Homeric Poems Research Articles

Homeric Repetition - S. Lowenstam: The Scepter and the Spear: Studies on Forms of Repetition in the Homeric Poems. (Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches.) Pp. xv+286. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. $62.50 (Paper, $27.50).

Homeric Repetition - S. Lowenstam: The Scepter and the Spear: Studies on Forms of Repetition in the Homeric Poems. (Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches.) Pp. xv+286. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. 27.50). - Volume 45 Issue 1

The Concept of Miracle in Homer

My aim is to establish whether there is a concept of ‘miracle’ or ‘the miraculous’ implicit in the Homeric poems (and therefore perceived and understood by Homer's audience). Such a question is fraught with difficulties, as it necessarily involves broader (and still widely debated) issues such as Homeric man's view of the gods and the essential nature of the early Greek oral epic tradition. But, if an answer can be found, it should in the process help us to gain more insight into those wider issues—the theological basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the world-view of Homer's audience.

The Scepter and the Spear: Studies on Forms of Repetition in the Homeric Poems

this adept treatment of Homeric diction successfully bridges the gap between the technical aspects of oral poetics and literary analysis.-RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW

Categories of Homeric Wordplay

Wordplays comprise a significant part of Homeric technique. The thematic O;t5; / gi'j-t; associations in Odysseus' encounter with Polyphemos and the repeated linkage of his name and *0bvjcjojat are but two famous examples. While commentators have noted the frequency of wordplay and its importance in particular episodes,' we can establish broader patterns regarding its use. This essay presents a rough system of classification for the phenomenon. By a deliberately broad and neutral term (cf. pun, calembour, paronomasia, and the like), I mean the following: a connection between two similar-sounding words which invests the relationship between them with additional meaning. Although words of similar sound may be attracted to each other in the Homeric poems for a variety of reasons, such as the generative process of reformulating phrases and formulae,2 the historical tendency of Archaic Greek to cluster together words from the same root, and even chance, I shall focus on how the poems make literary use of such wordplay, a central concern of Homeric compositional techniques. My emphasis is more on an empirical than theoretical analysis of the data. I do not claim particular explanatory power for the structure I present but hope to open a window onto some of the prevalent formations found in Homeric epic. Section I delineates three broad categories of wordplay. Section II shows how such classifications can provide an interpretive tool for individual passages, for characterization, and for larger thematic issues.

Gender, Sublimity, Culture: Retheorizing Disciplinary Desire

Here, My Lord, wrote Thomas Blackwell in 1735 of the life and writings of Homer, there seems to be occasion for a little philosophy.' What Blackwell wrote, however, bears little relationship to what we would now call philosophical discourse. Having first turned briefly to theology to assert that Homer's poems are of human composition, he proceeded to write history (of antiquity), geography (of Asia the Less), climatography (of the temperate regions), political science (of the early times of liberty), psychology (of young minds), sociology (of the Grecian manners), and anthropology (of people not taught to be ashamed of themselves), not to mention literary criticism (of a poet who has wrote well). Our label for such a proliferation of inquiries in contemporary academic work is interdisciplinary, but that word cannot describe Blackwell's situation. There were so many occasions for a little philosophy in the eighteenth century not because many different disciplines met on that common ground, but because what we now assume to be separate fields of knowledge-the modern disciplines-had not yet been fully differentiated.

The Occasional Contextual Appropriateness of Formulaic Diction in the Homeric Poems

The Occasional Contextual Appropriateness of Formulaic Diction in the Homeric Poems

