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1
Ferdous, Mafruha. "Reading Homer’s The Iliad in 21st Century." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 101. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.2p.101.
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Homer's Iliad refers to an epic story written by the ancient Greek poet Homer, which makes an account of the most significant events that earmarked the very last days which defined the Trojan War and the Greek siege of the city of Troy. Troy was also known as Ilium, Ilion, or Ilois in the past. Having made to center around the events of the Trojan War, Homer’s Iliad is a work of art that paints to all of us interested in literature, what really happened in the past. The paper purposes to provide invaluable insights regarding the significance of Homer’s Iliad today and what it teaches us about poetry and the ancient culture of the Greeks.
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Riddiford, Alexander. "Homer's Iliad and the Meghanādbadha Kābya of Michael Madhusūdan Datta." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009): 335–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0041977x09000548.
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AbstractThe debt owed to Homer's Iliad by the Meghanādbadha Kābya (1861), Michael Madhusūdan Datta's Bengali epic and masterpiece, has long been recognized but has never been examined with any close or academically sensitive reference to the Greek poem. This study sets out to examine the use of the Homeric epic as a model for the Bengali poem, with particular regard to character correspondences, the figure of the simile and narrative structure. In addition to this close analysis, Datta's response to the Iliad will be set in the context of contemporary (and earlier) British receptions of the Homeric poem: the Bengali poet's reading of the Greek epic, far from being idiosyncratic (“colonial”), in fact bears the marks of a close engagement with contemporary British appreciation of the poem.
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Fisher, R. K. "The Concept of Miracle in Homer." Antichthon 29 (1995): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0066477400000903.
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My aim is to establish whether there is a concept of ‘miracle’ or ‘the miraculous’ implicit in the Homeric poems (and therefore perceived and understood by Homer's audience). Such a question is fraught with difficulties, as it necessarily involves broader (and still widely debated) issues such as Homeric man's view of the gods and the essential nature of the early Greek oral epic tradition. But, if an answer can be found, it should in the process help us to gain more insight into those wider issues—the theological basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the world-view of Homer's audience.
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Ishtiaq, Muhammad. "HOMER’S CONCEPTION OF HONOUR AND GLORY IN THE ILIAD." International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH 7, no. 8 (2019): 104–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.29121/granthaalayah.v7.i8.2019.643.
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The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem which portrays the duration of Trojan War along with battle and events between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. In this paper, the honour and glory of ancient Greek civilization has been discussed in context of The Iliad. The definitions of honour and glory has been discussed along with what motivated the ancient warriors to fight for honour and glory. This study has been carried out to find out the importance standards of honour and glory along with the importance of honour and glory in lives of Greek warriors. One of the central ideas of the Iliad is the honour that soldiers earn in combat. For an ancient Greek man, the ability to perform in battle is the single greatest source of worthiness. The glory earned by soldiers on the battlefield enabled them to live on in legend, becoming heroes who would be remembered long after death. This essence of honour and glory has been discussed in this paper. This paper has also emphasized on the heroic honour of the Greek warriors as performance of war was the simplest measurement tool to measure the heroic honour of the warriors.
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Nguyen, Viet Hung. "ARTISTS CHANTING - NARRATING EPIC POEMS PROFESSIONAL OR UNPROFESSIONAL?" UED Journal of Social Sciences, Humanities and Education 10, Special (2020): 62–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.47393/jshe.v10ispecial.881.
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Homer’s creative works Iliad, Odyssey have undergone a history of thousands of years, but the Homeric issues have never ceased to be new to generations of researchers. There still remain unanswered questions: Was Homer a professional writer or a folk artist? Did his epical compositions belong to the written or oral literary genre? Were Homer's poems the works of a single poet or of many contributors? We refer to Homer as an artist, a collector and compiler of Greek epics in relation to the type of epic artists in Vietnam. A study of the artists chanting-narrating epic poems from various perspectives: society - profession (professional or amateur?), mode of artistic creation (folk or scholarly?), the relationship between performance and context (ritualistic or non-ritualistic?) ... will clarify the characteristics of the artists chanting - narrating epic poems and the nature of the artistic creation process, and probably put forward suggestions for the preservation of the epic repertoire of ethnic groups.
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Heidari, Ali, and Nozar Niazi. "Parallelizing Rostam and Sohrab with Achilles and Hector in Matthew Arnold’s Poem “Sohrab and Rustum”." Review of European Studies 10, no. 1 (2017): 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/res.v10n1p7.
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In translating “Rostam and Sohrab”, one of the most delightful stories in Shahnameh, Matthew Arnold did not stay true to Ferdowsi’s version. Instead, he opted to veer more into Homer’s The Iliad. The Homeric atmosphere hovering over the poem is exactly one of the factors that made Arnold’s poem universally famous. One of the scenes that Arnold intentionally, and most cleverly, copied in his rendition of Rostam and Sohrab was the battle between the Greek hero Achilles and the Trojan hero Hector, which he depicted under the heavy influence of Homer’s The Iliad. The present article is an attempt to demonstrate this parallelization which can be found in the overall framework of Arnold’s poem, especially in the battles between Rustum and Sohrab with that of Achilles and Hector.
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RUIJGH, CORNELIS J. "The source and the structure of Homer's epic poetry." European Review 12, no. 4 (2004): 527–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798704000456.
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Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were created, probably in the second half of the 9th century BC, in the framework of the Greek epic tradition of oral formulaic poetry, which started in the Peloponnese in proto-Mycenaean times (c. 1600 BC). The epic verse, the dactylic hexameter, must have been taken over from the Minoan Cretans. Whereas most 19th century scholars were analysts, considering Homer's epics' conflations of older and more recent epic poems, most modern scholars are unitarians, recognizing the unity of both epics, thanks to modern insights in the nature of oral traditional poetry and to modern narratology. Although many modern scholars ascribe the Odyssey to a later poet than that of the Iliad, there are no convincing arguments against the Ancients' opinion that both epics are the work of one single poet called Homer. Both Iliad and Odyssey are characterized by the principle of ‘unity of action’, a principle not found in other ancient epic poetry. There are reasons to suppose that Homer learnt the art of epic versification in Smyrna, his native city, by listening to performances of Aeolic singers. Driven by Ionic self-consciousness he transposed the epic Aeolic Kunstsprache into Ionic, thus creating the so-called Homeric dialect. He could perform his monumental epics at great religious festivals and at the courts of princes. There is evidence that he gave performances in the island of Euboea, the only prosperous region of the contemporary Greek world, and that there his epics were eventually written down. Thus, Homer's epics are the end-point of the oral epic tradition and the starting point of written Greek and European literature.
