Chapter 4 Mimesis in Lyric: Sappho’s Aphrodite and the Changing Woman of the Apache We turn to a striking example of the equation between a ritual “this” and a mythical “that,” as postulated in Aristotle’s formulation of mimesis. This example of dramatic re-enactment, taken from a culture that is definitely unrelated to the Greek, is explicitly a case of initiation—a concept that we have seen… Read more
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
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
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
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
The St Polyeuktos Epigram (AP 1.10): A Literary Perspective [1] Mary Whitby, Oxford Anicia Juliana’s magnificent church of St Polyeuktos, constructed on an elevated site in the centre of Constantinople in the 520s, [2] has rightly attracted great attention since its remains were first discovered by accident in 1960. Exciting work has been done, and is… Read more
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
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
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
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