The Arming of Achilleus on Early Greek Vases

This article is a critique of Friis Johansen's thesis that twelve Greek vases painted between 570 and 550 B.C. depict a first arming in Phthia. Details that Friis Johansen considered representative of domestic settings are shown to appear in other contexts too. Friis Johansen, who based much of his argument on a plate by Lydos depicting Achilleus, Thetis, Peleus, and Neoptolemos, problematically assumed that all the other early vases portraying Achilleus's arming must represent the same scene in Phthia. The appearance of Neoptolemos on Lydos's plate, however, shows that it is a "heroized genre-picture" and depicts no particular moment in myth. It is also questionable for Friis Johansen to contend that the first presentation of armor is depicted if all the details of a picture do not correspond with Homer's description of the second arming. Friis Johansen's final argument, that two Euripidean choruses describing Achilleus's first armor offer no "reasonable grounds for free mythological invention," runs counter to recent Euripidean scholarship. The conclusion of this critique is that it is very unlikely that any of the early vases showing the presentation of armor to Achilleus depict a first arming in Phthia. Instead, an episode loosely connected with Achilleus's arming in Troy is pictured. The examination of these arming scenes and others in which the material of the Homeric poems and vase-paintings overlaps is helpful in reassessing the question of how closely related the epic stories shown on Archaic Greek vases are to those related in the Iliad and Odyssey.

The World of Hesiod

Toute pensée de l'origine des choses n'est jamais qu'une revérie de leur disposition actuelle, une manière de dégénérescence du réel, une variation sur ce qui est.Paul Valéry in his Preface to Poe'sEureka.The World of Hesiodis familiar as a title, but the world of Hesiod is difficult to locate in a single place. Indeed, it is a number of places. It seems to have its centre in Askra in Boiotia and to extend out in space as far as the high slopes of Mount Helikon. It is a land-locked world and its severe limitations are apparent from what the poet says about the sea and the short sea passage from the mainland at Aulis to Chalkis on Euboia. Even as he offers his advice to the seafarer, he admits that he has no experience in seafaring or ships himself (W&D649). He had only made the trip across to the island of Euboia once to compete as a poet at the funeral games of Amphidamas (W&D646-60). Hesiodic poetry, when it centres on Hesiod's home, seems to crowd into a very small and disagreeable patch of typical Greek countryside. But his Muses enlarge this world. They provide him with a knowledge that he cannot gain himself—both of seafaring and of the vast expanse of the physical world whose origins go beyond the very beginnings of human time. Hesiod's local Muses transport him from the springs of Permessos to the deep currents of Ocean and they disclose to him a universe vaster in its extent and deeper in time than that of the Homeric poems. A sign of these enlarged horizons is the fact that in theTheogonyHesiod begins to sing of the Muses of Helikon (1-4), but then shifts attention to the Muses of Olympos (36-80).

Social Diversity in Dark Age Greece

This paper attempts to provide new insights into the nature of Greek society in the Dark Ages (1100–700 B.C.). It re-examines the relationship between the archaeological evidence and the institutions and practices described in the Homeric poems. The archaeological evidence indicates that there were marked regional differences in settlement pattern, burial customs and pottery traditions. This must, it is argued, reflect profound regional differences in social organisation. Ethnographic analogies are used to make sense of some of these regional patterns. Two of the larger and more stable communities in Dark Age Greece, Athens and Knossos, are subjected to detailed scrutiny. A close contextual analysis of the relationship between pot style and mortuary representations in these two sites reveal two patterns which are divergent rather than convergent. In Athens burial customs and later pot style appear to be part of an age and sex linked symbolic system. In Knossos however, there is no clear patterning, either in pot style or mortuary representations. Instead there is a continuum of variation. Such fundamental differences cannot be accomodated within the concept of a uniform ‘Homeric Society’. It is suggested here that the institutions and practices described in Homer only operated at an inter-regional level.

The introduction of athletic nudity: Thucydides, Plato, and the vases

A swell of recent books on Greek athletics has resurrected, often no higher than a footnote, an old question: when did Greek athletes begin to exercise nude? Bronze Age archaeology and the Homeric poems make it fairly certain that athletic nudity was not practiced before the late eighth century. The evidence for its introduction is, however, contradictory. A complex, confused, and predominantly late tradition crediting the innovation variously to the Olympic victor Orsippos of Megara (or of Sparta), Akanthos of Sparta, or to an unnamed Athenian athlete, places it in the eighth or seventh centuries. But both Thucydides and Plato report that it was only shortly before their time that Greeks stopped wearing the zoma and began to compete nude.

Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are madeforthem rather thanbythem; in some cases the instigators of action are gods, in other cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich (d.h. mil vollem Bewuβtsein eigenen Handelns), sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there issomedifference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy (with further differences among the tragedians themselves); but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not.

Comparative poetics: Eastern and Western literariness

Earl Miner's seminal study "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems" (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1978, pp. 339-353, Spring 1979, pp. 553-568) serves me as a point of departure. Adopting the differentiation between literary and critical systems as suggested by Claudio Guill~n, Miner thinks that two major systems of criticism, an Eastern and a Western system, have emerged in the history of world literature. Next he proves that the Western system of criticism has been defined from drama. Owing to the high standards and communal assets of dramatic poetry in ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle could base an influential critical system on it. "It is because Plato and Aristotle took drama as the norm that they considered imitation the essential character of literature. And taking imitation as the norm, they were unable to distinguish lyric from narrative. Moreover, they were unable to account for the very lyrics of which Greek tragedy was then largely made. And they were forced, by their conception of imitation, to consider the two Homeric poems as, in their description, half dramatic and half narrative. This seems to have bothered Aristotle insofar as he insisted that Homer was the single exception. Yet in each culture, a systematic poetics emerges in the same way as powerful critical minds encounter the existing, esteemed genre. As we shall be seeing, only a triadic conception of genre allows for the evidence available in the literatures of the world (although of course 'genre' is simply my word designating one of the three kinds)" (p. 350). Miner's prototype for an Eastern system of criticism is Ki no Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinsh~t: "It would be difficult to imagine a kind of criticism more different

L'ajustement symétrique des poèmes d'Homère : à la recherche du plan de l'Odyssée. Le principe du noyau central

Both Homeric poems show a striking structural featrue if compared : all the first quarter, 1-6, reveals a close parallelism in the incipit, nuclei and finales. Most others have a similar conformity of central motifs. Why so ? Is the Odyssey built on the same plan as the Iliad ? Internal logic is frequently at odds with that rule, so that we are obliged to ask : can a homeric edition be properly made without a cross-reference to the other poem when ruling out a given passage ? Parallelism might become a criterion.

The ironies of war: an introduction to Homer's Iliad

This book is a sustained interpretative essay addressed to the Greekless reader. It does not digress into speculations about the many historical questions common to such introductions but directs the reader's attention to the central issue of interpreting the epic with his modern imagination. The author seeks to give the Greekless reader the confidence to enter Homer's poem without a sense that he lacks the necessary historical discipline. The central interpretative thrust of this work stresses that the central issue in a study of the Iliad is the picture of warfare, an eternally present way human beings think about one aspect of their condition. Contents: include: An Introduction, Homer's Vision of War; War, Nature, and the Gods; The Heroic Code; Arms and the Men; The Iliad as a Tragedy: The Warrior, the Victim, and the Tragic Hero; and Homer and the Modern Imagination.

An Introduction to Greek Art

The fragments of Greek sculpture and vase painting that have survived into the twentieth century are like pieces of a shattered mirror reflecting the former glory of Greek art. Though some of the images are obviously beautiful, others require interpretation before their true quality can become apparent. This book, designed primarily as an introduction for students, helps the reader trace the development of Greek art in the immensely creative period from the eighth to the fourth century BC - the period between the composition of the Homeric poems and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Important works are generously illustrated and lucidly analysed, so that an integrated picture of Greek art emerges.

La menor edad en los poemas homéricos

This paper is a study of the various aspects of infancy, boyhood and girlhood in Homer. Firstly, of the terminology and the child psychology revealed in the poems. Secondly, of views on childhood, family scenes, breeding, the relationships between parents and their children, children and war and scenes of infants play in the open. Lastly, what might be described as the earliest courtships of adolescence, amongst other aspects. With some involvement of myth related to the subject, there are depictions of life and basic psychology evident in the Homeric poems. The Iliad appears relative to its length, richer regarding the subject of children compared with the Odyssey. It contains detail, which although complementary to that of the Odyssey, shows a clear contrast in nature and meaning.