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Shevtsov, Sergey. "The Iliad Paradox: A Look at Homer's Philosophical Foundations." ΣΧΟΛΗ. Ancient Philosophy and the Classical Tradition 14, no. 1 (2020): 104–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.25205/1995-4328-2020-14-1-104-141.
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The objective of the article is to demonstrate the paradox of the spread of the Homeric epics: having been created by the descendants of the Achaeans in exile three or four centuries after the Trojan war, they became widespread among all of the Greek-speaking world, i.e. mostly among those who destroyed the Achaean civilization forcing the heroes' descendants into exile. The author poses a question: why do the Greek tribes, who have driven the Achaeans out and took their territory, accept a story of the Achaeans' great past as their own? To answer this, the article suggests a hypothesis that on a profound level the Iliad contains a philosophical idea of the world unity. This idea is not terminologically defined in the epics, however, it is presented as a philosophy-of-law concept of responsibility for one's own decision (free will). This answer is based on analysis of the long similes in Iliad and the instances of interrelation of gods and men and the decisions made by the former and the latter out of their free will.
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Lardinois, André. "Eastern Myths for Western Lies." Mnemosyne 71, no. 6 (2018): 895–919. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1568525x-12342384.
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AbstractThat the great cultures of the Near East influenced Mycenaean and Archaic Greek culture has been amply demonstrated by the archaeological record. But did this influence extend to Greek literature? And was it recognized by the ancient Greeks themselves? In this paper I answer these two questions in the affirmative after examining two passages from Homer’s Iliad: Hera’s identification of Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of the gods (14.201) and Poseidon’s account of the division of the world through lot (15.189-193).The analysis of these passages is preceded by a methodological section on how literary parallels between these cultures can be evaluated.
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Horn, Fabian. "THE CASUALTIES OF THE LATIN ILIAD." Classical Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2020): 767–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838820000877.
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The so-called Latin Iliad, the main source for the knowledge of the Greek epic poem in the Latin West during the Middle Ages, is a hexametric poetic summary (epitome) of Homer's Iliad likely dating from the Age of Nero, which reduces the 15,693 lines of the original to a mere 1,070 lines (6.8%).
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Borgohain, Indrani A. "Breaking the Silence of Homer’s Women in Pat Barker’s the Silence of The Girls." International Journal of English Language Studies 3, no. 2 (2021): 10–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijels.2021.3.2.2.
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Since time immemorial, women have been silenced by patriarchal societies in most, if not all, cultures. Women voices are ignored, belittled, mocked, interrupted or shouted down. The aim of this study examines how the contemporary writer Pat Barker breaks the silence of Homer’s women in her novel The Silence of The Girl (2018). A semantic interplay will be conducted with the themes in an attempt to show how Pat Barker’s novel fit into the Greek context of the Trojan War. The Trojan War begins with the conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece. Homer’s The Iliad, a popular story in the mythological of ancient Greece, gives us the story from the perspective of the Greeks, whereas Pat Barker’s new novel gives us the story from the perspective of the queen- turned slave Briseis. Pat Barker’s, The Silence of the Girls, written in 2018, readdresses The Iliad to uncover the unvoiced tale of Achilles’ captive, who is none other than Briseis. In the Greek saga, Briseis is the wife of King Mynes of Lyrnessus, an ally of Troy. Pat Barker as a Postmodernist writer, readdresses the Trojan War in his novel through the representation of World War One, with dominant ideologies. The novel illustrates not only how Briseis’s has tolerated and survived her traumatic experiences, but also, how she has healed and composed her fragmented life together. Homer’s poem prognosticates the fall of Troy, whereas Barker’s novel begins with the fall Lyrnessus, Briseis’ home that was destroyed by Achilles and his men. Hence, Pat Barker uses intertextuality in her novel, engages both the tradition of the great epic and the brutality of the contemporary world. She revives the Trojan War with graphic pictorial vividness by fictionalizing World War in her novel. Through her novel, she gives Briseis a voice, illuminates the passiveness of women and exposes the negative traits of a patriarchal society.
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Miola, Robert S. "Lesse Greeke? Homer in Jonson and Shakespeare." Ben Jonson Journal 23, no. 1 (2016): 101–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2016.0154.
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Throughout their careers both Jonson and Shakespeare often encountered Homer, who left a deep impress on their works. Jonson read Homer directly in Greek but Shakespeare did not, or if he did, he left no evidence of that reading in extant works. Both Jonson and Shakespeare encountered Homer indirectly in Latin recollections by Vergil, Horace, Ovid and others, in English translations, in handbooks and mythographies, in derivative poems and plays, in descendant traditions, and in plentiful allusions. Though their appropriations differ significantly, Jonson and Shakespeare both present comedic impersonations of Homeric scenes and figures – the parodic replay of the council of the gods (Iliad 1) in Poetaster (1601) 4.5 and the appearance of “sweet warman” Hector (5.2.659) in the Masque of the Nine Worthies (Love's Labor's Lost, 1588–97). Homer's Vulcan and Venus furnish positive depictions of love and marriage in The Haddington Masque (1608) as do his Hector and Andromache in Julius Caesar (1599), which features other significant recollections. Both Jonson and Shakespeare recall Homer to explore the dark side of honor and fame: Circe and Ate supply the anti-masque in the Masque of Queens (1609), and scenes from Chapman's Iliad supply the comical or tragical satire, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601). Both poets put Homer to abstract and philosophical uses: Zeus's chain and Venus's ceston (girdle), allegorized, appears throughout Jonson's work and function as central symbols in Hymenaei (1606); Homer's depiction of the tension between fate and free will, between the omnipotent gods and willing humans, though mediated, inflects the language and action of Coriolanus (c. 1608). Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare practice a kind of inventive imitatio which, according to classical and neo-classical precept, re-reads classical texts in order to make them into something new.
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Sykes, Rosie. "Can studying a topic through a reception studies approach improve the quality of Year 7 students’ creative responses to the ancient world?" Journal of Classics Teaching 22, no. 43 (2021): 4–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2058631021000027.
