Greek Epics Research Articles

Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is epic poetry from Mesopotamia and is among the earliest known works of literature. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the protagonist of the story, Gilgamesh, which were fashioned into a longer Akkadian epic much later. This poetry is the earliest epic (c. 2150-2000BC). Earlier than the two great Indian epics (Mahabharata, and Ramayana, 1000-800BC) and the two great Greek epics (The Iliad, and The Odyssey, 900-700BC).

Editor's Column

Editor's Column John Miles Foley, Editor With issue 26, i, Oral Tradition delves into a wide variety of traditions and media in multiple cultural contexts, seeking as always to chart new territory and to expand the horizons of our joint, interdisciplinary field. We see this emphasis on diversity as perhaps the most important role our journal can serve: to report on the international panoply of both longstanding and emerging forms of traditional verbal art. Moradewun Adejunmobi begins the discussion with her examination of writing, performance, and new media in urban West Africa, explaining that verbal artists often portray themselves as writers despite their primary engagement with performance and digital technologies. Next in succession is Eric Shepherd's richly illustrated overview of Shandong "fast tales," a Chinese performance tradition over four centuries old; be sure to spend some time with the video and photographic content of the attached eCompanion to this article. From Africa and China, we move to central Asia, with Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Raushan Sharshenova describing how tales recounting the adventures of the folk hero Kuyruchuk depend on the different political worlds-tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet society-in which the continuously recontextualized tales have been told and received. The Byzantine epic Digenes Akrites existed on the cusp of oral tradition and manuscript culture, and Christopher Livanos examines the titular hero's encounter with the dragon and the Amazon Maximou from a Freudian perspective, as well as in a broad Indo-European frame of reference. Robert Mann draws together new evidence from various redactions of related texts to argue that the Russian Tale of Igor was an oral epic within an active tradition that continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, highlighting the performer's dependence on (and fluency in) traditional poetic phraseology. Also within the Slavic realm, Aaron Tate provides a translation of the famous nineteenth-century collector Luka Marjanović's first report on his massive fieldwork expeditions in Croatia and Bosnia, along with commentary that places Marjanović's ideas in historical perspective. Minako Sakata then offers a rare account of the structure and dynamics of folktales told by the Ainu, an indigenous people living in present-day Japan and Russia; she concentrates on shared motifs and the interactivity of individual tales within the tradition. Paul Koerbin's contribution treats the Turkish Alevi lyric songs associated with Pir Sultan Abdal, focusing on this figure's persona and the large body of lyrics, commentary, and texts that have accumulated since the early twentieth century. The final article in this issue, by Margo Kitts, addresses oath-sacrifice and commensal sacrifice scenes in the ancient Greek epics of Homer, maintaining that these scenes draw their structure from ritual paradigms as well as from Homeric poetics. As the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition and the journal emerge from their twenty-fifth anniversary year, it seems timely to emphasize the recent launch of the International Society for Studies in Oral Tradition (http://issot.org). The aim of the ISSOT, which provides a sponsored virtual platform for exchange among scholars, performers, and students around the world, is to leverage electronic media in order to promote and facilitate communication that otherwise could not happen. We have identified four ways in which the society can benefit the field. Member-to-member. In the spirit of person-to-person communication, members of the society, which is open-access and free-of-charge, are able to search our data-base to locate colleagues interested in various areas, traditions, and topics, and to exchange ideas and media as they wish. (The initial connection works through an approval mechanism, so that members who are contacted have the opportunity to approve or not to approve the connection by clicking on a reply e-mail through the ISSOT site. After both members agree to the exchange, communication then proceeds directly and independently.) Webinars. Second, we plan a series of webinars, or seminars broadcast live on the Internet, which will be captured as videos and posted on the ISSOT site for asynchronous viewing. Our first webinar, "Oral Epics in China" (http://issot.org/events) delivered by Dr. Chao Gejin, Director of the Institute of Ethnic Literature...

Are We "Misreading" Paul?: Oral Phenomena and Their Implication for the Exegesis of Paul's Letters

A critical approach toward oral rhetorical qualities and styles can be traced as far back as Quintilian, if not before. Inquiry into the orality of Homer dates as far back as Josephus, but the work of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord stands out in particular. Parry and Lord studied South Slavic poetry in an attempt to answer the Homeric question that addresses the authorship of the major Greek epics. Their research has alerted modern readers that the ancients did not receive a written message in the same way the modern readers do. These theories are absolutely essential foundations for any Pauline letter. Like the Greek epics, letters were verbally mediated, as the discussion below will indicate. A brief survey of both non-biblical and biblical scholarship on this matter will reveal varying insights, as well as implications for an improvement of rhetorical studies and general exegesis of Pauline letters. At the very least, the exegetical assumption of the interpreter must accommodate orality in Paul’s society.

Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature (review)

Contents of the DVD Foreword--William C. Stokoe Preface: Utopian Gestures--W.J.T. Mitchell Acknowledgments Users' Guide 1. Introduction H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, Heidi M. Rose PART ONE: FRAMING ASL LITERATURE 2. Face-to-Face Tradition in the American Deaf Community: Dynamics of the Teller, the Tale, and the Audience--Ben Bahan 3. The Camera as Printing Press: How Film Has Influenced ASL Literature--Christopher B. Krentz 4. Deaf American Theater--Cynthia Peters PART TWO: THE EMBODIED TEXT: WRITING AND VISION IN ASL LITERATURE 5. Getting out of Line: Toward a Visual and Cinematic Poetics of ASL--H-Dirksen L. Bauman 6. Textual Bodies, Bodily Texts--Jennifer L. Nelson 7. The Poet in the Poem in the Performance: The Relation of Body, Self, and Text in ASL Literature--Heidi M. Rose 8. ASL Literature Comes of Age: Creative Writing in the Classroom--Liz Wolter PART THREE: THE POLITICAL TEXT: PERFORMANCE AND IDENTITY IN ASL LITERATURE 9. If there are Greek epics, there should be Deaf epics: How Protest Became Poetry--Kristen C. Harmon 10. Visual Screaming: Willy Conley's Deaf Theater and Charlie Chaplin's Silent Cinema--Carol L. Robinson 11. Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance--Michael Davidson Afterword Carol A. Padden Appendix A: Time Line of ASL Literature Development Appendix B: ASL Video References Contributors Index

Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution (review)

Reviewed by: Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution Barry B. Powell Reyes Bertolín Cebrián . Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. Pp. 173. US $62.95. ISBN 0-8204-8165-3 Tackling the tough problem of the evolution of epic one must have a strong sense of what happened in archaic Greece and the ancient Near East and of how texts came into being then. Certainly Greek epics did not "crystallize" like salt in a glass, as Bertolín Cebrián would have it (p. 3), but were dictated at a single time and place by illiterate bards to men trained in the very new and radical technology of the Greek alphabet, as argued by Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, Richard Janko and many others. Working from a false model for text-formation, Bertolín Cebrián is from the beginning held from solving the problems she has chosen to address, and I found her book unpersuasive at many levels. Complicating her false model of text-formation, she raises from the dead such discredited interpretations as the "Pisistratean Recension," which never existed, and imagines that epic began after 1100 BC, which no one believes. Her affection for such neologisms as "illocutionary," "performativity," "self-referentiality," further muddies the waters to yield amateurish speculations about various matters. Considering the relationship between rite and myth, Bertolín Cebrián views rites as accompanying myths, but more conservative than them. Myths like to change. Bertolín Cebrián does not make clear what she means by "rite," but the religious act of sacrifice, the principle rite in Greek religion, was in fact rarely accompanied by myths in ancient Greek religion, so far as we know. We cannot connect one single Greek literary text with a known rite and certainly not the Iliad or the Odyssey. Bertolín Cebrián seems to confuse magical spells with rite. She sees a connection somehow between "rite" and choral poetry. Certainly such poetry was performed in public festivals, but was never a "rite" as was the slashing of an animal's throat and the consumption of its flesh. Bertolín Cebrián seems not to understand the all-male symposium as the natural setting for the delivery of elegy and lyric, but imagines that these forms of poetry took place, again, "in a ritual context" before being on occasion "secularized." Bertolín Cebrián's main argument is built on her vision of the initial [End Page 69] union of myth and rite. Epic grew from a specific rite, the lament for the dead (was this a "rite"?), though I was surprised to learn that such laments might blame as well as praise the deceased. Bertolín Cebrián appears unaware of the magical role of the lament in consoling the unhappy ghost, and through such practices as ululation of frightening the ghost away. She thinks that the purpose of the lament was to foster communal cohesion, which it no doubt did, and the willingness to die for the community, about which I am less certain. In any event, first came laments at the tomb, then the laments were separated from the tomb, then they incorporated narrative and indirect speech and became epic. Males created the epic, while females continued their ritual practice of lamenting the dead at tombs. That is where epic comes from. There is, however, no evidence that Greek epic, which also flourished at the symposium and probably at some public festivals, was ever connected with tomb-cult in any way. Epic was a form of entertainment, making use of traditional tales and other material, and no doubt enforcing public values, but has no plausible genetic relationship to lament. We are not sure what "rite" means, but just as well Bertolín Cebrián never makes clear what is meant by "epic." Nothing is said about dactylic hexameter verse, or the differences between Homer and Hesiod and what such differences imply in deciding what "epic" means. She places Homer two hundred years too late and does not understand the critical difference between dictated oral verse and poetry created in writing. Fanciful etymologies do more...

