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Part II. Fixed Text in Theory, Shifting Words in Performance5. Multiform Epic and Aristarchus’ Quest for the Real Homer

Chapter 5 Multiform Epic and Aristarchus’ Quest for the Real Homer. {|107} Multiformity, as conveyed by poludeukḗs ‘patterning in many different ways’, the variant epithet describing the sound of the nightingale in Odyssey xix (521), is a key concept in understanding poetry as performance in ancient Greece. This has been the general argument so far, which will now be applied specifically, in the second part of… Read more

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6. Homer as Script

Chapter 6 Homer as Script The Athenian Koine or “Vulgate” version of Homer, even if it were to have no claim to be the original Homer any more than the text established by Aristarchus, represents a crucial era in the history of Homeric performance traditions. This is the next argument to be made, added as a qualification to my earlier argument that we cannot simplistically… Read more

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7. Homer as “Scripture”

Chapter 7 Homer as “Scripture” Let us turn to the last of the five periods in the history of Homeric transmission, as formulated at the beginning of the fifth chapter. For the later Alexandrian scholars starting with Aristarchus, whom I put into period 5 of Homeric transmission, that is, into the most “rigid” period, the script or scripts stemming from the Athenian State tradition became… Read more

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Epilogue. Dead Poets and Recomposed Performers

Chapter 8 Epilogue: Dead Poets and Recomposed Performers There is a late twelfth-century lai by Marie de France, entitled Laüstic, about a nightingale that was killed by a jealous knight who had been told by his wife, when asked why she would leave the bed so often at night and stand by the window, that ‘there is no joy in all the world like hearing… Read more

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Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Late Antique Narrative Fiction: Apocryphal Acta and the Greek Novel in the Fifth-Century Life and Miracles of Thekla

Late Antique Narrative Fiction: Apocryphal Acta and the Greek Novel in the Fifth-Century Life and Miracles of Thekla Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Harvard University ‘The popular demand in fiction is always for a mixed form.’ [1] I. Introduction When it comes to the question of Christianity and narrative fiction, one is frequently presented with the apparent dilemma of faith and… Read more

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Preface to the 2008 online edition

Preface to the 2008 online edition P§1. This online book, “born digital” in 2008, stems from an earlier printed book, Greek: A Survey of Recent Work, co-authored by my late teacher Fred W. Householder and myself. It was published in 1972 by Mouton in the Hague (http://www.mouton-publishers.com). P§2. As Householder noted in an unnumbered introductory footnote (p. 15), I was the author of the following… Read more

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Introduction

Introduction 0§1. This work is eclectic. It is neither a bibliographical survey nor an exhaustive chronicle of progress. The main purpose is simply to explore various trends in research on the Greek language. Part I deals with generalities, while Part II concentrates on various different levels of linguistic analysis: phonology, morphology, syntax, etymology / vocabulary, and dialectology. {16|17}   … Read more

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Part I: Generalities

Part I: Generalities I§1. The heading etymology / vocabulary, just mentioned, is of and by itself an indication of recent trends in the study of Greek. I§2. I postpone the details until we reach that heading. ⊛I begin here by making a general statement about the study of Greek words, which requires both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.⊛ (In using these terms synchronic and diachronic, I have in… Read more

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Part II: Specifics

Part II: Specifics Phonology II§1. Despite the attestation of Greek as far back in time as the second millennium BCE, a chronological chasm remains between this language and the proto-language reconstructed as Indo-European. What I just said is most apparent on the phonological level. The necessity for positing a multitude of phases and patterns of phonology which must have been operative at some early point in… Read more