EPIC AND MYTH

Structures of Epic Poetry, Reitz and Finkmann (eds.), De Gruyter, 2019

An exploration into the conception of myth, in relation to politics and human existence. This dissertation will attempt to establish a definition of myth which will not only clarify the origin and processes behind myth, but also develop a means of evaluating individual myths.

The aim of this paper is to explore the use of the word κύκλος and its derivatives (κυκλικός, κύκλιος, κυκλικῶς) as literary terms for the description of the Epic Cycle. Given the prominent meanings of the word in the Iliad (wheel, shield), it is suggested that the description of the shield of Achilles (Iliad, Book 18) and the narrative about human ages in Hesiod’s Works and Days constitute an early cyclic conception of the totality of mythological tradition. The emphasis of classical period on the special properties of the cycle is examined in association with Aristotle’s application of the word for the characterization of epic poetry. The scope of the term in Hellenistic times is explored with special interest for the poets and sagas to which it is ascribed. The confining of the word by the school of Alexandria to the literary criticism of epic poetry as well as its use for the description of linguistic and stylistic features of that poetry is discussed. Finally, the reception of the Epic cycle in late antiquity is studied with relevance to the endowment of the term with new connotations and the content of Epic Cycle which has survived until now.

Colby Quarterly, 1994

Structures of Epic Poetry (Vol. 3), 2019

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.

1. Greek Mythographic Tradition (10,000 words) Jordi Pàmias (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) The opening chapter of Part Two will address mythographic (and paradoxographic) tradition in ancient Greece, the origins of the genre of mythography, and its evolution. Among individual mythographers discussed will be Hesiod (to whom the Catalogue of Women is ascribed), Acusilaus, Pseudo- Apollodorus (author of the Bibliotheca), Eratosthenes, Parthenius, Antoninus Liberalis, Greek scholiasts. 1. Introduction The first section of this ‘Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography’ (Part One: Myth) opened with four chapters dealing with Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, and Semitic mythologies before turning to Greek myth. This second section (Part Two: Mythography), instead, starts with ‘Greek Mythographic tradition’. Although those ‘high civilizations’ were well acquainted with written sources, Greeks seem to deserve the honour of primacy in the task of recording myths (by writing). A Greek word, mythography appears to be a ‘Greek’ creation. Under which conditions should it be so? To start with, the word ‘mythographer’, unattested before the fourth century BCE, is rarely used in Greek (‘mythography’ is first used by Strabo in the first century CE). In fact, as a genre, delimiting its borders with other literary genres poses a major problem (Calame 2016: 403). In late archaic and classical Greece, those works that we are accustomed to call local history, universal history, ethnography, genealogy, and mythography, overlap at the base. And the Greek themselves did not make a distinction: for them such activities are named with generic terms such as historiē ‘inquiry’ or, simply, logoi ‘accounts’ (Fowler 2001: 96–97). We can thus say that mythography seems to be an ‘exogenous’ category in Greece. However, research conducted in the last decades (and especially the major contributions by Fowler 2000 and 2013) has made it clear that prose writers collected accounts dealing with the past ever since the sixth century BCE. From before the time of Herodotus (fifth century BCE), the ‘father of history’, a burgeoning writing activity was going on in the Greek cities...