Homeric Poetry Research Articles

The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry (review)

Reviews 167 Our dead . . . [are] indifferent to honey-liquor, votive offerings, futile glory. Better a plain stone and a pot of geraniums, a secret sign, or even nothing at all. For safety's sake, we might do well to hold them inside us if we can, or better still, not even know where they lie. The way things have turned out in our time, who knows, we ourselves might dig them up, throw them out someday. ("The Tombs of Our Ancestors," 67) It's hard not to understand such a passage as a gloss on Ritsos's work as a whole—those innumerable shards, gems, or sketches, wistful or surreal, pretty or brutal. Read together, so many short poems can come to feel unambitious , a set of glib variations on a theme. It is therefore a revelation when, in a poem like "The Apples of the Hesperides I" (a mere fourteen long lines, but by Ritsos's miniaturist scale it feels much longer), a key to the mass of this oeuvre glints out at us, in the guise of comment on a myth. I have space to quote only the end of this marvelous poem, an end which seems to evoke not a shopworn stoa of battered statues but the modest meticulousness of an Elizabeth Bishop: This little bit of cunning, so human, which had overcome the malevolence of Atlas, brought the whole myth down to our measure, giving it at the same time a certain indefinite and intimate lighting, an almost aesthetic radiance. (78) "Indefinite and intimate": the phrase perfectly captures Ritsos's agile balance between the portentous and the personal, the vatic and the informal. Keeley has gathered in this volume poems which, to the credit of both anthologist and poet, cast an indefinite but also an intimate light on one another. Rachel Hadas Rutgers University, Newark David Ricks, The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 192. $42.50. This study aims to define more sharply what Dimitris Nikolarei'zis meant when he said: "Homer's poetry is present in the contemporary Greek poetic consciousness" (1947). Then term parousta, with its religious connotations, can allow too much talk about the "spirit" of Homer. Thus Seferis could observe of "the antiquity-obsessed Athens of 1860" that "in spite of the endless racket about them, the ancients are nowhere to be found." David Ricks concerns himself not with the mere aspirations or gestures of poets (though he may 168 Reviews note these) but essentially with their work in itself. His study is centered upon three major poets, Sikelianos, Cavafy and Seferis, as revealed in their verse between 1892 and 1940. Dr. Ricks's chosen limits coincide with a great era of modern poetry throughout Europe. He provides "a series of close, even strenuous readings" devoted to short poems (hence, the Odyssey of Kazantzákis has no place here). The poems, examined with tact and rigor, are seen in the context of a developing tradition, where the interplay between contemporary poems is no less important than their relation to Homeric text (not merely Homeric myth). The three Ionian poets, Kalvos, Solomos and—illuminatingly brought into the argument—Ugo Foseólo, belong to the prehistory of the subject. Palamas, for all his excellence, failed to engage truly with Homer, though his adoption as a persona of the bard Phimios from the Odyssey, with a divine gift that incapacitates him for action, was clearly suggestive to Seferis. Sikelianos, younger than Cavafy, precedes him in this book, since Cavafy does not participate in the mainstream tradition. Very important for Ricks's theme are Sikelianos's "Yannis Keats" which so brilliantly comes to terms with the Hellenism of the 19th-century European romantics, guiding Keats into a kind of Telemachy. "Achelous" goes "beyond Homer" to reshape the river episode in Iliad 21 as a myth better suited to Sikelianos's glorifying of the imagination. In "Secret Iliad" he forsakes Homeric allusion for Pindar, whose supposed "free verse" sends him on the slippery path to Whitman. Palamas had celebrated his rootlessness in The Gipsy; Sikelianos claimed that Homer was present in his own Lefkadian landscape. Cavafy...

The language of Achilles and other papers

language of Achilles landscape in Greek poetry Thucydides what can we do to Homer? Shakespeare and history Bacchylides - an introduction Homer - The Odyssey the two voices of Virgil's Aeneid a notion on the origins of teleology have we Homer's Iliad? classical philology and literary criticism Herodotus and Thucydides the language of Thucydides' description of the plague Thucydides' use of abstract language the making of Homeric verse - an introduction the idea of art in Virgil's Georgics language and characterization in Homer Thucydides' historical perspective.