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The lessons planned in this essay were designed for a group of Year 7 students in an independent girls’ school in London. Their course of study for Classics in Year 7 was a general introduction, involving beginners’ Greek and the rudiments of Latin, but largely focused on learning about Greek mythology, Homeric epic and Roman culture. Wright's Greeks & Romans textbook was often used in class, but the content was chosen and materials designed by the class teacher. I began teaching this class just as they were finishing Greek mythology and beginning to study the Iliad and Odyssey. The sequence of four lessons, based around the Underworld was intended to provide a re-cap of the Homeric material after they had studied the two epics, as well as exploring in further detail episodes which I had skipped over for the sake of brevity in the previous sequence, such as the Odyssey's katabasis. It also looked forward to studying Roman material in the next module by introducing the Aeneid in translation.
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Maitland, Judith. "Poseidon, walls, and narrative complexity in the Homeric Iliad." Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cq/49.1.1.
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The sea god Poseidon is taken for granted as such in Classical Greek literature and iconography. Yet one does not have to look far in the literary or iconographical sources to find material that conveys a somewhat different impression. This has been noticed, and in the past there have been some interesting attempts to surmise Poseidon's origins and significance from the evidence at hand. This paper is not an attempt to reconstruct a putative Mycenaean deity, but will examine certain episodes of the Homeric Iliad to suggest possible reasons for the inconsistencies and anomalies that appear.
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Shcherbakov, Fedor. "When Homer ceased laughing." European Journal of Humour Research 9, no. 2 (2021): 63–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2021.9.2.476.
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Since the very beginning of its proliferation, the Homeric epic has been subject to various ways of interpretation and modes of understanding. Particular attention has been paid to those passages from Homeric poems in which the gods commit obscene, absurd, or comical actions. In the opinion of critics of Iliad and Odyssey, such myths were not worthy of the appropriate faith in the Greek gods. Therefore, my article focuses on the third, “comical” group of these Homeric grey areas, and deals with the following questions: how and why did Homer’s comical passages move from a discourse of the ridiculous and the funny to a discourse of the serious by means of philosophical interpretation over the centuries? I will try to uncover the general principles and conditions of that hermeneutical mechanism which made it possible to translate Homer’s comical plots from the language of Olympic “domestic” nonsense into the language of the most important physical, ethical, and metaphysical truths. To achieve this task, my article will conditionally distinguish two ways of transition from the comical to the serious: the first, which was carried out in ancient allegorism, was to directly produce a translation, and to declare that the “superficial” meaning of the myth is false, and its deep level is true. The second way – ancient symbolism – was to turn the comical into the serious through the immediate translation of comical myths into the religious discourse of the sacred, which did not imply a stark contrast between the comical and the serious but, on the contrary, harmonized them.
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Purves, Alex. "AJAX AND OTHER OBJECTS: HOMER'S VIBRANT MATERIALISM." Ramus 44, no. 1-2 (2015): 75–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/rmu.2015.4.
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ἕρϰος Ἀχαιῶν: ἔμψυχον τεῖχος τῶν Ἑλλήνων.Bulwark of the Achaeans: living wall of the Greeks.Schol. D. Il. 6.5 (on Ajax)Now, still breathing, he is simply matter…Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’ The two quotations at the start of this paper, one from the D scholion on the Iliad and the other from Simone Weil's famous essay on force, both make of the Homeric warrior a kind of ‘breathing material’. Two references, then, to the liveliness of objects, but each meaning very different things. For the scholiast places man on the same side as materiality, as if humans and things can equally be infused with life and can exist in a sort of continuum, but Weil argues that a human who is reduced to mere matter, even if he is a still a thing that breathes, is as good as nothing. Unlike the scholiast, Weil's interpretation is predicated on a strong belief in the duality of body and soul in the structure of human life, and since objects do not have souls they are, for her, essentially dead. Throughout her essay, Weil visits again and again the materiality of Homeric man and his propensity to turn, under the crushing power of force, into what she calls alternately a ‘thing’, ‘inert matter’, ‘stone’, and even ‘nothingness’. But for the D scholiast, the comparison of Ajax to stone does not subjugate him or turn him into a ‘mere’ or ‘inert’ object. On the contrary, the gloss ἔμψυχον τεῖχος speaks instead to the lively and permeable boundary between human and nonhuman in early Greek epic, one that suggests that objects can have their own life form, their own energy, vitality, and even creativity.
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Mikhelson, Olga K. "Between Duty and Bliss: Ancient Greek Moral Imperatives, Mythology, and Modern American Cinema." Study of Religion, no. 2 (2019): 131–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.22250/2072-8662.2019.2.131-137.
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The article treats the reception of ancient Greek mythology and history in modern American cinema. Modern directors do not just illustrate ancient narratives, but update them, enriching them with additional readings and subtexts. In the films considered, eternal questions are posed: life and death, duty and moral choice, the destiny of man and desire to become equal to the gods, but they are reinterpreted. It demonstrates that the ancient Greek myth continues its life in the modern cinema, which serves as a kind of contemporary mythology. In the V. Petersen’s film “Troy” man finds true immortality, embodied in heroism and glory. The director’s version of the Iliad still contains the spirit of the Homeric epic, but in doing so conveys later themes through it as well. Homer's tales of the heroes of Troy are filled with new breath, not least due to the anthropocentrism of the film. In O. Stone’s film “Alexander” not only the mythologization of ancient history can be seen, but it can also be comprehended through an even more ancient mythology. The mythological structure of the film is further emphasized by the cyclicity of the narrative, but the film is topical at the same time.
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Dalby, Andrew. "The Iliad, the Odyssey and their audiences." Classical Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1995): 269–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800043391.
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It has been easy to take the apparently detached viewpoint of the two early Greek epics as actually objective, a window on a ‘Heroic Age’, on a ‘Homeric society’ and its values. We used to ask whether ‘Homeric society’ belongs to the poets' own time or to some earlier one. We still ask how to characterize and explain the ways in which the ‘Homeric world’ differs from any world that we can accept as having existed: we answer with phrases such as ‘poetic exaggeration’ and ‘epic distance’. We have constructed ‘Homeric society’, but it remains an isolate. It can tell us nothing in return of the poets' intentions, or of the society of their time, unless we have a working hypothesis as to the place in that society that was held by the poets and their audiences.
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de Jong, Irene. "Convention Versus Realism in the Homeric Epics." Mnemosyne 58, no. 1 (2005): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1568525053420815.
