Homeric Scholarship Research Articles

Literary Interpretation in the Homeric Scholia: The Similes of the Iliad

Literary Interpretation in the Homeric Scholia: The Similes of the Iliad

The Role of the Plague in the "Iliad"

IN HIS FAMOUS study of image and symbol in the Aeneid, Viktor P6schl remarks that Homer does not use the plague motif to set the mood of the Iliad in the same way that Virgil does through the opening storm at sea.1 Homeric scholars have concurred insofar as the episode of the plague is discussed mainly as the occasion of Agamemnon and Achilles' quarrel.2 Yet this drama should not blind us to the role of the plague in setting the tone for what follows, nor, more importantly, in providing an ethical pattern which lies near the heart of the story. The connections between the Loimos and the central story of the Menis are illustrated through the uniformity of diction in the two.3 Mfjvtg is the first linking work to be noticed. The plague is caused by the ELjvig of Apollo (fjlvv 'Ajt6kkovog, 1.75), which therefore recalls verbally and foreshadows dramati cally the rtjvLg of Achilles (Fjvlv, 1.1). In both cases Agamemnon provokes the wrath by seeking possession of a woman. The IltjVL; of 1.1 not only singles out the most central theme of the Iliad but, despite the passions of the poem's

At home and abroad: aspects of the structure of the Odyssey

It remains an open question what sort of structure, or what kind and degree of unity, the reader may legitimately expect to find in the Homeric epics, or in oral poetry in general. More specifically, when critics identify long-range correspondences, symmetrical patterns and precise correlation of speeches, scenes, similes and events, they are often confronted with considerable scepticism. Here it may be that excessively schematic attempts, such as those of the late Cedric Whitman, have shown such patent weaknesses that the whole approach has fallen into undeserved disrepute. Yet it is not unreasonable to suppose that any story-teller, oral or literate, improvising or premeditating, should desire and be able to connect his ending with his beginning, to develop themes in a recognisable and coherent sequence, and to draw attention to related scenes by direct repetition or allusive resemblances. Homeric scholarship has not been blind to such considerations, but they have yet, I think, to be systematically and sensitively applied. Much remains to be done, especially perhaps for theOdyssey.In this paper I intend principally to argue that there is a significant resemblance (embracing equally important differences) between the finale ofOdyssey8 together with the opening of book 9, and the finale of book 21 and opening of 22. The situation in the later scene is modified, indeed reversed and distorted; the earlier scene presents the norm, the later scene the unusual and extraordinary; and these differences are stressed in such a way as to reinforce the development of major themes which run through the poem: themes such as hospitality, feasting, self-revelation, and the hero's status as both man of action and poet.

Battle Scenes in the Aeneid

Caedicus Alcathoum obtruncat, Sacrator Hydaspen (Aen. 10.747)A fine line, with resonant names! It occurs at the beginning of a general list of killings, what in Homeric studies is called an androktasia, one of the few such found in the Aeneid. Perhaps the resonance of the names suggests to us that these are real people; but who are they? The answer is that we have not the faintest idea. Indeed, we are probably uncertain which side each of them is on, Trojan or Latin.Virgilian battle scenes may properly be compared with those of Homer. In the Iliad, the descriptions are extraordinarily precise; and it is wholly possible, if one is interested, to understand exactly what is being described by the poet. There are certain conventions, which were without doubt fully understood by Homer's audience. Any lack of understanding on our part is not Homer's fault. The conventions, and implications of what happens in the battle scenes, are most clearly set out in the work of Dr Franz Albracht, Kampf und Kampfschilderung bei Homer (1886 and 1895). It is abundantly clear that Virgil not only knew Homer from beginning to end, and used his own personal technique of ‘creative imitation’ in putting together the Aeneid with one eye on Homer, both in the large scale and in detail, but that he also knew the Alexandrian commentaries on Homer. The former of these facts has recently been demonstrated at great length, but still not exhaustively, by G. N. Knauer in Die Aeneis und Homer (1964); the latter in a more selective way by R. R. Schlunk in The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid (1974). There can thus be little doubt that in deciding how to present the fighting scenes in the ‘Iliadic Aeneid’, as Brooks Otis calls it – the necessary second half of the epic, which engages in the maius opus of establishing Aeneas and his people in Italy – Virgil would pay very close attention to the action of the Iliad.

