The Places of Song in Aristophanes’ Birds Dan Sofaer Birds’ Ideal Music between Tradition and Utopia Scholars of Greek Old Comedy often treat comic lyric in a limited manner: meters are analyzed, the occasional allusion to Anacreon or Pindar is noted, the emotional effect of… Read more
Chapter 13. The Dream Action by Odysseus is just what Penelope envisages next, immediately after the Aedon comparison, in her dream about the eagle and the geese – or rather her message in the form of the dream. [1] The transition is abrupt, and Anhalt… Read more
Chapter 14. The Decision In response to the dream tale, Odysseus implicitly asserts that he will do just what Penelope expects, and Penelope is by no means blind to this assurance. She does act accordingly, even though her verbal response is skeptical. The scenario she described is a… Read more
Chapter 15. Back to the Loom Before turning to the question of larger context, it is necessary to consider one more muthos Penelope tells in Book 19: the tale of her weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud. I have left Penelope’s most famous tale aside until now because it occupies… Read more
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,… 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… 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… 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. 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… 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… Read more
