Berenices in particular are explained. Nisetich translates only those fragments for which an adequate context can be reconstructed, a sound decision even if it does leave approximately six hundred of the eight hundred or so fragments in Pfeiffer's edition untranslated.Poems of Callimachus that we have in their entirety include sixty-three epigrams and six narrative hymns. The epigrams are helpfully arranged here by type (erotic, dedicatory, display, epitaph) rather than following any standard edition (although they are helpfully indexed to Pfeiffer as well as to the Planudean Anthology. The six narrative hymns are presented in their traditional order. An enlightening discussion in the introduction traces the thematic contours of this arrangement and suggests, convincingly, that it is deliberate on the part of Callimachus. We may have in Callimachus' Hymns the first extant poetry book.Stylistically the translation is clean and fluent but rather undistinguished as poetry. As a poet-translator, Nisetich was more successful with Pindar's pyrotechnics (Pindar's Victory Songs [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]) than he is here with Callimachus' leptotes, which tends to come off as flat rather than subtle. His stated aim is more to serve the reader interested in what Callimachus... (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)

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)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 429-432 [Access article in PDF] John Miles Foley. Homer's Traditional Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. xviii + 363 pp. Bibl., indexes. Cloth, $48.50. With Homer's Traditional Art, which may well prove his most popular book, Foley attempts a synthesis of his theory of traditional oral aesthetics, which has been under construction for a decade, since Traditional Oral Epic (Berkeley 1990) (...) and Immanent Art (Bloomington 1991). Because substantial passages in the book have lived past lives, and the fresh material adapts arguments made elsewhere, we are looking here for a statement that gives coherence and new force to a program of study; one that cultivates, rather than breaks, new theoretical ground. That this is Foley's aim is confirmed by a description of his audience: "a wide spectrum of readers, from the advanced undergraduate to the professional scholar" (xv), representing "the greatest number and variety of readers" possible (317 n. 1). Foley offers three main justifications for this new synthesis. First is the doctrine of the Homeric sêma (a key sign open to interpretation), which Foley ingeniously cites as evidence for a Greek concept similar to that of the South Slavic rec=, or "word." This he takes from Parry's interviews with Yugoslav epic singers in which they proclaim the term's application to various levels of traditional discourse, from the formula to the proverb to larger narrative patterns. The second--if I read the book's stylistic motives correctly--is a new "Homeric" technique in scholarly prose. Homer's Traditonal Art is a rhetorical juggernaut that creates inevitable momentum by frequently signaling the progress of Foley's argument, often rewording parts of the theory, and, as if to demonstrate in prose the referential power of Homer's "traditional register" of speech, offering some sêmata of his own (5-7): six "proverbs" of his own coining that encapsulate the main findings of his previous studies (e.g., "Oral tradition works like language, only more so"). These recur steadily throughout, often in closing paragraphs or summing up evidence, and are lightly varied according to context, but always point back to larger critical vistas. Third is the début of the apparatus fabulosus, or running cues to the "traditional referentiality" of a passage; here some lines from Odyssey 23 (reproduced 254-55; cf. the similar printing of the Old English poem Deor, 275). This is an attempt to approximate an "original" experience of a traditional text in performance, though Foley has no illusions about its perfection. Again, the effort requires that he supply conventions of his own (introduced in chapter 7), which he promises to refine for future "editions" on traditional principles.The book is laid out in four large sections, subdivided into an introduction, eight main chapters, an afterword on Old English poetics, two appendices, a large [End Page 429] apparatus of notes, and a rich bibliography (with few serious omissions, such as Manetti's Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity [Bloomington 1993]), a good general index (including scholars cited), and index locorum. If this does not sound like a work for a general readership, that is because Foley has expressly sought to divide his voice in two: the main discussion was to be plainly worded and clearly laid out; the scholarly audience to be addressed in the notes. On the whole, this technique works well, only occasionally failing one side or the other. The editors made the strange and regrettable decision of omitting non-Greek works from the index locorum, so that you have to check all entries in the general index for discussions of key passages in Beowulf, Deor, the many recorded South Slavic epics discussed, and so on. Greek traditional phrases are indexed in translation, so that for a discussion of (e.g.) chlôron deos, you need to know how Foley happens to translate it. The Pennsylvania State University Press has atoned for such lapses by producing a handsome volume, printed on good paper and bound in signatures with linen thread, a delight to hold. (Teachers will want... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliadby Lorenzo F. GarciaJonas GrethleinL orenzoF. G arcia. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies 57. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013. Distributed by Harvard University Press. viii + 321 pp. Paper, $22.50.The philosophy of Heidegger continues to cast a spell on some Classicists. It is less Heidegger’s own interpretations of Greek authors that serve as stimulus (...) than the main work of his early career, Sein und Zeit(Halle 1927), that seems to invite applications to ancient texts. Reading such studies as Shanske’s Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History(Cambridge 2007), I keep wondering to what extent the attractiveness of Heidegger to some Classicists ultimately derives from the impact that ancient texts may have had on the formation of his philosophy. Attending a humanistisches Gymnasium, Heidegger received a thorough training in Greek and must have read a fair amount of ancient texts in the original. Besides tying in with the existentialism of his day, the gloomy nature of Heidegger’s philosophy is highly reminiscent of what is traditionally referred to as Greek pessimism. It is easy, for instance, to sense in the concept of “ Sein zum Tode” an echo of the sentiment of the Herodotean Solon that “we must look to the conclusion of every matter and see how it will end” (Hdt. 1.32.9). The common tenor notwithstanding, applying Heidegger’s philosophy of Being to the interpretation of ancient literature is a daunting task.In Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad, Garcia draws on Heidegger to show that “the subject of the Iliad... is time itself and the durability of its objects to withstand time’s withering flow” (5). Garcia claims that the tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy of time plays out in the Iliadat various levels. For Heidegger, Daseinis defined by death, which is always impending and thereby constitutes its totality. Daseinis essentially Sein zum Tode(“being-toward-death”). This, Garcia argues, is reflected in the temporal economy of the Iliadwhich hinges on the notion of “not yet” already encapsulating a “no longer.” Various physical objects, humans, and, to some extent, also gods are presented as enduring, but fated to fade. Garcia’s central argument is that they thereby reflect the temporal dynamics of epic poetry itself. To him, kleos aphthitondoes not imply the idea of eternity, but a duration that entails its own ending. Before discussing the soundness of this argument in conjunction with its deployment of Heidegger, let me give a brief synopsis of the individual chapters.In chapter 1, Garcia elaborates on “the rhetoric of time and memory”; while “time has disintegrating effects..., memory in a pure or ideal form, on the other hand, preserves its object against time” (45). This dialectic comes to the fore in Iliad2 where the rotting of the ships and the flagging morale of the [End Page 481]Greeks indicate the “loss of cohesion through waiting” (55). At the same time, Garcia claims, Odysseus’ intervention illustrates the power of memory. Odysseus reminds the Achaeans of Calchas’ prophecy which he remembers as if “it was either yesterday or the day before” and “thereby seeks to undo the disintegration of the Achaeans’ emotional resolve” (63). The tension between the decaying force of time and the attempt at recuperation through memory yields the framework for the investigation of various entities and their temporal dynamics in the main part of the book.The second chapter is devoted to the fate of the bodies of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector. In the eyes of Garcia, “the preservation of these exquisite corpses serves as an analogue within the poem for the very project of the epic commemoration of Achilles—as if the epic were a ‘freezing’ of temporal flow against the ravages of time” (66). However, neither the application of ambrosia and nectar nor funeral rites achieve permanent preservation: bodies can be removed from time only temporarily. They are subject to “the logic of the ‘still perfectly’ and ‘not yet’” (94) and thereby mirror the fame of Achilles which, despite its longevity, carries its termination in itself.In chapter... (shrink)

