Homer's Enemies: Lyric and epic in the seventh century (original) (raw)
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Lyric Musical Practice in the Epic Context of Archaic Greece
Greek Lyric Poetry and its Influence: Texts, Imagines, Music and Cinema, 2020
It is the object of this paper to research how musical practice, which in Antiquity also means literary practice, of the Near-East could have directly influenced archaic Greece at a time in which the names of certain composers that specialize in the lyric genre begin to emerge. Their works have survived to a greater or lesser extent in a direct way or through other author’s quotes. This genre is mentioned in the Homeric poems. However, from the eighth century on, our knowledge of the lyric genre moves between the mythical information of legendary names and that of authors whose historicism is doubted by certain researchers in certain cases. This happens with Terpander, father of the innovations we find in eighth- and seventh-century Greece. Once the new musical characteristics are explained, we may find that Greece imported some from Asia. We shall try here to set out the differences that may be seen between the lyrical practice of these new composers and an allegedly older practice, mainly used for interpretation of the epic repertoire.
Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After establishing Heracles’ independent existence outside Homer, we explore how speakers in the Iliad relate – and relate to – the accomplishments of this hero, in trying to make sense of or influence their situations. Finally, we consider how Heracles’ appearances in the Iliad communicate the poem’s sustained engagement with Heracles traditions through the adaptation of traditional structures and the manipulation of formulaic language. This analysis helps us reconsider Achilles’ curious statement as part of an agonistic process by which the Iliad appropriates and marginalizes a hero ill fit to its tale.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: From Oral Performance to Written Text
New Directions in Oral Theory (Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005) 43-89
In the very fertile field of Homeric Studies there were published in this, the last year of the 20th century, more than a dozen new dissertations, two dozen new scholarly books and monographs, and over 250 new articles and reviews in scholarly journals-a total of almost 10,000 pages of text (and that does not include reprints, translations, popular literature, conference talks, or the ever-growing corpus of electronic text on the World Wide Web). 1 From the last decade of the 20th century I have personally collected more than 2,200 titles of new books, monographs, and journal articles-a total of over 60,000 pages of text (and I must be missing at least a few!). I estimate that in the last century around a half-million new pages of scholarly text were printed; this adds up to 460 pages of commentary for each page of Homeric text, including the "Homeric" Hymns! And this has gone on year after year for at least the last two centuries, and, though sometimes with somewhat less enthusiasm and prolificacy, for twenty-four centuries before that. There is a very present danger that we as Homeric scholars will fail to keep up with all the new discoveries and insights in our field as a whole. This is inevitable, and we recognize it. We do well if we can manage the bibliographical searching tools for the material published during the 20th century, if we have a grasp of the general flow of scholarship during the 19th, and if we can access and comprehend the commentaries on Homer that have survived from earlier centuries (from the Alexandrian hypomnemata whose vestiges are embedded in the Homeric scholia, to Eustathius' magna opera on both epics, to Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum). Some new and even important discoveries in the field will pass many of us by. But there is another danger, I think, more sinister than this one: that the ever rising inundation of new material will cause us to drift away from those moorings established by the toilsome research of our predecessors. I propose to offer here not something entirely new and imaginative, not something more to add to the mass of material to be mastered, but simply a reminder of some of those moorings from which we seem to have lost our grasp.
The Homeric Epics As Palimpsests
Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Reflections in Medieval Literature, 2010
In: AOQU. Forme e modi dell'epica 1, 2020, pp. 9-101, 2020
This paper hosts three case-studies that are meant to be representative of paradigm-shifting trends in Homeric Studies and to cater to specialists and non-specialists alike. Boosted by new archaeological findings and by an increased awareness of Homer’s Near-Eastern entanglements, the “historicity” of the poems has regained centre stage. Against this backdrop, Andrea Debiasi develops a persuasive interpretation of Homer’s name, whose meaning points to the performative-agonistic dimension of Homeric poetry in the context of the clashes that characterized Euboia in the archaic age. By contrast, George Gazis focuses on the one aspect of the Homeric world that cannot possibly be mapped onto space and history, namely Hades. The underworld is unfathomable even for the gods, which accounts for its potential as a trigger of poetic invention. No less than Debiasi’s, this approach resonates with recent scholarship: a return to “history” is often complemented by an opposite, but fully compatible, “symbolic” trend, which has unraveled the systematic juxtaposition, in Homer’s world, between “history” and symbolic constructs. Finally, Cecilia Nobili shows that Homeric epics builds on pre-existing poetic genres such as elegy, although the earliest extant examples of the latter date to a later time. The claim that lyric poetry emerges though a confrontation with epics, then, is no less plausible than its opposite. One more important consequence of Nobili’s approach is that the “subjective” turn scholars have long recognized in Hellenistic and Roman epics is in fact firmly grounded in Homer himself.