7. Beauty and Transience? Flowers and Death in Greek Elegy and Homeric Poetry Given the preoccupation of many poems in the Greek elegiac tradition with death, the floral imagery of that tradition offers the most obvious comparandum for the Homeric floral images of death that we shall… Read more
8. Fertility and Formlessness: Images of Death in the Iliad and the Odyssey In the last chapter, we compared Homeric and elegiac treatments of the “flower of youth” and found that, while the elegiac poets associated the phrase with the brevity of life, their Homeric counterparts employed… Read more
9. Homeric Flowers and the Monstrousness of Death In the previous chapter, we found that the Homeric floral imagery of death frequently evokes the notion of fertility, at times an exceptional fertility. The Odyssean images that we studied also associate flowers with the notions of insubstantiality and… Read more
Conclusion Over the course of this book, we have gained a sense of the particular choices made by the Homeric poets in forming their vegetal images. We have seen that the relevant images draw on some of the most striking characteristics of the Greek flora—the sudden, exceptionally… Read more
Appendix. The Semantics of ἄνθος and ἀνθέω A number of the passages discussed in this book incorporate the noun ἄνθος, which is commonly translated “flower.” [1] Linguists have however expressed doubts over the semantics of the lexeme: some have suggested that it… Read more
Bibliography Adkins, A. W. H. 1983. “Orality and Philosophy.” In Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. K. Robb, 207–227. La Salle, IL. Adler, A. 1928. Suidae Lexicon. Vol. 1. Leipzig. Ahl, F., and H. M. Roisman. Read more
4. The Characterization of Agamemnon in the Iliad 4.1 Introduction A vivid picture of what Agamemnon’s character was like for the Odyssey poet and his core audience emerged from our discussion in the last chapter, and it joins the portrait we began to see develop already… Read more
5. The Traditional Characterization of Agamemnon What has emerged from a consideration of Agamemnon’s appearances in person, name, or through retrospective narrative, is the tenor of his characterization in the Iliad and Odyssey. As I have noted throughout the foregoing chapters, Agamemnon’s involvement in other story patterns,… Read more
Appendix. Colometry and Formulae Oral-traditional tale-telling includes embedded cues to the larger back stories that begin at the level of cola and formulae. They are the first level of consideration in any search for characterization in Homer. [1] In colometry, “words,” to… Read more
