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2013
Widely revered as the father of Western literature, Homer was the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the epic poems which immortalised such names as Achilles, Cyclops, Menelaus, and Helen of Troy. In this vivid introduction, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen celebrate the complexity, innovation and sheer excitement of Homer’s two great works, and investigate the controversy surrounding the man behind the myths – asking who he was and whether he even existed.
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This paper examines the role of Diomedes in the Iliad. Focusing in particular on the three appearances of the divine horses he steals from Aeneas in Book 5, I examine the connection between his characterization and his narrative function. His prominence in the first third of the poem stands in stark contrast with his minimal participation in the main events of the plot, which has suggested to many that he is a late addition to the traditional "wrath of Achilles" story, expanding the poem's length by standing in for the absent hero. This is reflected in Diomedes' characterization: again and again he defies the expected order (of his commanders, of the gods) and attempts to hijack Achilles' story. I conclude with a reading of the chariot race in Iliad 23, suggesting that Diomedes' win over Eumelus would have been recognized by the original audience as an unexpected change to the tradition with which they were familiar.
Pre-proof copy of paper forthcoming in YAGE This article examines the development of the theme of eris in Hesiod and Homer. Starting from the relationship between the destructive strife in the Theogony (225) and the two versions invoked in the Works and Days (11–12), I argue that considering the two forms of strife as echoing zero and positive sum games helps us to identify the cultural and compositional force of eris as cooperative competition. After establishing eris as a compositional theme from the perspective of oral poetics, I then argue that it develops from the perspective of cosmic history, that is, from the creation of the universe in Hesiod's Theogony through the Homeric epics and into its double definition in the Works and Days. To explore and emphasize how this complementarity is itself a manifestation of eris, I survey its deployment in our major extant epic poems.
In this paper we analyse Oedipus’ appearance during Odysseus’ tale in book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey in order to outline and test a methodology for appreciating the poetic and thematic implications of moments when ‘extraneous’ narratives or traditions appear in the Homeric poems. Our analysis, which draws on oral-formulaic theory, is offered partly as a re-evaluation of standard scholarly approaches that tend to over-rely on the assumed pre-eminence of Homeric narratives over other traditions in their original contexts or approaches that reduce such moments to instances of allusions to or parallels with fixed texts. In conjunction with perspectives grounded in orality, we emphasise the agonistic character of Greek poetry to explore the ways in which Odysseus’ articulation of his Oedipus narrative exemplifies an attempt to appropriate and manipulate a rival tradition in the service of a particular narrative’s ends. We focus specifically on the resonance of the phrases algea polla and mega ergon used by Odysseus as a narrator to draw a web of interconnections throughout Homeric and Archaic Greek poetry. Such an approach, in turn, suggests to what extent the Homeric Oedipus passage speaks to the themes and concerns of Homeric poetry rather than some lost Oedipal epic tradition and illustrates the importance of recognizing the deeply competitive nature of Homeric narratives vis-à-vis other narrative traditions.
2019, Helios
Although the Iliad does not explicitly depict Achilles and Patroclus as lovers, I argue that the poem suggests an erotic dimension to their relationship by comparing them to husband-wife pairings in Homeric epic. Previous scholars have tended either to deny any erotic component to Achilles and Patroclus's bond or to assume that the Iliad unproblematically depicts them as lovers. Others have hinted at the possibility of a deliberate homoerotic subtext between the two heroes but have adduced little specific evidence other than the intensity of their emotional connection. In this article, I show that Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad are analogous to a husband and wife by presenting specific examples from the text of how their relationship structure and affective bond mirror those of Homeric husband-wife couples. I conclude that the poem portrays Achilles and Patroclus's relationship as a conjugal bond in order to highlight Achilles' alienation from traditional social structures as well as the excessive and transgressive nature of his affective responses. I also suggest that Homeric epic presents the ideal conjugal bond as being characterized by the potential for power exchange and role reversal rather than by strict hierarchy.
This paper examines the relationship between wind, narrative, and time in Homer. It begins by considering Fränkel’s observation that weather rarely occurs outside the similes in the Iliad, and goes on to show that wind plays a subtle but fundamental role in shaping the narratives of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
In F.-H. Mutschler (ed.), The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundation Texts Compared (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017), 381-409
2012, Brill's Companion to the Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception
Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After establishing Heracles’ independent existence outside Homer, we explore how speakers in the Iliad relate – and relate to – the accomplishments of this hero, in trying to make sense of or influence their situations. Finally, we consider how Heracles’ appearances in the Iliad communicate the poem’s sustained engagement with Heracles traditions through the adaptation of traditional structures and the manipulation of formulaic language. This analysis helps us reconsider Achilles’ curious statement as part of an agonistic process by which the Iliad appropriates and marginalizes a hero ill fit to its tale.
