Statius' Achilleid is a playful, witty, and open-ended epic in the manner of Ovid. As we follow Achilles' metamorphosis from wild boy to demure girl to lover to hero, the poet brilliantly illustrates ...a series of contrasting codes of behaviour: male and female, epic and elegiac. This first full-length study of the poem addresses not only the narrative itself, but also sets the myth of Achilles on Scyros within a broad interpretive framework. The exploration ranges from the reception of the Achilleid in Baroque opera to the anthropological parallels that have been adduced to explain Achilles' transvestism. The study's expansive approach, which includes Ovid and Ovidian reception, psychoanalytic perspectives and theorizations of gender in antiquity, makes it essential reading not only for students of Statius, but for students of Latin literature, and of gender in antiquity.
The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the ...English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.
The scholarly tendency has too often weakened the conspicuous novelty and originality that characterizes Zeus in the Iliad. This book remedies that tendency and depicts the extraordinary figure of ...Zeus: lord (or impersonation) of lightning and thunders, exclusive master of human destiny --and therefore of human history-and chief of Olympus. This unique personality endowed with polyvalent powers represents itself the conflict between superhuman moral indifference for mortal destiny and anthropomorphic feelings for human beings: he both preordains the death of his son and weeps on his demise. Zeus embodies the Mysterium tremendum. This new Zeus cannot glance at the past image that the tradition painted of him without smiling at its simplicity and disrespect: a parodic or amusing tone surrounds him as he refers or is referred to aspects of his traditional image. The great characters of the Poem give two wise responses to Zeus, lord of destiny: "heroic death" or serene acceptance. We, the readers, are expected to react in the same way.
Extending his distinctive analysis of Homeric epic to the Iliad, Bruce Louden, author of The Odyssey: Structure, Narration, and Meaning, again presents new approaches to understanding the themes and ...story of the poem. In this thought-provoking study, he demonstrates how repeated narrative motifs argue for an expanded understanding of the structure of epic poetry. First identifying the subgenres of myth within the poem, he then reads these against related mythologies of the Near East, developing a context in which the poem can be more accurately interpreted.
Louden begins by focusing on the ways in which the Iliad's three movements correspond with and comment on each other. He offers original interpretations of many episodes, notably in books 3 and 7, and makes new arguments about some well-known controversies (e.g., the duals in book 9), the Iliad's use of parody, the function of theomachy, and the prefiguring of Hektor as a sacrificial victim in books 3 and 6. The second part of the book compares fourteen subgenres of myth in the Iliad to contemporaneous Near Eastern traditions such as those of the Old Testament and of Ugaritic mythology. Louden concludes with an extended comparison of the Homeric Athena and Anat, a West Semitic goddess worshipped by the Phoenicians and Egyptians.
Louden's innovative method yields striking new insights into the formation and early literary contexts of Greek epic poetry.