The "Narrative is Travel" Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence

The “Narrative is Travel” Metaphor:Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence Kai Mikkonen (bio) The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp's classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero's departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint.1 Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of "the path of life" that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin's history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120). The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrative potential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial structures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, encounters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure that raises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasiveness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental development as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative. [End Page 286] The question of the relation between travel and narrative is indeed large and complex. Here I will work from a narrower conception of narrative as travel (or as travel writing) so as to investigate the motivation behind the metaphor and to focus specifically on the question of the relation between narrative consecutiveness and consequence. I will develop the ideas of consecutiveness and consequence around two specific generic features and expectations of travel narratives. On the one hand, travel experience and travel writing presuppose the sense of a consecution of places, and events happening in particular places. The travel concept, and especially the journey plot pattern, manifests a specific model of temporality and causality—travel entails the arrangement of points of actuality in temporal order. On the other hand, the notion of travel is prone to give identity and narrativity to a series of events since it "humanizes" the experience of time and space. A travel story is dependent on the projection and experience of a world from a particular perspective, a person or a group of people moving through space in a given time, enabling thus the treatment of space as a stage for possible narrative action. Narrative progress, therefore, is intimately related to, even if does not always equal, the representation of the traveler's experience of space and time. My analysis has three goals: (1) to highlight the significance and some of the limitations of the metaphor of travel in narrative theory and textual analysis; (2) to rethink some of the identifying traits and expectations of travel writing through concepts of temporality, causality, and narrative experientiality as they are developed in narrative theory; (3) to extend cognitive-linguistic research on metaphors into the specifics of narrative form, specifically the issue of the relation between consecutiveness and consequence in travel narratives. In order to illustrate these theoretical points, I will toward the end of the essay offer an analysis of Graham Greene's travel narrative Journey Without Maps (1936). Greene's narrative is particularly pertinent to the questions raised here since it foregrounds the relationship between consecutiveness and consequence by questioning the meaning of maps and by projecting a narrative voice concerned with the issue of how to narrativize the flow of travel experience in the...

Traces of Power: Recent Books on Women in Antiquity

Traces of Power:Recent Books on Women in Antiquity Laura McClure (bio) Philippe Borgeaud . Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary. Trans. Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xix + 186 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7985-X (cl). Susan Guettel Cole . Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv + 292 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-520-23544-4 (cl). Barbara Goff . Citizen Bacchae: Women's Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiii + 400 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-23998-9 (cl). Diane Kleiner . Cleopatra and Rome. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. 340 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-01905-9 (cl). These four ambitious books provide welcome new perspectives on the lives of ancient women, the spaces they inhabited, and the ways in which they influenced their societies. Although long a commonplace of classical scholarship that religion provided the primary access to power for ancient women, scant attention has been paid to the subject. All of these books address some aspect of gender and religion, from the ritual activities of women in ancient Greece, to the evolution of a maternal divinity in pagan religions and her translation to Christianity, and to the profound impact of a deified Egyptian queen on Roman culture. In Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space, Susan Guettel Cole explores the intersection of gender and ritual practice in ancient Greece, with close attention to the epigraphical evidence. Meticulously researched, the book weaves together a broad range of evidence, from inscriptions, literary and medical texts, to archaeological remains. What emerges is a complex picture of the organization of ritual space in ancient Greece and the ways it structured political communities. Cole begins by exploring three related and coextensive landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined. In Greece, the division of space always had political implications, and stories about the organization of space and the natural landscape were often "infused with gender." Early Greek epics, such as Hesiod's Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, contain [End Page 184] numerous geographical narratives that "locate the individual community in its landscape and connect it to mythic representations of the larger universe" (21). Such narratives also reflected human categories and social hierarchies: for instance, fixed locations, like the hearth, were associated in the Greek imagination with the female. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the ancient Greeks delimited the human from the divine. Injunctions against washing in a woman's bathwater, setting a boy on a grave, or eating from an unconsecrated pot, illustrate the profound need to separate human physical processes from the divine. Directed to an exclusively male audience, they also show the importance of delineating male from female. The inability to maintain these boundaries could infect the entire political community with pollution, thus requiring constant maintenance through the symbolic marking of perimeters and the repetition of ritual. In chapter 3, Cole considers the form and function of regional sanctuaries. These helped to merge autonomous cities—separated by geography and fiercely independent political structures—into a unified culture of shared traditions. The gods worshipped at these sites—Zeus at Olympia and Apollo at Delphi—promoted the universal recognition of divine laws. Apollo in particular was invested with a judicial authority that transcended political and territorial boundaries, supporting the "process by which cities made decisions and protected citizens from capricious leaders" (73). The fact that his sanctuary at Delphi marked the imaginary center of the world attests to the god's universality. Just as Delphi provided a sacred center that unified separate city-states into a culture of shared traditions and common laws, so, too, each city-state itself was organized around the prytaneion, "a space . . . both sacred and political" (80) that enclosed its common hearth and sacred fire and forged male solidarity and community. Chapter 4 elucidates the gender asymmetries entailed in ritual practice. Because the ancient Greeks worshipped in groups, gender often came into play in ritual contexts. Although it was less common for men and women to participate in shared rituals, there was no single formula for determining ritual constituency. Rituals connected with the body, especially...

