Chapter 3. Hesiod and the Poetics of Pan-Hellenism The Hesiodic Question From the vantage point of the ancient Greeks themselves, no accounting of Homer is possible without an accounting of Hesiod as well. In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus was moved to observe (2.53.2) that the Greeks owed the systematization […]
Chapter 2. Formula and Meter: The Oral Poetics of Homer Since the discoveries of Milman Раrry [1] and Albert Lord [2] about the nature of “oral poetry,” some problems have developed over how to define the formula. Parry’s own definition will serve as a useful point of departure: the formula is […]
Chapter 1. Homer and Comparative Mythology Still under the spell of Heinrich Schliemann’s rediscovery of Troy, students of ancient Greece have been accustomed to regard the Greek epic tradition of Homer as a reporting of events that really happened in the second millennium B.C., the Mycenaean Bronze Age. [1] This view […]
Introduction [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the […]
Foreword Greek Mythology and Poetics is the second book in the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that will help integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and that will pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. […]
Acknowledgments I thank the Classics Department of Harvard University for the allocation of a subsidy that has helped make this book more affordable. At an early stage of the project, Lenore Savage, with her expertise at the keyboard, navigated through vast stretches of unwieldy text. The final printed version was achieved […]
Abbreviations BA – The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry = N 1979a GM – Greek Mythology and Poetics = N 1990b HC – Homer the Classic = N 2008 HQ – Homeric Questions = N 1996b HP – Homer the Preclassic = N […]
Appendix 1. Testimonia on the Kreophuleioi of Samos In Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus 4.4 we read how Lycurgus the Lawgiver acquired the Homeric poems from the descendants of Kreophylos in Samos and brought the poems back to the Spartans: ἐκεῖ δὲ καὶ τοῖς Ὁμήρου ποιήμασιν ἐντυχὼν πρῶτον, ὡς ἔοικε, παρὰ […]
Chapter 8 Epilogue: Dead Poets and Recomposed Performers There is a late twelfth-century lai by Marie de France, entitled Laüstic, about a nightingale that was killed by a jealous knight who had been told by his wife, when asked why she would leave the bed so often at night and […]
Chapter 7 Homer as “Scripture” Let us turn to the last of the five periods in the history of Homeric transmission, as formulated at the beginning of the fifth chapter. For the later Alexandrian scholars starting with Aristarchus, whom I put into period 5 of Homeric transmission, that is, into […]