Abbreviations BA – The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry = N 1979a GM – Greek Mythology and Poetics = N 1990b HC – Homer the Classic = N 2008 HQ – Homeric Questions = N 1996b HP – Homer the Preclassic = N 2009 HR – Homeric Responses = N 2003a HTL – Homer’s Text and Language =… Read more
Acknowledgments I thank the Classics Department of Harvard University for the allocation of a subsidy that has helped make this book more affordable. At an early stage of the project, Lenore Savage, with her expertise at the keyboard, navigated through vast stretches of unwieldy text. The final printed version was achieved by Gary Bisbee, master compositor and scholar. I wish to record my deep gratitude… Read more
Foreword Greek Mythology and Poetics is the second book in the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that will help integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and that will pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. For such an undertaking, we may look to the comparative testimony of relatively complex societies,… Read more
Introduction [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] This book concentrates on what ancient Greek society inherited… Read more
Chapter 1. Homer and Comparative Mythology Still under the spell of Heinrich Schliemann’s rediscovery of Troy, students of ancient Greece have been accustomed to regard the Greek epic tradition of Homer as a reporting of events that really happened in the second millennium B.C., the Mycenaean Bronze Age. [1] This view must be modified by the perspective of comparative mythology, as… Read more
Chapter 2. Formula and Meter: The Oral Poetics of Homer Since the discoveries of Milman Раrry [1] and Albert Lord [2] about the nature of “oral poetry,” some problems have developed over how to define the formula. Parry’s own definition will serve as a useful point of departure: the formula is “a group of words… Read more
Chapter 3. Hesiod and the Poetics of Pan-Hellenism The Hesiodic Question From the vantage point of the ancient Greeks themselves, no accounting of Homer is possible without an accounting of Hesiod as well. In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus was moved to observe (2.53.2) that the Greeks owed the systematization of their gods—we may say, of their universe—to two poets, Homer and Hesiod. The… Read more
Chapter 4. Patroklos, Concepts of Afterlife, and the Indic Triple Fire The rituals occasioned by the Funeral of Patroklos, as narrated in Iliad XXIII, have been compared with the royal funerary rituals of the Hittites. [1] The parallelisms in details and in ideology suggest a common Indo-European heritage, in view of additional comparative evidence available from the Indic traditions. Read more
Chapter 5. The Death of Sarpedon and the Question of Homeric Uniqueness It has been argued often, and in many ways, that the poetry of Homer is unique, transcending his poetic heritage. The point of departure for this presentation is a confrontation with one such argument, concerning the meaning of the Homeric expression kléos áphthiton ‘fame…imperishable’ at Iliad IX 413, cognate with the Indic expression… Read more
Chapter 6. The King and the Hearth: Six Studies of Sacral Vocabulary Relating to the Fireplace In the Electra, of Sophocles, Clytemnestra dreams that Agamemnon has come back from the dead to the realm of light (417-419; ἐς φῶς 419). The king seizes the skêptron ‘scepter’ (σκῆπτρον 420) that had once been wielded by him, but which is now held by the usurper Aegisthus (420-421),… Read more
