Abstract
This essay deals with the comparison of the socio-religious roles of the poets which prevailed in Homeric Greece and Vedic India according, respectively, to Homer and the R̥gveda. The social control of the human audience to which was submitted the Homeric poet is compared to the compulsory link between the patron of the sacrifice and the officiating poet in Vedic India. While the human and the divine powers that dominated the Homeric poet were disconnected from each other, the Vedic sacrifice’s internal dynamics was characterized by a smooth continuity between the acts of the social human and divine groups involved. It seems possible to assume that the common features of both poetic practices go back to the Indo-European past. Ancient Celtic (Irish) data provide a third series of proofs of the Indo-European prehistory of these poetic practices.
Published Version
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