5. Of Beards and Boar Hunts, or, Coming of Age in the Odyssey In Homer it is the connection with a paternal model and in general with the model of his male forebears that eventually makes a boy into a man. If the child is unconnected to his father, he is by definition νήπιος ‘childish’, as Susan Edmunds has shown. [1] Who… Read more
6. The End of the Telemachy The Culmination of Extinction? “ . . . Time past and time futureWhat might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.” T. S. Eliot “Burnt Norton” (No. 1 of Four Quartets) If much of the emotional effect of the first 21 books of the Odyssey… Read more
Part I. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
Part II. Chapter 1. Theban Traces at Troy [1] Our understanding of the subtlety and scope of allusion as a feature of the poetics of early Greek epic has been greatly augmented in recent years by a number of valuable studies on the intricate narrative relationship between the Iliad and Odyssey, and more generally among hexameter poems of the Archaic period. Read more
