Slatkin's influential book explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad, showing how our awareness of alternative myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis's place in the Epic's thematic structure. This edition also includes six additional essays, which cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic.
We have long recognized in the Iliad the hallmarks of the oral, traditional poet who chooses among alternative arrangements of formulaic elements. In The Power of Thetis, Laura M. Slatkin makes us aware of another compositional resource, just as crucial to our understanding of the meaning of Homeric epic. Slatkin shows how, through the selection and combination of mythic motifs, Homer interprets mythological traditions and locates his characters within them by allusion or oblique reference. The figure of Thetis, the mother of Achilles, provides an especially revealing example of the way in which such mythological resonance contributes a wider context and meaning to the epic's central themes. Slatkin teaches us to listen for what is unspoken as well as spoken in the poetry of Homer, and thereby confronts us with the larger questions of the function of epic and its boundaries as a genre.
In 1991, Laura Slatkin published The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, in which she argued that Homer knowingly situated the storyworld of the Iliad against the backdrop of an older world of mythos by which the events in the Iliad are explained and given traction. Slatkin’s focus was on Achilles’ mother, Thetis: an ostensibly marginal and powerless goddess, Thetis nevertheless drives the plot of the Iliad, being allusively credited with the power to uphold or challenge the rule of Zeus. Now, almost thirty years after Slatkin’s publication, this timely volume re-examines depictions and receptions of this ambiguous goddess, in works ranging from archaic Greek poetry to twenty-first century cinema. Twenty authors build upon Slatkin’s readings to explore Thetis and multiple roles she played in Western literature, art, material culture, religion, and myth. Ever the shapeshifter, Thetis has been and continues to be reconceptualised: supporter or opponent of Zeus’ regime, model bride or unwilling victim of Peleus’ rape, good mother or child-murderess, figure of comedy or monstrous witch. Hers is an enduring power of transformation, resonating within art and literature.
Translated into English for the first time, The Archeologist is a landmark of Greek national literature, and an important document in the history of archeology and classicism. Published for the bicentennial year of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. A Penguin Classic The year 2021 marks the bicentennial of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. This historical milestone provides the impetus for a new period of intensified reflection on the past, present, and future of Greece, especially in light of recent financial and humanitarian challenges the country has found itself facing: the debt crisis that began in the last days of 2009 and the migration crisis five years later. These crises had already stirred renewed and often animated debate about Greek national identity, especially in relation to Europe, and the legacy of classical antiquity remains central to how that relationship is imagined. Where does Greece fit into the modern world and what role, if any, should its celebrated and idealized antiquity play in the country's national identity? More than a century ago, Karkavitsas's The Archeologist (1904) helped to articulate and frame these kinds of questions. The work is an allegory of Greek nationalism that is stylized as a folktale about Aristodemus and Dimitrakis Eumorphopoulos, two brothers and descendants of the illustrious Eumorphopoulos line. For centuries, the family had been persecuted by the Khan family, but when the Khan dynasty starts to topple, the Eumorphopoulos family resolves to regain their ancestral lands and restore their line's ancient glory. Yet the two brothers disagree about the best path forward into the future. Aristodemus insists, to the point of mania, that they must look only to the ancient past—to the family's ancient language, texts, religion, and monuments; Dimitrakis, on the other hand, exuberantly embraces the present. The Archeologist, however, attempts to map and dramatize the tensions that were violently brewing in the Balkans at the turn of the twentieth century and which, within a decade of the work's publication, would contribute to the outbreak of World War I. Also included in this edition are a selection of "sea tales," which Karkavitsas heard from sailors during his extensive time aboard ships in the Mediterranean. Considered as indigenous to Greek literature, the four sea stories represent some of the best known of the Tales from the Prow. "The Gorgon," one of Karkavitsas's shortest sea stories, is also one of the most famous.
"Spectacular and constantly surprising." -Ken Burns Written with the authority of a scholar and the vigor of a bestselling narrative historian, The War That Killed Achilles is a superb and utterly timely presentation of one of the timeless stories of Western civilization. As she did in The Endurance and The Bounty, New York Times bestselling author Caroline Alexander has taken apart a narrative we think we know and put it back together in a way that lets us see its true power. In the process, she reveals the intended theme of Homer's masterwork-the tragic lessons of war and its enduring devastation.
Ovid's Homer examines the Latin poet's engagement with the Homeric poems throughout his career. Boyd offers detailed analysis of Ovid's reading and reinterpretation of a range of Homeric episodes and characters from both epics, and demonstrates the pervasive presence of Homer in Ovid's work. The resulting intertextuality, articulated as a poetics of paternity or a poetics of desire, is particularly marked in scenes that have a history of scholiastic interest or critical intervention; Ovid repeatedly asserts his mastery as Homeric reader and critic through his creative response to alternative readings, and in the process renews Homeric narrative for a sophisticated Roman readership. Boyd offers new insight into the dynamics of a literary tradition, illuminating a previously underappreciated aspect of Ovidian intertextuality.
Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.
How can the ancient relationship between Homer and the Epic Cycle be recovered? Using the most significant research in the field, Andrew Porter questions many ancient and modern assumptions and offers alternative perspectives better aligned with ancient epic performance realities and modern epic studies.
The Doloneia is the most controversial book of the Iliad, its authenticity having been doubted since antiquity. Modern scholars are divided between those who regard it as a major interpolation by a later poet who was trained in the technique of epic composition and those who see it as the earliest manifestation of the very ancient theme of lochos. However, the first claim assumes the stylistic homogeneity of book 10, while the second sweeps out dictional and thematic difficulties by attributing them to the theme of ambush that is weakly represented in the extant corpus of archaic Greek epic. By applying sophisticated interpretive tools such as intratextual association, intertextual allusion, and oral neoanalysis, this book maintains that Iliad 10 is thematically consonant with the rest of the Iliad and that it has evolved from an earlier Iliadic version after the addition of the Rhesus episode, which did not circulate as an independent composition but formed part of lost oral epic poetry with cyclic features that focused on the events after the death of Achilles.
The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media is a convenient and authoritative reference tool, introducing specific terms and concepts helpful to the study of the Bible and related literature in ancient communications culture. Since the early 1980s, biblical scholars have begun to explore the potentials of interdisciplinary theories of oral tradition, oral performance, personal and collective memory, ancient literacy and scribality, visual culture and ritual. Over time these theories have been combined with considerations of critical and exegetical problems in the study of the Bible, the history of Israel, Christian origins, and rabbinics. The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media responds to the rapid growth of the field by providing a source of reference that offers clear definitions, and in-depth discussions of relevant terms and concepts, and the relationships between them. The volume begins with an overview of 'ancient media studies' and a brief history of research to orient the reader to the field and the broader research context of the book, with individual entries on terms and topics commonly encountered in studies of the Bible in ancient media culture. Each entry defines the term/ concept under consideration, then offers more sustained discussion of the topic, paying particular attention to its relevance for the study of the Bible and related literature