Passé Légendaire, Archéologie et Réalité Historique : L'Hellénisation de Chypre

Fare storia significa studiare fonti. La problematica storica non è, se non al caso limite, uno studio dei fatti in quanto tali, ma uno studio délie fonti in quanto in un modo o nell'oltro ci danno i fatti.(Arnaldo Momigliano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (1980), p. 392).L'expansion du monde mycénien, tel qu'il nous apparaît au terme d'un long siècle d'activités archéologiques, fait toujours l'objet de multiples études et prises de position. On a longtemps cru reconnaître la présence physique de Grecs mycéniens en des lieux aussi éloignés de la péninsule hellénique que l'Italie du Sud, la Sicile, l'Anatolie occidentale, Chypre ou encore Ugarit.

Homère, Hipparque et la bonne parole

L'intérêt pour le développement de l'écriture, et en particulier le système alphabétique, est assez récent. Il a fallu attendre les travaux de E. Havelock et de J. Goody pour révéler l'existence d'un problème d'ordre conceptuel plutôt que simplement technique dans les premières productions écrites de la Grèce ancienne. Mais comment et où cette écriture intervient-elle ? Pour l'épigraphiste, la réponse est claire : les premiers documents, graffiti ou peintures sur vases, remontent certainement au milieu du VIIIe siècle, sans préjuger de ce qui a pu exister à une date encore plus haute (l'apparition de l'alphabet est plausible au moins dès le début de ce siècle). Les études récentes ont renouvelé un débat qui faisait rage depuis la parution en 1921 du remarquable travail de M. Parry,L'épithète traditionnelle chez Homère, sur l'oralité, totale ou partielle, d'un des trésors littéraires de l'humanité, composé à l'aube de la culture grecque : la poésie homérique. Épineuse question, que je me garderai d'affronter directement, tant elle a suscité de pages imprimées. Mais comment résister à la tentation de l'évoquer une fois encore, de façon détournée, en empruntant des chemins de traverse peu explorés, susceptibles de diriger un éclairage inattendu sur des questions trop rebattues ? Un texte de Platon, relatif au tyran Hipparque, fils de Pisistrate, et à son goût pour la poésie, en fournit le moyen.

Athenian Festival Judges–Seven, Five, or However Many

No ancient authority has left us a clear account of how the judges at the Athenian dramatic festivals operated. We can therefore never know for certain what happened. But it may be possible to improve the reconstruction normally given, which does not look as if it could ever have yielded acceptable results.One thing that is very clear (from Isocrates 17.33–4) is that the choice of judges was taken seriously. Not only did it involve the Council, the Prytanies, and the Treasurers, but any tampering with the panel from which the judges were eventually selected seems to have been punishable with death. Even the physical arrangements were quite complicated. Names approved by the Council were deposited in ten jars, one jar for each tribe but each jar containing several names, sealed by the Prytanies, held in safe-keeping on the Acropolis, and eventually brought down to the theatre, where the archon publicly broke the seals and drew out one name from each jar.At this stage of the process there emerged ten judges, one from each tribe. Their quality had been guaranteed by the Council's prior vetting of the panel, but their actual names were unpredictable because randomly selected from it. All had been done democratically and with equal representation of tribes, in perfect accord with normal Athenian practice.But now comes the difficulty. The paroemiographers record a proverb (or rather perhaps a joke since it seems to be a kind of parody of a Homeric verse) about judgement being in the lap of five judges — ⋯ν π⋯ντε κριτ⋯ν γούνασι κεῖται; Lysias tells us of a judge whose vote was not counted; and Lucian, who likes to disguise a very careful antiquarianism behind an apparent casualness of style, says that at festival competitions the many know how to clap and hiss but that judgement is in the hands of seven or five or however many.

El epíteto en Apolonio de Rodas: tradición e innovación

Apollonius Rhodius’ treatment of the epithet follows models from Homeric and other hexametric poetry. This paper shows that Apollonius sometimes is faithful to his models, but other times modifies them. These variations refer to the position of the epithets within the verse, the change of case, the creation of new formulae, etc. Besides, the new formulae are not always recurrent. It is important too the attribution of the old epithets to new characters, sometimes with a new meaning.

Imitation and Style in Angelo Poliziano's Iliad Translation

In 1470 the fifteen year old Angelo Poliziano published his first major work, a Latin hexameter translation of Iliad 2 dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici. Poliziano was motivated to write this translation not only by a sincere and enduring interest in Homeric poetry, but also by a desire to display his extraordinary poetic and linguistic talent and thereby to win the attention and perhaps the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici. The translation of Iliad 2 was received with lavish praise, and Poliziano was soon invited into the Medici household where, under Lorenzo's official patronage, he continued to work on the translation. In 1472, he completed Iliad 3; in 1474, Iliad 4; and in 1475, at age 20, Iliad 5, the last book he was to do. What is most interesting is that the style of books 2 and 3 differs substantially from the style of books 4 and 5.