The rise of the Greek epic

My title is familiar as that of a book, and my subject may be thought to call for one. I hope in due course to explore the genesis of the Homeric poems in that format, and what I have to say here may take its place there in a maturer form (wiser, fatter). For the moment I offer merely a provisional attempt to trace out the stages by which the epic tradition developed, stopping short of any discussion of theIliadandOdysseythemselves. Any such attempt necessarily involves a certain amount of rehearsal of familiar arguments, and, if it is to be plausible, a fair measure of concurrence in familiar conclusions. But conclusions that are familiar are sometimes also controversial, and can be strengthened against their assailants by a fresh discussion; and I have certain doctrines of my own that are best presented in the context of a broad synthesis.

Homer, The Poet of the Dark Age

This paper began as a lecture to an extramural weekend course on the Greek Dark Age, organized in Oxford by the Department of External Studies in December 1983. It was intended to suggest that the world of the Homeric poems, insofar as it had any relationship with reality, was more likely to reflect the conditions of the Dark Age than those of Mycenaean Greece, and it was born of increasing frustration at the dominance of what I will call the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation of Homer, particularly at the popular level. The recent BBC series In Search of the Trojan War has done nothing to lessen this dominance – indeed, it barely suggested that such an interpretation had been seriously challenged – and the theme of the lecture has therefore lost none of its relevance. In presenting a considerably revised version here, I have not attempted to offer an exhaustively argued and documented discussion, which would require a book, and must refer the reader to more extensive treatments of the topic for fuller details. Rather, I have decided to leave it as a rather provocative exposition of a case which deserves to be made. I have made some attempt to step outside the framework in which the discussion has often been conducted, which to my mind unduly favours the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation, but readily acknowledge that many of my arguments have been presented in similar form by others, and that some have been admitted to have force by those who in general support the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation. Given the quantity of writing on the topic, it is only too likely that I have neglected some discussions, and I have given references mainly to Homeric sources and to recent archaeological finds of relevance. Finally, I should make it clear that it is not my primary purpose to discuss the historicity of the Trojan War or of the Greek heroic legends generally, though this has often been made to depend on the supposedly Mycenaean content of the Homeric poems, at least in part.

The Old English Formula in Context

As is well known, the concept of the formula in Old English poetry is indebted to Milman Parry's classic definition: formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea.1 The history of Old English formulaic studies has been long and controversial,2 but the efforts of scholars to isolate the characteristics of the formula within the Old English, rather than the Homeric, poetic tradition still continues.3 This paper extends that effort by examining the meanings of traditional thematic formulas in context.4 In the process it proposes some new defini-

Oral Composition in the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles

A STAGE PLAY is by definition composed for performance by action and elocution. To argue for composition may seem to be arguing for the obvious. The orality of Greek drama, however, if it exists, goes deeper than a mere management of stage conventions. It would mean that what had to be spoken on the Greek stage in the fifth century before Christ was molded in a very special way. There are of course compositional rules common to all drama qua drama. But I shall argue that there were certain rules operating in classic Greek drama which were peculiar to it, and which stage production of later periods from the Hellenistic age to the present has, in the nature of things, been unable to share. The surviving plays have come down to us as texts carefully read, copied, and transmitted over hazardous centuries and now at last printed in books. It is surely as texts that they deserve to be estimated, that is, as creations by authors. So runs the consensus of scholars, critics, translators, and adapters, to whom it would not occur that something like the oralism now accepted as inherent in the Homeric poems would survive in a Greek tragedy and be detectable there, let alone one so tightly constructed as the Oedipus Tyrannus. These plays were written down at the time of composition, else we would not have them. They were composed, so we usually think, with that kind of economy that is expected of the written word, and so rank as literate composition. But suppose the case is more complicated than that? Allowing their share in literacy, does one also perceive a share in preliteracy? Historically speaking, these are admittedly unique productions. It has not occurred to any postclassical playwright to put anything quite like them on stage, or if he has tried this he has failed. Even as we translate, imitate, or adapt, we are aware of our modern distance from them. Could it be that the uniqueness of their nature derives from a uniqueness in their cultural position, poised midway between previous centuries of oral composition and coming centuries of composition? The case for orality as a genre of verbal composition specifically