Homeric Poetry Research Articles

Homer and the Oral Tradition

(a) a tradition of epic poetry whose features include: set verbal expressions that fit into specific sections of a Homeric verse and probably developed to simplify non-written and extemporaneous composition; regular structures for composing repeated scenes, allowing the length of a given scene to vary to suit immediate circumstances while enabling singer and audience to keep track of the sequence of essential items included in the scene; and story patterns likewise showing regular structures and occurring repeatedly both in epic and in myth.

“Making up Stories”: Law and Imagination in Contemporary Canada

Adeimantus, I said, you and i are not up moment; we're a community. Plato, Republic, Book II IN PLATO'S CAVE, as we know, representation was already a problem and troping of representation--art--even more so. The distortions produced by written words occasioned danger and potential a particular concern in establishment of a well-regulated where at least for general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one's authority over pleasures of drink, sex, and were paramount (Republic Book III). In Canada since R. v. Sharpe and R. v. Malmo-Levine we appear to be less concerned with drink and food and more with sex and drugs but concern with representation remains and I suspect that Plato would feel right home. In this paper I want to consider some of things that happen when Court thinks about up stories, especially when artistic merit of those is issue, and what happens when Court thinks about harm and public in context of art. I am going to suggest that in this hall of interpretive mirrors, art runs a great risk of going up in smoke just as individual freedom recently did in Malmo-Levine. Given that Court has maintained that in certain contexts perceiver, perceived and maker are all liable, I am also going to maintain that teachers have a vested interest in this debate and should prepare accordingly. But let's return to Plato briefly while bearing in mind that this inter-disciplinary approach situates law in context of theory ancient and modern rather than undertaking rigourous analysis of precedent and rigourous distinction between obscenity and child pornography which a longer paper and conventions of legal scholarship would require. Sex, Lies, Plato, Aristotle For Plato, rhapsode's gift was inseparable from underworld of Orphic cults, Dionysian frenzies, and, as we would say now, sex and drugs. The requirement that art depict and serve the was corollary of rejection of art produced by possessed or crazed hysterics disseminating their misleading and seductive messages so harmful to young and vulnerable. In Ion, rhapsode is mocked as an ignorant singer of Homeric verses, devoid of social responsibility and intellectual acumen, inciting equally ignorant and misguided to delusion and potential riot. The poet, as a well-known passage from Republic puts it, disseminates artistic lies which have no redeeming value and must be banned since if young men of our community hear this kind of thing and take it seriously, rather than regarding it as despicable and absurd, they're hardly going to regard such behavior as despicable in human beings like themselves and feel remorse when they also find themselves saying or doing these or similar things. (Republic Book III) Under these circumstances, making up stories becomes serious business indeed, fraught with anxiety and obsessed with production of good use of language, harmony, grace and rhythm [which] all depend on goodness of character (Republic Book III), Goodness becomes entry ticket for art into republic and only context in which making up stories can be justified. Where, as Luce Irigaray puts it, [r]e-semblance is she law, founding a re quires elimination of any further levels of distortion (149-50). Aristotle's response in Poetics is to undertake a redaction of rhetorical analysis, formalizing Plato's delusion as catharsis, embedding transformation center of his process theory of artistic production while developing an understanding of mimesis as fundamental to art. Poetry is invention, constructed of tropes and figures, governed by decorum, expressive of plot, theme, and emotion. From this point on into Middle Ages, Aristotelian rhetoric develops into a taxonomically complex but conceptually elegant hermeneutics well adapted to both theological and jurisprudential articulations. …

Homeric Poetry and Problems of Multiformity: The "Panathenaic Bottleneck"

M ULTIFORMITY, according to Albert Lord, is a basic feature of oral traditional poetry.1 In his writings, lectures, and conversations, Lord preferred to use the terms multiformity and multiform instead of variation and variant in order to emphasize the fluidity of oral poetry, to be contrasted with the fixity of written texts. Lord was worried that those who are unfamiliar with the workings of any given oral tradition might easily be misled to think of its variants exclusively in terms of a preexisting fixed text:

Style and Construction, Sound and Rhythm: Thetis' Supplication to Zeus ( Iliad 1.493-516)

