The Center for Hellenic Studies

Homer
Hellenic Studies Series

The Iliad and the Oral Epic Tradition

The Iliad reveals a traditional oral poetic style, but many researchers believe that the poem cannot be treated as solely a product of oral tradition. In The Iliad and the Oral Epic Tradition, Karol Zieliński argues that neither Homer’s unique artistry nor references to events known from other songs necessarily indicate the use of writing in its composition. The development of traditional oral cycles suggests that the Iliad is only one of many possible retellings of the… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody

Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different options for performative pause—a phonetic phenomenon evidenced by phonology. From the ubiquitous compositional pauses in sense and metrical surface structure, Audible… Read more

Curated Books

Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics

This text first considers the character of Penelope from the Odyssey as the object of male gazes and as a subject acting from her own desire, and then it develops the notion of “possible plots” as structures in the poem that co-exist with the plots Penelope actually plays out. “This book explores Homer’s construction of the character of Penelope, and his more general theory of poetic production and reception. Read more

Online Event

Muse Lee

19 November 2021, 11:00 am ET

How do we sing Homer's immortal stories in this moment of isolation? Emerging writer Muse Lee answers this question with a dazzling project: Aristos: the Musical, a queer pop/rock adaptation of The Iliad produced remotely during the pandemic. Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Demetrios of Scepsis and His Troikos Diakosmos: Ancient and Modern Readings of a Lost Contribution to Ancient Scholarship

Ancient scholarship had many faces, but most have faded away over time. Demetrios of Scepsis is one of the more shadowy of these lost figures, best known for his commentary on the Trojan Catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad. Alexandra Trachsel’s work represents the first treatment dedicated to Demetrios of Scepsis in over a century. Because of the incomplete transmission of Demetrios’s work, Trachsel necessarily focuses on the way later readers… Read more

Curated Books

Rhythm without Beat: Prosodically Motivated Grammarisation in Homer

In this study, the author argues that syntactical development beyond the autonomy of single words or word groups was facilitated by an aspect of Homeric prosody that differs from the metrical surface structure, though it is realized together with meter. The focus will be on the strength of metrical boundaries as phonetically realized pauses. This work will deal, in other words, with the combination of metrics and phonetics. The hypothesis… Read more

Curated Articles

Review of Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer (London: Allen Lane, 2008)

[This article is a draft of a review later published in Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011) 166–169 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426911000127). Page numbers for that publication have been added in curly brackets. For instance, {166|167} indicates the break between pages 166 and 167.] For the author (hereafter LF), the ‘epic age of Homer’ is the 8th c. (here and hereafter, all dates are BCE). The word ‘travelling’ refers to… Read more