Homer’s Iliad recounts the struggles of the Greek (also: Achaean) army, led by Agamemnon, during the tenth year of their siege of Troy.1 The poem begins with a plague inflicted on the Greek camp by...

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

The broad outlines of Joyce's narrative are of course strongly Homeric: the three parts, with Telemachus' adventures at first separate from those of Ulysses, their eventual meeting, their homeward journey and return. Equally Homeric is the account of a heroic traveler picking his way among archetypal perils. That the Odyssey was an allegory of the wanderings of the soul had occurred to Joyce as to many before him, and he had long since designated the second part of a (...) book of his poems as "the journey of the soul" . He had also construed Stephen's progress in A Portrait as a voyage from Scyllan promiscuity in chapter 4. Although in Ulysses he diverged sharply from Homer in the order of events, Joyce clearly adapted the Homeric settings and what he chose to consider the prevailing themes. He found the Odyssey beautifully all-embracing in its vision of human concerns. His own task must be to work out the implications of each incident like a Homer who had long ago outlived his time and had learned from all subsequent ages. Joyce once asked his friend Jacques Mercanton if God had not created the world in much the same ways as writers compose their works; but he then bethought himself and murmured, "Perhaps, in fact, he does give less thought to it than we do." Neither God nor Homer could compete with Joyce in self-consciousness. Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, received the 1960 National Book Award for his definitive James Joyce: A Biography. He has written extensively on Joyce and other modern writers, edited work by and about them, and examined the theoretical implications of biography in Golden Codgers. "Joyce and Homer" is a selection from his book, The Consciousness of Joyce, published by the Oxford University Press. (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)

