Homeric Language Research Articles

Neoplatonic and Gnostic Resonances in the Martyrdom of Cyprian of Athenais Eudocia

Aelia Eudocia Augusta (formerly Athenais), wife of the emperor Theodosius II, lives at the borderline between the ancient and the Christian world and writes one of the most distinctive poetic texts of Byzantine literature. In the Martyrdom of Cyprian, written in Homeric language, the Saint's past, when he was a magician and initiated into a multitude of Greek mysteries, is presented in an original and remarkable way. Within this text, the resonance of philosophical ideas originating from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism is of particular interest. This article attempts to highlight these resonances in order to open a research dialogue regarding the complex network of ideas and the coexistence of different worldviews in early Byzantium.

Computational authorship analysis of the homeric poems

Natural language modeling is used to predict or generate the next word or character of modern languages. Furthermore, statistical character-based language models have been found useful in authorship attribution analyses by studying the linguistic proximity of excerpts unknown to the model. In prior work, we modeled Homeric language and provided empirical findings regarding the authorship nature of the 48 Iliad and Odyssey books. Following this line of work, and considering the current philological views and trends, we break down the two poems further into smaller portions. By employing language modeling we identify outlying passages, indicating reduced linguistic affinity with the main body of the two works and, by extension, potentially different authorship. Our results show that some of the passages isolated as outliers by the language models were also identified as such by human researchers. We further test our methodology and models on texts of similar language and genre created by other authors, namely Hesiod’s “Theogony” and “Work and Days”.

The Homeric Dependency Lexicon

Abstract This paper presents the Homeric Dependency Lexicon (HoDeL), a new resource with a user-friendly interface facilitating the study of Homeric verbs and dependents. HoDeL was induced from the analytical layer of AGDT 2.0, extracting all dependents tagged as SBJ, OBJ, PNOM, and OCOMP with a set of SQL queries. The paper illustrates HoDeL functionalities and shows how they can be employed by researchers to answer specific research questions about the Homeric language. Introducing the uses of HoDeL offers the opportunity to reexamine some crucial, though frequently underestimated, methodological challenges concerning annotated corpora and resources derived from them that relate to the linguistic theories underlying annotations and error propagation. It is argued that the careful documentation of how linguistic resources were created, what data they contain, and how they can be queried through their dedicated interfaces is essential to lay the groundwork for users’ investigations.

Linzensoep met odeklonje

Summary This paper offers a new reading of the longest extant fragment of Hegemon of Thasos’ parodies (fragment 1 Brandt) in the context of Greek parodic literature and ancient conceptions of literary propriety (τὸ πρέπον or decorum). After a brief overview of Hegemon’s life and works and an introduction to the ancient term παρῳδία and the history of Greek parodic literature, the paper suggests that the incongruity between elevated style and lowly subject matter is the most salient feature of ancient parody. This contrast between form and content, it argues, is at odds with ancient norms of literary propriety, which prescribed that manner and matter should form a harmonious unity. Throughout Greco-Roman history, parodic texts overtly play with their incongruity by finding various ways of denying accusations of transgression. Hegemon’s fragment 1 is perhaps the earliest instance of a parodist grappling with the issue of literary propriety. The paper shows how in Hegemon’s epic, Homeric language contrasts with the iambic (or iambos-like) content of his poem; how the poet authorizes his parodic transgressions of genre through the divine permission of Athena; and how he invokes his nickname, ‘Lentil Soup’, to argue that παρῳδία is the most suitable genre possible for him.

