CAPÍTULO 6. El Contexto Agrario de la Odisea En este capítulo, estudiaré écfrasis en el contexto de la descripción física de Itaca y las referencias a la tierra cultivada. Mi propósito es mostrar que existen dos caracterizaciones principales del paisaje, y que estas dos miradas pueden ser estudiadas en relación al nostos de Odiseo. Mostraré que en la ausencia de Odiseo, Itaca es caracterizada sobre todo como… Read more
CAPÍTULO 7. La Écfrasis Homérica Las escenas de animales en conflicto son comunes en objetos que provienen de diversas épocas históricas, aparecen en frescos y anillos sellos minoicos y micénicos y en la cerámica del período geométrico. Leones, perros, jabalíes y cervatos en arreglos de lucha son uno de los motivos más comunes de decoración en Grecia antigua. Los estudiosos de Homero han intentado esclarecer la… Read more
CAPÍTULO 8. La écfrasis general, joyas y textiles Usualmente se considera a la joyería como un arte menor; esto es cierto en términos de escala, sin embargo, la importancia de la joyería en el estudio del arte y la técnica antigua,y en el entendimiento de la historia económica, religiosa y social no debe ser menospreciada. De hecho los adornos usados por un egipcio, griego o romano pueden… Read more
BIBLIOGRAFIA Ahl F. and H. M. Roisman. 1996. The Odyssey Re-formed. Ithaca. Allen T. W. 1921. The Homeric Catalogue of Ships. Oxford. Anderson J. M. 1976. Early Epic Scenery: Homer, Virgil and the Medieval Legacy. Ithaca / London. Armstrong J. I. 1958. “The Arming Motif in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology 79:337-354. … Read more
Introduction [[This volume is an electronic version of Homeric Questions, originally published in 1996 by the University of Texas Press. The original pagination of the printed version will be indicated in this electronic version inside pointed brackets (“{“ and “}”). For example, {6|7} indicates where p. 6 of the printed version ends and p. 7 begins.]] The title of this work is marked by the word… Read more
Chapter 1. Homer and Questions of Oral Poetry The term oral poetry may not fully capture the concept behind it, in view of the semantic difficulties conjured up by both individual words, oral and poetry. Still, the composite term oral poetry has a historical validity in that both Parry and Lord had used it to designate the overall concept that they were developing. I propose to continue… Read more
Chapter 2. An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry The massive accumulation of new or newly-appreciated comparative evidence about the nature of epic in oral poetry demands application to the ongoing study of individual epic traditions. I propose here to apply some of this evidence, as collected over recent years by a broad variety of experts investigating a wide variety of societies in Eastern Europe,… Read more
Chapter 3. Homer and the Evolution of a Homeric Text In order to find a historical context for the writing down of the Homeric text, the most obvious strategy is to look for a stage in ancient Greek history when the technology of writing could produce a text, in manuscript form, that conferred a level of authority distinct from but equivalent to the authority conferred by an… Read more
Chapter 4. Myth as Exemplum in Homer There are questions about the Homeric parádeigma, which I translate for the moment by way of Latin exemplum ‘example’, following the lead of earlier inquiries. [1] In an influential article on the subject of mythological exemplum in Homer, Malcolm Willcock proposes that the contents of myths cited by Homeric characters, with reference to their own… Read more
Epilogue Throughout this work, the central aim was to reintroduce the vitality of performance, of oral tradition in general, to the conceptual framework of the Classics. This aim addresses the need to be vigilant over tradition itself, all tradition. Earlier, I had argued that the field of Classics, which lends itself to the empirical study of tradition, seems ideally suited to articulate the value of tradition in… Read more
