Homeric Poems Research Articles

Neurotrauma and Cerebrospinal Fluid in Homer's Poems

AbstractHomer's Iliad, from the 8th century BC, remains the oldest record of Greek medicine and a unique source of surgical history. The Odyssey, also authored by Homer, narrates several medically significant events. Among the 148 war traumas described in the Iliad, over a quarter occurred in the craniocervical region. Studies on the Odyssey report at least 11 craniocervical traumas, 9 of which prove fatal. Is there any indication of the presence of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the cases described by Homer, considering its last mention was 800 years prior in the Egyptian surgical papyrus of Edwin Smith? A passage in the Iliad suggests that the “tears” Homer mentions in the eyes of Eumelos, resulting from trauma, might be due to CSF oculorrhea secondary to a skull base fracture. In Odyssey Book IX, when the Cyclops strikes the heads of two sailors, and fluid and cranial contents emerge, it can be inferred that the poet was aware of fluid in the head (CSF), as there is no mention of blood. It is proposed that 800 years after the writing of the Edwin Smith papyrus, Homer probably provides the second human observation of CSF associated with traumatic situations involving direct head blows.

Imagery of Childhood from the Homeric Poems

As the first European literary documents, the Iliad and the Odyssey ensure in the cultural history of the West a unique status, assuming itself since Antiquity as the first foundation of philological and philosophical research, and also as superior literary and artistic model. In the framework of their traditional nature, due to the creative elaboration of generations of aedos, both epics, based on a peculiar technique of production and transmission, articulate in an enigmatic poetic plot threads of mythic narratives and historical realities that modern archaeological investigations confirm. From the poetic testimony of Homer, we will try to analyse the references to childhood. While some occur generically as images of a certain extract of human society, marked by peculiar characteristics, functions and needs, others, supported by peculiar mentions, assume a dramatic functionality in the mythical plot of the two poems, which contributes to their symbolic density. These poetic founding references, plastically reflected in the Greek ceramic art of the classical period, will offer us the pretext not only to better understand the ancient worldview, but also to interpret in it the symbolic expressiveness of the childhood universe. Keywords: Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, childhood, classical ceramic art

The Homeric Chariton

This study demonstrates that far from having a mere ornamental function or from simply serving as testimony to the author’s erudition, the extracts from the Homeric poems illuminate better certain developments in the plot of Chariton’s novel or the psychology of some of its characters by the juxtaposition of the world of Callirhoe to those of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Ricoeur between Ithaca and the isle of the Phaecians

The aim of this contribution is to critically engage with the ricoeurian reading of the topic of recognition in the Homeric poem Odyssey. The hypothesis presented here is that the ricoeurian reading shows only one side of the coin, since it is almost solely focused on the recognition received by Ulysses when he comes back to Ithaca incognito. Ricoeur stresses the unilaterality of recognition, which is only directed to re‑establish Ulysses’ power as king. Being recognized as the king of Ithaca does not imply, so Ricoeur’s argument goes, to recognize those who are subjected to him, and is a mere way of exhibiting power. But there is another possible reading of the scenes of recognition in the Odyssey, even if Ricoeur does not take them into account. Indeed, another moment of the recognition story can be found in the Isle of the Phaeacians, and it cannot be traced back to the “will to power”, but, rather, to Ulysses’s fragility. When Demodocus, the poet at the court of the king Alcinoos, starts singing the story of the famous hero Ulysses, who is there incognito, Ulysses cannot hold back his tears, and in the end he discloses his own identity. Here, Ulysses does not look for recognition, instead recognition is granted to him in an unexpected way. This act of recognition reveals all the fragility of the hero, who discovers himself in the words of others, and understands that he depends upon them to be, to exist, and, in the end, to come back home. This sort of “recognition by fragility” is possible due to a narrative dimension where Ulysses is hosted, and whose configurative and refigurative power makes the hero able to name his feeling as a feeling of “nostalgia”.

Analogical Perspectives on the Comparison between Vǫlundr and Daedalus

Analogical Perspectives on the Comparison between Vǫlundr and Daedalus

Pavese’s Border Multilingualism: The Homeric Nekyia and Beyond

Abstract: This article examines Cesare Pavese’s translations from the Homeric poems and other Ancient Greek works, including those from his confino or exile in Brancaleone Calabro from 1935–1936 and his English translations and writings from the same decade. By developing the concept of border multilingualism, I argue that these translations are part of a specifically Pavesian ethics and poetics of language that takes in-betweenness as its defining trait. Within this framework, I suggest that the practice of confino created borderlands within Italy by designating spaces on the national territory in which citizens were paradoxically stripped of their civil rights.

