“Theory and Method in John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Iliad and Allegories of the Odyssey.” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 3, 141-171. (original) (raw)
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From 5-7 June 2024 the international conference “The Poet of the Greeks. The Genesis and Reception of Homer in Archaic and Classical Greece” took place in Basel. It was initiated by Lars Hübner, organised and hosted in cooperation with Johannes Bernhardt, Anton Bierl, and Alexandra Trachsel; it was made financially possible by the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Exchange programme and the Basel Department of Greek Studies. The conference centred on the question of when and, above all, how Homer became the poet of the Greeks. Against the background of the various turns in cultural studies, it was based on three premises: First, it was assumed that the Homeric epics are based on an oral narrative tradition that goes, at least in parts, back to the Mycenaean period. Second, it was based on a pre-Aristotelian concept of Homer, which encompassed the entire pre-, side-, and post-stories of the Trojan War, as they have come down to us in the so-called Epic Cycle, the Thebais, and the Homeric Hymns. Third, the concept of “reception” was conceived not only as an aesthetic, but also as a historical category. By involving philology, archaeology, and history, the aim was to challenge the widespread view that it was Athens which had a decisive role in the shaping and dissemination of the Homeric epics. Instead, it aimed to take a Panhellenic perspective and record the genesis, reception, and geographical dissemination of the Homeric tradition in the stream of Greek literature, imagery, and history at a crucial time when the Greek world was taking shape.
Homer on poetry: two passages in the Odyssey
Eranos, 1987
This article examines two passages in Homer (Odyssey 1.353-5 and 8.523-31), and argues that they do not show that poetry has a didactic purpose or effect. The task of the bard is to give an accurate and transparent account of heroic deeds, and not to select or adjust the facts in order to point a moral.
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.