Chapter 6 Homer as Script The Athenian Koine or “Vulgate” version of Homer, even if it were to have no claim to be the original Homer any more than the text established by Aristarchus, represents a crucial era in the history of Homeric performance traditions. This is the next argument […]
Chapter 5 Multiform Epic and Aristarchus’ Quest for the Real Homer. {|107} Multiformity, as conveyed by poludeukḗs ‘patterning in many different ways’, the variant epithet describing the sound of the nightingale in Odyssey xix (521), is a key concept in understanding poetry as performance in ancient Greece. This has been the […]
Chapter 4 Mimesis in Lyric: Sappho’s Aphrodite and the Changing Woman of the Apache We turn to a striking example of the equation between a ritual “this” and a mythical “that,” as postulated in Aristotle’s formulation of mimesis. This example of dramatic re-enactment, taken from a culture that is definitely […]
Chapter 3 Mimesis of Homer and Beyond The variant epithet of the Homeric nightingale’s voice in Odyssey xix (521), poludeukḗs ‘patterning in many different ways’, applies to Homer himself and—just as important—to those who perform Homer. In making this claim, I am arguing that Homer’s nightingale is in effect a […]
Chapter 2 Mimesis, Models of Singers, and the Meaning of a Homeric Epithet Let us continue where we left off, with the song of the nightingale. In the previous chapter, we noted that the idea of variation is implicit in the epithet poludeukḗs describing the voice (phōnḗ) of the songbird in […]
Chapter 1 The Homeric Nightingale and the Poetics of Variation in the Art of a Troubadour. {|7} Let us begin with a passage from epic, where the epic is representing lyric, not epic. Specifically the lyric form is a song of lament. Penelope is at the moment comparing herself to a […]
Introduction: A Brief Survey of Concepts and Aims The two central concepts of this book can be summed up in the words performance and composition, which are to be taken as two different aspects of one process in oral poetics. The emphasis here is on performance, as the title of the book […]
Preface for the Online Edition The printed edition of Poetry as Performance, originally published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press, is now in 2009 published online here by the Center for Hellenic Studies, with the permission of the Press. The original page-numbers are indicated within braces (for example, “{1|2}” indicates the break […]
Originally published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Copyright, Cambridge University Press. Also available for purchase in printhere.
About the Author Mary Ebbott is Assistant Professor of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She holds an A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College and earned both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University. Her previous publications have focused on Homer’s Iliad and the Persians of […]