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.
Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story ...of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.
Through an extensive series of extracts and accompanying interpretative and contextual essays, this volume showcases the expertise in classical learning that flourished in medieval Gaelic Ireland. ...Providing translations of all excerpts, it situates better known ‘antiquity sagas’ in the Middle Irish language, such as Togail Troí (The Siege of Troy, based on Dares Phrygius), Imtheachta Aeniasa (The Wanderings of Aeneas, based on Virgil’s Aeneid), In Cath Catharda (The Civil War, based on Lucan) and Togail na Tebe (The Siege of Thebes, based on Statius), within the broader constellation of medieval Irish literature that references and engages with classical antiquity. Included are synchronistic poetry and world chronologies; lesser-known Irish poetry and prose recounting episodes from Graeco-Roman mythography and featuring, for instance, Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses and Penelope, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Daedalus and the Minotaur; linguistic and metaphysical tracts; place-name lore; and medieval historiographies of Alexander the Great, Hercules, and warriors of Irish legend recast as classical heroes. Creating access to this body of texts and revealing the marked influences of classical concepts on the imaginative resources of medieval Ireland fills a conspicuous lacuna in our knowledge of classical reception in European literatures. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council, grant no. 818366.
This article examines ancient depictions of the death of Troilus in art and literature and challenges the widespread belief that the Iliad implies an alternative version of the myth in which Troilus ...dies in battle. In particular, it argues that the death-in-battle interpretation is both insufficiently supported by the internal evidence and incompatible with the external evidence. Given the evident popularity of the story of Achilles’ ambush of Troilus in the Archaic period, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the poet of the Iliad knew the story of Troilus’ death by ambush. That the poem's only reference to Troilus does not contradict this story, and possibly even alludes to it, should persuade critics of the strong likelihood that the popular story of Troilus’ ambush at the fountain was also the one in the poet's mind.
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.
In Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984), Wolf retells the Trojan War story from the perspective of the seer Cassandra, taking the Trojan War as a parallel to issues of her day. She uses the ...Amazons as important secondary characters, representing them as both woman-loving women and warriors. Wolf believes their valor in battle is only a version of men's militarism and thus provides no solution to the problem of war, her primary concern.
In this masterly interpretation of narrative sequence in theIliad, Keith Stanley not only sharpens the current debate over the date and creation of the poem, but also challenges the view of this work ...as primarily a celebration of heroic force. He begins by studying the intricate ring-composition in the verses describing Achilles' shield, then extends this analysis to reveal theIliadas an elaborate and self-conscious formal whole. In so doing he defends the hypothesis that the poem as we know it is a massive reorganization and expansion of earlier "Homeric" material, written in response to the need for a stable text for repeated performance at the sixth-century Athenian festival for the city's patron goddess.
Stanley explores the arrangement of the poem's books, all unified by theme and structure, showing how this allowed for artistically satisfying and practically feasible recitation over a period of three or four days. Taking structural emphasis as a guide to poetic discourse, the author argues that theIliadis not a poem of "might"--as opposed to the Odyssean celebration of "guile"--but that in advocating social and personal reconciliation the poem offers a profound indictment of a warring heroic society.
Originally published in 1993.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Iliad. Book XXII Homer; Jong, Irene J. F. de
06/2012, Letnik:
Book XXII
eBook
Book XXII recounts the climax of the Iliad: the fatal encounter between the main defender of Troy and the greatest warrior of the Greeks, which results in the death of Hector and Achilles' revenge ...for the death of his friend Patroclus. At the same time it adumbrates Achilles' own death and the fall of Troy. This edition will help students and scholars better appreciate this key part of the epic poem. The introduction summarises central debates in Homeric scholarship, such as the circumstances of composition and the literary interpretation of an oral poem, and offers synoptic discussions of the structure of the Iliad, the role of the narrator, similes and epithets. There is a separate section on language, which provides a compact list of the most frequent Homeric characteristics. The commentary offers up-to-date linguistic guidance, and elucidates narrative techniques, typical elements and central themes.
A passionate and sensitive study that examines both text and context, situating the play within the historical and political milieu of the eclipse of Athenian power.
Abstract
A primary theme of the first story in Joseph and Aseneth (Jos. Asen. 1-21) is the conversion of an Egyptian to the worship of the living God, motivated by romantic attraction. In this ...respect, Joseph and Aseneth is one among many ancient novelistic writings to use a story about intermarriage, in this case the marriage of a Hebrew to an Egyptian, as a means to explore themes related to hybridity. Though different in tone, I propose that the second story (Jos. Asen. 22-29) is equally concerned with hybridity and that it can likewise be read as expressing an intercultural sensibility that is open to gentile incorporation and intermarriage through its imitation-and subversion-of literary models from two different cultural domains, the Jewish Scriptures (the rape of Dinah; the slaying of Goliath) and classical Greek literature (the abduction of Helen).