2011, A Companion to Greek Mythology, Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone eds
This is the appendix of my book, Jane Austen: Closet Classicist, and covers ancient literature from Homer to the New Testament.
An up-to-date survey of the theory proposed in “The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales” is presented here. The real setting of the Iliad and Odyssey can be identified not as the Mediterranean Sea, where it proves to be undermined by many incongruities, but rather in the north of Europe. The oral sagas that originated the two poems came from the Baltic regions, where the Bronze Age flourished in the 2nd millennium BC and where many Homeric places, such as Troy and Ithaca, can still be identified today. The blond seafarers who founded the Mycenaean civilization in the Aegean in the 16th century BC brought these tales from Scandinavia to Greece after the end of the climatic optimum. These peoples then rebuilt their original world – where the Trojan War and many other mythological events had taken place – farther south in Mediterranean waters, transferring significant names from north to south. Through many generations, they preserved the memory of the heroic age and the feats performed by their ancestors in their lost Hyperborean homeland, until the oral tradition was put into written form around the 8th Century BC, when alphabetical writing was introduced in Greece. This new prospect can open new developments as to the European prehistory and the dawn of the Greek civilization.
In this work, I study different scenes within the Iliad and the Odyssey in order to understand what kind of relationships appear governing the relationships with the “contemporaneous others”: those with whom the heroes share time and community, whether one understands this as a small-scale local group or in a broader sense as the whole group of Achaeans. I also question what sorts of formerly unrecognized groups can constitute Others in Homer. First, I analyze how members of the aristocratic warrior group related to each other. Secondly, I focus on the relationship between the aristocratic social group and the commoners, known as “κακοί.” Throughout a detailed analysis of different episodes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I show how the relationships among characters reveal a hierarchical and asymmetrical reality perfectly recognized by us, similar of that of many places in the world today.
2009, American Journal of Philology, Vol. 130
Nostos is first considered as a poetic genre. In the epic tradition and within the Homeric poems, it typically designates the song about the sea travels of Greek heroes home from Troy. The identification of some extra-Homeric narrative motifs leads the author to explore the uses of nostos and of etymologically related words (such as nostimos, nosteo\ , and neomai). The textual analysis highlights homeward as well as non-homeward, sea-oriented and non-sea-oriented meanings.
My MA Thesis charts Homer’s Iliad as a song of thumoresistance. I mean the very intersection of thumos and stasis. Thumos means heart, spirit, rage, bravery and is understood to be the courageous part of the Ancient Greek psyche. Stasis implies civil strife—a radical rupture with the organization of political power—an event which needs to occur for structural changes to manifest. Stasis, as contestation and conflict is politics as such. I have deeper interests in producing a strong, albeit polemic, argument that affirms and extenuates Ancient forms of rage, dissent and courageous action. It is in the points of resonance between Menis, Thumos and Stasis, that I locate brave, courageous and enraged modes that engage and produce political crises. I am examining liberatory, revolutionary acts of thumotic resistance/stasis (individual/heroic and collective rage), as essential parts of Ancient Greek life. Affirming menis, thumos and stasis, as I feel the need to do, will strengthen critique Plato for being anti-democratic, anti-collective decision-making, against the capacity for courageous and spited action, and against political rage and politics as such. The object of my analysis is Homer’s Iliad, the tradition of militant rage that persists in the Bronze Age that was carried though in song well throughout 4th Century Democratic Athens. Over the course of this paper I will come to see Achilles not only as a flat warrior-model, but as a thumo-resisting hero who creates a legitimate and ethical stasis against the rule of the tyrant Agamemnon, and also a parrhesiastes. In addressing the dense network of themes I just described, I will be making close readings of the Ancient Greeks, including Homer, Solon, Plato, Aristotle and their interpreters: Peter Sloterdijk, Kostas Kalimtzis, Gregory Nagy, Michel Foucault, Leonard Muellner, DL Cairns and Glen Most.
In a recent pair of articles I argued that the Odyssey presents itself as the heroic analogue to, or even substitute for, fertility myth. 1 The return of Odysseus thus heralds the return of prosperity to his kingdom in a manner functionally equivalent to the return of Persephone, and with her of life, to earth. The first paper focused on a detailed comparison of the plots of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Odyssey; 2 and the second on the relationship between withdrawal and return narratives and ring-composition. 3 In my analysis of ring-composition, I concluded that what began as a cognitive and functional pattern, organizing small-scale narrative structures, evolved into an aesthetic pattern, organizing large blocks of narrative, before finally becoming an ideological pattern, connecting the hero's return to the promise of renewal offered by fertility myth and cult. In the story of Persephone, the pattern of withdrawal, devastation, and return with renewal takes place in cyclical time. But, I also suggested that the same pattern can be re-imagined in linear time as a return of the past, and specifically the heroic age. 4 In what follows, I argue that the Odyssey involves just such a return, of the heroic age in linear time, and in two, complementary ways. My central claim is that epic performance is a kind of time travel that involves both the internal characters and the external audience. The idea of 'return' has thus exerted a centripetal force on the narrative so that return is a narrative ring-structure, representing a spatial journey-pattern by the protagonist(s), that has assimilated to itself complementary, cyclical and linear temporal processes. Abetting this assimilation is the underlying idea that return brings with it renewal for the community; and that the returning hero is thereby assimilated to the function of a returning Persephone is further abetted by the status of both as chthonic deities.
