Homeric Epics Research Articles

Kin-Groups in the Homeric Epics

Nineteenth-century theories about the progression of primitive societies (including the Greeks) from a "social organization" made up of small kinship units (clans) and tribes to the "political organization" of the city-state were fundamentally disproved by the demonstration, in the 1970s, that the historical subdivisions of the polis were not derived from clans, phratries, and tribes, as anthropologists defined them, but were new groups that served new purposes. Walter Donlan's paper reexamines the reasons why evidence of supra-familial groups is negligible in the Homeric epics, although at the poet's time they must have existed, and what use the epic poet makes of concepts such as genos/geneē and phrētrē.

Which Letter? Text and Subtext in Ovid's Heroides

The source texts for Ovid's Heroides often contain precedents for his heroines as message senders at moments in their tradition especially ripe for elegiac refashioning. The first part of this paper suggests that the disputed first word of Heroides 1, a hanc with no apparent referent, signals Penelope's penchant for composing messages, both in Ovid's elegiac letter and in Homer's epic, and functions as a programmatic opening to the collection. The second part more briefly treats letters 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 13 to show how their authors' previous mythographical correspondence also provides points of origin for the Heroides.

Prevajanje iz klasičnih jezikov v 2. polovici 19. stoletja

Pred letom 1850 je bilo prevajanje iz klasičnih jezikov na Slovenskem še povsem v povojih; prevajalcev s filološko izobrazbo ni bilo, le občasno so izšli prevodi krajših del (največkrat pesmi ali izbori iz kakega antičnega avtorja). Prve obsežnejše prevode in prve knjižne izdaje prevodov del antičnih piscev smo Slovenci začeli dobivati šele v 2. polovici 19. stoletja.

Greek mythology: the eye, ophthalmology, eye disease, and blindness

Background: In distant eras, mythology was a form of expression used by many peoples. A study of the Greek myths reveals concealed medical knowledge, in many cases relating to the eye.Methods: An analysis was made of the ancient Greek texts for mythological references relating to an understanding of vision, visual abilities, the eye, its congenital and acquired abnormalities, blindness, and eye injuries and their treatment.Results: The Homeric epics contain anatomical descriptions of the eyes and the orbits, and an elementary knowledge of physiology is also apparent. The concept of the visual field can be seen in the myth of Argos Panoptes. Many myths describe external eye disease (‘knyzosis’), visual disorders (amaurosis), and cases of blinding that, depending on the story, are ascribed to various causes. In addition, ocular motility abnormalities, congenital anomalies (cyclopia), injuries, and special treatments, such as the ‘licking’ method, are mentioned.Interpretation: The study of mythological references to the eye reveals reliable medical observations of the ancient Greeks, which are concealed within the myths.

Matricidal Madness in Foucault's Anthropology: The Pierre Rivière Seminar

I consider how Michel Foucault avoids trauma and tragedy while emphasizing power and discourse in his study of a 19th‐century matricide in the Normandy countryside. Drawing on Jonathan Lear's discussion of knowingness, I show how Foucault misreads tragic drama as well as psychoanalysis to emphasize power, pleasure, and discourse. While seeming to acknowledge tragedy, his emphasis on will to power, violent madness, and male agonism more closely resembles Homeric epic. The attempts to displace psychoanalysis and refigure tragedy, however, are unconvincing, even self‐defeating. Ironically, Foucault makes an inadvertent argument for psychoanalysis and tragedy and, thus, psychoanalytic anthropology.

Reading The Gunfighter as Homeric Epic

This paper examines the progress of the warrior's glory and his homecoming through a comparison of Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950) and Homer's eighth century BCE Iliad and Odyssey. It explores the themes of the hero's cunning, the destination, homecoming, and reunion in the Odyssey and his being condemned to glory, his self-recognition, and the roles of irony and fate in the Iliad. This is a tale about the gunfighter as warrior, the hero who desires honor, receives it through gifts, and ends in achieving glory through those gifts. It is a tale of discovery through self-recognition that ends in the repudiation of that glory so dearly won. It is a tale of the hero's realization as he turns homeward from the wars and inward, away from the externals that glory represents, to discover that his humanity lies in the importance to him of family.

A Software Commentary on Homeric Epic Poetry

A Software Commentary on Homeric Epic Poetry

Perguntar-se pela escrita da história

Não se alcança o específico da escrita da história por subtração do que não lhe seria próprio senão por comparação com o discurso que, desde os gregos, lhe é próximo: o discurso literário. Assim não se pode compreender a narrativa de Heródoto e Tucídides sem a proximidade da épica homérica e, contudo, elas pertencem a campos discursivos diversos porque são diversos seus eixos de orientação. Tal compreensão era e é dificultada pela carência teórica que os cerca. A concepção moderna de história mantém a insuficiência epistemológica constatada nos antigos. O artigo quer mostrar, que, ao não ser acompanhada de uma indagação epistemológica suficiente, a antiga distinção entre res facta e res ficta não permite o entendimento suficiente de suas proximidades e diferenças. História e literatura são discursos que não se confundem, mas não porque um fale a verdade e o outro seja fantasioso. Ambos os campos são prejudicados pela carência que, no Ocidente, acompanha as suas práticas.