On Weighing Achilles' Winged Words

In their recent article in this journal, 'Speech as a personality symbol: The case of Achilles' (1978), Paul Friedrich and James Redfield (hereafter FR yet I believe that the conclusions reached are not only unconvincing but demonstrably false. Despite some useful data and intriguing incidental apergus, F&R-as I trust to make clear in what follows-have neither soberly pondered the implications of their various assertions nor placed them in the proper perspective. I intend to present several specific counter-arguments, drawn both from Homeric scholarship and from stylistics, which to my mind invalidate their position. Perhaps an initial caveat is in order. Familiar as the Iliad and Odyssey may be, it is hard to find any two scholars in complete agreement about the evolution, composition, and interpretation of these famous texts: the winds of learned controversy continue to gust through all of Homer's demesne. Specialists in the Greek epic, including of course F&R, are only too aware of these hotly-debated issues, but a great many of their readers may not be equally well-informed. Indeed, one may wonder whether F&R might not have done better to publish their densely philological article, with its challenging hypothesis, in a classical rather than a linguistic journal. Nowadays, subscribers to Language subsist mainly on a high-protein diet of syntactic and semantic theory, and are rarely served up either Homer or stylistics,' let alone the two conjoined in a sort of exotic sandwich.

Literary Criticism in the Exegetical Scholia to theIliad: A Sketch

The Homeric Scholia are not the most obvious source for literary criticism in the modern sense. And yet if one takes the trouble to read through them one will find many valuable observations about poetic technique and poetic qualities. Nowadays we tend to emphasize different aspects from those which preoccupied ancient critics, but that may be a good reason for looking again at what they have to say.

The Homeric Scholia and the "Aeneid": A Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil. Robin R. Schlunk

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Homeric Scholia and the "Aeneid": A Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil. Robin R. Schlunk Bernard C. FenikBernard C. Fenik Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 73, Number 1Jan., 1978 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/366399 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Epic Cycle and the uniqueness of Homer

The Homeric poems are the subject of such a flood of print that a definite justification is needed by one who adds to it. Especially perhaps is this so if the Epic Cycle is to be involved; ‘enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle’, said T. W. Allen in 1908. My argument will be that the Cycle has still not been fully exploited as a source to show, by comparison and contrast, the particular character and style of the two great epics, particularly the Iliad. With the domination of Homeric scholarship in English by formulaic studies on the one hand and archaeology on the other, the poems themselves have perhaps been less discussed than might have been expected, and the uniqueness of the Homeric style and picture of the world has not been fully brought out. Most treatments of the Cycle have been concerned to assert or to deny that it contained poems or incidents earlier than the surviving epics, a question which will not be raised here. Most recent writers on Homer have more or less ignored the Cycle; even Hermann Fränkel, the first part of whose book Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (2nd edition 1962; now available in English, Poetry and Philosophy in Early Greece [1975]), is perhaps the most illuminating single work to have appeared on Homer in this century, does not discuss it, although it could have been made to support many of his arguments. No inferences are based on it, for example, in Wace and Stubbings, Companion to Homer, nor by Sir Maurice Bowra in his posthumous Homer. ‘My remarks are restricted to the two epics’, says J. B. Hainsworth in his short account; and G. S. Kirk, who does refer to the style of the fragments, does so summarily and without quotation. Yet after all the Cycle was a large body of early Greek heroic poetry, composed at a time not too far removed from that of the great epics, and at least passing as being in the same manner. We have some 120 lines quoted in the original, and a good deal of information about the content of the poems. If it proves possible to draw from this material any clear contrast with the Iliad, it may be felt that this will bring out the individuality of the latter even more strikingly than does the epic poetry, currently more often invoked, of the ancient Hittites or the modern Yugoslavs.

The Homeric Scholia and the "Aeneid." a Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil

The Homeric Scholia and the "Aeneid." a Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil

Homer the Innovator

A vY person who spends very much time in the study of the Homeric poems will almost certainly find himself involved, perhaps with regret, in the study of Homeric scholarship. As he surveys various periods in its long history, he may well be impressed by the differences in emphasis which characterize the different generations. He may notice, for example, how many persons for so long a time were greatly interested in Homer's knowledge, in displaying him as a kind of encyclopedia of all the arts and sciences, a side of Homer's genius which arouses relatively little enthusiasm today. Our own century has been characterized by a pleasant variety of interest and emphasis, the greatest stimulations, I suppose, being supplied by archaeology, by Milman Parry, and by Michael Ventris. Here I propose to consider an aspect of Homeric studies in this century which is less novel, and I should say less fruitful, than some, but which is, for all that, extremely popular and important. What I have in mind is the numerous and often vigorous efforts of many twentieth-century Homerists to convince us, not only that Homer was in general a great innovator, but also that we can now identify particular significant additions which he made to what he inherited from his predecessors.' These claims for Homeric originality are many and varied. They may, for instance, involve characters, or episodes, or stylistic details. We have even been told that the very kind of poem represented by the Iliad was a great novelty'. I shall not, of course, deal with all aspects of this movement, much less with all the individual claims. Moreover, in treating the aspects which I shall discuss, I shall follow the method employed by Odysseus himself in his Odyssean narratives and treat some features in a fairly expansive way, while dismissing others in rather summary fashion. I begin with the characters. One type of originality which many have urged us to accept is the freshly invented character. Unfortunately, claims of this type have often involved a serious ambiguity. It is not always easy to decide whether we are being asked to believe that the character X has been created by Homer ab ovo or that a character named X did indeed exist in the tradition but has been so completely transformed and magnified by Homer that he may fairly be called a new creation. Apart from this ambiguity, claims for novel characters suffer from the handicap which pervades this entire field of study: a distressing lack of evidence. The inevitable result is that ordinarily advocates of this sort of innovation do not make any elaborate effort to substantiate their

The Wedding of Smailagić Meho

In researching this collection, Milman Parry set out to test the theories he had evolved on oral epic, theories that were to introduce a new era of Homeric scholarship. In the Balkans, one of the few areas where a living tradition of oral heroic poetry was still to be found, he observed firsthand how unlettered singers composed their poems, and collected more than 1200 hours of poetic performance from the most experienced bards. Comprising representative texts and translations from the Parry Collection, this series records the South Slavic tradition.

An historical Homeric society?

I begin with two modern texts, both as it happens printed on the first page of earlier issues of this journal, and each, I think, expressive of a strong body of opinion in Homeric scholarship, at least in the English-speaking countries, at the time of their writing. First, Miss Dorothea Gray in 1954: ‘Belief in an historical Homeric society dies hard’. Secondly, Professor Adkins in 1971: ‘I find it impossible to believe … that the bards of the oral tradition invented out of their own imaginations a society with institutions, values, beliefs and attitudes all so coherent and mutually appropriate as I believe myself to discern in the Homeric poems. This aspect of the poems is based upon some society's experience’. Miss Gray's prophecy, whether or not one shares the misgivings that it embodied, was thus soundly-based: the seventeen years between these two quotations have indeed witnessed a powerful revival of the belief that the social system portrayed in the Homeric poems, and with it such attendant features as the ethical code and the political structure, are in large measure both unitary and historical. One good reason for the vitality of this belief is the simple fact that it has been alive since Classical times. Another is that it has received support from several influential recent works: if pride of place should be given to M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus, on whose conclusions Professor Adkins expressely says that he takes his stand, a number of others should be acknowledged also. Whereas Finley located the social system of the Odyssey most probably in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., A. Andrewes in his book The Greeks extends this type of inference when he argues for an historical origin in the ‘migration period’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries for the Homeric political system. As influences on the other side, one may mention T. B. L. Webster's work in isolating Mycenaean practices and features, whose divisive effect on the social pattern is apparent; while G. S. Kirk has a significantly entitled chapter in his The Songs of Homer, ‘The cultural and linguistic amalgam’ (my italics). Most recently, the early chapters in the German Archaeologia Homerica have shown a certain tendency to discern a consistent and historical pattern in the allied area of the material and technological practices of the poems. It is true that in one chapter the author is led to conclude that the metallurgical picture of the Iliad is substantially earlier than that of the Odyssey, and that the date of composition of the former poem must accordingly be very much earlier. But this is only because he is pressing the arguments for the ‘historical’ case one step further: the historical consistency of the metallurgical pictures in each of the two poems is, for him, so apparent and so precise that each can and must be given an historical setting, even if the two are separated by a long period.

