Chapter 16. The Pandareids and the Festival of Apollo I have suggested above that to a certain extent the myths Odysseus and Penelope tell each other in Odyssey 19 are related to their own story as a myth might be related to a ritual or a festival, both in the sense that there are parallel thought structures involved, and that the myth is often tragic or negative,… Read more
Chapter 17. Penelope and the Penelops So far I have argued that Penelope’s myths, above all the Pandareid myths, have special affinity to their poetic environment in the Odyssey, namely a crisis and a turning point from dissolution to “light and life,” which in the Odyssey is marked by the festival of Apollo. In this chapter, I am pulling even further back to an even larger frame, to look at… Read more
Conclusion My goal has been to contribute to the understanding of the dialogue between Penelope and Odysseus in Book 19 by looking at its mythic aspects. In Homeric poetry, evocation of myth is a diachronic phenomenon: it can accumulate in a poem, or rather, evolve with the poem, so that there are layers of evocation in the dialogue that are likely to represent a span of its… Read more
Bibliography Aarne, A. and Thompson, S. 1964. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Helsinki. Adrados, F. R. 1972. “Les institutions religieuses mycéniennes.” Minos n.s. 11:170–203. Ahl, F. and Roisman, H. M. 1996. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca. Alden, M. J. 1997. “The Resonances of the Song of Ares and Aphrodite.” Mnemosyne 50:513–529. Read more
Acknowledgments I am grateful for the encouragement and support I have received while writing this book. I owe special thanks to my teachers, Leslie Kurke, Mark Griffith, and Tony Long, who all, in different ways, inspired me with their teaching, and who sparked my interest in the Greek wisdom tradition. Without their intellectual engagement and generosity of spirit this book would not have been possible. Loïc Wacquant… Read more
Introduction The philosophical field is undoubtedly the first scholastic field to have constituted itself by achieving autonomy with respect to the developing political field and the religious field, in Greece in the 5th century BC. Bourdieu Pascalian Meditations Competing Articulations of Philosophy It is widely accepted today that philosophy as a specialized discipline was not developed before Plato, but that he… Read more
1. The Many and Conflicting Meanings of Σοφιστής Most modern treatments of the sophists assert that there existed in fifth- and fourth-century Greece a distinct group of individuals called sophists (σοφισταί). [1] Such studies often mention in passing that the term had an earlier, less pejorative undertone, but that by the end of the fifth century a new class of people had… Read more
2. Wisdom for Sale? The Sophists and Money Plato constantly accuses the sophists of teaching for money. For example, in the Hippias Major (282c–d) Socrates elaborates a distinction between the wise men of old, who did not think it right to charge fees, and the sophists of his own day, who all made huge profits from their instruction. This comparison is not incidental; it is absolutely integral to Plato’s characterization of the… Read more
3. Sophoi and Concord In this chapter we shall examine the theme of concord (ὁμόνοια), which figures so prominently in the sources on the sophists. The aim is to advance our understanding of this concept beyond Kerferd’s pessimistic verdict: “It is … a matter for regret that it is simply not possible to recover the history of the term in fifth-century thought.” [1]… Read more
Appendices Appendix I Ethnographically speaking, the relation of a rumor to an eyewitness account is not generally straightforward, as J. Vansina observes: “Very often, one can no longer ascertain whether the rumor derives from an eyewitness account or not. In most cases internal evidence itself will have to guide us . . . ” (1985:6). Apart from this uncertainty we must also reckon with the element… Read more