Divine justice and cosmic order in early Greek Epic

AbstractThis article examines the ethical and theological universe of the Homeric epics, and shows that the patterns of human and divine justice which they deploy are also to be found throughout the wider corpus of early Greek hexameter poetry. Although most scholars continue to stress the differences between theIliadandOdysseywith regard to divine justice, these come not (as is often alleged) from any change in the gods themselves but from theOdyssey'speculiar narrative structure, with its focus on one hero and his main divine patron and foe. Indeed, the action of theIliadembodies a system of norms and punishments that is no different from that of theOdyssey. Values such as justice are shown to be socially constituted in each epic on both the divine and human planes, and each level, it is argued, displays not only a hierarchy of power (and the resulting tensions), but also a structure of authority. In addition, the presentation of the gods in the wider hexameter corpus of Hesiod, the Epic Cycle and the Homeric Hymns is analysed, revealing a remarkably coherent tradition in which the possibility of divine conflict is combined with an underlying cosmic order. Finally, consideration of Near Eastern myths relating cosmic order to justice brings out the distinctiveness of the Greek system as a whole and, in particular, of the way it uses the divine society under Zeus's authority as a comprehensive explanatory model of the world.

Surgery in the Graeco-Roman era

In the Graeco-Roman era medical treatment characteristically consisted of regimen (diet and a healthy lifestyle), medicaments and surgery – the latter being reserved for those cases in which regimen and medicaments had failed. Evidence of primitive surgery dates back to the Bronze Age, and the Homeric epics describe surgical treatment of war wounds with frequent intervention of the gods. With the arrival of empiric medicine in the 5th century BC, surgery featured prominently in the Hippocratic Corpus by way of excellent contributions on head and orthopaedic surgery in particular. Alexandrian medicine (late 4th century) facilitated surgical development through the knowledge of anatomy and physiology gained from human dissection. Greek medicine brought a much improved standard of surgery to the Roman era (2nd century BC). Physicians were still expected to be proficient in all three modalities of medical practice (above), but surgery was now held in higher regard and specialisation in fields such as eye diseases, obstetrics and women’s diseases, bladder ailments, mouth and throat surgery developed. Military medicine, well organised in Roman times, brought experience in trauma surgery, and procedures penetrating the abdomen and thoracic cavities were no longer uniformly fatal. Veterinary surgery came into being. The first significant surgical textbook after the Hippocratic Corpus was compiled by Celsus in the 1st century AD. From the 3rd century onwards surgery stagnated and the scientific language gradually changed from Greek to Latin. The surgical expertise of the era was carried into the Middle Ages and later predominantly by Islamic physicians.

Neoanalysis, Orality, and Intertextuality: An Examination of Homeric Motif Transference