To Hexes in Homeric Scholia and Servius' Ordo

To Hexes in Homeric Scholia and Servius' Ordo

II. Comparison

Casual judgements on Homer, and even those less casual, are often in a sense comparative, because the mind is illumined, or fogged, by contemporary prejudices. Blind ourselves, we laugh at Xenophanes who denounced the theologian Homer, and Plato who found fault with the moralist. The disease was diagnosed and the cure prescribed over 80 years ago by the Russian, A. N. Veselovsky: ‘The scholars of the West, who know very little about modern epic poetry, involuntarily transfer problems of purely literary criticism to the folk-poetry of the ancients. This is the usual fault of all the criticism of theNibelungenliedand part of that of Homer. ... It is absolutely necessary to take as a starting-point the living epos, whose structure and stages of development must be carefully investigated.’ The comparison of one literature with another sheds light on both in various ways. It may be simply a matter of bringing a better balance to the judgement. Thus the long tradition of Homeric scholarship has made us well aware of the flaws in the Homeric plots. A whole school of criticism has rested on the assumption that the construction is incompetent. For such an attitude I know no better remedy than a reading of the paratactic, anticlimacticArgonauticaof Apollonius Rhodius. Both Homeric epics are intensely dramatic and very cunningly put together.

Biblical Chronology in the Hellenistic World Chronicles

Chronography became a discipline of its own during the Alexandrian age. Herodotus and Thucydides still reckoned the remote past by generations. But from 300 B.C. onward learned men of Alexandria attempted to assign more or less precise dates for notable events. Homeric scholars dated the fall of Troy 407 years prior to the first Olympic games in 776 B.C., i.e., 1184 B.C. Eratosthenes of Cyrene asserted that this was the first datable event of human history, giving an unmistakable demarcation line between mythology and history. For the Orientals, whose records reputedly went back to the time when gods and semi-gods held sway over man, Eratosthenes' Greek-colored view of ancient history appeared myopic. Perhaps to match the Orientals, Greek writers manufactured genealogical tables which traced the pedigrees of famous Greek cities to remote antiquity with their autochthonous progenitors. To create order among the conflicting claims, during the second century B.C., the universal chronicle made its appearance. In the universal chronicles the Greek and Oriental genealogical lists followed each other, were synchronized, or even tabulated.

Oral Poetry in Mediaeval English, French, and German Literature: Some Notes on Recent Research

THROUGH M. Parry and his analyses of contemporary Serbo-Croatian song' Homeric scholarship in recent years has once more happily influenced the study of mediaeval literature. A. B. Lord, continuing and gradually expanding Parry's work, included a tentative chapter on the mediaeval epic in his authoritative book Tht, Singer of Tales (Cambridge, 1960). By this time F. P. Magoun, Jr had begun to use Parry's and Lord's findings in the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and since then a good deal of scholarship in this field has consisted of related efforts.2 Studying a living oral tradition, Parry developed convenient and apparently convincing techniques of proving the oral-formulaic character of a given text (see especially Homer and Homeric Style, 118 ff.). Unfortunately these methods provide a certain temptation to mechanical analysis: one breaks down passages of Anglo-Saxon or, as has more recently been done, Old Spanish and Old Saxon poetry3 into formulas and formula systems, only to find once

Vergil and the Homeric Scholia

Vergil and the Homeric Scholia

The Singer of Tales and Mediaeval Spanish Epic

Dr L. P. Harvey's recent article is the first attempt to assess the relevance of recent work on oral-formulaic poetry to the study of mediaeval Spanish epic. Investigation of modern Yugoslav oral petry was begun in the early 1930s by Milman Parry, and continued after Parry's death by Albert B. Lord, whose book The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960) summarizes the results so far. Parry and Lord were chiefly concerned with the effect of their investigations on Homeric scholarship, but Lord includes in his book a chapter on mediaeval epic with, as Harvey says, two almost casual references to the Cantar de Mio Cid. At the same time, there have been attempts to apply Lord's methods, which had previously been outlined in a number of articles, to Anglo-Saxon and French material.

The Fall of Troy

Nine superposed cities were uncovered at the mound of Hisarlik on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, where Heinrich Schliemann’s visionary search for the Homeric Troy had led him. Soon the interest of Homeric scholars concentrated upon the two cities labelled Troy VI and Troy VIIa as the most likely candidates for the Troy of Homer. Both cities yielded Mycenaean pottery, showing connexions with mainland Greece in the centuries from 1400-1200 B.C., when Mycenaean power was at its height. Both cities had been violently destroyed. However, the brilliant excavations by the University of Cincinnati under the distinguished leadership of Professor Carl W. Blegen have been able to prove that Troy VI was undoubtedly destroyed by a violent earthquake about 1300 or somewhat later.

Contemporary Homeric Scholarship: Sound or Fury? III (Continued)

Contemporary Homeric Scholarship: Sound or Fury? III (Continued)