Introduction: A Word on Assumptions, Methods, and Aims §1. This effort is a continuation of two earlier books. One of these, The Best of the Achaeans, [1] centered on the role of oral tradition in early Greek achievements of poetic artistry and precision of expression, with Homer in the forefront. The task was difficult, in that I was challenging two influential stances… Read more
1. Oral Poetry and Ancient Greek Poetry: Broadening and Narrowing the Terms §1. The theory of oral poetry as set forth by Milman Parry and Albert Lord resists application to Archaic Greek poetry only if oral poetry is defined too narrowly by the opponents of the theory—and if the surviving poetry of Archaic Greece is treated too broadly as a general example of oral poetry. In what… Read more
2. The Poetics of Panhellenism and the Enigma of Authorship in Early Greece §1. I have been attempting both to distinguish poetry from song and to broaden the current concept of oral poetry in such a way as to include song. Since the conventional semantic range of our word poetry tends to exclude song, however, I prefer not to use the actual term oral poetry in this… Read more
3. The Panhellenization of Song §1. The concept of Panhellenism helps explain not only how the multiple traditions of Archaic Greek oral poetry became a synthetic tradition but also how this tradition, as visualized in the hypothetical schema that has been offered, tended to counteract the emergence of historically verifiable authorship. Further, the concept of Panhellenism also helps explain why the oldest body of Greek literature to… Read more
4. Pindar’s Olympian 1 and the Aetiology of the Olympic Games §1. Let us begin a closer scrutiny of Pindar’s traditions by examining an occasion that typifies the social context of his authorship. This occasion is memorialized in Pindar’s Olympian 1, a composition commissioned by the tyrant Hieron of Syracuse to celebrate a Panhellenic victory in a horse race event of the Olympics of 476 B.C. Read more
5. The Ordeal of the Athlete and the Burden of the Poet §1. Having contemplated the ritual ideology of athletic events in one particular festival from among the four seasonally recurring Panhellenic Games that produced the victors celebrated by the lyric poetry of Pindar, we may proceed to consider how this poetry formally relates itself to such ritual ideology. §2. A prominent word used in the… Read more
Introduction: Homeric Anger {1} Across the landscape of Homeric studies there are monuments that demonstrate how central anger is to whatever the early Greeks—audience and performers alike—imagined the Homeric narratives to be about. By our own various references to the powerful concept of anger, we seem to wave it as a magic wand for conjuring meaning. The titles of some of the most insightful works in Homeric… Read more
Chapter 1. The Prophet Defines Within the first hundred lines of the Iliad, the Achaean prophet, Calchas, presents a definition of anger (Il. 1.74-83). The immediate context is that Achilles has just called an assembly in response to the suffering of the Achaeans. So great is their suffering that, Achilles suggests, they are on the brink of entirely abandoning their efforts on the Trojan plain (Il. 1.59-67). Read more
Chapter Two. Forms and Formulae Kôtos in Its Noun Forms {32|33} The formal details concerning the noun kótos are straightforward. The substantive kótos is attested six times in the Iliad and the Odyssey, each time in the accusative case. [1] Each of these instances occurs at the hephthemimeral caesura, in other words, always in the second hemistich of the verse and… Read more
Chapter 3. Κότος and Social Status {78|79} At the beginning of this study, I suggested that kótos was identified in Calchas’s definition both by the length of time that it lasts and by the social status of the angered party. We have seen that the use of télos, metópisthen, and other related terminology gives kótos a sense of extraordinary duration. The issue of the term’s relation to… Read more