The present study aims to explicate the style of a specific passage in Book 1 of the Iliad with the intention of offering a model for a close reading of Homeric poetry that is also suitable for the classroom. I should make it clear from the outset that I am not proposing new ways of reading epic but rather applying some of the rich harvest of recent scholarship to illuminate a specific passage, namely Thetis’ supplication to Zeus in Iliad 1. The importance of this scene for Iliad 1 and, subsequently, for the poem as a whole makes it an ideal place to begin. Although the Iliad moves on various levels and rotates between different poles, 1 one set of boundaries is Thetis’ supplication to Zeus (forming the last part of the scene that begins with the meeting between herself and Achilles in Book 1), and Priam’s supplication to Achilles in Book 24 (which brings the epic to a close). Thetis’ supplication also functions as a nucleus, introducing themes that run through the entire epic. Its importance lies in its hybrid nature since it operates as a miniature model or paradigm, presenting for the first time themes which continue to evolve and create larger units. Some of these themes are Achilles’ short life span, his liminality 1 I am not inclined to see a single thematic thread upon which the Iliad is composed and developed: anger, lament, supplication are among the most important structural threads permeating the entire poem. Recent attempts to highlight one of these themes while underestimating the others are bound to be one-sided once we acknowledge the multifariousness of the epic as well as the presence of many aspects which create an exploding poetic and aesthetic polysemy.

Institutionalized utterances, literature, and language teaching

Linguists have recently suggested that a large proportion of linguistic performance in naturally acquired languages is enabled by the internalization of a huge number of institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases, or fixed and semi-fixed expressions. This research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of the oral-formulaic nature of Homeric poetry. Furthermore, although written literature (as opposed to oral epic poetry) is generally assumed to be anything but formulaic, it can be shown that it too necessarily contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least transformations of them, and that our own repertoire of memorized phrases almost certainly comes from literary as well as oral sources. Foreign language teachers clearly need to give serious consideration to the prevalence of lexical phrases, in both speech and writing. Literature can be used in the foreign language classroom as (among many other things) a source of institutionalized phrases.

The Trial of Theoris of Lemnos: A 4th Century Witch or Folk Healer?

While belief in witchcraft and magic abounds in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.,' actual trials for witchcraft are extremely rare, though not nonexistent during this period.2 The exception that proves the rule is the case of Theoris, an alleged witch (pharmakis) from the island of Lemnos, who was prosecuted in Athens before 3383 allegedly for casting incantations (epoidai) and using harmful drugs (pharmaka).4 The evidence of her prosecution gives us the most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft5 from this period in Greece, though by the standards of late medieval or early modern witchcraft trials the details as we have them are very slim. The practice of singing incantations and administering harmful drugs had existed in the Greek popular imagination at least since the eighth century, the era of Homeric poetry, and so we shall have to consider what this exact combination of charges signifies for Theoris in the fourth century. From the point of view of late fifth- and fourth-century intellectuals (physicians, philosophers), the prejudice against Theoris and her alleged magic sounds similar to those of contemporary American physicians toward folk healers and their remedies. Many of the same differences between modern physicians and folk healers toward illness outlined, for example, in the work of David Hufford (1988 and 1992), bear striking resemblances to the attacks on magic by Plato and Hippocrates. Ultimately, as I hope to demonstrate, Theoris's demise can be attributed to a legal apparatus for the most part uninterested in magic, except where magic could be shown to be responsible for serious injury or death. What Athenian law was less equipped to deal with, however-and here is the crack in the system through which Theoris fell-was whether magic was intended for healing or harmful purposes. Hence those of Theoris's ilk played a dangerous game in which they were free to offer magical services

The poetics of Aethalides: silence and poikilia in Apollonius' Argonautica

When the Argonauts reach the island of Lemnos, Apollonius of Rhodes tells us, they send their herald Aethalides to the ruler of the island. Such a means of establishing contact and requesting safe passage was the norm in the Homeric world; there heralds acted as intermediaries between commanders and subordinates or between groups of people. In preliterate societies, heralds facilitated communication: messages were transmitted through memorization and repetition rather than by means of writing. While verbatim repetition was no doubt a necessary feature of this form of communication, its wholesale transference into Homeric poetry was not necessarily the logical corollary. Nonetheless, we know of such repetitions precisely because of their appearance in the Homeric poems. It is now widely accepted that such passages are a result of the oral style of composition in which the oral poet repeats passages just as he uses shorter formulaic phrases. The debate embedded in the A-scholia of the Iliad suggests that repeated passages were a source of contention already in antiquity. While it is more common to see the scholiasts trying to decide which passage is ‘correct’ and which should be athetized, this provides evidence that athetization was not a unanimous impulse. The scholiast defends 2.60–71, part of which (65–9) is repeated for the third time, against Zenodotus: His defence is based on context: it is necessary for the passage to be repeated for the sake of internal coherence. Clearly not all scholars believed all repetitions to be spurious padding.