Neoanalysis, Orality, and Intertextuality: An Examination of Homeric Motif Transference Jonathan Burgess University of Toronto As with other schools of thought in Homeric research, neoanalysis has experienced experimentation and change. 1 Neoanalysts have slowly become aware of points of contact between their methodology and an oralist approach, and recently some oralists have enthusiastically accepted the compatibility of the two schools of thought. Intertextual theory can also provide much insight into the phenomena uncovered by neoanalysis, particularly motif transference. A central concept in neoanalyst methodology, motif transference involves the use of non-Homeric motifs within Homeric poetry. Neoanalysts have persuasively identified examples of motif transference, but their explanation of its mechanics and significance has been lacking. An oralist perspective modifies our understanding of how motif transference is produced and received, and intertextual theory can help explain the possible significance of Homeric reflection of non-Homeric material. Three levels of narrative are posited for this examination: A) cyclic myth, B) cyclic epic, and C) Homeric epic. Level B (cyclic epic) is an epic version of Level A (cyclic myth). 2 Level C (Homeric epic) exists as a self-conscious [End Page 148] extension of Level A (cyclic myth) and Level B (cyclic epic). Levels B/C (cyclic/Homeric epic) are both manifestations of level A (mythological traditions) that share the same form (long narrative in dactylic hexameter), but Level C (Homeric epic) is a more complex manifestation. While Level B (cyclic epic) presents the narrative in Level A (cylic myth) directly, Level C (Homeric epic) plays off "cyclic" myth and epic in an allusive manner. In the sense that Level C (Homeric epic) employs Level A (mythological traditions) and Level B (cyclic epic) in order to implement its full meaning, we might say that Homeric epic is "metacyclic." 3 Homeric poetry is commonly portrayed as an overwhelming replacement of pre-Homeric tradition, but it is instead a respectful and dependent outgrowth of earlier myth and epic. The traditions from which the Iliad and Odyssey stem are both assumed and appreciated by Homeric poetics. Motif transference is the transposition of motifs from elsewhere into a Homeric context; the Homeric manifestation of the motif should be recognizably derivative and therefore considered secondary. In my analysis motif transference is not a passive accumulation of influences but an active narratological tool that evokes Trojan war material. Correspondence between Trojan war motifs and their secondary manifestations within the Homeric poems will therefore have implications in terms of meaning. For an audience informed about traditional Greek myth, the secondary Homeric motif will evoke the non-Homeric context, functioning as a subtle yet powerful allusive device. Motif transference so defined would appear to be a distinctive aspect of Homeric poetics. But it is not unrelated to typology and repetition in oral poetry, and it is comparable to such poetic phenomena as mythological exempla, or paradigms. Homeric motif transference is therefore an example of how Homeric technique extends oral poetics yet is not independent of it. [End Page 149] Neoanalysis Neoanalysis is a methodology that employs analyst technique in pursuit of a unitarian interpretation of the Iliad. It assumes the influence of pre-Homeric material on Homeric poetry and attempts to discover indications of this influence within Homeric poetry. Trojan war episodes that fall outside the narrative boundaries of the Homeric poems have usually interested neoanalysts, especially material concerning the death of Achilles. The Iliad and Odyssey directly refer to many events in course of the war, but it is the inexplicit reflection of these events that has been explored in neoanalysis. As a source for the pre-Homeric tradition of the Trojan war, neoanalysts have primarily used the Epic Cycle. Though the poems of the Cycle are now lost, what we know of them provides important information about the tradition of the Trojan war. Reconstruction of the cyclic tradition can be difficult, and using it as an indication of the pre-Homeric tradition has been controversial. But it is revealing that early Greek artists reflected...

Intertextualizing Polyphemus: Politics and Ideology in Walcott's Odyssey

whole course of imitations and adaptations is simply a method of apprenticeship. --Derek Walcott, interview given in 1977 idea of art has no tense apart from the present. Dante, for a poet, is. That is related to the same idea that God is. God doesn't have a past or future And art does not have a past or future tense. --Derek Walcott, remarks before the reading of his poem Sea Is History Three years after the publication of Omeros and with his repeated denials that he was rewriting Homer still echoing, Derek Walcott returned to Homer, this time adapting the Odyssey into a drama which, by retaining the title of its epic antecedent, dispelled any lingering doubts as to its classical source. (1) But while Omeros has already attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, Odyssey has lagged behind, despite that over a decade has elapsed since its publication. (2) Existing studies of the play provide a rapid overview of its scenes, drawing along the way some good but undeveloped connections with the Homeric precedent and commenting in passing on its medium, language, and cultural context. (3) Such haste is perhaps inevitable, given not only the thematic richness of Walcott's work and its multilayered allusions to Homer, but also the relatively small size of the studies themselves. In this paper, I shall attempt to remedy this haste by examining only one episode, Odysseus's adventure with the Cyclops, from the point of view of its use of time, space, and characters. The restricted scope of my interpretation will permit a detailed analysis of one fully realized and thematically independent dramatic incident as it reveals some of Walcott's core ideological stances, which may then be fruitfully explored in the rest of the play. While the focus of my attention will be on Walcott's rendering of the adventure, I shall draw comparisons throughout between the play's depiction of the episode and that of its epic antecedent. The essentially performative nature of both the Walcottian and the Homeric media invests the parameters of my study with special significance, as time, space, and characters constitute the necessary ingredients of performance. Of course, both works have by now become texts: Homer's Odyssey has ceased being an oral poem since it was written down, and Walcott's play, although still performable, must lamentably be for most a reading pleasure. (4) And yet for all their textuality, their status as species of performative poetry remains: both were created in order to be enacted before an audience, recording events firmly situated in time and place and populated by characters. It might then be useful to linger briefly on the nature and extent of the kinship between Homeric performance and Caribbean theater, as well as to offer a brief overview of Walcott's Odyssey, before I clarify further my objectives. While modern epic poems are received on the printed page or perhaps through public readings, the Homeric epics were performed. Both the rhapsoidoi, who recited the creations of the aoidoi (the singers), and the deliverers of speeches within the epics are social actors, addressing an audience, the judges of their performance. (5) The long oral tradition, of which Homer is part, supplies the epic poems with mostly formulaic material which, however, is not merely repeated, as oralists tend to argue, but is re-created and transformed during verbal transmission over time. (6) Although the exact parameters of the Homeric oral culture are forever lost to us, the presence and importance of the audience, a key component of the essentially performative nature of the epic, can be glimpsed from within the texts themselves: both the Iliad and the Odyssey include many instances of speakers engaged in public speech acts, and the putative effects of those acts on the audience inform the content of the speeches and the discursive modes deployed in them. Similarly, West Indian theater has been deeply influenced not only by the rich oral tradition of the area but also by the imaginative worlds of legends, myths, and folktales it has inherited. …

