History and Myth in Graeco-Roman Epic

comparison of structural and narrative techniques in the Homeric epics and in Herodotus and Thucydides

Colby Quarterly, 1994

Arethusa, 2021

Greek epic has a notoriously ambiguous relationship to authorship, with composers from Homer to Nonnus finding covert, creative ways to construct their identities in relation to their models, origins, or sources. In this essay, I look at three Greek works from the imperial period: Quintus's Posthomerica, Triphiodorus's Sack of Troy, and Colluthus's Abduction of Helen. These poems display a highly paradoxical approach to literary origins. They maintain a hyper-close relationship to Homer, adopting his language, style, and Trojan subject. And yet they also include signals which disavow these Homerizing claims: philological quirks, contemporary references, and later literary allusions. By focusing not, as is usual for recent imperial epic scholarship, on these poems' programmatic openings, but rather on their highly complicated ends, I argue that they all put forth an alternative mode of response to originality and canonicity. Opening up Homer's poems as they close their own, they continue the epic canon in a non-linear fashion: returning to its deep, foundational past, and also treating it as inherently open and unfinished—ripe for correction, expansion, and ultimately re-embodiment.

Daniel Ben-Amos (ed.): The Challenge of Folklore. Humanities 6, 97., 2017

The epic is an intriguing genre, claiming its place in both oral and written systems. Ever since the beginning of folklore studies epic has been in the centre of interest, and monumental attempts at describing its characteristics have been made, in which oral literature was understood mainly as a primitive stage leading up to written literature. With the appearance in 1960 of A. B. Lord's The Singer of Tales and the introduction of the oral-formulaic theory, the paradigm changed towards considering oral literature a special form of verbal art with its own rules. Fieldworkers have been eagerly studying oral epics all over the world. The growth of material caused that the problems of defining the genre also grew. However, after more than half a century of intensive implementation of the theory an internationally valid sociological model of oral epic is by now established and must be respected in cognate fields such as Homeric scholarship. Here the theory is both a help for readers to guard themselves against anachronistic interpretations and a necessary tool for constructing a social-historic context for the Iliad and the Odyssey. As an example, the hypothesis of a gradual crystallization of these two epics is discussed and rejected.

There are certain invariants of heroic poetry, elements that define it essentially: the theme – a narrative about “extraordinary deeds”, famous, adventurous topics, in the style of “traditional heroic mythology” (Marino) – and the idealized typology so that the epic hero usually occurs like a sum of the virtues appreciated by the community which assumes him. Very likely influenced by the Mesopotamian one from the beginning of the second millennia B.C., the Homeric epic exerts its influence further in time and cultural geography, over the Latin one from the end of the 1st century B.C. and, via the Aeneid, over the Germanic epic from the Middle Ages. Through Virgil, Homer’s self -confessed competitor, there could be clarified an issue of the European literary history: how did the transition from the “heroic song” of the Germanic tribes –“lost, as long as it was not recorded in writing” (Curtius) –, to the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic or the Medieval German one (mittelhochdeutsch) occur? The Aeneid appears to be, according to Heusler and Curtius, the missing link between the epic tradition of Mediterranean Antiquity and the Germanic Medieval heroic epic. (The latter, the product of a culture that, by its “barbarian” roots, had the inspiration of and ability to assimilate, from the defeated Rome, the classic inheritance of Greek -Latin humanism). The literary heredity that unites Homer, Virgil and the Germanic epic on the background of Mesopotamian loans, provides yet another very interesting example of (inter)cultural intermediation and continuity in the Eurasian space, within a historical interval of almost four millennia –from Gilgamesh’s legendary rule in Uruk and its literary echoes to the Germanic heroic epic from the Middle Ages.

Structures of Epic Poetry (Vol. 3), 2019

The author of this paper sets out to explain how the different treatment of myth found in ancient Greek epic (Homeric Poem, Epic Cycle and Hesiod respectively) responds to the different functions-poetic, political and ideological respectively-that it fulfils in the three groups of works cited.