Introduction How many ways are there to tell the story of Troy? A passage from Iliad 20 makes me wonder just how flexible the Homeric tradition might be. At the beginning of book 20, Zeus calls the gods to an assembly. He tells them that they may now join the battle taking place before the walls of Troy on whichever side they wish, something that he had… Read more
1. Flowers, Subjectivity, and the Gaze: The Erotic Imagery of Greek Lyric The imagery of archaic Greek lyric offers our most promising comparandum for Homeric treatments of flowers and erotic bodies; accordingly, I would like to consider relevant images from the lyric corpus before turning to the Homeric images that will form the focus of my study. [1] The bodies decked with… Read more
2. Fantasizing the Narcissus, Gilding the Hyacinth: Flowers, Seduction, and Deception in Homeric Poetry Having studied floral images of the erotic that were developed by the archaic lyric poets, we turn now to the equivalent Homeric images. By comparing these two genres we can set in relief the particular choices made by the Homeric poets in their development of such imagery. As we have seen, in Greek… Read more
3. Shifting Surfaces of Art and Nature: Flowers, Deception, and the Ποικίλον I would now like to consider how Homeric associations of flowers, seduction, and deception interacted with the general characteristics of the Greek flora. As we shall see, we get a clearer sense of the origins of the relevant Homeric images when we consider them alongside a further set of Homeric images that associate seduction and… Read more
Part II. Cosmic and Civic Order Preamble In Part I, we considered a set of Homeric floral images associated with erotic bodies, and we explored their interactions with the characteristics of flowers in the Greek natural environment. I would now like to focus on a rather different class of Homeric vegetal images. As we shall see, the Homeric poets developed both floral and arboreal images to… Read more
4. Stable Trees and Sudden Blooms: Images of Continuity and Change in the Cosmos In this chapter, I will focus on the sorts of images that the Homeric poets associated with the concepts of order in the cosmos and of changes and challenges to that order—or to put it another way, with changes put into effect or merely threatened. As we shall see, these poets drew on… Read more
5. Anchises’ Pastures, Laertes’ Orchards: Images of Civilization and Its Opposite Having explored Homeric vegetal imagery that describes order and threats to that order at the cosmic level, we turn now to a set of images that explores similar concepts on the human scale. We found in Chapter 4 that the Homeric poets associated trees and pillars with stability in the cosmos and flowers with challenges to… Read more
6. The Modes of Generation of Flowers and Trees: Homeric Poetry and Theophrastus In Chapters 4 and 5, we surveyed two sets of Homeric vegetal images. The one set associates arboreal images with the established order of the cosmos and floral images with changes or challenges to that order. In the other set, the wild growths both of flowers and of trees are associated with uncivilized lands,… Read more
Part III. Youth and Death Preamble The third and final part of this monograph focuses on Homeric vegetal images of death and, in particular, on Homeric associations of death with flowers, which provide some of the most striking examples of such imagery. We might feel intuitively that such floral images will capture the brevity of life—its brief bloom—an idea that is common in the modern west,… Read more
7. Beauty and Transience? Flowers and Death in Greek Elegy and Homeric Poetry Given the preoccupation of many poems in the Greek elegiac tradition with death, the floral imagery of that tradition offers the most obvious comparandum for the Homeric floral images of death that we shall discuss below. [1] We can get a first sense of the particular associations of the… Read more