The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Reviewed by: The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer Carolyn Higbie Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 265. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-062631-0. Rosenmeyer focuses on the statue in Egyptian Thebes identified as the colossus of Memnon and surveys ancient visitors' reactions to it, in particular the call that it often made to its mother Eos (Dawn) in the morning. Her book falls into three sections. Chapters 1-3 give background, and discuss the identities of the visitors and inscriptions that they leave on the colossus. Chapters 4-5 focus on two subsets of the inscriptions: those that reflect the Homeric Memnon and those linked to Sappho. In chapter 6 reactions of German and English Romantic poets to Memnon and to the statue known as Ozymandias are surveyed. The book concludes with three appendices: diagrams of the inscriptions on the colossus; the text and translation of the inscriptions; and an index of the relevant names. Bibliography and an index follow. Chapter 1 opens with Richard Pococke's description of the two colossi at Thebes, then quotes the earliest and latest datable ancient inscriptions on Memnon—by Servius Clemens, who wrote in Latin c. 20 ce, and Falernus, who composed elegiac couplets in Greek c. 205 ce. Within this 200-year span, 108 inscriptions recorded visits of over 90 visitors—centurions, prefects, strategoi; prefects' wives, women in Hadrian's circle (including his wife); sophists and poets. The nature of these visits to the colossus is the subject of chapter 2, in which Rosenmeyer joins the debate about travel to sanctuaries in the Roman empire: was it primarily religious, for sightseeing, or scholarly? After she summarizes the scholarship, she examines the language that the inscribers use to record their reactions to hearing Memnon's cry. She concludes that their motivations [End Page 113] are "mixed: those of both a tourist and a worshipper, both an intellectual curiosity-seeker and someone eager to hear the voice of the divine" (75). Chapter 3 studies two rhetorical devices found in the inscriptions: apostrophe and prosopopeia. Both reflect visitors' desire to present their experience of hearing the noise made by the colossus as a conversation. Sometimes they hear Memnon's cry to his mother, then they address the statue. Sometimes they tell Memnon that they have come to hear him call to Eos, although it has required repeated visits. In chapter 4 Rosenmeyer summarizes much of the recent interest in the afterlife of the Troy tale and shows how many of these inscriptions fit the patterns that others have recently analyzed. Although visitors to the colossus accepted the identification as Memnon, they don't seem to have done anything new in their poetry—they use Homeric language, sometimes compose in dactylic hexameter, and demonstrate their knowledge of Memnon's fate. Chapter 5, on poetesses, particularly Balbilla, and their poems that reflect Sappho, has a similar starting point, Greek and Roman interest in an earlier poet. Because there has been much less work done on ancient fascination with Sappho, Rosenmeyer has more of her own to contribute. She distinguishes between responses to Sappho as a poetess and Sappho as a lesbian, and after examining what could be identified as archaizing and/or Aeolic about Balbilla's verses, concludes that the latter wishes to be regarded as a poet in the tradition of Sappho. Chapter 6 begins with the silencing of Memnon, then examines a selection of Romantic poetry devoted to the colossus, linked to the classical inscriptions through their use of prosopopeia. Rosenmeyer describes the rediscovery of the statue and provides glimpses of western European reactions of poets who did not—unlike their ancient counterparts—visit Thebes: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Klingemann, Mayrhofer. Shelley's Ozymandias concludes the modern survey. Rosenmeyer shows us another manifestation of ancient fascination with the Homeric past and demonstrates how broadly across society and time that interest spread. Her quick glance at the nineteenth century reveals more recent uses of the Homeric world. I would have enjoyed more discussion about the seemingly unquestioned...