To Split a Head in Two and Pop Out Eyeballs: On the Plausibility of Two Injuries in the Iliad

The goal of the present paper is to show the plausibility of two groups of injuries in the Iliad, a skull “split in two” (Il. 16.412–14, 16.578–80, 20.386–87) and the famous popping out of the eyeballs of two warriors hit with a stone in the face (Il. 13.614–18, 16.733–42). Each type of wound is studied by contrasting the descriptions in the poem with current medical research. The conclusions reflect on the issue of realism in the Homeric poems and the impact that the plausibility of the studied wounds have on it.

Visões do coletivo e da partilha em Homero e Aquilino: entre a convergência e a diferença

Andam faunos pelos bosques stands out in Aquilino Ribeiro’s vast work for the supposedly supernatural dimension created by a disruptive “mystagogic entity” embodying the power of Eros over humans, whose alleged assaults on beautiful girls impact the life of rich and poor alike in some bucolic villages of Beira Alta. There, everyday life includes many celebrations, more or less opulent, that constitute spaces of relevant social and personal interaction, and, ultimately, of hospitality, community and communion with nature. Collective feasting (“agape”) stands out among these moments of simple happiness, particularly the multitudinous picnic that closes the otherwise unsuccessful hunting journey for the mysterious creature. Its location in Chapter II and the presentation of a catalogue of hunters that parodistically evokes the Achaean Catalogue in the second canto of the Iliad, together with the use of Homeric allusions, allow the parallel between the countryside agape and the numerous feasts narrated in the Homeric poems, along with their concept of hospitality and happiness, expressed in some of the scenes engraved on Achilles’ shield. The parody involves the inversion of some fundamental features of Homer’s heroic world, with the valorisation of popular figures and the subversion of serious moments, such as the epic speech or song at the end of the feast, attributed not to a Nestor or Demodocus, but to a disgusting beggar, who takes the opportunity to deliver an anarchist sermon, with evangelical overtones.Thus, and in line with his thought, Aquilino blends the classical and Christian heritage, achieving at the end of the chapter a moment of communion between humans and also with nature, which was after all the goal of the “mystagogic entity” and his human avatars.

The Age of Johnson, ed. Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlan

<i>The Age of Johnson</i>, ed. Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlan

A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020

The Odyssey ‘Round the World was a collaborative public reading of Homer’s Odyssey published on YouTube in December 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming from the larger Reading Greek Tragedy Online initiative and organized by the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, the reading featured performances of every book of the Odyssey by students, faculty, actors and laypersons from about twenty countries. The contributors were encouraged to perform in their own language, but they could also use the Ancient Greek, or any other language; the text could have been read, recited, sung, acted. The result, still available online, is briefly described here. Reflecting on the event I notice that public readings and YouTube videos are, as genres and cultural activities, rarely included in surveys of Homeric reception. The Odyssey ‘Round the World event is distinguished by its prominent diversity; in this way, the event connects with current debates on “Classics” as an academic discipline and with the theory of multiform, diachronic development of Homeric poems. The event also demonstrates both advantages and limits of the technology, and, most importantly, it makes us aware of the distance between Homeric poems as performance in ancient Greece and the usual way we deal with them as our reading matter.

Phonetic and lexico-morphological particularities of Homeric poems in Turkish versions

The following pages are a sample of possible directions for analysing translations from an ancient and very special language – the Homeric Greek – into a modern language. Even if the two languages are genealogically and typologically related, any translation, naturally, is a challenge in terms of mentality and the linguistic approach. When differences imposed by the genealogical and structural-typological criterion interfere between the two languages brought into cultural contact, the difficulties in rendering the original text increase very much. However, the new versions may be very well done, because, as it is known, any natural language has compensating virtues for rendering particularities in the source language. The corpus of texts selected for our little excursion into the diachrony of Turkish translations from the Iliad and the Odyssey has been extracted from the most representative Turkish version, “Erhat-Kadir”. In order to render the texts in Romanian, we have used the best-known version in this cultural-linguistic area, the “Murnu version”.

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”.

La fuerza en la Ilíada. Las lecturas de Homero de Simone Weil y Rachel Bespaloff

In the turbulent Europe of the World Wars, two French thinkers of Jewish Origin wrote both essays on the Iliad: Simone Weil (The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, 1940-1941) and Rachel Bespaloff (On the Iliad, 1943). Both writers have in common the return to the foundational texts of Western culture —Homer in the Classical tradition and the Bible and the Gospels in the Christian tradition— to rethink war and barbarism. This paper analyses the concept of ‘force’ in both authors, their similarities and differences, in order to conclude on the way in which this notion determines their interpretation of the Homeric poem.

