To the memory of C. J. Ruijgh and C. M. J. Sicking Preface Epic is concerned with the past. It depicts heroes that are larger than life and accomplish their exploits in a bygone age outside the reach of ordinary mortals. Often, and certainly in the case of the Homeric tradition, epic’s very language is a representation of the past, in the form of vocabulary, syntax,… Read more
Chapter 1. Peripheral and Nuclear Semantics In recent years a number of studies on Homeric versification have appeared which aim to show a way out of the deadlock at which the study of the Homeric formula ended in the ’60s and ’70s. [1] Milman Parry’s analysis of the systematic precision in the use of noun-epithet formulas, as presented in his 1928 dissertation,… Read more
Chapter 2. Formula, Context, and Synonymy Milman Parry’s 1928 dissertation, [1] insofar as it drew upon and continued the work of earlier scholars, provided a functional dimension to the findings of such earlier scholars as Düntzer, Ellendt, Witte, and Meister. Parry pointed out that the coexistence of semantically equivalent but metrically different forms in the Homeric diction was not only the creation… Read more
Chapter 3. How Oral is Oral Composition? In the two preceding chapters the main interest was the question of the formula, which we approached from a number of perspectives. The present chapter will start widening the horizons by asking the question that ought perhaps to be at the center of the study of oral poetry: the question of orality itself. What does it mean for a poem… Read more
Chapter 4. Mimesis as Performance The reputation of the first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis among classicists has risen and fallen with the tides of fashion in Homeric studies. The notion of Homeric privileging of the part over the whole, argued for in the essay on Odysseus’s scar, gained wide currency at a time when scholars were concerned with parataxis and paratactic composition as the hallmark of Homer’s… Read more
Chapter 5. The Poetics of Deixis Deixis is what speakers do to locate themselves in space and time, with respect to things, events, and each other. When speaking, it is impossible not to be deictic, not to “be in” the context of one’s discourse. Not being deictic is not communicating, not being in a situation, not being. This is what happens in some narratives, whose narrator disappears… Read more
Chapter 6: Storytelling in the Future The question whether the Greek epic tradition is a matter of “truth” or of “fiction” remains a central issue in Homeric scholarship, and any answer to it betrays one’s stance with regard to a host of other issues, such as text, tradition, and authorship. Opinions are divided as to whether the Homeric rendition of the heroic past is wholly traditional, and… Read more
Chapter 7. Similes, Augment, and the Language of Immediacy Any function we assign to the Homeric simile has to take into account the fact that similes evoke a reality that is different from that of narrative proper. As many commentators have noted, similes are “close” to the audience, in evoking a domestic, rather than heroic, reality. [1] Yet instead of exploring the… Read more
Chapter 8. Remembering the God’s Arrival “What’s remembered goes on living and can happen again.” Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller The Homeric Hymn to Apollo is commonly believed by scholars to consist of two parts, one Delian, dealing with the god’s birth and his cult at Delos, and one Pythian, describing the foundation of his shrine at Delphi. Read more
Chapter 9. Mohammed and the Mountain In Chapter Fifteen of the treatise On the Sublime we find a discussion of the imagination and of visualization as sources of grandeur and dignity in literature. The key term is phantasia. This term applies “when by an effect of enthusiasm and passion you seem actually to see what you are saying, so placing it before your listeners’ eyes.” [… Read more