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AbstractThe Homeric epics are generally called realistic. The first part of this paper investigates what is meant by this label. It appears that there are in fact several forms of realism: historical, ontological, daily-life, and descriptive realism. In the second part it is shown that underneath this realistic surface many conventions lie hidden: highly stylized type-scenes form the basis of daily-life realism; the many speeches for which Homer is famous are possible because all the characters speak Greek and all the warriors on the Iliadic battle field know each other's name; the innumerable single fights of the Iliad are not the result of a special fighting method, but of the narrative convention of selective focus.
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Moller, Herbert. "The Accelerated Development of Youth: Beard Growth as a Biological Marker." Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 4 (1987): 748–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500014869.
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Anyone who sees today's high schoolers sporting beards will be surprised— or incredulous—to read in Homer's Iliad that Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks at Troy, was still beardless. Yet Plato accepted it as a wellknown and unsurprising tradition.
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DAVIDSON, JOHN. "HOMER AND EURIPIDES' TROADES." Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 45, no. 1 (2001): 65–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2001.tb00232.x.
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Abstract Like all other Greek poets, Euripides falls under the shadow of Homer. The Troades is closely bound up with the Iliad, in that it represents the fulfilment of Troy's fate so clearly foreshadowed in the Homeric epic. It is not so much a question of linguistic echoes as of situational allusion associated especially with the figures of Andromache and Asyanax, widow and son of Hector. While Homeric and 5th Century values are clearly in tension, as can also be seen in the formal debate between Hecabe and Helen (which also draws the Odyssey into the intertextual nexus), and while Euripides may well to some extent be ironizing and critiquing, he appears at the same time to be offering an impassioned Homeric sequel to the Iliad itself.
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Sammons, Benjamin. "The Space of the Epigone in Early Greek Epic." Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic Online 3, no. 1 (2019): 48–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24688487-00301002.
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Abstract Several poems of the Epic Cycle (especially the Little Iliad and the Nostoi) have a strong interest in the figure of the epigone, as does the Odyssey. Reconstruction of these cyclic epics suggests the operation of narrative conventions that are found to be pointedly inverted in the Homeric poem and thoroughly perverted in the cyclic Telegony.
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Rutherford, Richard. "I - Introduction: Background and Problems." New Surveys in the Classics 41 (2011): 1–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383512000381.
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EPICI have lived in important places, timesWhen great events were decided, who ownedThat half a rood of rock, a no-man's landSurrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seenStep the plot defying blue cast-steel—‘Here is the march along these iron stones’That was the year of the Munich bother. WhichWas more important? I inclinedTo lose my faith in Ballyrush and GortinTill Homer's ghost came whispering to my mindHe said: I made the Iliad from suchA local row. Gods make their own importance.1 Patrick Kavanagh's short poem confronts the reader with a number of questions which will preoccupy us in this survey. The Homeric poems show us a world which in many respects seems primitive and remote; even if the expedition of the Greeks against Troy really happened, even if it took place on the scale which the Iliad asserts, and lasted the full ten-year span, it would still be ‘a local row’ compared with later historical conflicts, ancient or modern. Can the bad-tempered disputes of warrior chiefs, the violent revenge of a savage and undisciplined soldier, the lies and posturing of a vagabond rogue, still move or excite an audience today? It will be necessary to show here some of the ways in which Homer gives the conflict at Troy, and the homecoming of Odysseus, a timeless importance, so that these mere episodes in the vanished heroic age – long past even for the poet and his audience – become microcosmic images of human life. The vast subject of Homer's influence upon later western literature cannot be even superficially addressed here; but occasional comparisons and illustrations may help to show how much subsequent poets and artists have found in the Iliad and the Odyssey to enlighten and inspire their own work.
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Barbosa, Tereza Virgínia Ribeiro. "Mil Homeros e mais um: Borges e a literatura grega." Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura 17, no. 1 (2015): 129–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2317-2096.17.1.129-137.
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Resumo: O artigo trata de uma leitura pessoal e “classicista” de algumas conferências de Jorge Luis Borges e do conto Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Pretendemos mostrar a importância dos poemas homéricos para uma nova direção interpretativa. Examinamos passagens do texto e propomos quatro analogias genéricas: Ashe/Schliemann; Uqbar/Baruch/Spinoza; Tlön/Troia e, finalmente, a obra de Thomas Browne, Urn burial (1893), e o último canto da Ilíada de Homero.Palavras-chave: Borges; metáfora; analogia; história; ficção; literatura grega; Tlön; Troia.Abstract: This paper deals with a particular reading – a classicist’s point of view – of some Jorge Luis Borges’ conferences about literature and of the tale Tlön, Uqbar, orbis tertius. We intend to show the importance of the Homeric poems for a new direction of interpretation. We examine passages in the text and propose four general analogies: Ashe/Schliemann; Uqbar/ Baruch/Spinoza; Tlön/Troia and the Thomas Browne’s Urn burial (1893) and last book of the Iliad of Homer.Keywords: Borges; metaphor; analogy; history; fiction; Greek literature; Tlön; Troy.
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Lowenstam, Steven. "The Arming of Achilleus on Early Greek Vases." Classical Antiquity 12, no. 2 (1993): 199–218. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25010994.
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This article is a critique of Friis Johansen's thesis that twelve Greek vases painted between 570 and 550 B.C. depict a first arming in Phthia. Details that Friis Johansen considered representative of domestic settings are shown to appear in other contexts too. Friis Johansen, who based much of his argument on a plate by Lydos depicting Achilleus, Thetis, Peleus, and Neoptolemos, problematically assumed that all the other early vases portraying Achilleus's arming must represent the same scene in Phthia. The appearance of Neoptolemos on Lydos's plate, however, shows that it is a "heroized genre-picture" and depicts no particular moment in myth. It is also questionable for Friis Johansen to contend that the first presentation of armor is depicted if all the details of a picture do not correspond with Homer's description of the second arming. Friis Johansen's final argument, that two Euripidean choruses describing Achilleus's first armor offer no "reasonable grounds for free mythological invention," runs counter to recent Euripidean scholarship. The conclusion of this critique is that it is very unlikely that any of the early vases showing the presentation of armor to Achilleus depict a first arming in Phthia. Instead, an episode loosely connected with Achilleus's arming in Troy is pictured. The examination of these arming scenes and others in which the material of the Homeric poems and vase-paintings overlaps is helpful in reassessing the question of how closely related the epic stories shown on Archaic Greek vases are to those related in the Iliad and Odyssey.
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Van Wees, Hans. "Kings in Combat: Battles and Heroes in the Iliad." Classical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1988): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800031219.