Plot and point of view in the Iliad

Plot and Point of View in the that Homer, the poet of the Iliad, may be fully distinguished from the narrator of Homeric poetry, who the Muse, and also from the heroes and heroines who live within the world of the story. The Iliad is a poem with a particularly rich and complex structure of perspectives, and as point of view as an element of storytelling has garnered tremendous interest in this century, critical attention has taken up this question in relation to Homer's poem.Robert Rabel argues that in different ways, both the Muse-narrator and the poet manipulate point of view in order to discover and define the meaning of the Iliad, placing various ways of thinking in competing and complementary relationships with one another. In the process, the Muse-narrator produces a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the tragic limitations of life in accordance with the heroic ethic. In the end, the poet provides a demonstration of the extent to which reality can only be grasped and apprehended in epic poetry through images that are constructed from various individual perspectives.This volume will be of interest to students of comparative and classical literature, philosophers, and readers of Homeric epic. All Greek passages are translated, and discussions of technical language are kept to a minimum.Robert J. Rabel Associate Professor of Classics, University of Kentucky.

Formulas and their relatives: a semiotic approach to verse making in Homer and modern greek folksongs

In a book I published a few years ago, entitledTowards a Poetics of Modern Greek Folksong, I examined certain aspects of the poetics of modern folksongs in the light of the ‘oral composition theory’ of Homeric poetry, originally expounded by Milman Parry in the late twenties and early thirties and subsequently elaborated by Albert B. Lord. In this paper I propose to follow the opposite course, and inquire whether some of my findings regarding the verse-making techniques of the modern folksongs could be applied to the Homeric epics, and whether they could be made to cast some additional light on the making of ancient epic poetry. More specifically, in my study of formular and otherwise similar verses in the folksongs, I was able to distinguish five degrees of kinship, as it were, or of decreasing similarity, from identical formulas to sense units of similar type. Can a comparable scale of similarities be found in Homer, and, if it can, could it be used in modern discussions of ancient epic versification and composition, without further encumbering a terminology that is not always clear or generally agreed upon? The purpose of this exercise is not merely taxonomic; by using some basic concepts of structural linguistics as tools, I think we may perhaps come a little closer to understanding the verse-making process, which is a prerequisite for understanding Homer's manner of composition and, in the last analysis, his ‘creativity’ or even ‘originality’ vis à vis the tradition to which he belonged.

Individuation and paideia

This article attempts to discover an important historical precedent for the concept of individuation in the idea of paideia, which today, mistakenly, is often understood to have been simply the form of ‘education’ practised in ancient Greece. Paideia, however, was not limited to the instruction of youth and was based on no fixed programmes. It was conceived as continuing throughout the life of the individual, and as a development of natural, in‐born potential. Paideia articulated a notion of ‘inner culture’, or cultura animi, which has since receded from Western civilization, with its anti‐psychological emphasis on progress, specialization and extra‐version, and with its notion that a civilization's ‘culture’ is primarily defined by its social structures and material tools. Present‐day interest in the Jungian concept of individuation can thus be seen as a return of the repressed. An analysis of the Telemachy ‐ the opening cantos of the Odyssey ‐ in which Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, accomplishes his passage to adulthood, reveals the need for the realization of natural potential to be an innate and archetypal ideal. Homeric poetry is then seen to have furnished a unified canon for the whole human being, whereas the subsequent course of European civilization, starting with the Greek Sophists and an ever more specialized notion of philosophy, is seen to have fostered a unilateral mode of maturation. It is argued that nostalgia for paideia indirectly reasserts itself through the widespread cultural interest in the idea of individuation.

Philodemus and Poetry: Poetic Theory and Practice in Lucretius, Philodemus, and Horace

Building on recent advances in the reconstruction of the charred Papyri of Philodemus excavated from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, this volume presents eleven new chapters in the history of literary criticism in antiquity. Philodemus of Gadara (c.110-40 BC) shares with his Roman contemporaries Lucretius and Horace the fact that all excelled in the production of poetry, while all three were (at some stage in their careers) adherents of Epicureanism. Designed to offer a critical survey of trends and developments in recent scholarship on Philodemus in particular, and Hellenistic literary theory in general, the essays treat the newly published and re-edited papyrus texts of Philodemus' treatises on poetry and the related subjects of rhetoric and music. In addition, the volume contains a complete translation of a new text of Philodemus' On Poems book 5. The essays evaluate the philosophical and historical importance of these Epicurean treatises and of Philodemus as a literary theorist, and document connections between Greek philosophy and Roman literary production in the first century BC. The recent papyrus discoveries of Ennius, Lucretius, and Posidippus make this volume especially topical. Philodemus was himself a poet of considerable repute. His Epigrams were noticed by Cicero and have been shown to have influenced the poetry of his younger contemporaries Catullus, Vergil, and Horace. As a literary critic, Philodemus embraced a formalism which denied both the moral utility of poems and the separability of content from poetic form. At the same time Philodemus, especially for the benefit of his wealthy patron Piso, sought to demonstrate the convergence of the Epicurean and the traditionally poetic, to show how Homer's poetry, for example, could be seen as providing moral and political paradigms and personal guidance for the potential ruler. How Philodemus attempted to reconcile this position with standard Epicurean views and his own rejection of the moral utility of poetry is a question explored by the essays in this volume.

