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
8. Fertility and Formlessness: Images of Death in the Iliad and the Odyssey In the last chapter, we compared Homeric and elegiac treatments of the “flower of youth” and found that, while the elegiac poets associated the phrase with the brevity of life, their Homeric counterparts employed it only in evocations of the prime of life. In order to study the Homeric floral imagery of death, we… Read more
9. Homeric Flowers and the Monstrousness of Death In the previous chapter, we found that the Homeric floral imagery of death frequently evokes the notion of fertility, at times an exceptional fertility. The Odyssean images that we studied also associate flowers with the notions of insubstantiality and the dissolution of form. As we shall see, these different concepts combine to suggest a particular conception of death. We… Read more
Conclusion Over the course of this book, we have gained a sense of the particular choices made by the Homeric poets in forming their vegetal images. We have seen that the relevant images draw on some of the most striking characteristics of the Greek flora—the sudden, exceptionally diverse blooms of the Greek spring. And by accessing these phenomena, the Homeric poets were able to draw their listeners’… Read more
Plates Plate 1. Spring blooms at the ancient site of Epidaurus, 30 March 2015. Photo by the author. Plate 2. Spring blooms at the ancient site of Eleusis, 31 March 2015. Photo by the author. Plate 3. Spring bloom on the slopes of the ancient site of Mycenae, 10 March 2009. Photo by the author. Plate 4. Narcissus… Read more
