Chapter 2. Singers: Performance and Training Were we to seek to understand why a literary poet wrote what he did in a particular poem in a particular manner and form, we should not focus our attention on the moment when he or someone else read or recited his poem to a particular audience or even on any moment when we ourselves read the poem in quiet solitude. Read more
Chapter 3. The Formula There came a time in Homeric scholarship when it was not sufficient to speak of the “repetitions” in Homer, of the “stock epithets,” of the “epic clichés” and “stereotyped phrases.” Such terms were either too vague or too restricted. Precision was needed, and the work of Milman Parry was the culmination of that need. The result was a definition of the “formula” as… Read more
Hour 17. Looking beyond the cult hero in the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides of Aeschylus The meaning of tīmē 17§1. The key word for this hour is tīmē, plural tīmai, ‘honor; honor paid to a superhuman force by way of cult’. So far, we have seen situations where cult heroes as well as gods can receive tīmē. But now, as we will see in this hour, tīmē is also… Read more
Hour 18. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and the power of the cult hero in death The meaning of kolōnos 18§1. The key word for this hour is kolōnos, which means a ‘tumulus’ or ‘elevation’ in a local landscape. As we will see, kolōnos means also the whole landscape itself, which is a garden or grove that is entered by Oedipus. Further, Colonus / Kolōnos is the name of a district… Read more
Hour 19. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and heroic pollution The meaning of miasma 19§1. The key word for this hour is miasma, meaning ‘pollution, miasma’, a noun derived from the verb miainein, meaning ‘pollute’. In the last hour, we saw that Oedipus in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles needed to perform libations to the Eumenides in order to free himself of pollution, which was preventing him from becoming the cult… Read more
Hour 20. The hero as mirror of men’s and women’s experiences in the Hippolytus of Euripides The meaning of telos 20§1. The key word for this hour is telos, ‘end, ending, final moment; goal, completion, fulfillment; coming full circle, rounding out; successfully passing through an ordeal; initiation; ritual, rite’. We have already seen this word in many of the contexts that fit the translations that I give here (1§49, 5§119,… Read more
Hour 14. Longing for a hero: a retrospective The meaning of pothos 14§1. The key words for this hour are the noun pothos and its variant pothē, which both mean ‘longing’ or ‘yearning’ or ‘desire’, and the verb derived from this noun, which means ‘long for’ or ‘yearn for’ or ‘desire’. As we will see, such longing can be directed toward the sacred. In fact, as we have already seen… Read more
Hour 15. What the hero ‘means’ The meaning of sēmainein 15§1. The key word for this hour is sēmainein, which means ‘mean [something], indicate [something] by way of a sēma’. In Hour 7, the key word was sēma (plural sēmata), meaning ‘sign, signal, symbol; tomb, tomb of a hero’. The verb sēmainein is a derivative of the noun sēma. As we will see in this hour, the very idea of… Read more
Introduction to tragedy III§1. In considering the traditions of tragedy, it is important to keep in mind that the medium of tragedy in particular and of drama in general was the central context for the evolution of traditions in poetry, song, and dance in Athens during the classical period of the fifth century BCE and thereafter. The primary setting was a synthetic festival in honor of the god Dionysus. This… Read more
Hour 16. Heroic aberration in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus The meaning of atē 16§1. The key word for this hour is atē, the meaning of which can be interpreted as ‘aberration, derangement, veering off-course; disaster; punishment for disaster’. In Homeric poetry, as we saw in Iliad XIX 91 as quoted in Hour 1 Text C, atē is perceived as a noun derived from the verb aâsthai, ‘veer off-course’. A basic… Read more