Christopher Logue and the Iliad

Christopher Logue and the Iliad* CHARLES ROWAN BEYE Icame to the Greek text of the Iliad when I was in my late teens after an outing with Plato’s Apology and Homer’s Odyssey. I never looked back: ancient Greek literature became my undergraduate major, Homeric epic my graduate specialty, a narrative technique of the poet of the Iliad my dissertation topic. I had the singular pleasure of introducing students to the ancient Greek language for almost every one of the forty-two years that I taught. And in almost every one of those forty-two years I also taught them either an introduction to Homeric Greek using the Iliad as my text, or a course in Homeric epic in English translation, sometimes both when enthusiasm for classical antiquity reached a dramatic peak in the sixties. In the English language course, I used to fret over my choice of the translation of the text of the Iliad. Because I could read the poem in the Greek of Homer I was acutely sensitive to the intricate structure of the phraseology which formed the basis of the Homeric language. Nobody talked like Homer; the text of the Iliad and Odyssey is sui generis, a language created over centuries by professional singers of tales who composed, collaborated, transmitted over time and place, all manner of stories. Like hip-hop which nobody speaks, only far more intricate. Out of that there came down to us the Iliad and the Odyssey. This simple bald statement, like equally unequivocal statements about the nature of God, can set off the equivalent of religious wars among professional Homerists. So we shall *Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, Christopher Reid, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 352 pages. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 leave it. The point is that the language in which the Homeric texts are written, and probably originally sung, is a thing of intricate, exquisite, complex beauty, well worth the effort to learn, and laughably unlike anything to be found in the so called “translations” of Homer. That there are thousands of them—and more being turned out every day when the readership is dramatically, if not fatally, declining—is testament to what is instinct in anyone who becomes intimate with the Homeric language: dammit, I can turn this into something that will bring across the ancient Greek. It doesn’t happen, didn’t happen to Richmond Lattimore who so very carefully retained the repeated epithets, the repeated phraseology; he was the translator du jour of the 1950s, albeit for many readers the great classroom snooze. Robert Fitzgerald, the favorite of English professors in those days—his more cautious, his more “poetic,” effort certainly was not action-packed; and although things got better with Robert Fagles—nowadays the almost authorized text, if only because Bernard Knox’s introduction to it is like the Homeric seal of approval—reading page after page of those interminable battles is not pleasant. Recently, I introduced a small group of senior citizens to the Iliad in a refreshingly honest course where the students were not examined and had the option of reading the poem or a brief precis—nothing concentrates one’s attention like realizing your days are numbered. After a few weeks, one gentleman brought up the tedium of reading the Fagles translation in toto, pointing out that page after page produced such boredom as to be unendurable. “All too true,” I said, adding with the freedom and candor of someone retired from his job; “I just don’t think translations work.” Which brings me to Christopher Logue’s account of the Iliad. And behind him the miracle of his being prompted, quite unwillingly, into the whole enterprise. BBC producer D. S. Carne-Ross has gained his fifteen minutes of fame for convincing Logue to make an English language script for a BBC broadcast of Homer’s telling of the great scene when Achilles fights with the river god, Scamander. Logue’s hesitachristopher logue and the ILIAD 166 tion was because he read no Greek. The genius moment was when Carne-Ross said he would tell him the story line for line, word...

EURYKLEIA'S SILENCE AND ODYSSEUS’ ENORMITY: THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF ODYSSEUS’ TRIUMPHS

At his greatest moment of triumph, Odysseus demands holy silence. The hero who has more to say about himself than any other Homeric character, who boasts that his fame resounds up to heaven, quiets his most ardent accomplice, the old, faithful nurse Eurykleia, as she is about to shout in joy at his victory over the suitors. Why this uncharacteristic circumspection, this apparent humility? Reaching an answer to this question will take us through several important topics in the critical study of the Odyssey. We will find greater nuance to Odysseus’ ethics than are usually allowed; certain words and phrases have underappreciated layers of meaning that are brought out by paying attention to other contexts and parallel episodes in which they are used; focalization can be deliberately obscured; several of Odysseus’ greatest triumphs turn out to have an ironic cast. The broader conclusion my investigation leads to is that, behind the surface, positive interpretation of his character, Odysseus casts a darker shadow connoting a more sinister evaluation. Odysseus recognizes the possibility of such a negative interpretation when he silences both Eurykleia and the darker, alternative evaluation of his character that her reaction ironically signifies. This conclusion should lead us to revise a prominent (perhaps even the prevailing) view that the Odyssey is essentially a univocal text. This study might best be thought of as an experiment in seeing how far we can take the possibility of multiple, countervailing interpretations of Homeric language. If my reading is even partly persuasive, the Odyssey will come to seem more sophisticated and more disturbing than we might have thought.

ARISTARCHUS’ WORK IN PROGRESS: WHAT DID ARISTONICUS AND DIDYMUS READ OF ARISTARCHUS?

As is well known, the work of Aristarchus on Homer is not preserved by direct tradition. We have instead many fragments preserved mainly in the Homeric scholia, the Byzantine Etymologica and the Homeric commentaries by Eustathius of Thessalonica. These fragments go back to the so-called Viermännerkommentar (abbreviated VMK), the ‘commentary of the four men’, a commentary that is dated to the fifth-sixth century c.e. and collects the works of Aristonicus, Didymus, Nicanor and Herodian. In the first century b.c.e. Aristonicus explained the meaning of Aristarchus’ critical signs in a treatise called Περὶ τῶν σημείων τῶν τῆς ᾿Ιλιάδος καὶ ᾿Οδυσσείας, while in the Περὶ τῆς ᾿Αρισταρχείου διορθώσεως Didymus studied Aristarchus’ Homeric recension. In the second century c.e. two more scholars, Herodian and Nicanor, dealt with Aristarchus while analysing questions of prosody in the Homeric language (Herodian) or the punctuation of the Homeric text (Nicanor). Not all of these four ‘men’ are equally important, however, as sources for Aristarchus. In fact, Herodian and Nicanor had aims that were quite independent of Aristarchus’ enterprise: the former was concerned with problems of prosody, accentuation and aspiration in Homer, whereas the latter had developed a new system of punctuation to elucidate the Homeric text from a syntactic point of view. Although both Herodian and Nicanor did take an interest in Aristarchus, their focus was thus different from that of their Alexandrian predecessor. The goal of Aristonicus and Didymus, on the other hand, was specifically to reconstruct Aristarchus’ work on Homer; it is for this reason that they are considered the most trustworthy witnesses for Aristarchus’ fragments.