Blood for the Dead: Homeric Ghosts Speak up

But merely 'approaching' the blood is not enough. After Tiresias departs, Odysseus waits until his mother 'came forward and drank the dark blood' (152-3). Only upon imbibing does Anticleia recognize and speak to her son. So what, exactly, is the function of the sacrificial blood? Does the ghostly imbibing enable the Homeric dead to regain some form of consciousness, or does it allow the shades to speak intelligibly with the living? Or both? Does this rule always apply, or only in certain circumstances or with specific individuals? The Homeric picture of the dead is notoriously complex, ambiguous, and even contradictory. Indeed, the fate itself of the dead is variously depicted in the epics with several alternatives to the predominant shadowy world of the dead of Odyssey 11. In addition to the uncomfortable double post-mortem life of Heracles at Od. 11 .601-626, one learns of alternative afterlives provided or offered to Ganymede (II. 20.231-5), Menelaus (Od. 4.561-9; cf. Calypso's offer of immortality to Odysseus, 5.206-10, 23.336), Leucothea (Od. 5.333-5), Castor and Polydeuces (Od. 11.299-304), and Cleitus (Od. 15.250-1). Things are even more manifold once one considers other early Greek epics (see below on Achilles). A familiar critical approach to such contradictions surrounding the Homeric dead has been to try to separate out the various strands of thought into chronological layers, to attempt to tease out the development of Greek beliefs about death and dying from the Mycenaean through the Archaic Age.' Take the notorious issue of witless shades, for example. Circe tells Odysseus that Tiresias is the one

Minor Angels: Toward an Aesthetics of Conflict

If, some time in the future, a literary critic or a cultural anthropologist were to conduct a survey of literature from its beginnings up until the end of the twentieth century, that scholar would realize that representations of violence and conflict feature prominently across periods, traditions and genres. She or he would then come to the realization that it the war narrative, from Greek epics to historiographic metafictions, that has most significantly contributed to the popularization of violence in literature. If this critic were to pursue his or her inquiries further, and attempted to catalogue works that address the related issues of conflictual violence and war, he or she would have to include, among many: Agrippa d'Aubign6 (Les tragiques), Rabelais (Pantagruel, Gargantua), Voltaire (Candide), Victor Hugo (Les orientales, La ldgende des sikcles), Gustave Flaubert (Salammbo), Maupassant (Boule de suif), Zola (La debacle), Malraux (Les conquierants), Sartre (Les mains sales), Patrick Modiano (La place de l'Ptoile), and Jean Rouaud (Les champs d'honneur). In an addendum to this prestigious list, our critic would then list a somewhat less-known writer who went by the pen-name of Antoine Volodine. Having added Volodine's name to the footnotes of his or her magnum opus, and sent the final manuscript to the publisher, our critic would think no more of it, and go on to pursue other lofty academic projects. A few days later, a commando of anonymous radicals would seize the manuscript, drown the unsuspecting editor in his own blood, and finally set our unsuspecting critic on fire with the pages of his or her book. At this point, you will have guessed that, for Antoine Volodine, literature is a serious business, and that, like Prometheus, one always gets burned when one plays with fire. Antoine Volodine does not write about the war-related calamities that

TheIliad, theOdysseyand their audiences

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 fromanyworld 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.

Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικού δημοτικού τραγουδιού (review)

Reviews 305 Greek, and questionnaires (for which no information is given about the respondents and which in no way produce statistically significant results). Despite the author's elaborate justification, one could seriously object to the use of decontextualized constructions to study "language in its social context." For this reason, the book's strength lies not so much in any rigorous sociolinguistic approach as in the wealth of material it unearths and in its useful insights into a series of phenomena whose study in Greek is still in its infancy. In its descriptive analysis, Sifianou's Politeness PL·nomena in Engend and Greece covers the areas of pragmatics and everyday usage that are known to be most demanding and most useful to the foreign learner, the translator, and the linguist. In addition, it emphasizes the need for further research on social aspects of Greek on the basis of pragmatic principles and contextual information. The informed theoretical discussion and the range of evidence from Greek (especially in chapter 7) are an invaluable contribution not only to Modern Greek linguistics but also to research on politeness from a crosscultural perspective. This contribution is especially welcome as an attempt to improve cross-cultural understanding at a time when nationalistic sentiments are resurfacing so ominously. Dionysis Goutsos University of Birmingham G. M. Sifákis. Γ. M. Σηφάκης, Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικοϕ δημοτικοϕ τϕαγουδιοϕ. Iráklio: Panepistimiakés Ekdósis KrÃ-tis. 1988. Pp. 236. Gregory Sifákis makes substantial progress "towards a poetics of modern Greek folk song" by harnessing the potential of oral-compositional theory more fully than any previous effort, as well as by marshaling selected elements of semiotic and linguistic theory for his purpose. This progress is all the more commendable when viewed in the context of the slow response in Greece to the rampant growth of oral-composition theory over half a century—a slowness that is paradoxical because it was from work on ancient Greek epics in the late 1920s by Milman Parry that the study of the purportedly universal phenomenon of oral-formulaic composition spread to a host of other medieval and modern literatures and waxed to the point of claiming the status of a whole new discipline, and because Homer has remained the standard analogue for modern oral poetry ever since. It is not that the Homer/folk song nexus had escaped notice in Greece, but rather that folklorists were preoccupied with exploiting the Homeric qualities of modern texts for other purposes, as revealed, for example, in the sub-title of I. E. Tsouderos's slim volume Όμοια καιπαϕάλληλαφϕαστικάσυστήματασταομηϕικάÎ-πηκαιστονεοελληνικό δημοτικότϕαγοϕδι:τασωστάκϕιτήϕιατηςγνησιότηταςτωννεοελληνικών δημοτικών τϕαγουδιών (Athens, 1976). More sophisticated investigators of 306 Reviews this nexus mentioned by Sifákis (pp. 137, 203) also refrained from pursuing formula analysis, and one might speculate that perhaps the use of South Slavic epic by Parry and A. B. Lord as the modern point of comparison for Homer dampened enthusiasm for their method and findings among exponents of the traditionally nationalistic discipline of laografÃ-a in Greece, while the perception that Parry's emphasis on tradition detracted from The Poet's originality and artistry (which earned Parry the label of "the Darwin of Homeric studies" in the West) would not have endeared him to Greeks who might otherwise have been pleased to argue for continuity from ancient to modern poetic technique. On the other hand, throughout his book Sifákis takes up the challenge of refuting the facile assumption that tradition and creativity are mutually exclusive. Whatever the reasons, just ten years before the publication of Sifákis's book, Alki KyriakÃ-du-Néstoros could report that Milman Parry's oral-formulaic theory had made no impact to date on the θεωϕία της ελληνικής λαογϕαφίας, which formed the title of her book (Thessaloniki, 1978, p.174). It seems that the efforts of overseas scholars including Morgan, Trypanis, Jeffreys, Alexiou, A. B. Lord himself, and especially James Notopoulos, who had tried valiantly in the 1950s to replicate Parry's and Lord's "Yugoslav laboratory" in Greece, failed to arouse much local interest. But the momentum was not lost, and it was not much longer before Roderick Beaton's Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980) substantially inaugurated, among other innovations, the Parry-Lord approach to Modern Greek folk song. Not that his...

Comparative Fluidity of French and Greek Epics

Comparative Fluidity of French and Greek Epics