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What decides the outcome of a Homeric battle? This may sound like one of those arcane problems only a devoted Homer-specialist would care to raise, but in fact the question strikes at the root of major issues in archaic Greek history.The orthodox answer is that Homeric battles were decided by single combats between champions, with the rest of the warriors only marginally influencing the fighting. It is added that these champions were aristocrats, ‘knights’. On this interpretation many have argued that the political dominance of archaic Greek aristocrats was largely based on their military dominance, and that their power was seriously impaired when, in the seventh century B.C., military prominence shifted to the mass, the ‘commoners’; this change in the balance of power contributed crucially to the rise of the polis and the emergence of tyrannies. In outline the theory derives from Aristotle(Pol. 1297 b) and is firmly entrenched in modern works.
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Heath, Malcolm. "Greek Literature." Greece and Rome 66, no. 1 (2019): 113–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383518000347.
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It felt slightly spooky when I opened The Winnowing Oar and found a lecture by Martin West on editing the Odyssey that concludes with a pre-emptive defence of his endorsement of Aristophanes’ reading at Od. 13.158: six months earlier, in my brief review of West's edition (G&R 65 [2018], 272), I had – somewhat recklessly – described that reading as ‘reckless’. It's an excellent lecture, and well worth reading. But the Aristophanic variant still fails to convince me. This difference of opinion pales into insignificance, however, next to the textual bombshell in Franco Montanari's chapter in the same volume, on the failed embassy in Iliad 9. Applying the familiar analytic argument-schema ‘X would have mentioned Y, if Y had been in the text that X read’, I am inexorably led to the conclusion that Montanari is working from a text of Iliad 9 in which the embassy concludes with Achilles’ response to Phoenix (47). The long-standing riddle of the use of duals to describe a three-man delegation is therefore solved: Ajax was a later addition to the text. The alternative explanation, that X has chosen not to mention the one member of the delegation who (even after Achilles has pointedly declared the discussion at an end) succeeds in getting Achilles to make a positive (though deferred) commitment to coming to the rescue of his comrades (649–55), is surely too far-fetched to be credible. Montanari is a very fine scholar: but the embassy that he describes is not the one that I find in my text. Eleven other fine scholars have contributed to this Festschrift for Antonios Rengakos: I will briefly mention three chapters that particularly caught my attention. Margalit Finkelberg argues persuasively for a seventh-century fixation of the Homeric texts in the light of iconographical evidence. Jonas Grethlein, in a study of Odysseus and Achilles in the Odyssey, hopes to show (and succeeds in doing so) ‘that the relation between Odysseus and Achilles in Homeric epic is far more complex than the metapoetically charged juxtaposition of βίη versus μῆτις, which Greg Nagy's The Best of the Achaeans has made a central creed of Homeric scholarship’ (140). I agree whole-heartedly: this painfully reductive antithesis never deserved the prominence it has gained. And, as Grethlein observes, ‘the Iliadic echoes make the Odyssey into more than an adventure story: it becomes a multi-facetted narrative engaged with ethical issues’ (138). Gregory Hutchinson, who can be relied upon for stimulating thoughts expressed with precision, elegance, and wit, begins by suggesting that scholars have laid ‘too much emphasis on the production’ of the Homeric poems, ‘and not enough on the effect of the works on the audience or audiences of the time’ (145). He goes on to examine the phenomenon of repetition in the light of cognitive studies (specifically, the concept of ‘attention’) and comparative literature. Oral improvisation is acknowledged as ‘a conceivable possibility’, but ‘it may be time to turn…our primary attention…to an understanding of [the poem's] impact which best fits the text and best captures its multiplicity and power’ (167).
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Gagné, Renaud. "The Poetics of exôleia in Homer." Mnemosyne 63, no. 3 (2010): 353–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852510x456156.
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AbstractThe notion of delayed generational punishment, or ancestral fault, has a long history in Greek literature. The identification of its earliest attestations in the Archaic period is contested, especially its presence in Homeric poetry. This paper aims to show that delayed generational punishment does indeed appear in Homer, where it is, however, confined to one context: the great oath of exôleia of Iliad 3.298-301 and 4.155-65. The institutional and ritual context of the generational oath is essential to understanding this earliest Greek attestation of ancestral fault, and making sense of the idea’s larger significance for narrative perspective, divine justice, and temporal order in the Homeric epic.
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Horsley, G. H. R. "Homer in Pisidia: Aspects of the History of Greek Education in a remote Roman Province." Antichthon 34 (November 2000): 46–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0066477400001179.
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In the pantheon of poets of all cultures and ages, Homer (however we respond to the ‘Homeric Question’) has a unique place. His primacy is due to the fact that his two epic poems encapsulated Hellenic culture, both for the Greeks themselves, and for others steeped in the ‘European tradition’ whether in antiquity or in subsequent ages. So much is this the case that the very name ‘Homer’ became an abstraction, summing up what it was to be Hellenic. All literature written by Greeks, in the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial periods, and much that was produced by others (including in Latin), looks back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, takes its rise from them, finds its locus in them. A canonicity was conferred on these poems such as on no other Greek text in equal degree. If Shakespeare was representative of an entire age in one culture, Homer summed up a culture itself.
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Wilson, Penelope. "Reading Pope's Homer in the 1720s: The Iliad Notes of Philip Doddridge." Translation and Literature 29, no. 2 (2020): 163–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2020.0417.
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As a young minister in 1725, Philip Doddridge (1702–1751), later to become one of the most influential figures of eighteenth-century Dissent, embarked on a close reading of Homer's Iliad in Greek alongside Pope's English verse translation of 1715–20. As he read he recorded, in shorthand notes, detailed ‘remarks’ critically comparing the Greek and English texts as works of poetry, with a particular eye to the success or otherwise of Pope's version. The unique manuscript containing the remarks has in part survived, and is held by Dr Williams' Library, London. In this discussion, Doddridge is introduced and his remarks transcribed for the first time. They provide a contemporary reading of Pope's Iliad which in its depth and detail goes well beyond anything else available for private readers, as opposed to the professional critics and scholars whose extensive attacks and defences it elicited.
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Scafoglio, Giampiero. "Criticism and Rework of Homeric Narrative in Dio's Trojan Discourse." Classica et Mediaevalia 68 (March 25, 2019): 15–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/classicaetmediaevalia.v68i0.113091.