Greek Literature

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).

Twitter" en las notas de C.S. Peirce

For CSP (C.S.Peirce) the appearance of the printing press in the 16th-century means that Anglo-Saxon, a fundamentally phonetic written system, evolves into two radically different languages: written English with fixed spelling rules, and the spoken idiom depending on the idiosyncratic particularities of the speakers. Such spoken practices give way to the creative process of conversationalism. This article argues that CSP’s use of the term twitter must be understood in this context, as related to the “winged words” of Homeric language.

Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form

Let us trace a theme, but more than a theme, an enactment, of exile as it has come to inform recent work of J. M. Coetzee. Exile I mean not simply in political sense-the final decision to shake dust of [South Africa] off [his] feet, to seek a place where it is not yet properly shameful to be alive, in Australia (1)--but more intrinsically than that, insofar as it affects substance of his art, and very frame of his writing body. This is exile from one's body about which Paul Rayment thinks in Slow Man: is running down (53-54), unstrung in Homeric language. So it is with characters of Elizabeth Costello and JC, in their respective books, Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year persons taking regretful leave of their bodies. This sequence is a literature of leave- taking, a trilogy of novels in flight from homeland, from body, and from very comforts of novelistic form. Novels against novel. This is a kind of aesthetic exile that implies a deliberate self-distancing from necessity of formal finishing, given that what had characterized Coetzee's art up to Nobel ceremony was just this quality of laborious finishedness: spare prose and a spare, thrifty (Coetzee, Doubling 20), chiseled gauntness without any trace of flaccidity or unassimilated matter. Not so with this last trilogy, which suddenly, as with a weary shrug of shoulders, shows all seams and fissures, failures of integration, which would hitherto have been smoothed over in a determinate movement of formal resolution. It is a literature touched by death, and intimately so. Its style is, to be clear, a late style, as Adorno memorably described it apropos of Beethoven: The power of subjectivity in works of art is irascible gesture with which it takes leave of works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off appearance of art. Of works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, hand of master sets free masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to finite powerlessness of I confronted with Being, are its final work. (566) We read at start of Elizabeth Costello, after a brief description of eponymous character's attire and appearance: the blue costume, greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply particulars, allow significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe (4). That is an irascible gesture. You cannot simply call it metafiction and leave it at that. Characteristic of opening movements of this book, such discourse is more aggressively disenchanting and disappointing than that term allows. There is a scene in restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip (7) we read. It is not a good idea to interrupt narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which time and space of real world fade away, superseded by time and space of fiction. Breaking into dream draws attention to constructedness of story, and plays havoc with realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. (16) This passage is doing something more interesting than pacing track of postmodern metafiction; after all, as Coetzee has written, Anti-illusionism-displaying tricks you are using instead of hiding them-is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in end there is only so much mileage to be got out of ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in history of novel. The question is, what's next? …

