Agamemnon\u27s Test of the Army in Iliad Book 2 and the Function of Homeric Akhos

I offer a reading of the Diapeira episode based on the semantics and thematics of akhos. My findings resolve a crux at 2.171, where Homer identifies akhos as the reason Odysseus is not launching his ship. Homer clearly signposts the nature of Odysseus\u27 akhos as grief over loss of time in Athene\u27s subsequent speech to him, but the reference is proleptic and has consequently eluded the commentators

Near Eastern Sources for the Palace of Alkinoos

The last quarter century of archaeological discoveries have significantly enriched and nuanced our understanding of interactions between the Greek world and the Levant during the Greek Archaic period (conventionally defined as 776-479 B.C.E.). They have also allowed us to construct an increasingly detailed model explaining the diffusion of knowledge from Mesopotamia to Greece at this time. In addition, advances in our understanding of oral cultures, and the role of oral narrative traditions within them have cast valuable new light on the ways in which the Homeric epics appropriate, adapt, and preserve cultural knowledge. The palace of Alkinoos, described in Book 7 of the Odyssey, poses an interesting problem for archaeologists and Homerists alike, in that it departs significantly from the generalized, or formulaic, image of a Homeric palace and, moreover, departs equally from Bronze and Iron Age Greek architecture. In order to account for anomalous features such as these, one must always take into account the narrative function and context of the description, which in this case suggests a possible Near Eastern origin. Archaeological evidence not only confirms the possibility, but allows us to take the comparison further: although some of its features doubtless belonged to a stereotypical Greek image of Near Eastern palaces, the description is sufficiently detailed and coherent that we can identify Assyrian palatial architecture as the chief prototype of the palace of Alkinoos

Epiphany in the Homeric \u3cem\u3eHymn to Demeter\u3c/em\u3e and the \u3cem\u3eOdyssey\u3c/em\u3e

In the following essay I investigate the Odyssey’s sustained engagement with the theme of epiphany. Within the poem’s own narrative, the central epiphanic moment is the recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope, and it resonates powerfully with a series of other such moments throughout the poem, beginning with Athene’s epiphany to Telemakhos in Book 1. But I also hope to show that these Odyssean scenes resonate just as powerfully with Demeter’s epiphanies in the Homeric hymn to the goddess

Introduction to the Iliad

Sing of rage, Goddess, that bane of Akhilleus,Peleus\u27 son, which caused untold pain for Akhaians,sent down throngs of powerful spirits to Aides, war-chiefs rendered the prize of dogs and everysort of bird. Edward McCrorie’s new translation of Homer’s classic epic of the Trojan War captures the falling rhythms of a doomed Troy. McCrorie presents the sundry epithets and resonant symbols of Homer\u27s verse style and remains as close to the Greek\u27s meaning as research allows. The work is an epic with a flexible contemporary feel to it, capturing the wide-ranging tempos of the original. It underscores the honor of soldiers and dwells upon the machinations of Moira, each man\u27s and woman\u27s portion in life. Noted Homeric scholar Erwin Cook contributes a substantial introduction and extensive notes written to guide both students and general readers through relevant elements of ancient Greek history and culture. This version of the Iliad is ideal for readings and performances

The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity [Review]

The Returns of Odysseus will be essential reading for specialists in Homer, early Greek history, and ancient ethnology. They and others willing to expend the time and energy necessary to read this densely argued and worded book will win a perspective on Greek (pre)colonization and its mythology unavailable from any other source. I myself required a full week for a careful reading, after which I noted to my surprise that I had taken over 50 pages of notes, many of which now belong to my permanent files. If, in what follows, I concentrate on some illustrative problems with Malkin\u27s (M.) use of archaic epic, it is in order to spare BMCR and its readers a commensurate review, and because I am counting on you to go out and buy a copy (you will want your own to mark up)

The Philosophy of Mythology

The early German romantic philosophy of myth can help elucidate the nature of romanticism itself, which notoriously resists descriptive or theoretical definition. To be sure, myth is an equally problematic term, whose precise meaning varies among romantic philosophers, though its role in the romantic project remains usefully consistent: myth is offered as a solution to the crisis of modern alienation, or, more radically, to the crisis of the subject object dichotomy. The sources of this alienation are likewise varied but broadly coherent. I will mention those relevant to the task at hand

Homeric Time Travel

It has been a commonplace among anthropologists since Malinowski that during the performance of traditional stories the listening community experiences the primordial past when the gods still appeared freely to humans. Significantly, this involves not a return to the past, but a return of the past. The Odyssey not only depicts its own hero as a character from the heroic past, in which the gods were intimately involved with the heroes who fought at Troy, but also as one who brings the past with him when he returns home to an Ithaca that represents a greatly diminished present. In so doing, the Odyssey reproduces the metaphysics of its own performance, so that singing the epic is represented as a deeply religious act that restores the ancestors to life and equally restores the modern condition to past greatness

The Modern Construction of Myth [Review]

The Modern Construction of Myth, by Andrew yon Hendy, is an interdisciplinary survey of the construction of myth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author\u27s thesis is that modern theories of myth can be divided into three broad groups, folkloristic, ideological, and constitutive, and that they all derive from an original, romantic, construct. The survey is organized diachronically, with some attention to taxonomy and axiology. I find the author\u27s thesis entirely persuasive: what follows is meant to serve as a guide to the overall argument and additionally to highlight various important threads that remain somewhat diffuse in a book of this scope