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GLORY AND NOSTOS: THE SHIP-EPITHET ΚΟΙΛΟΣ IN THE ILIAD
Abstract
In the Iliad the Achaean ships play a prominent role in the narrative; they are foregrounded as Achilles sits by his vessels in anger and threatens to sail home; as the Trojans come close to burning them; and as Hector's body lies by Achilles’ ships until ransomed. Where not in the foreground, the ships remain a consistent background; without them the Achaeans would not have reached Troy; they are an essential component of the Greek encampment; and are the unrealized potential vehicle of the Achaean homecoming.
Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions – placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.
This paper uses a textual decision at Iliad 9.394 to argue for irregularity as a functional and meaningful principle in the constitution of the Homeric text. In contrast to almost all recent major editions, I argue that the ‘irregular’ MSS γαμέσσεται should be preferred to the Aristarchaean conjecture γε μάσσεται. Aristarchus’ widely adopted emendation, I suggest, is the product of a drive towards standardization that is still operative in Homeric text-critical practice. This paper opposes that standardization with the evidence of ancient, perhaps pre-Alexandrian, responses to Iliad 9.394, in which the ‘irregularity’ of γαμέσσεται is embraced as an interpretive opportunity. The formal disruptions of γαμέσσεται, I propose, can be understood by locating them both within the immediate context of Iliad 9 and within the wider thematics of irregularity that mark the character of Achilles. This paper thus attempts to reframe our approach to the role of irregularity in the Iliad as an integral feature of meaning rather than grounds for suspecting the integrity of the text.
This article attempts to reconcile, at root, longstanding tensions between intertextuality, narrative function, context-sensitive semantics and formal, repetitive structure in oral and orally derived archaic epic hexameter diction. Calling upon a revised methodological model, drawn from the natural and exact sciences and the study of stochastic, non-deterministic and non-reversible process and, more directly, from the study of complex adaptive systems in contemporary cognitive functional linguistics, the article argues for the inherent evolutionary interdependence – rather than conflict – between context and pattern and between exception and rule, in essence between dynamic, intertextual continuity and change. The article considers selected examples with an emphasis on early Greek epic and in the Epic Cycle.
Reading the Words of the Greek LanguageUnity and Disunity in LSJPrototype SemanticsThe Example of τ ϱ έ ϕ ωGrammaticalization: Syntactic EntrenchmentWord-Formation and EtymologyFurther Reading
Some sixty times in the Iliad and Odyssey, the narrator describes a sequence of events with the climactic phrase, "And now X would have happened, had not Y intervened." Though some recent studies have begun to focus on this narrative technique, a fuller accounting of its properties remains desirable, as many of the passages where it is employed are quite significant to the overall construction of the plots. I have termed the phenomenon pivotal contrafactuals. The present study argues that the composer achieves three general narrative benefits by employing this device. First, it is a method for emphatically changing the direction of the plot (hence the adjective "pivotal"). Second, it allows the narrator to confer added emphases of various kinds upon the events he describes. Third, the narrator often uses the construction to make an editorial comment upon the character on whose behalf the intervention occurs. Intriguingly, Homer appears to link some pivotal contrafactuals together through various means. Some occur as equivalent elements in different multiforms of a common type scene. Some occur in different narratives describing the same event. These latter raise the possibility that divine intervention of which he is unaware occurs in Odysseus's narrative of his wanderings. Finally, I suggest that a passage at the beginning of the Catalogue of Ships, which has attracted various interpretations, is a modified pivotal contrafactual.
The contention that the Homeric epics, and perhaps also the Hesiodic poems and the Homeric Hymns, are the products, directly or at a very short remove, of a tradition of orally improvised poetry is widely accepted as a basic premiss in Homeric criticism. The cogency of the argument depends on the frequency and characteristic use of formulae in the early hexameter poetry, and their rarity in the literature of Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman times, which is known or assumed to have been composed in the study. The reasoning appears to me valid, but in some respects overstated or ambiguously stated in recent publications, and the first fault arises out of the second.
Die Gleichheit fordert das Nachdenken heraus durch Fragen, die sich daran knüpfen und nicht ganz leicht zu beantworten sind. Ist sie eine Beziehung? eine Beziehung zwischen Gegenständen? oder zwischen Namen oder Zeichen für Gegenstände? Das letzte hatte ich in meiner Begriffsschrift angenommen. Die Gründe, die dafür zu sprechen scheinen, sind folgende: a=a und a=b sind offenbar Sätze von verschiedenem Erkenntniswerte: a=a gilt a priori und ist nach Kant analytisch zu nennen, während Sätze von der Form a=b oft sehr wertvolle Erweiterungen unserer Erkenntnis enthalten und a priori nicht immer zu begründen sind. Die Entdeckung, daß nicht jeden Morgen eine neue Sonne aufgeht, sondern immer dieselbe, ist wohl eine der folgenreichsten in der Astronomie gewesen. Noch jetzt ist die Wiedererkennung eines kleinen Planeten oder eines Kometen nicht immer etwas Selbstverständliches.
Unreal conditions in Homeric narrative
- Lang
Homeric formulae for ships
- Alexanderson
Formulae or single words? Towards a new theory on Homeric verse-making
- Visser
- Schein
Formular Economy in Homer: The Poetics of the Breaches
- R Friedrich
Homer's Traditional Art (Philadelphia, 1999). Cf. Kelly, A., A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer Iliad VIII (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar, especially 5-17, for a useful summary of traditional referentiality and a defence of its necessarily subjective application
- J M Foley
- Art Immanent
- Finkelberg