Dating the <I>Homeric Hymn to Selene</I>: Evidence and Implications

On the basis of language and allusion, I argue that the Homeric Hymn to Selene (32) should be dated to the early-fifth century BCE or earlier. This runs counter to conventional wisdom, which places the hymn’s time of origin to the Hellenistic period or later. Such an early date of composition has serious implications for our understanding of the collection of the Homeric hymns as a whole. Hymn 32 has received little scholarly attention. The arguments of Allen, Halliday, and Sikes (1936) that it is late represent the scholarly consensus on the topic. Vocabulary (ἐνδιάονται, line 6, appears nowhere else before Theocritus), infelicities of style, and a “search after recondite mythology,” particularly the otherwise unknown figure of Pandeia, are the evidence they offer. Gelzer (1987) goes further, assigning this hymn, along with those to Ares (8) and Helios (31) to a distinct genre of “astral hymns” composed in the early imperial period. It is worth pointing out, however, that Gelzer assumes a late date for Selene rather than really arguing for one. Cassola (1975), who prefers an earlier date, levels this criticism against scholarship on Selene more broadly, arguing that none of the evidence cited makes a definitive case for Hellenistic authorship, and indeed that it points at least as strongly to an archaic date. Building on Cassola’s skepticism, I argue for an early date for the hymn. The strongly Hesiodic language of the hymn, difficult to understand in an imitator of Homeric texts, is one piece of evidence. In addition, there is the testimony of two intertexts: the phrase Μουσάων θeράποντeς appears at line 21 of the hymn and also at line 913 of Aristophanes’ Birds, where it is attributed to Homer; and the phrase γαῖαν ἑλίσσeται is found at Selene line 3 and in a fragment of Empedocles (45 D-K). The former, noted by Allen, Halliday, and Sikes, is not strong evidence on its own, since the reference could also be to the pseudo-Homeric Margites. The latter, previously unobserved, makes a more compelling case. The Empedocles fragment describes the moon as reflecting the light of the sun, adapting Homeric language to do so. Although the brevity of both hymn and fragment make it difficult to know who is alluding to whom, I argue that Empedocles’ language suggests he is rebutting the argument of another source, probably this hymn in particular. It, on the other hand, betrays no knowledge of Empedocles’ cosmology (such as we would expect if it were the later text), but instead is unambiguous in its description of the moon the source of its own light. In understanding the intertext as an allusion by Empedocles to the hymn, we must place the terminus ante quem for the hymn’s composition in the mid-fifth century. This has significant implications for our understanding of the corpus of the Homeric hymns. First, the hymn’s reference (lines 18-20) to epic recitation becomes the earliest evidence for the hymns as prooimia to epic performance, a point controversy in the scholarship of these poems. Second, since the goddess Selene received little or no cult in archaic and classical Greece, the performative context for the hymn could not have been a festival or similar cult event. It would be corroboration, then, to the arguments of Clay (1989), who identified symposia, rather than festivals, as the performative context for the Homeric Hymns. Bibliography Allen, T. W., Halliday, W. R., Sikes, E. E. 1936. The Homeric Hymns. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cassola, F. 1975. Inni Omerici. Vicenze: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla. Clay, J. S. 1989. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princetion, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunbar, Nan. 1995. Aristophanes’ Birds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gelzer, Thomas. “Bemerkungen zum Homerischen Ares-Hymnus (Hom. Hy. 8)” in Museum Helveticum 44 (1987): 150-167. Wright, M. R. 1995. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments. London: Bristol Classical Press.

Hector et les principaux personnages féminins de l'Iliade

Hector and the main feminine characters in the Iliad : Study of the scholia In the Iliad, the song VI presents a very touching and famous scene, the last interview between Hector and his wife Andromaque, who shows to him their baby Astyanax (v. 344-500). The only Trojan women are mentioned by the poet, and specially when they speak to Hector ( VI 251-285, Hecube and Helene, who have an ambiguous status, XXII 19-91, Hecube). These scenes have a literary and also sociological interest. Therefore it is worth studying how the scholiasts have analysed these passages. In fact, the scholiasts have made remarks about the phonetics, the morphology, syntax and lexicology : the scholiasts, who are sometimes anonyms and of undetermined date, prove that the homeric poetry was began partly difficult to understand. If s true for grammatical reasons, the homeric language showing many artificial forms, and also because the social structures had evolved (if s necessary to explain the signification of the homeric edna). In spite of the real interest of their works, written in a heavy style, the modern reader is surprised by the narrow side with which the scholiasts study the Homeric poetry : the scholiasts don 't know the tragic scenes, don't speak of the emotional and pathetic passages (when they study them, if s always quickly). They fail to appreciate the beauty of the homeric text.

Le rôle de l'eubéen et celui de l'Eubée dans l'épopée homérique

Euboean's and Eubea's action in the Homeric Epics Some features of the Homeric language have been explained as due to Attic influence. Some of them may be only a "varnish", covering other features belonging to other epic dialects, but, for metrical reasons, some other features cannot have replaced elements belonging to other epic dialects. An examination of these features shows that most of them can be explained through the influence of Euboean, West Ionic, more probably than through that one of Attic dialect. Other features suspected to be attic could really been explained through other dialects which have influenced the epic language, as for example, East Aeolic. This opinion is confirmed by what we know of Greece in Homer's time, when Euboea was much more important than Attica, which seems to emerge only in the time of Peisistratos.