History of Political Thought, Vol. 31/1 (2010)
2012, Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry
This article shows that the mourning of Thetis at the start of Iliad Book 18 is not an atypical or under-motivated motif derived from (or alluding to) the Aithiopis, but an extraordinary example of the 'prospective lamentation' typical sequence, found several times in both Homeric poems. It thus offers a new solution to the crux of Iliad 18.95–6 and its prediction of Akhilleus' death 'straightaway after' Hektor's.
"This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature – the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words – and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it makes the claim that debate is best understood in relation to an institutional framework, in which issues of authority and dissent are variously set out and worked through. Intersecting with key recent scholarship, it shows that the Homeric poems establish, and scrutinise, the assembly as an institution which accommodates dissent, in line with an understanding of epic narrative as foundational; that the historians’ marginal status as writers in an oral culture manifests itself in their representing debate as a challenge to the utility of public institutions; and that tragedy marks the formal institutionalisation of dissent in its adversarial structure with an onus on speaking back, which offers a new way of thinking about tragic politics in terms of the process by which dissent is enacted and managed. Aimed at both scholar and student, including anyone interested in the origins of political thought, this book demonstrates not only the fundamental importance of debate to these genres, but also the ways representations of debate construct an agonistic mentality which intersects with and informs the broader cultural construction of a citizen community. "
2016, The Classical Review
This paper examines the meaning and connectedness of Kleos (eternal glory, fame), Nostos (homecoming, heroic return) and Ponos (toil, ordeal, pain) in various myths from the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Cycle. Despite being essential to the analysing cultural significance of Homeric tradition, folklore feels disconnected from initial manifestations of heroic stories. We can say that such an unfortunate outcome is caused by the popularity of non-poetic narratives that have been created by numerous writers to bring the coherent plot into the foreground. This approach might be a comprehensible presentation of the story, though such versions lack the essence of imprinting heroic deeds into epic poems by earning Kleos and sustaining heroes' Kleos by repeated performance. Thus, this essay explores the significance of Kleos, nostos and Ponos within the Homeric tradition and suggests that we should abandon a canonical way of reading these virtues because such approach does not correspond with original myths that had been passed down from generation to generation. For this purpose, above-mentioned heroic virtues will be demonstrated on examples of Odysseus, Diomedes, Telemonian Ajax, Neoptolemus and with emphasis on Achilles – the epitome of Kleos. Moreover, popular adherence to " multi-volume " way of reading the Trojan War will be re-evaluated by juxtaposing Homer's works and the Epic Cycle to locate distinct traditions regarding Kleos, Nostos and Ponos.
The Homeric epics, the two earliest surviving literary works of Western culture, document a tradition that is oral both in composition and transmission. At a very early date, they were attributed to an authorial figure who is really only a symbol standing for a literature of an entire culture. It matters little to us whether a particular ‘singer’ (aoidós) was called H. Even if a ‘H.’ did exist, we can ascribe to him at most part of the literary activity involved in the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey – perhaps the redactional part. Any search for the intervention of individual personalities, of ‘fingerprints’ in the transmitted text will be in vain. Rather, what is reflected in the text is the entire Greek culture of the Archaic period. That culture found both epics an inexhaustible source for practically all aspects of life. In many respects, writing a comprehensive reception history of H. means writing a literary and cultural history of Greece.
This paper examines the importance of poetry and song in ancient Greece with particular attention to classical epics such as the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Argonautica and the Aeneid.
