Once a productive subfield of Homeric studies, the examination of formulae to prove or disprove Milman Parry's theses has largely fallen out of vogue. Into this silence bursts Rainer Friedrich's polemical reevaluation of formulaic economy. Friedrich sets out to compel his reader to examine whether Homeric language squares exactly with Parry's theories as they were originally articulated. His argument is that the number and quality of the violations of economy render the complete orality of our Homeric epics impossible and point (...) instead to a "third way" between Parryist orality and a literary Homer. (shrink)

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. (shrink)