1. Introduction 1.1 Characterizing Agamemnon Homer [1] and his audience knew Agamemnon as the primary leader of well over 1,000 Achaian ships that sailed against Troy. [2] He led an intense ten-year struggle, only to return home and die a miserable death at his wife’s hands. His presence in person or name impacts the poetic narratives… Read more
2. Characterization in Homer and Agamemnon’s Appeal in Iliad 4 2.1 Traditional Characterization Our discussion in the last chapter argued that Homeric characterization is tradition-based. Epic characters, at least the major ones, are already known in some detail to Homer and his core audience by distinguishable character traits. The existence of recognizable characterization attached to a particular figure frees the poet from the necessity of pure… Read more
3. The Characterization of Agamemnon in the Odyssey 3.1 Introduction Agamemnon is in Hades by the time the action of the Odyssey opens. This necessitates that his personal appearances be incorporeal and only in the underworld (Odyssey 11 and 24). Agamemnon as a traditional character is with us in greater and lesser ways beyond his apparitions as a specter, however. He appears metonymically, through retrospective narrative… Read more
6. Beyond Thebes “And what about you, Nikêratos—what kind of knowledge do you take pride in?” And he said: “My father, because he wished for me to be a good man, compelled me to memorize all of Homer. And now I can recite the whole Iliad and Odyssey.” Xenophon Symposium III 5 [1] Lykourgos, a Greek from the Peloponnese, is famous for having traveled to… Read more
Conclusion: Endgame “Simonides said that Hesiod is a gardener while Homer is a garland-weaver—the first planted the legends of the heroes and gods and then the second braided them together in the garland of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” Simonides [1] One of the issues shadowing this book throughout—and one with which we have sparred… Read more
Acknowledgements This book has its origins in my University of Chicago dissertation. I treasure my conversations with my advisors: first, the late David Grene, who demanded that every act of translation be a performance, and then James Redfield, Laura Slatkin and the late Paul Friedrich. Each of these brilliant scholars opened to me doors of reading and thinking and encouraged me to strike out on the path… Read more
Introduction “Isn’t everything that is said by the storytellers and the poets a narrative of what has happened or what is or what is to come?” “What else?” he said. Plato Republic 392d This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite the focus on orality for the last several decades, and… Read more
1. The Elements of Poetics and Presence The specific virtue of solo Homeric performance has come into view: namely, the performer’s position between representation and action. The bard drifts within the space of half-acting; he does not merely alternate smoothly between narrating and enacting. Epic performance brings characters and objects into presence but also induces uncertainty as to the “whereabouts” of the performer, the characters, and the… Read more
2. Marpessa, Kleopatra, and Phoenix Perhaps it means that at the point where we are we have lost all touch with the true theater, since we confine it to the domain of what daily thought can reach, the familiar or unfamiliar domain of consciousness;—and if we address ourselves to the unconscious, it is merely to take from it what it has been able to collect… Read more
Interlude 1. Ring Thinking: Phoenix in Iliad 23 A full account of the theatricality or performability of Phoenix’s speech involves features such as structure, image, and mythological background. This Interlude shows how these features carry forward from Book 9 to reappear in the narrative of Phoenix’s other major appearance in the poem, in the Funeral Games of Book 23. Somewhat as the second panel of his speech,… Read more