The Proto-Hexameter Hypothesis: Perspectives for Further Research

Nils Berg's hypothesis of a proto-hexameter, being the combination of a glyconic and a pherecratean with variants, gives new perspectives for further research on the Homeric language. This paper discusses the metrical aspects of the proto-hexameter hypothesis, shows its explanatory force in questions concerning Homer's artificial forms, and points out areas where further study is needed.

The Tomb of Aias and the Prospect of Hero Cult in Sophokles

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet's primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father's body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic (1168-84). One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse (1180), however, is here not understood to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection (as with Orestes in Eum. 242f., 439f.). By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero's burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms (1163-67). This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse (Menelaos vs. Teukros) and also between the hero's death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero's future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" (katechei) or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb (1167, kathexei). The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced (Archilochos, Simonides). In Sophocles' Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias (a suicide) becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet's sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus.

Aspects of Synonymy in Homeric Diction: An Investigation of Dative Expressions for "Spear"

Milman Parry's 1928 dissertation,' insofar as it drew upon and continued the work of earlier scholars, provided a dimension to the findings of DUntzer, Ellendt, Witte, and Meister. Parry pointed out that the coexistence of semantically equivalent but metrically different forms in the Homeric diction was not only the creation of epic verse (cf. the notion of the epic Kunstsprache as a hexametric language),2 but was also due to the need of the epic poets to have metrical alternatives for the sake of easy versification. In other words, many peculiarities of the Homeric language and diction could be shown to have not only a cause, but also a motivation. As is well known, Parry's main concern was to show that by adding epithets to names or substantives, the epic poet had various, metrically different forms at his disposal for one and the same essential idea.3 The regularity in the use of epithets, on the basis of which they form a system, could be shown to lie in their economy: for each relevant metrical form, there was one and only one noun-epithet combination, which suggested that the point of epithets was metrical differentiation in the first place, rather than to contribute to the content of the sentence. The idea that epithets are used in systematic ways for the sake of metrical diversity could be added to the observations made by Parry's predecessors, concerning the occurrence of morphologically and phonologically different alternatives (e.g., dialectal and even artificial forms) for a given word. To these, the same principle of economy applied. A third means to achieve metrical diversity was what can be called functional synonymy, that is, the use of synonyms, not for the sake of stylistic variation, but, again, for the sake of metrical diversity. Parry was aware of the importance of synonymy and introduced the concept in his discussion of noun-epithet

Ἄβρομοι - αὐίαχοι (<i>Il</i>. XIII 41)

A. G. Tsopanakis attempts here a new c1assification of various forms with the apocope of a preposition, which had led him long ago (1950) to the derivation of the adjectives ἄβρομοι, αὐίαχοι ( Iliad XIII 41), both hapax legomena , from original forms with ἀνά- (*ἀνά-βρομοι, *ἀνα-ϝἱαχοι). The apocope of the final vowel of various prepositions (ἀνά, κατά, διά, παρά, ἀπό, ὐπό) before an initial consonant was very common in the Homeric language (as well as in the Aeolic and Doric dialects), with subsequent adaptations of the consonantic groups created by this procedure, through assimilation, muting, simplification: ὑποβάλλeιν > *ὑπ-βάλλeιν > ὑββάλλeιν, καταβάλλeιν > *κατ-βάλλeιν > καββάλλeιν, ἀν-στήσeσθαι, παν-συδίη, πασσυδίη and πασυδίη. Through these adaptations we can explain other unexplained or difficult forms like ὔγγeμος, ὑστάς, ὔστριξ, etc.

A residual problem in Iliad 24

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.

On Poetry and Language in Homer

It has long been customary to stress the artificial and conventional character of the Homeric language. The coexistence of aeolic and ionic forms, for instance, the metrical lengthenings, the so-called diektasis of contract verbs, the glosses have been studied and used to posit the theory of a language that was never spoken by anybody on earth, composed rather than developed on its own strength. More recently Milman Parry has further enhanced this view. He has stretched the same principle of conventional composition to cover the whole syntax and phraseology of Homer. The traditional language which he postulates is again far removed from the sources of living speech.