In recent decades, the evidence for an oral epic tradition in ancient Greece has grown enormously along with our ever-increasing awareness of worldwide oral traditions. John Foley here examines the artistic implications that oral tradition holds for the understanding of the Iliad and Odyssey in order to establish a context for their original performance and modern-day reception. In Homer's Traditional Art, Foley addresses three crucially interlocking areas that lead us to a fuller appreciation of the Homeric poems. He first explores the reality of Homer as their actual author, examining historical and comparative evidence to propose that &"Homer&" is a legendary and anthropomorphic figure rather than a real-life author. He next presents the poetic tradition as a specialized and highly resonant language bristling with idiomatic implication. Finally, he looks at Homer's overall artistic achievement, showing that it is best evaluated via a poetics aimed specifically at works that emerge from oral tradition. Along the way, Foley offers new perspectives on such topics as characterization and personal interaction in the epics, the nature of Penelope's heroism, the implications of feasting and lament, and the problematic ending of the Odyssey. His comparative references to the South Slavic oral epic open up new vistas on Homer's language, narrative patterning, and identity. Homer's Traditional Art represents a disentangling of the interwoven strands of orality, textuality, and verbal art. It shows how we can learn to appreciate how Homer's art succeeds not in spite of the oral tradition in which it was composed but rather through its unique agency.

What kind of allusion is possible in a poetry derived from a centuries-long oral tradition, and what kind of oral-derived poetry are the Homeric epics? Comparison of Homeric epic with South Slavic heroic song has suggested certain types of answers to these questions, yet the South Slavic paradigm is neither straightforward in itself nor necessarily the only pertinent paradigm: Augustan Latin poetry uses many sophisticated and highly self-conscious techniques of allusion which can, this book contends, be suggestively paralleled in Homeric epic, and some of the same techniques of allusion can be found in Near Eastern poetry of the third and second millennia BC. By attending to these various paradigms, this challenging study argues for a new understanding of Homeric allusion and its place in literary history, broaching the question of whether there can have been historical continuity in a poetics of allusion stretching from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, via the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Aeneid and Metamorphoses, despite the enormous disparities of time and place and of language and culture, including those represented by the cuneiform tablet, the papyrus roll, and by an oral performance culture. The fundamental methodological problems are explored through a series of interlocking case studies, treating of how the Odyssey conceivably alludes to the Iliad and also to earlier poetry on Odysseus' homecoming, the Iliad to earlier poetry on the Ethiopian hero Memnon, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to earlier poetry on Hades' abduction of Persephone, and early Greek epic to Mesopotamian mythological poetry, pre-eminently the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an "oral poem," since very near the time of its composition the great epic has circulated as a text stabilized in writing. Thus whether or not it is in some sense "oral poetry," the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it quite satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for modern Homeric scholarship even to frame, much less address, within the research paradigm of "oral poetics." In Homer's Cosmic Fabrication Bruce Heiden delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers that makes it comprehensible and engaging. His program conceptualizes the act of reading as a flexible repertoire of cognitive functions that a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, Heiden's experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable "reading material" the poem provides. These analyses reveal that the trajectory of events in the Iliad manifests the central agency of one character, Zeus, and that the transmitted articulation of the epic into chapter-like "books" conforms to distinct narrative subtrajectories. The analyses also show, however, that the fixed sequence of "books" functions suitably as a design that cues attention to the major crises in the story, as well as to themes that develop its significance. The transmitted arrangement therefore furnishes an implicit cognitive map that both eases comprehension of the storyline and indicates previously unexplored pathways of interpretation. Through Homer's Cosmic Fabrication enthusiasts of the Iliad will gain enhanced understanding of the epic's poetic design and the philosophical rewards it offers to thoughtful study.

The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Im 19. Jahrhundert war die Antike eine wichtige Bezugsgröße in vielen europäischen Ländern. Dabei gab es Unterschiede in der Sicht und Aneignung der griechischen, römischen und auch "archaischen" Antike. Im Sinne einer Histoire croisée zeigt der Band, wie jede Nation ihre eigene Antike schuf.

For over 2500 years many of the most learned scholars of the Greek language have concerned themselves with the topic of etymology. The most productive source of difficult, even inexplicable, words was Homer s 28,000 verses of epic poetry. Steve Reece proposes an approach to elucidating the meanings of some of these difficult words that finds its inspiration primarily in Milman Parry s oral-formulaic theory. He proposes that during the long period of oral transmission acoustic uncertainties, especially regarding word boundaries, were continually occurring: a bard uttered one collocation of words, but his audience thought it heard another. The consequent resegmentation of words and phrases is the probable cause of some of the etymologically inexplicable words in our Homeric texts.

This volume of essays in honor of Lucia Athanassaki offers a great variety of chapters on a number of topics in Greek and Latin literature and genres, from Greek epic and lyric poetry to Greek drama and late antiquity, Greek historiography, and Latin lyric poetry.

The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Edited by Mary Louise Lord after the author's death, The Singer Resumes the Tale focuses on the performance of stories and poems within settings that range from ancient Greek palaces to Latvian villages. Lord expounds and develops his approach to oral literature in this book, responds systematically for the first time to criticisms of oral theory, and extends his methods to the analysis of lyric poems. He also considers the implications of the transitional text - a work made up of both oral and literary components. Elements of the oral tradition - the practice of storytelling in prose or verse, the art of composing and transmitting songs, the content of these texts, the kinds of songs composed, and the poetics of oral literature - are discussed in the light of several traditions, beginning in the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, to the present. Throughout, the central figure is always the singer. Homer, the Beowulf poet, women who perform lyric songs, tellers of folktales, singers of such ballads as "Barbara Allen", bards of the Balkans: all play prominent roles in Lord's book, as they have played central roles in the creation of this fundamental literature.