Abbreviations BA – The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry = N 1979 EH – “The Epic Hero” = N 2005a GM – Greek Mythology and Poetics = N 1990b HQ – Homeric Questions = N 1996b HR – Homeric Responses = N 2003a HTL – Homer’s Text and Language = N 2004a LP… Read more
Foreword to the First Edition [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] This book is a partly revised… Read more
Foreword to the English Edition It is a special pleasure for me, almost ten years after finishing the manuscript of the first edition, to present this book in the English language and in lightly revised form. I have made a special attempt in my references to the scholarly literature both in the body of the text and in the footnotes to take into account the most important… Read more
Translator’s Note This translation is long overdue, both in the sense that it has taken me a long time to complete it and in the sense that it is a book that I feel deserves a wider audience than the original German version may have found. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked so closely with it. All translations of passages in… Read more
Abbreviations A & A – Antike und Abendland AION – Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli AJP – American Journal of Philology ARV – J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, I–III, Oxford 19632 Austin – C. Austin, ed., Nova Fragmenta Euripidea in Papyris Reperta (Kleine Texte für Vorlesungen und Übungen 187), Berlin 1968 … Read more
Introduction. The Choral Dance and Song as Ritual Action: A New Perspective Introductory Thoughts, Performativity, and the Twofold Composition of the Chorus To the extent that any kind of agreement can be attained in the irresolvable dispute about the origin of drama, this much is clear: tragedy as well as comedy developed out of choral and for the most part cultic festivities. [1]… Read more
Chapter 1. The Comic Chorus in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes Using the approach demonstrated in the introduction I should now like to analyze the Thesmophoriazusae, a work that has been relatively little discussed. This comedy is particularly well-suited for showing the non-Aristotelian, pre-dramatic, and ritual character of the comic chorus. The deliberate, “ulterior” plot, or sujet, is not only overlaid by comic episodes on the part of… Read more
Chapter Two. Homer the Classic in the Age of Callimachus 2ⓢ1. An esthetics of fluidity 2§1 Homeric poetry imagines itself as rigid – that is, unchanging like the petrified serpent in Iliad II. That is what I was arguing in Chapter 1. But there is more to it. As I will now argue in Chapter 2, this three-dimensional vision of arrested motion is being expressed by… Read more
Chapter Three. Homer the Classic in the Age of Plato 3ⓢ1. The Koine of Homer as a model of stability 3§1 The Koine of Homer, as approximated by the base text of Aristarchus in the second century BCE, was more rigid and less fluid than the Homerus Auctus, as approximated by the base text of Zenodotus in the age of Callimachus in the third century BCE. Read more
Chapter Four. Homer the Classic in the Age of Pheidias 4ⓢ1. Homer as a spokesman for the Athenian empire 4§1 In Chapter 3, my argumentation was limited to showing that Plato’s Homer, as reflected in such virtual dialogues as the Ion and the Hippias Minor, was the Panathenaic Homer of his day, in the fourth century BCE. I used the internal evidence provided by Plato’s precise… Read more