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 Dio Chrysostom, in his Trojan Discourse (Speech 11) rewrites the story of the Trojan War in a new and different way (with Trojans’ victory over Greeks, the murder of Hector by Achilles, and so on), in contrast with the tale of the Iliad and under the pretense of an historical reconstruction. He preys on Homeric narrative techniques (such as the selective and motivated plot of the Iliad, and the first-person tale in the Odyssey), in order to disprove the traditional version of the legend and to pave the way for a new view. Dio takes a metaliterary and intertextual approach to Homeric epics, insofar as he criticizes and deconstructs their narratives (bearing in mind Homeric criticism by Aristotle and by Alexandrine grammarians), in order to rebuild the story anew. He also provides a specimen of generic crossing, since he frames an epic subject in the context of a prose speech that belongs to epidictic oratory and that simulates some historiographical practices.
 
 
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Louden, Bruce. "Iliad 11: Healing, Healers, Nestor, and Medea." Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic Online 2, no. 1 (2018): 151–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24688487-00201005.
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Abstract Iliad 11’s series of wounded Greek chiefs sends the doomed Patroklos to Nestor’s tent, where Heka-mede has just given Neleus’s son and the wounded healer Makhaon a restorative potion and shortly afterward will give Makhaon a bath. Nestor delivers a lengthy account, a Pylian epic, which briefly mentions Aga-mede, who knows all the pharmaka the earth grows. Together these details suggest two meanings for Nestor’s surprising longevity. Within the Iliad it serves as a vector to pre-Homeric epic but also alludes to Medea’s rejuvenation of Aison and to related episodes in her larger myth.
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Werle, Dirk, and Katharina Worms. "Jacob Baldes Batrachomyomachia Homeri Tuba Romana cantata (1637) und der Dreißigjährige Krieg." Scientia Poetica 22, no. 1 (2018): 214–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/scipo-2018-009.
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Abstract One of the most extensive texts of the neolatin poet and Jesuit Jacob Balde is his ›Battle of the Frogs and Mice‹, a Latin version of the Batrachomyomachia, an ancient Greek epic, which for a long time was seen as a work of the founder of European literature, Homer. The pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia was read as a humorous travesty of the Iliad. By assigning the comic text to Homer, scholars implied the appealing, yet wrongful idea that the author of the greatest mythical war was mocking his own work, thereby parodying the respectable genre of heroic epics. With Balde’s creation of a new version of this Greek poem during the Thirty Years’ War, the question arises as to whether his text is no more than an intertextual play on a famous literary genre, or whether it reacts to the recent historical events in early modern Europe - or both.
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van Wees, Hans. "The Homeric Way of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx (II)." Greece and Rome 41, no. 2 (1994): 131–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500023366.
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Even more than the noise and the clouds of dust raised by men and horses, the flashing of bronze armour and weapons is characteristic of Homeric panoramas of battle. When the Greeks armed themselves with helmets, shields, corslets and spears, the brightness lit up the sky, and all around the earth beamed in the shine of bronze (19.359–63). It blinded eyes, the glare of bronze from shining helmets, newly-polished corslets and bright shields, as they advanced in their masses (14.340–3).
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Jamison, Stephanie W. "Draupadí on the Walls of Troy: "Iliad" 3 from an Indic Perspective." Classical Antiquity 13, no. 1 (1994): 5–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25011002.
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Helen's "viewing" of the Greek heroes from the walls of Troy in "Iliad" 3 (the Teikhoskopia) and its relation to the duel between Menelaos and Paris later in the same book are much-discussed episodes in Homeric criticism. Comparison with a cognate epic tradition, that of ancient India, produces insight on these problematic scenes. The illegal abduction and correct reabduction of Draupadī, the wife of the heroes of the Mahābhārata, show striking parallels to the sequence of the events in "Iliad" 3, and the narrative pattern in both epics appears to reflect inherited Indo-European legal institutions that bear upon the legality and correct procedure of marriage by abduction.
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Celano, Giuseppe G. A. "A computational study on preverbal and postverbal accusative object nouns and pronouns in Ancient Greek." Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 101, no. 1 (2014): 97–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/pralin-2014-0006.
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Abstract Many studies try to determine whether Ancient Greek is an OV or VO language. All of them, however, fail to conduct a research whose method is entirely clear. This paper presents the first attempt to quantify the number of verbs governing preverbal or postverbal accusative object nouns or pronouns in single or coordinate independent clauses in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Herodotus’ Histories, and the New Testament, by providing results which are fully verifiable and reproducible. I prove that as for the parameter OV vs. VO there is great variation in the texts, which suggests a change over time from OV order in Homer to VO order in the New Testament. The figures for Herodotus’ Greek prove a quasi-exact match between OV order and VO order.
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Probert, Philomen. "Zeus on the stud farm? Against a Homeric instance of attractio relativi." Mnemosyne 69, no. 3 (2016): 365–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1568525x-12341879.
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The genitive ἧς at Iliad 5.265 is sometimes considered due to attractio relativi. Alternatively it is taken as a partitive or ablatival genitive, or emended. The question matters for Greek linguistic chronology because uncontroversial attractio relativi is not found until the fifth century BC. This paper addresses the question via a fresh examination of the syntax and sense of lines 265-269. The linguistically most plausible views are: (i) we should not understand εἰσίν with τῆς γάρ τοι γενεῆς, nor punctuate strongly after 267; (ii) ἧς should stand, and is a partitive genitive; (iii) οὕνεκα means ‘because’. The resulting interpretation implies that Zeus accessed some pre-existing stock of horses, otherwise unknown to Greek literature. For many scholars this is a fatal objection to ἧς as a partitive genitive, with some concluding that ἧς is due to attractio relativi or corrupt, and others that ἧς is an ‘ablatival genitive’ (a suggestion that does not solve the perceived problem). This paper defends the partitive genitive analysis on the grounds that Homeric audiences could easily have imagined Zeus getting the horses from some pre-existing stock. Parallels support the plausibility of this background assumption. We do not have a Homeric instance of attractio relativi.
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West, M. L. "The rise of the Greek epic." Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (November 1988): 151–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/632637.
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My title is familiar as that of a book, and my subject may be thought to call for one. I hope in due course to explore the genesis of the Homeric poems in that format, and what I have to say here may take its place there in a maturer form (wiser, fatter). For the moment I offer merely a provisional attempt to trace out the stages by which the epic tradition developed, stopping short of any discussion of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves. Any such attempt necessarily involves a certain amount of rehearsal of familiar arguments, and, if it is to be plausible, a fair measure of concurrence in familiar conclusions. But conclusions that are familiar are sometimes also controversial, and can be strengthened against their assailants by a fresh discussion; and I have certain doctrines of my own that are best presented in the context of a broad synthesis.
