Bibliography Asheri, D., A. Lloyd, and A. Corcella. 2007. A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV. New York. Austin, M. 2008. “The Greeks in Libya” in Greek Colonisation: An Account of Greek Colonies and Other Settlements Overseas, Volume Two, ed. G. R. Tsetskhladze, 187–217. Mnemosyne, Supplementa 193. Leiden. Bietak, M., and N. Marinatos. 1995. “The Minoan Wall Paintings from… Read more
Preface to the Edition of 1990 This study was written in 1975–76 as my doctoral dissertation. In preparing it for publication 13 years later, I made such revisions as seem to me to render the text clearer and more readable. This new edition does not, however, incorporate recent work on the Homeric poems or new ways of thinking about semantic problems. My object was to… Read more
1. The Problem Homeric Greek nēpios, at first glance, does not present obvious semantic problems. LSJ [1] give as a first meaning “infant, child,” citing νήπιον, οὔ πω εἰδόθ’ ὁμοιΐου πολέμοιο [2] nēpios, who knew nothing yet of the joining of battle [3] IX 440 [4]… Read more
2. ΗΠΙΟΣ The word ēpios, used in Homer of persons, feelings, and medicines, is glossed by LSJ as “gentle…kind…soothing…assuaging.” This interpretation is supported by its association with the word aganos (“gentle”) in the phrase: μή τις ἔτι πρόφρων ἀγανὸς καὶ ἤπιος ἔστωσκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς No longer now let one who is a sceptred king be eagerto be gentle and ēpios ii 230–231… Read more
3. Children Nēpia Tekna In the last chapter, I tried to show that while the idea of fatherhood is a frequent contextual associate of ēpios, the basic meaning of this word is something like “connecting.” Thus it implies a social relationship between the ēpios person and someone else. And, indeed, whenever the word ēpios describes a person in the Iliad or Odyssey, that person is… Read more
4. Adults In Chapter Three, I proposed that the word nēpios expresses the very limitations that can be overcome, in certain symbolic frameworks, through initiation rituals—namely, childhood, ignorance, and what Eliade calls “the profane condition.” The subject of that chapter was children; in the Homeric language (or world view) children, as a class, are nēpios. All who are nēpios are not children, however. This chapter discusses… Read more
Conclusion My object in this study has been to explore the meaning of the word nēpios within the Homeric poems. The possibility of an etymological connection between nēpios and ēpios led me to consider the contexts of ēpios also. At the least, these two words are thematically parallel—not only in that to be ēpios is to be “like a father” and to be nēpios is to… Read more
Bibliography Beekes, R.S.P. 1969. The Development of th e Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Greek. The Hague. Benveniste, E. 1969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (2 vols.). Paris. Boisacq, E. 1950. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (4th ed.). Paris. Chantraine, P. 1974. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots (vol. 3). Paris. Read more
Foreword Cedric H. Whitman When Milman Parry died in 1935, his great demonstration that the Homeric poems were the culminating product of a long, highly developed oral tradition had already raised many questions to which scholars today are still trying to discover answers. Perhaps the most formidable question was: if oral poetry is composed by illiterate bards out of inherited metrical formulas, how can the Iliad… Read more
Acknowledgments This monograph, to put it simply, would not have been written without the precedent of Calvert Watkins’s work on Indo-European metrics. His field is linguistics, a discipline which I especially admire for the elegant precision that it can bring to literary studies. For my own approach to Hellenic literature and pre-literature, I have learned from him a τέχνη that has always been an invaluable aid. … Read more
