The Center for Hellenic Studies

Chapters

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part II. Chapter 3. Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey

Part II. Chapter 3. Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey Why is the narrative structure of the Odyssey so complicated? Although the plot of the poem is perfectly straightforward—Aristotle observed that it was the imitation of a single action—nevertheless the ordering of its narrative is elaborately nonlinear. The Iliad gets under way with a question from which ensues a linear, chronological account of the… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part II. Chapter 2. Les Amis Mortels

Part II. Chapter 2. Les Amis Mortels [1] Battle in the Iliad is far from wordless carnage, resonating only with the sound of armor clashing. The general description of the poem’s first military encounter begins strikingly by contrasting the eerie silence of the Greek troops with the heteroglossia of the Trojans. But once the battle is joined: ἔνθα δ’ ἅμ’ οἰμωγή… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part I. Chapter 4. Allusion and Interpretation

Part I. Chapter 4. Allusion and Interpretation To the Iliad’s modern audiences, compelled by the urgent momentum of the poem’s action and absorbed in the inexorability of its progress and the frontal intensity of its character portrayals, the epic’s digressions from the imperative of its plot can seem to be a perplexing distraction, and its texture of oblique allusion and elliptical reference, of glancing, arcane hint and… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part I. Chapter 3. The Wrath of Thetis

Part I. Chapter 3. The Wrath of Thetis An inconsolable mother, unable to save her only child—Thetis is the paradigm for the image of bereavement conjured up with the fall of each young warrior for whom the poem reports that the moment of his death leaves his anguished parents forlorn. Shaped by allusion to her mythology, however—its resonance augmented, as we shall see, through various forms of… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part I. Chapter 2. The Power of Thetis

Part I. Chapter 2. The Power of Thetis  Τhe most startling silence in the voluble divine community of the Iliad is the absence of any reproach made to Thetis for her drastic intervention in the war. What accounts for Thetis’s compelling influence over Zeus and, equally puzzling, for her freedom from recrimination or retaliation by the other Olympians? From the standpoint of characterization, of course, for Zeus to accede to… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part I. Chapter 1. The Helplessness of Thetis

Part I. Chapter 1. The Helplessness of Thetis In a key passage in Book 1 of the Iliad Achilles, in order to obtain from Zeus the favor that will determine the trajectory of the plot, invokes not Athena or Hera, those powerful, inveterate pro-Greeks, but his mother. The Iliad’s presentation of Thetis, as we recall, is of a subsidiary deity who is characterized by helplessness and by impotent grief. Her… Read more

Book Chapter

Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays: Part I. Preface

Part I. Preface The challenge to define as fully as possible the cultural environment in which a work of literature was produced presents itself with every examination of an ancient text. In the case of the extraordinarily complex phenomenon of Attic drama the task is perhaps facilitated by the survival of more complete documentation about the conditions, if not of its genesis, at least of its evolution… Read more