The "Odyssey" Cassone Panels from the Lanckoroński Collection: On the Origins of Depicting Homer's Epic in the Art of the Italian Renaissance

It is difficult to remember today that the Odyssey was translated into Latin and thus became an important element of Western civilisation as late as on the eve of the age of the Renaissance. In the middle of the 15th century in Florence, Apollonio di Giovanni produced the earliest narrative illustrations of Homer's epic in post-antique art. They adorn four long panels on wood which originally constituted the fronts of cassoni or marriage chests; two of them, once in the collection of Count Karol Lanckoronski in Vienna, have, since October 1994, belonged to the Royal Castle in Krakow. Despite their notable artistic qualities and the fact that they provide the most complete depiction of the adventures of Ulysses in early-Renaissance art, the Lanckoronski Odyssey panels have never been the subject of a separate study. The present paper seeks to fill this gap; it investigates Apollonio's literary sources, the models for the numerous scenes he depicted, and the context in which his Odyssey panels were produced. Furthermore it answers the question: What could have been the message being conveyed to the newly weds by the panels in question? Thus this paper is also a contribution to the research on Apollonio di Giovanni's connections with humanism and also 15th-century archaeology.

Offrandes orientales de prestige et notion d’archaïsme à la haute époque archaïque

Abstract–. Since the research done by Louis Gernet, we know that objects carry some further values than just material and technical qualities. Archaeological remains, and particularly prestigious items, convey symbolic speeches depending on the archaeological context. During the Archaic period, some prestigious offerings dedicated in Greek sanctuaries recall, by their real or symbolic use, the archaic elite way of life. Some of these artefacts were displayed in the Homeric epics, a poetry used as The Reference to the Past, all along Antiquity. Thus, those dedications carried the values of “ archaism”. Among them, oriental offerings were, because of their origin, the most prestigious and valuable. Those items evoked the main activities of the elite living in archaic cities, such as war, banquet and hospitality, political power. The change of space and use – from movable objects to dedications erected in sanctuaries – increased some of their value, but it implied a modification of their function while still keeping the memory of an old time : this allusion to the Past reinforced in a new context their prestige which reflected also on the people who offered them. Moreover, these “ archaic” artefacts received new values and sometimes new uses due to their ancient prestigious functions. These objects described in the epics were manipulated by those who had the power : they were carrying ideas of prestige in sanctuaries, but with different modality involving new strategy from the dedicators.

The Heroic Image of the Warrior in the First World War

The heroic tradition of the warrior in the Western military tradition begins with Homer. In his epic on the Trojan War the centrepiece of battle is the personal conflicts between heroes of noble or semi-divine stature-Achilles, Paris, Menelaos. It goes without saying that Homer's epic is not an accurate representation of warfare even in the Ancient Greek Dark Age. Yet the myth of the warrior and the martial virtues as determinants in battle has endured.

Convention Versus Realism in the Homeric Epics

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.

Alternate Worlds in Homeric Epic

Alternate Worlds in Homeric Epic

Proxemic and Chronemic in Homeric Epic: Time and Space in Heroic Social Interaction

Proxemic and Chronemic in Homeric Epic: Time and Space in Heroic Social Interaction

Spenser, Homer, and the Mythography of Strife*

AbstractThis article examines a central narrative and ethical motif of Edmund Spenser’sFaerie Queene —the golden chain—in the context of Spenser’s broader debts to Homeric epic. While largely neglected in favor of more immediate sources, such as Virgil’sAeneidand Tasso’sGerusalemme Liberata, the influence of Homer’sIliadandOdysseyis profoundly felt in Spenser’s mythography of strife. In its representation of the consequences of cosmological and spiritual strife,The Faerie Queenerealizes the classical and late antique allegorical tradition of interpreting Homeric epic as illustrative of the doctrines of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Empedocles. Its moral landscape structured according to the oppositional yet complementary forces of love and strife, Spenser’s epic enacts the Homeric-Empedoclean epic of the allegorists so as to offer its own etiology of discord, one sympathetic with, but also distinct from, that of Homer.

The source and the structure of Homer's epic poetry

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.