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Heath, Malcolm. "Greek Literature." Greece and Rome 63, no. 2 (2016): 251–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383516000127.
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Let us begin, as is proper, with the gods rich in praise – or, more precisely, with The Gods Rich in Praise, one of three strikingly good monographs based on doctoral theses that will appear in this set of reviews. Christopher Metcalf examines the relations between early Greek poetry and the ancient Near East, focusing primarily on hymnic poetry. This type of poetry has multiple advantages: there is ample primary material, it displays formal conservatism, and there are demonstrable lines of translation and adaptation linking Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite texts. The Near Eastern material is presented in the first three chapters; four chapters examine early Greek poetry. Two formal aspects are selected for analysis (hymnic openings and negative predication), and two particular passages: the birth of Aphrodite in Theogony 195–206, and the mention of a dream interpreter in Iliad 1.62–4. In this last case, Metcalf acknowledges the possibility of transmission, while emphasizing the process of ‘continuous adaptation and reinterpretation’ (225) that lie behind the Homeric re-contextualization. In general, though, his detailed analyses tend to undermine the ‘argument by accumulation’ by which West and others have tried to demonstrate profound and extensive Eastern influence on early Greek poetry. Metcalf finds no evidence for formal influence: ‘in the case of hymns, Near Eastern influence on early Greek poetry was punctual (i.e. restricted to particular points) at the most, but certainly not pervasive’ (3). His carefully argued case deserves serious attention.
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Boegehold, Alan L. "Two ‘Fragmenta Dubia Incertae Sedis’, Possibly Comic." Classical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1991): 247–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800003724.
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Eustathios, in his commentary to Homer's Iliad 768.20–2 preserves two elements of Attic speech which could derive originally from comedy. Although neither of them appears as so much as a conjecture in standard collections, a possibility that they are quotations from a lost comedy merits testing. They may, as it turns out, even be fragments of a comedy by Kratinos. The argument for this possibility rests on a manner Eustathios (and other Greek writers) has of presenting evidence to support his general observations. The pattern is as follows: He will say that such-and-such a usage can be observed among the ancients, and then he will cite an ancient author in whose work he has observed such a phenomenon. A good, simple, short example of this presentation can be found at Eustathios' Commentary to Homer's Odyssey 1419.50–4; λλ κα πλλαξ ξ οὗ κα παλλακή κα παλλκια δ κατ Aἴλιν Διονσιον οὑ παλλήκια οἱ παδες, στιν εὑρεν παρ τος παλαιος οἲ δικαστήριον ἱστοροσιν πώνυµον τς Παλλδος. 'Aριστοφνης ἄκων κτεν σε τκνον. δ'ὑπεκρνατο π Παλλαδωι κτλ (Aristophanes, frag. 602 PCG).
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Trubotchkin, Dmitry. "The Iliad in Theatre: Ancient and Modern Modes of Epic Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2014): 379–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x14000712.
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In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).
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Hooker, J. T. "A residual problem in Iliad 24." Classical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1986): 32–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000983880001051x.
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The late Colin Macleod's commentary on Iliad 24 (Cambridge, 1982) has rightly received praise for its sensitivity to the nuances of Homeric language and its appreciation of the entire poem as a carefully constructed work of art. Although reluctant to accept the more radical solutions proposed by the ‘oral’ school, Macleod showed himself fully aware of the contribution made by the oral theory towards elucidating the history of the epic. Nevertheless, his commentary is concerned principally with the Iliad as we have it: a poem which is at one level a masterly re-telling of saga but at another a sublime tragedy, commiserating the sorrows inseparable from human existence and holding up for our admiration the heroes who nobly confront pain and death. I believe that much, and probably most, of the Iliad can and should be viewed in this light. The last book of all, as Macleod himself has shown, offers especially rich rewards to an interpreter who keeps in the front of his mind the overriding aims of the great poet. Yet Macleod's method, like any other single method, will never yield a fully satisfactory answer on all occasions. However the ‘definitive’ or ‘monumental’ composition of the Iliad was brought about, it formed only one stage (though from our point of view incomparably the most important stage) in the development of the Greek epic. Our Iliad cannot have been the first or the only treatment, on a large scale, of the matter of Troy.
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Nischik, Reingard M. "Myth and Intersections of Myth and Gender in Canadian Culture: Margaret Atwood’s Revision of the Odyssey in The Penelopiad." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 68, no. 3 (2020): 251–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-2003.
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AbstractThe first part of the article deals with the national myths of Canada. It demonstrates that the long-time supposed lack of myths in Canada may itself be regarded as a myth. After presenting useful meanings of the term myth, the intersections of myth/mythology and gender are considered, both in Canadian culture and in Greek mythology. Linking Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—the canonized beginnings of Western literature and their foundation on ancient myth—with Canadian culture, Margaret Atwood’s works and their treatment of ancient and social myths are then focussed on, particularly her revisionist rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey in her novel The Penelopiad (2005). This women-centered rewriting of the originally male-dominated story starts from two issues: what led to the hanging of the 12 maids, and what was Penelope really up to? Among the results are an intriguing re-conception of the original main characters, an upgrading of female domestic life, and a debunking not only of Odysseus and his supposedly heroic deeds but also of the authority of ancient myths where precarious not least concerning their conception of gender and gender relations.
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YOSE, JOSEPH, RALPH KENNA, PÁDRAIG MacCARRON, THIERRY PLATINI, and JUSTIN TONRA. "A NETWORKS-SCIENCE INVESTIGATION INTO THE EPIC POEMS OF OSSIAN." Advances in Complex Systems 19, no. 04n05 (2016): 1650008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/s0219525916500089.
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In 1760 James Macpherson published the first volume of a series of epic poems which he claimed to have translated into English from ancient Scottish-Gaelic sources. The poems, which purported to have been composed by a third-century bard named Ossian, quickly achieved wide international acclaim. They invited comparisons with major works of the epic tradition, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and effected a profound influence on the emergent Romantic period in literature and the arts. However, the work also provoked one of the most famous literary controversies of all time, coloring the reception of the poetry to this day. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scholars, while others protested that they misappropriated material from Irish mythological sources. Recent years have seen a growing critical interest in Ossian, initiated by revisionist and counter-revisionist scholarship and by the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first collected edition of the poems in 1765. Here, we investigate Ossian from a networks-science point of view. We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources. Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant network-structural differences between Macpherson’s text and those of Homer. They also show a strong similarity between Ossianic networks and those of the narratives known as Acallam na Senórach (Colloquy of the Ancients) from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.
