Did Homer tell the 'truth' about the Trojan War? If so, how much, and if not, why not? The issue was hardly academic to the Greeks living under the Roman Empire, given the centrality of both Homer, ...the father of Greek culture, and the Trojan War, the event that inaugurated Greek history, to conceptions of Imperial Hellenism. This book examines four Greek texts of the Imperial period that address the topic - Strabo's Geography, Dio of Prusa's Trojan Oration, Lucian's novella True Stories, and Philostratus' fictional dialogue Heroicus - and shows how their imaginative explorations of Homer and his relationship to history raise important questions about the nature of poetry and fiction, the identity and intentions of Homer himself, and the significance of the heroic past and Homeric authority in Imperial Greek culture.
This article contains a poetical translation of the epic poem by the late-ancient poet Triphiodorus, The Sack of Ilion. For a long time, Triphiodorus had been considered as a poet of “the school of ...Nonnus” and as his epigone, and his lifetime had been dated to the end of the 5th — beginning of the 6th century. But after the publication in 1972 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus of the 3th century containing a few lines by Triphiodorus, it became clear that his lifetime should be shifted to the 3th century and it was not Nonnus who influenced Triphiodorus, but vice versa. Triphiodorus anticipated some stylistic and metrical innovations of Nonnus. “Suda” conveys some data about Triphiodorus stating that he lived in Egypt, and attributing to him several epic poems, among which only The Sack of Ilion has survived. It is a poem containing 691 verses and based on the plot of the Song of Demodocus summarised in Odyssey. The poem by Triphiodorus can be called “a reconstruction” of Demodocus? Song. It is also close in content to the last books of the epic Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, though it is not a paraphrase but an independent development of the theme. Such Christian authors as Gregory the Nazianzenus and Gregory of Nyssa could be familiar with the poem. This is the first full translation of the poem into Russian.
Scopul acestei cercetări constă în a valorifica creaţia poetică a lui Nicolae Dabija din perspectiva imaginilor mitice şi ale personalităţilor notorii din cultura antică. Sunt selectate poezii din ...diferite volume care dezvăluie respect pentru cultura antică elină, cum ar: simbolul orfic, poetul Homer, Ulise, Nausicaa, Euridice etc. Conexiunea misteriosului cu lumea reală este o componentă a poeziei de a crea o atmosferă de reverie. În acest articol sunt incluse argumente de complicitate a eului liric în a descoperi, a trăi mirarea. Comprehensiunea macrocosmosului se realizează în detaliu de cinematografie. În poezia lui Nicolae Dabija elucidăm cum este valorificat poetul contemporan, pliat pe imaginile culturii antice Homer şi Orfeu, ceea ce contribuie la o deschidere spre universalitate dintr-o viziune inedită. Măiestria în arta cuvântului se măsoară în tendinţa de a vedea frumosul, de a pleda pentru viaţă şi de a avea forţă să opreşti timpul printr-o fotografiere de fulger, prin textul poetic. THE POETRY OF NICOLAE DABIJA UNDER THE SIGN OF THE MYTHICThe purpose of this research is to capitalize on the poetic creation of Nicolae Dabija from the perspective of mythical images and notorious personalities from ancient culture. Poems from different volumes are selected, revealing a respect for the ancient Hellenic culture, such as: The Orphic symbol, the poet Homer, Odysseus, Nausicaa, Eurydice, etc. The connection of the mysterious with the real world is a component of poetry in order to create an atmosphere of reverie.
This article includes arguments of complicity of the lyrical self in discovering, living the wonder. The understanding of the macrocosmos is done in cinematic detail. In Nicolae Dabija's poetry we illustrate how the contemporary poet is capitalized, reported to the images of Homerus and Orphaeus – the ancient culture, thus contributing to an opening towards universality from a unique vision. The mastery of the word is measured in the tendency to see the beautiful, to plead for life and to have the strength to stop time through a flash photography, by means of the poetic text.
The HomericIliadandOdysseyare among the world's foremost epics. Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer-a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems ...composed-at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it.
InHomeric Responses,Nagy presents a series of essays that further elaborate his theories regarding the oral composition and evolution of the Homeric epics. Building on his previous work inHomeric QuestionsandPoetry as Performance: Homer and Beyondand responding to some of his critics, he examines such issues as the importance of performance and the interaction between audience and poet in shaping the poetry; the role of the rhapsode (the performer of the poems) in the composition and transmission of the poetry; the "irreversible mistakes" and cross-references in theIliadandOdysseyas evidences of artistic creativity; and the Iliadic description of the shield of Achilles as a pointer to the world outside the poem, the polis of the audience.
This monograph lays the groundwork for a new approach of the characterization of the Homeric Helen, focusing on how she is addressed and named in the Iliad and the Odyssey and especially on her ...epithets. Her social identity in Troy and in Sparta emerges in the words used to address and name her. Her epithets, most of them referring to her beauty or her kinship with Zeus and coming mainly from the narrator, make her the counterpart of the heroes.
In The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the ...workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences—both ancient and modern—a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, ...the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.
PDF