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)

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 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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prolegomenon to the Homeric CentosM. D. UsherHomeric centos are poems made up entirely of verses lifted verbatim, or with only slight modification, from the Iliad and Odyssey. Only a few have survived antiquity. There exist three short Homeric centos in the Palatine Anthology (9.361, 381, 382; cf. Hunger 1978, 98–101), a ten–line cento about Herakles quoted by Irenaeus (Wilken 1967), and a seven– line cento grafitto (...) inscribed on the leg of a statue of Memnon in Egypt, which dates from the reign of Hadrian (Bernand 1960, 111–13; Bowie 1990, 65). There are also several cento–like incantations from the Greek Magical Papyri that use lines from Homer (Maltomini 1995). The only Homeric centos we possess in any quantity are the topic of this study. These originated with a Christian bishop named Patricius in the fourth century C.E., and were later expanded by Eudocia Athenaïs, wife of the emperor Theodosius II, in the early fifth.Eudocia's Homeric centos have long been neglected for lack of a complete and authoritative text. The responsibility for this situation rests with the otherwise eminent Homerist, Arthur Ludwich, whose Teubner edition of 1897, the only edition of the centos currently available, is based on a single, partially edited manuscript (Par. graec. suppl. 388: "Codex Mutinensis").1 Pessimism about establishing a reliable text and aesthetic disenchantment with the poem itself have hampered further study: according to Joseph Golega, for example, the Homeric centos are "weder des Druckes noch des Lesens wert" (Golega 1960, 1).Such an assessment lacks understanding and imagination. In his short study of 1979, Kurt Smolak called for a new edition of the centos in no uncertain terms, emphasizing the poem's great heuristic potential (49):Die Zentonen als spezielle Form der spätantiken Homerrezeption erwiesen sich als der Interpretation ihrer oft nicht anerkannten dichterischen Möglichkeiten durchaus zugänglich—dann sind sie doch wohl auch eine [End Page 305] Edition wert! Denn die frühbyzantinische Bibeldichtung kann dem Theologen, Komparatisten und sich auch dem Philologen ein wenig bebautes Arbeitsfeld eröffnen—sofern dieser sich nicht als Zensor im Namen einer klassizistischen Ästhetik versteht.The present study is offered as a prolegomenon to a new, complete edition of Eudocia's poem—a first installment on the larger interpretive program suggested by Smolak.2 It concerns my collation and transcription of a manuscript of the Homeric centos in the collection of the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, Greece, which I inspected meis oculis in the summer of 1995.3 This hitherto unaccounted–for cento manuscript, datable on palaeographical grounds to the mid–fourteenth century, is one of a type used by Aldus Manutius for the editio princeps of the centos, published in Venice in 1502 (Renouard 1825, 57–62). Ludwich all but ignored Aldus' edition and the important revision of it published by Henricus Stephanus in 1578. His oversight was unfortunate, for the Iviron–Aldus–Stephanus recension of the centos (hereafter simply "Iviron," or "Iviron recension") is completely different from his, and as we shall see, better than his as well.Our investigation begins with the Aldine edition, the preface to which indicates that the text was transcribed and corrected for Aldus by Petrus Candidus, the son or perhaps nephew of Petrus Candidus Decembrius (1399–1477), papal secretary to Nicolas V. This younger Candidus belonged to the Benedictine order of the Camaldunensians, who were housed in the Venetian monastery of St. Michael Murianus. Following the preface of Candidus is a six–line elegiac poem on the centos composed by Scipio Fortiguerra, a member of the Aldine Academy who frequently collaborated with Aldus in preparing printed editions. We can safely infer, therefore, that both Candidus and Fortiguerra had a hand in the production of the editio princeps, and it is likely that the ms or mss they used were Venetian, or at least Italian (cf. Harris 1898, 25–26). That manuscript has yet to resurface, and may no longer exist, though it is possible that Iviron 4464 was once in Venice. The monastery obtained it, according to its librarian Father Theologos, from the personal library of [End Page 306] Maximos Margounios (1549–1602), bishop of Kythera, who... (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)

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)