Pausal Forms and the Structure of Biblical Poetry

1 It has long been the consensus that biblical Hebrew poetry is composed in groups of two (rarely three) short units, more or less equal in length, and related (parallel) in meaning. Despite the general agreement, however, this view cannot be said to be securely grounded. It is a valid description of the patterns which appear most commonly in the text, but it cannot be shown with certainty that these were the only patterns acceptable. 2 In some ancient poetry, the basic structural units are clearly defined: by scribal conventions (e.g. in Akkadian), by metre (Greek, Syriac, Arabic), or by other phonological features identifiable in written texts, such as the syllable structures which mark the ends of the lines in Homeric or Akkadian poetry, or the pausal forms in Arabic. No such defining feature is recognized for the structural units of biblical poetry 1). Pausal forms do exist, but, because of the common belief that only the letters of the text can reflect features of the ancient literature 2), their use has never been studied.

Poesía oral gnómica en <i>Los trabajos y los días</i>: una muestra de su dicción formular

The author, on grounds of certain aspects of the diction concerning the term ἀνήρ in the poem, detects the heritage of an oral gnomic tradition, independent of the Homeric one. In the great majority of the cases when ἀνήρ appears in the Works the term goes together with an adjective originating a series of «formulae», of which a certain number appears in the rest of the traditional poetry only very occasionally. When they appear at all they do so in aphorisms, or else in passages which are presumably more recent. In the more numerous group of such syntagmata the adjective is a hapax in Hesiod and Homeric poetry; but since the metric-morphologic structure of each one of those formulae tits other types of formulae external to the poem itself, the presence, therefore, of these parallels guarantees the traditional base of the former.

Huella de <i>H</i> (procedente de <i>s</i>) en la <i>Ilíada</i> y el origen de la épica

In Mycenaean dialect there are traces of survival of H from s with consonantal function. This paper attest also the traces of H with consonantal function in Homeric poetry, corroborating in this way, from a linguistic point of view, the theory that Homeric poetry is rooted in Mycenaean or pre-Mycenaean times, at least in certain formulae.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access THE MAKING OF HOMERIC VERSE: THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF MILMAN PARRY , edited by Adam Parry . Oxford , Clarendon Press , 1971 ; pp. lxii, 483 ; £6. C. W. MACLEOD C. W. MACLEOD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 21, Issue 8, August 1974, Pages 318–319, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/21-8-318 Published: 01 August 1974

The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Adam Parry , Milman Parry

<i>The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Papers of Milman Parry</i>. Adam Parry , Milman Parry

The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

A Principle of Composition in Homeric Verse

(0) 1 12 3 34 5 5? First of all, word-ends are noticeably less frequent at 31 and 4 than at any other of the individual points in the first half of the line.2 Statistics show increasingly high totals for the first four points (1, 11, 2, and 3) and again for the alternatives for the medial caesura (5 and 5-), but at the two intervening points the totals drop considerably. The following, as an example, are H. N. Porter's figures for two sample passages of 1,000 lines from each epic (II. 5.1-6.91 and Od. 5.1-7.176):3

The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

This book collects together the major published works, as well as some previously unpublished items, by Parry, who remains a major figure in Homeric studies. His work, which had been edited by his son, connected disparate contentions and observations made by preceding scholars on the Homeric question (as to who composed the poems, for example, and how they were composed). In formulating a consistent picture of what Homeric poetry was and what the conditions were that allowed it to come into being, his work continues to have a major impact in classics. This is a paperback reissue of a title first published by Clarendon Press in 1970.

The Lyre and the Harp: A Comparative Reconsideration of Oral Tradition in Homer and Old English Epic Poetry. Ann Chalmers Watts

<i>The Lyre and the Harp: A Comparative Reconsideration of Oral Tradition in Homer and Old English Epic Poetry</i>. Ann Chalmers Watts

The Making of Homeric Verse

The Making of Homeric Verse

Formula, Character, and Context: Studies in Homeric, Old English, and Old Testament Poetry

Formula, Character, and Context: Studies in Homeric, Old English, and Old Testament Poetry

Formula, Character, and Context. Studies in Homeric, Old English, and Old Testament Poetry. William Whallon

<i>Formula, Character, and Context. Studies in Homeric, Old English, and Old Testament Poetry</i>. William Whallon