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"ILIAD"
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Enraged : why violent times need ancient Greek myths
\"Millennia ago, Greek myths exposed the dangers of violent rage and the need for empathy and self-restraint. Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Hecuba, and Sophocles' Ajax show that anger and vengeance destroy perpetrators and victims alike. Composed before and during the ancient Greeks' groundbreaking movement away from autocracy toward more inclusive political participation, these stories offer guidelines for modern efforts to create and maintain civil societies. Emily Katz Anhalt reveals how these three masterworks of classical Greek literature can teach us, as they taught the ancient Greeks, to recognize violent revenge as a marker of illogical thinking and poor leadership. These time-honored texts emphasize the costs of our dangerous penchant for glorifying violent rage and those who would indulge in it. By promoting compassion, rational thought, and debate, Greek myths help to arm us against the tyrants we might serve and the tyrants we might become.\"--Amazon
BOOK
Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad
Jonathan L. Ready offers the first comprehensive examination of Homer's similes in the Iliad as arenas of heroic competition. This study concentrates primarily on similes spoken by Homeric characters. The first to offer a sustained exploration of such similes, Ready shows how characters are made to contest through and over simile not only with one another but also with the narrator. Ready investigates the narrator's similes as well. He demonstrates that Homer amplifies the feat of a successful warrior by providing a competitive orientation to sequences of similes used to describe battles. He also offers a new interpretation of Homer's extended similes as a means for the poet to imagine his characters as competitors for his attention. Throughout this study, Ready makes innovative use of approaches from both Homeric studies and narratology that have not yet been applied to the analysis of Homer's similes.
eBook
Homer and the poetics of Hades
\"Homer and the Poetics of Hades offers a new and unique approach to the Iliad and, more particularly, the Odyssey through an exploration of the role and function of the Underworld as a poetic resource permitting an alternative perspective on the epic past. By portraying Hades as a realm where vision is not possible, Homer creates a unique poetic environment in which social constraints and divine prohibitions do not apply, resulting in a narrative which emulates that of the Muses but which at the same time is markedly distinct from it. In Hades experimentation with, and alteration of, important epic forms and values can be pursued with greater freedom, giving rise to a different kind of poetics: the 'poetics of Hades'. In the Iliad, Homer offers us a glimpse of how this alternative poetics works through the visit of Patroclus' shade in Achilles' dream. The recollection offered by the shade reveals an approach to its past in which regret, self-pity, and a lingering memory of intimate and emotional moments displace an objective tone and traditional exposition of heroic values. However, the potential of Hades for providing alternative means of commemorating the past is more fully explored in the 'Nekyia' of Odyssey 11: there, Odysseus' extraordinary ability to see the dead in Hades allows him to meet and interview the shades of heroines and heroes of the epic past, while the absolute confinement of Hades allows the shades to recount their stories from their own personal points of view. The poetic implications are significant, since by visiting Hades and listening to the stories of the shades Odysseus, and Homer with him, gain access to a tradition in which epic values associated with gender roles and even divine law are suspended in favour of a more immediate and personally inflected approach to the epic past. As readers, this alternative poetics offers us more than just a revised framework within which to navigate the Iliad and the Odyssey, inviting as it does a more nuanced understanding of the Greeks' anxieties around mortality and posthumous fame.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Reading Homer's Iliad
We still read Homer's epic the Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer's own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one's mortality teach? We also turn to Homer's Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet's preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic's 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book's commentary.
eBook
Thinking in Circles
Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a technique which places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today's scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around the world.
Found in the Bible and in writings from as far afield as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer'sIliad, the Bible's book of Numbers,and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne'sTristram Shandy, developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones.
eBook
Thetis in Identity Crisis
This article focuses on Statius’ representation of Thetis in the Achilleid in comparison with her representation in the Iliad . Statius, it is argued, goes against the Homeric tradition, depicting the goddess with features opposite from those she possesses in Homer. Thetis, generally perceived as a modest and ladylike speaker in the Iliad , employs masculine-gendered rhetoric and becomes offensive in the Achilleid ; paternal acts linked to Peleus in the Homeric tradition are in Statius’ poem undertaken by Thetis; Homer’s omniscient and powerful goddess is almost ridiculed in Statius: being obsessed with the impossible, i.e. Achilles’ salvation, she repeatedly fails to achieve a possible delay of his doom. Through this technique, Statius inverts Thetis’ traditional character, creating a heroine that fits perfectly in his unconventional epic of cross-dressing and role-play.
Journal Article
The death and afterlife of Achilles
Achilles' death—by an arrow shot through the vulnerable heel of the otherwise invincible mythic hero—was as well known in antiquity as the rest of the history of the Trojan War. However, this important event was not described directly in either of the great Homeric epics, the Iliad or the Odyssey. Noted classics scholar Jonathan S. Burgess traces the story of Achilles as represented in other ancient sources in order to offer a deeper understanding of the death and afterlife of the celebrated Greek warrior.
Through close readings of additional literary sources and analysis of ancient artwork, such as vase paintings, Burgess uncovers rich accounts of Achilles' death as well as alternative versions of his afterlife. Taking a neoanalytical approach, Burgess is able to trace the influence of these parallel cultural sources on Homer's composition of the Iliad.
With his keen, original analysis of hitherto untapped literary, iconographical, and archaeological sources, Burgess adds greatly to our understanding of this archetypal mythic hero.
eBook
Γameσσetai/γe Maσσetai: Homer Iliad 9.394 and the Constitutive Role of Irregularity
This paper uses a textual decision at Iliad 9.394 to argue for irregularity as a functional and meaningful principle in the constitution of the Homeric text. In contrast to almost all recent major editions, I argue that the ‘irregular’ MSS γαμέσσεται should be preferred to the Aristarchaean conjecture γε μάσσεται. Aristarchus’ widely adopted emendation, I suggest, is the product of a drive towards standardization that is still operative in Homeric text-critical practice. This paper opposes that standardization with the evidence of ancient, perhaps pre-Alexandrian, responses to Iliad 9.394, in which the ‘irregularity’ of γαμέσσεται is embraced as an interpretive opportunity. The formal disruptions of γαμέσσεται, I propose, can be understood by locating them both within the immediate context of Iliad 9 and within the wider thematics of irregularity that mark the character of Achilles. This paper thus attempts to reframe our approach to the role of irregularity in the Iliad as an integral feature of meaning rather than grounds for suspecting the integrity of the text.
Journal Article
Considerations on Fate in the Iliad and the Remarkable Interventions of the Divine
By borrowing the metaphor of the ‘tapestry of existence’ to discuss the matter of fate in Homer’s Iliad, we selected four threads that are interwoven in the warp of each hero’s destiny—that of necessity/fatality, the relations between Zeus and the Moîra, the plots and tricks of the gods, and fate and human actions—with the aim of inviting the reader to appreciate the texture of the work with the passages that most caught our attention, without the intention of exhausting the subject. To do so, we draw upon the origin of the word Moîra in anthropology, as well as some of Heidegger’s ideas and those of other commentators to enrich the discussion.
Journal Article