Enforced aphasia: Language and violence in Christopher Logue's Homeric poetry

Enforced aphasia: Language and violence in Christopher Logue's Homeric poetry

Homeric Poetry and Its Significance for the Modern World

Homeric Poetry and Its Significance for the Modern World

The message, the medium, and The Lancet

From the first inscriptions of Homeric verse nearly 3000 years ago, the editor-publisher has sought to claim a place as welcome interloper between author and reader—a communicator sharing information with others, often at a price. The Internet has punctuated the gradual evolution of this traditional publishing world, leaving its future uncertain. One prediction is, perhaps, safe to make: the role of journals will never be quite the same again. Rather than act as a passive relay point for our reading community, journal sites on the web are likely to become a prominent forum amongst readers for immediate exchange of news and ideas, promoting dialogue and moderating discussion. Editors will become more active mediators in this process.

Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece

Greek hero cult has been extensively discussed by both archaeologists and philologists. This paper considers two current hypotheses: one links the development of hero cult in the eighth century B. C. with the circulation of Homeric poetry; the other views hero cult as a transformation of ancestral veneration in the context of the emergent polis. A review of the archaeological evidence for the Iron Age and Early Archaic period suggests that the earliest hero cult in the archaeological record emerged at Sparta during the eighth century. The small number of early hero cults, and their location and distribution, do not lend support to the theory of Homeric influence. Veneration of ancestors, on the other hand, was practiced widely in the Greek world throughout the Iron Age; it did not disappear with the emergence of the polis and hero cult.Rather than a single, unified concept, ancestral and hero cult articulated different versions of the past. Conflicting or competing concepts, both ritual and epic, serve to debate the past within and between communities. In Greece, as elsewhere, the debate helps to mediate social change within a framework of culturally determined rules.

Enjambment and Binding in Homeric Hexameter

PREVIOUS STUDIES of enjambment in Homeric verse have posed a variety of questions, such as: What are the types of Homeric enjambment? Do the differences between Homer's practice and that of later poets help to demonstrate that the Homeric epics were oral compositions? What is the relationship between enjambment and sentence structure? And recently the methods of discourse analysis have been used to call into question the very status of enjambment in Homeric verse.1 In this paper I will investigate the larger lexical context of enjambed single words and short phrases. In particular I will be interested to see what role such runover words and phrases play within the Homeric system of formulas. My argument requires a few technical terms. The enjambed word or short phrase I will call a runover. The word or words just before the runover I will call the dux, and the word or words just after the runover I will call the comes; the fundamental concept of this study is binding, which is simply the probability that two words will occur together.

Discourse and Performance: Involvement, Visualization and "Presence" in Homeric Poetry

W ITHIN THE CHANGING CLIMATE of folklore studies, anthropology, the so cial sciences, and linguistics, the study of oral is gradually increasing in depth, scope, and variety. To the line of research initiated by Milman Parry and Albert Lord that has been known for decades as oral-formulaic theory, a number of new approaches have been added, not necessarily supplanting Parry's original insights, but adding new dimensions to them and placing them in novel perspectives. In particular, current thought tends to focus on what it means for verbal art to be traditional, which in a sense entails a return to Parry's earliest ideas on traditional poetry and a relative shift in the thinking about the function of formulas: from metrical utility to traditional situatedness and from structure

Oral and written transmission in Ethiopian Christian chant

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry

Research Article| October 01 1992 Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry Sheila Murnaghan Sheila Murnaghan Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Classical Antiquity (1992) 11 (2): 242–264. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010975 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sheila Murnaghan; Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry. Classical Antiquity 1 October 1992; 11 (2): 242–264. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25010975 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentClassical Antiquity Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1992 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Homemric Survivals in the Medíeval and Modern Greek Folksong Tradition?

The basis of comparison between the Homeric poetry and Modern Greek folksong is that in either case we have a body of poetic texts behind which stretches a long tradition of oral composition; they both have existed, roughly, in the same geographical area, including mainland Greece, Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Sea, Crete, and Cyprus; and they are cast in cognate language forms. But the two bodies of poetry are separated by a great time distance, though how great it is difficult to determine because whatever we can say about the origins of modern folksongs is hypothetical and uncertain.