Recent conceptualizations of early Greek epic poetry (Foley 2004; Martin 1989 and 2005; Minchin 2007) have shown that the Homeric poems functioned like a matrix-genre that diachronically incorporated many speech and poetic genres in a way that, at least for the Odyssey (Bakker 2013), can be considered dialogic according to the Bakhtinian model (Bakhtin 1982). In order to tackle the performance of two speeches by Menelaos in Odyssey IV.76-112 and 168-82, my starting point is comprised by the understanding of “genre” as the stabilization of communicative patterns and by the differentiation proposed by M. Bakhtin and T. Todorov between primary or everyday and secondary or literary genres (Bakhtin 1986; Todorov 1980), adapted respectively as epos and aoidê in the Homeric cultural context by E. Bakker (Bakker 2013). I intend to discuss the use of the rhetorical form “lament” in the Odyssey vis-à-vis its well discussed use in the Iliad (Tsagalis 2004) in a context where a senior and wiser hero uses his rhetorical knowledge and ability to teach the younger Telemachus how to speak authoritatively in public. The first four books of the Odyssey are an excellent test-case for Knudsen’s recent proposal that Homeric poetry displays a systematic and technical concept of rhetoric (Knudsen 2014). I intend to show how Homer embeds in the dialogue between Menelaus and Telemachos a lesson about how to choose the correct topics of an epideictic speech by examining how the speeches are structured and which effect they produce in their internal audience. By pinning down these discourses I hope to advance two discussions, one about the use of speech genres and the other about the conceptualization of a specific sophia (knowledge, ability) regarding the authoritative performance of speeches in the Homeric poems.
summary: This paper analyzes the Iliad's representation of odunai, pains usually caused by weapons, within the context of the complex relationship between violence, payment, and timê in the poem. Absent from scenes of death, odunai appear, rather, in descriptions of wounding, where they have been interpreted as offering the wounded warrior an opportunity to display aretê. I demonstrate that wounds also help to represent the circulation of suffering (algea) that constitutes the epic plot; a critical component of this representation is blood. The latter part of the paper examines the wound of Agamemnon in Book 11, which challenges conventional representations of odunai and blood, not least of all by calling up the image of a woman in labor—the only time a simile is used to capture odunai. I argue that the simile implicitly challenges an economy in which timê is traded in blood and pains, a challenge echoed more darkly by Hecuba in Book 24. The epic's use of mothers to represent fierce and irreducible pain anticipates tragic appropriations of the feminine. in the culture of pain, a wide-ranging study of how bodily suffering has been invested with meaning over the course of several millennia in Western art and literature, David Morris has this to say about the poem conventionally located at the origins of these traditions:
The aim of this study is to offer a critical reassessment of the progress made in recent years with respect to two of the most fruitful schools of interpretation in Homeric research, i.e. Neoanalysis and Oral Theory. After revisiting a series of theoretical issues, the author presents his personal viewpoint concerning the much-debated question concerning symptomatic or derivative innovation.
2018, Thinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honour of James M. Redfield
1993, Transactions of the American Philological Association
In: F.-H. Mutschler (ed.). Singing the World. The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs Compared. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018, 15-38.
A modified version of Marshall Sahlins's model of reciprocity, which maps the modes of reciprocity across kinship distance, helps elucidate reciprocity in Homer. With important qualifications, Homeric reciprocity can also elucidate the social realities of Archaic Greece. There are three primary modes of Homeric reciprocity: general, or altruistic giving, balanced exchange, and negative taking. The model for general reciprocity is family relationships, and it characterizes a ruler's relationship with the community, where it masks the reality that the upward flow of chiefly tribute exceeds the downward flow of the ruler's largesse. Balanced reciprocity is practiced between peers within the same community: exchange items are notionally of equivalent value and the transaction is completed within a limited timeframe. Exchanges outside the community tend to be negative: 'stranger' is often synonymous with 'enemy'. Walter Donlan further distinguishes between balanced reciprocities that are compensatory, and tend to be (but are not always) negative, and positive compactual reciprocities such as guest-friendship (xenia). Significantly, compensatory reciprocity includes reciprocities that begin as negative, in which the victim is able to exact compensation (poinē) or revenge (tisis). In Homer, balanced reciprocity consists of seven primary ritual practices: marriage (gamos) and supplication (hiketeia) can be related to xenia, as can sacrifice (iera rezein), somewhat more distantly; ransom (apoina) is related to poinē and tisis. In addition to systematizing further and refining Sahlins's model, this paper shows that the plots of both Homeric epics are comprehensively structured by reciprocity.
2014, Crime and punishment in Homeric and archaic epic
2019, International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics
The Iliad is an epic poem of Homer narrates The War of Troy between Trojans and Achaeans which takes place in ancient history and it is full of heroic stories. The Trojan War is caused by the betrayal of Helen and Paris and the war is concluded with the death of Hector and the collapse of Troy. In Homeric society, wars and being a great warrior occupy a significant place in their lives since great warriors are believed as virtuous existences. That's why, Homer tells the great stories of great warriors. Alongside heroic stories, Homer also indicates a path to be virtuous through Achilles' rage, dishonesty of Helen and voluptuous behaviours of Paris. He underlines these elevated elements and gives lessons from each of them to his society to praise 'virtue'. However, it oversteps its time and place and it is able to survive until the modern world thanks to its moral messages which are still valid. In this paper, Homer's lessons through these elevated elements related to 'virtue' are going to be studied and depicted with exemplifications from the poem.