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Bassino, Paola. "TRANSLATING THE POET: ALEXANDER POPE'S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE HOMERIC BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN HIS TRANSLATIONS OF THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY." Greece and Rome 68, no. 2 (2021): 183–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383521000024.
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This article explores Alexander Pope's experience as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly his engagement with Homer as a poet and his biographical tradition. The study focuses on how Homer features in Pope's correspondence as he worked on the translations, how the Greek poet is described in the prefatory essay by Thomas Parnell and Pope's own notes to the text, and finally how his physical presence materializes in the illustrations within Pope's translations. The article suggests that, by engaging with the biography of Homer, Pope explores issues such as poetic authority and divine inspiration, promotes his own translations against European competitors, and ultimately establishes himself as a translator and as a poet. Throughout the process, Homer appears as a presence that forces Pope constantly to challenge himself, until he feels he can stand a comparison with the greatest poet ever.
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Kathy L. Gaca. "Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of Iliad 16.7–11: The Girl and Her Mother In Ancient Greek Warfare." American Journal of Philology 129, no. 2 (2008): 145–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ajp.0.0001.
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MINCHIN, ELIZABETH. "Commemoration and Pilgrimage in the Ancient World: Troy and the Stratigraphy of Cultural Memory." Greece and Rome 59, no. 1 (2012): 76–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383511000258.
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This article takes up the subject of shared memory and its interaction with landscape, with specific reference to Troy, to Homer's Iliad, and to the tradition of ‘pilgrimage’ to Troy and its environs that evolved in the ancient world in response to the Trojan War story. Over the course of centuries this particular location on the Hellespont, a Bronze Age site, exercised a particular fascination, thanks to memories – no doubt gravely distorted – of a great siege by combined Greek forces eager to avenge, as legend tells it, the abduction of Helen. A few centuries later, the site became a destination for ‘pilgrims’ who were eager to see for themselves the landscape of Troy and the Troad and to experience for themselves, physically and emotionally, certain actions that were attributed to the heroes of the so-called Trojan War.
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Carvounis, Katerina. "Transforming the Homeric Models: Quintus' Battle among the Gods in the Posthomerica." Ramus 37, no. 1-2 (2008): 60–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00004902.
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Quintus' Posthomerica in fourteen books covers events from the Trojan saga that take place between the funeral of Hector, which marks the end of the Iliad, and the homeward journey of the victorious Greeks after the sack of Troy. Various hints in the text help us place the epic within the Roman Empire but do not allow much scope for further speculation on a more specific date. Relative chronology with other hexameter poets in the Roman period sets the composition of the Posthomerica in the third century, which saw a floruit of mythological poetry. For material shared between Quintus' Posthomerica and Oppian's Halieutica, which is placed between 177 and 180 CE, it is generally agreed that Quintus is drawing on Oppian, and the end of the second century is thus a plausible terminus post quern for the Posthomerica. Key to establishing a terminus ante quern for this epic is Triphiodorus' epyllion on the Sack of Troy, which is now dated to the late third century: scholarly opinion is divided about the direction of the borrowing between the two poets, but if Triphiodorus is drawing on Quintus, which seems to be more likely, then the Posthomerica can be placed before the end of the third century.
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Waldron, Cordell M. "From Performance to Casket Copy." Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts 2, no. 2-3 (2008): 190–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/post.v2i2.190.
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Does the central role of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek culture indicate that they functioned as scripture? Taking the role of the Tanakh in Jewish culture as the standard of comparison, this essay argues that, while the Tanakh and the epics functioned similarly as foundational texts in their respective cultures, the ways in which Homer was used in Hellenic culture differ markedly from the ways in which the Tanakh was used in ancient Jewish culture. The Homeric epics were primarily thought of as orally delivered or performed events throughout most of their history, only coming to be thought of as primarily written texts in the Hellenistic era and later, whereas almost from its origins the Tanakh commands and exemplifies a textcentered community in which that which is written is most important.
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Heath, Malcolm. "Greek Literature." Greece and Rome 62, no. 2 (2015): 218–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s001738351500008x.
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In the latest Cambridge Green and Yellow Homer, Angus Bowie tackles Odyssey 13–14, intent on ‘rescuing the reputation of these books’ (ix): a worthy project, to which he makes a significant contribution. He has good things to say on the dovetailing of the two parts of the epic, and provides illuminating analyses of some of the conversations in Book 14. He places particular stress on the major roles given to lower-status characters, in which he discerns ‘a new type of epic’ (16) – a phrase qualified by a cautious question mark. Caution is abandoned, however, when he goes on to say that ‘the ideology of the Odyssey…represents a parity of status of the rich and poor’ (22): the hyperbolic ‘parity’ distracts from a valid underlying point. As in his commentary on Herodotus 8 (G&R 56 [2009], 99), Bowie is generous in providing linguistic support. In this case, perhaps over-generous: is the attention paid to historical linguistics disproportionate to student needs? It is true that ‘if one has an idea of how linguistic forms and constructions came about, they are more comprehensible and so easier to learn and retain’ (ix); my own Greek teacher applied the principle to good effect – but less relentlessly, and with a lighter touch. (The introductory section on Homeric language has four subsections, the third of which has up to five nested sublevels: incorrect cross-references in the glossary under ‘grade’ and ‘laryngeal’ suggest that even Bowie struggled with this elaborate hierarchy.) Some points are forced. When the Phaeacians put Odysseus ashore asleep in a blanket, Bowie comments: ‘Od. is treated almost like a tiny child coming swaddled into the world for the first time; again, the idea of a new start is evoked’ (117): I am not a qualified midwife, but am fairly sure that babies do not come into the world ready-wrapped and slumbering soundly. In his note on 13.268 Bowie cites three passages in the Iliad in which ambush ‘is presented as a cowardly tactic’: one is about the use of distance weapons, not ambush (11.365–95), while the other two celebrate the target's victory without reference to the ambushers’ courage or lack of it (4.391–8, 6.188–90). Ambushes are hard to execute successfully, and therefore dangerous. That is why the best men are chosen for operations of this kind (6.188–90, 13.276–86), and why Achilles is not paying Agamemnon a compliment when he claims that he takes no part in them (1.227–8).