Homer and Euripides: Remarks on Mythological Innovation in the Scholia

This paper analyses two exegetical strategies adopted by ancient scholars to explain Euripides’ mythological innovations and variations with respect to Homer through a selection of scholia. The first approach considers Euripides a (mis-) reader of Homer. The dramatist regards an epic passage as the reference text, but fails to understand its wording correctly: therefore, he uncritically reproduces the model, even though inspired by a genuine impulse to emulate; this circumstance de facto equates the tragedian with a sort of exegete and represents his deviation from the epic text as the locus of an implicit (erroneous) interpretation. The second approach evaluates the work of Euripides, comparing it with the Homeric poems, by means and in the light of concepts of literary criticism. The tragedian creates a good or bad product depending on whether his innovation achieves a certain poetic result: an implausible or unrealistic description of a character is contested, whereas a strategy to enhance the emotional impact of the dramatic moment is recognised and perceived as a careful and conscious artistic operation, hence possibly praised. Keywords: ancient scholarship, exegetical activity, Greek scholia, literary comparison, literary criticism

Homer’s Moving Pictures: Audio-Visual Aspects of the Scar Episode (Odyssey 19.386–504)

Although it is a matter of common knowledge that the cultural context in which the Homeric poems were communicated both before and after their fixation in writing was one of public performance, more often than not the reception of Homer’s narrative by the audience is addressed in scholarly literature in terms of the experience of a reader. It seems, however, that no interpretation of Homer’s narrative would be adequate if it neglects the fact that the ancient audience experienced a live performance which resulted in a form of enactive narration resembling the visual juxtaposition of scenes in modern cinema.

Raising the Dead: The Neo-Assyrian Ideological Background of Odyssey 11

This article reanalyzes the Near Eastern background for the ritual that Odysseus performs at the entrance of the Underworld in Odyssey 11. The scholarly consensus is that this ritual was borrowed from the Hittites during the Late Bronze Age and survived until it appears in the text of the Odyssey. Recent work has shown that the Sargonid Assyrian kings also performed a similar ritual in the same era as the textualization of the Homeric poems and invested it with ideological importance. Using the globalization phenomenon of glocalization as a frame, this article resituates Homer’s adaptation of the ritual against this background to argue that the adaptation has important implications for how Greeks conceived of themselves in the wider Mediterranean world and how we should approach Greco-Near Eastern literary parallels.

Formular Mutation and the Oral Character of the Cyclic Thebaid

The disparate and fragmentary states of Cyclic poems make quantitative studies of their features impossible. However, qualitative methods exist for comparing the mobility of their formular language to that of known oral-derived epic. The common noun-epithet formulaic expressions in surviving fragments of the Cyclic Thebaid, when they do not appear verbatim in Homeric poetry, only vary along lines well-established in early epic tradition, not in other ways. This suggests a position for the Thebaid within the development of epic relatively close to that of the Homeric poems and not from a later stage either of literacy or of self-consciously archaizing orality.

The Androids of Hephaestus: Between Human and Machine in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;

The description of Hephaestus’ workshop in Iliad 18 presents several kinds of fanciful automata. Contrary to several previous treatments of this topic, this paper argues that it is not anachronistic to think of these figures as “robots”—i.e., as having some kind of inner-workings, even though Homer does not explicitly say what they are. This discussion helps to situate the Homeric poems within the pre-history of Greek natural philosophy.

L’abc della filologia nello studio di Omero in età ellenistica: sistemi di scrittura e corruttele

Abstract Through the analysis of selected passages from the Homeric scholia and an ancient hypomnema, this paper aims to show that in the Hellenistic Age the idea that literary texts had been formerly written using orthographic systems different from the current one triggered the discussion and favoured the solution of some textual issues. At the time of Aristarchus of Samothrace and Crates of Mallos the identification of potential corruptions on the basis of writing features of the exemplar was definitely one of the tools available for the textual constitution of the Homeric poems (maybe the same holds true already for Aristophanes of Byzantium). This suggests that the Hellenistic scholars based their editorial work on conceptual premises that are the fundamentals of an acquainted approach to the transmission of the texts.

Longing for home: a complex emotion in Homer’sOdysseyand Derek Walcott’sOmeros

AbstractUsing recent affect theories, this article focuses on the role that emotion plays in new receptions of ancient texts, in this case the emotion of longing for home — for the place, as well as for the people — as we find it in the Homeric epics and in the modern Caribbean world of Derek Walcott. Longing for home in the Odyssey is portrayed as a contradictory emotion comprising both place attachment and grief, often felt with some ambivalence about returning home at all. I argue that, responding to this emotional tension, in his poem Omeros Walcott attempts to heal the historical wounds of slavery and a longing for a home that no longer exists through a new appreciation of and attachment to the landscape of St. Lucia. In addition, by challenging a Eurocentric view of racial dominance, it becomes possible to acknowledge anew the importance of Egyptian and other African influences on the Homeric tradition, influences that may have been neglected or dismissed, allowing for a new appreciation of the Homeric poem and place attachment in a post-colonial world.