Homer and the Resources of Memory: Some Applications of Cognitive Theory to the Iliad and the Odyssey
Abstract
How could a poet who worked in an oral tradition maintain the momentum of his song? How could a poet such as Homer weave a tale which filled an evening or, perhaps, a whole long night? The answer lies in memory, as we have known. But this bald explanation does not do justice either to the complexity of memory or to the richness of the Homeric epics. Now that so much more information has become available to us, from cognitive psychology and linguistics, about the workings of the mind, we can identify with greater precision those contributions which memory makes to the composition and performance of oral traditional song. In this study the author shows that the demands made on the poet, who relies neither on rote memory nor on written notes, have led him adopt to certain memory-based strategies which have left their traces in the text. What we discover is that the poet in an oral tradition makes intense and creative use of those resources of memory, which are available to us all - episodic memory, auditory memory, visual memory, and spatial memory - to assist him both in the preparation of his song and at the moment of performance.
... For repetition as a cognitive process which can be recognized by an audience through visualization, cf. Minchin (2001), 25-8. ...
While recent studies in the Homeric poems have explored the connotative value of topographic features (e.g. the sea, caves, etc.) and material objects (e.g. the bow, the olive tree, etc.) in the narratives, the significance of mountains has not been addressed. This study illustrates the pervasiveness of these spatial units in the Apologue, Books 9 to 12, of Homer’s Odyssey and then goes on to explore the associations of isolation — from topographic, social, and temporal perspectives — which these units garner through their contexts and deployment.
... Approaches such as the study of formulaic repetition, epic language features, and structural analysis are distinctive and varied in focus. yet none of them are entirely comprehensive [5]. There are still some problems remain to be investigated: a poet who relies on oral tradition must maintain the coherence of his song, weaving a story that can fill an entire evening or perhaps stretch through a whole long night. ...
For a long time, the study of The Iliad has mainly focused on the fate of the main characters and the will of the gods, especially the analysis of the characters and the moral conflicts. However, little attention has been paid to the role of object description. However, descriptive objects play a vital role in shaping narrative flow and thematic resonance. Through close reading and analysis of the text, this paper argues that how Homer uses detailed descriptions of these objects to slow down the rhythm of the narrative and create pauses in the action, thereby increasing the emotional impact of important moments, and how can everyday objects carry deeper symbolic meanings to connect ordinary details to big themes like heroism, destiny, and the role of gods. This article provides a new analytical perspective and understanding of how Homer tells his story, and shows how detailed descriptions of objects help maintain the wholeness of the story and add to its deeper meaning. These findings suggest that paying more attention to object descriptions can help us better understand ancient epics and the spiritual civilizations behind them.
... The concept of composition in performance has in recent years generated investigations into how a traditional oral poet might work with the resources of his memory: we have observations on how the poet uses a formulaic language adapted to meter that helps him sing his way along one of the song paths in his repertoire;1 how he might draw on cognitive scripts that are stored in episodic minchin Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic Online 8 (2024) 63-82 memory as he builds his so-called typical scenes; how he uses spatial memory to guide him as he assembles his catalogue of ships; or how visual memory and semantic memory together support him as he sings his similes (Minchin 2001). But what has been neglected or obscured, as we focus on that moment when he stands before an audience and sings, is what precedes it: that is, the extent to which a poet might prepare, in advance, for any performance. ...
Forward planning and rehearsal were essential to a successful oral performance of the Homeric kind. Drawing on the work of linguistic anthropologist Karin Barber, on research in cognitive psychology, and ethnographical studies, I propose that we may find in the epics good evidence for poetic preparation. I present a number of passages from the Homeric epics that, I argue, were the product of composition and rehearsal in tandem; to use Barber’s phrase, they “pre-existed the moment of utterance.”
... W tym miejscu otwiera się szerokie pole badawcze, zagospodarowywane przez kognitywistykę, a teorię kognitywną w homerologii w swojej pracy "Homer and Resources of Memory. Some Applications of Cognitive Theory to the Iliad and the Odyssey" zastosowała Elizabeth Minchin (2001). ...
Born into a family boasting eminent educators—William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington University in St. Louis, and Charles William Eliot, famous Harvard President—T.S. Eliot joined the debate about schools and universities early on, in the era of the great educational reform leading to the development of the system of elective courses. He criticized the changes and the resulting decline of Classics, though his concern with the problem of education was never purely theoretical. His own education was a product of the elective system, and he himself, as he complained, a “victim” of it. But, for a while, Eliot was also a teacher: prior to working at Lloyds Bank, and before his professional and financial investment in Faber and Faber, he taught pupils in grammar schools and, as an extension lecturer under the auspices of Oxford University, evening classes to adults. His interest in educational issues continued over many years, assuming diverse forms—from writing on education to lecturing and giving opening addresses at universities, to recommending poetry books for pupils and asking practical questions about the accessibility of university accommodation for students from abroad. Nevertheless, he was criticized for seeming to oppose the equality of educational opportunity. This essay re-examines the ideas from Eliot’s “Notes towards the Definition of Culture” (1948) and “The Aims of Education” in the context of his ephemeral prose writings, and it reconsiders the question of whether Eliot’s views on education did indeed represent exclusivist elitism.
https://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/dlibra/publication/134163/edition/123634
... De Oratore, Cicero recommended the technique for memorizing speeches, lyric poems, and the like. The Classicist Minchin (2001) argued that Homer used this method to compose and perform the Iliad and Odyssey. In the Middle Ages, it was common for monks to use this technique to memorize the Bible's 150 Psalms, as well as long passages from other scholarly texts (Carruthers 2008). ...
Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory.
Philosophers and neuroscientists grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist, who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories.
The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other's mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.
Contributors
Sara Abdulla, Eyal Aharoni, Corey H. Allen, Sara Aronowitz, Jenny Blumenthal-Barby, Ned Block, Allison J. Brager, Antonio Cataldo, Tony Cheng, Felipe De Brigard, Rachel N. Denison, Jim A. C. Everett, Gidon Felsen, Julia Haas, Hyemin Han, Zac Irving, Kristina Krasich, Enoch Lambert, Cristina Leon, Anna Leshinskaya, Jordan L. Livingston, Brian Maniscalco, Joshua May, Joseph McCaffrey, Jorge Morales, Samuel Murray, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Laura Niemi, Brian Odegaard, Hannah Read, Robyn Repko Waller, Sarah Robins, Jason Samaha, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Joshua August Skorburg, Shannon Spaulding, Arjen Stolk, Rita Svetlova, Natalia Washington, Clifford Workman, Jessey Wright
What if formularity, meter, and Kunstsprache in Homer weren't abstract, mechanical systems that constrained the poet's freedom, but rather adaptive technologies that helped poets to sustain feats of great creativity? This book explores this hypothesis by reassessing the key formal features of Homer's poetic technique through the lenses of contemporary linguistics and the cognitive sciences, as well as by drawing some unexpected parallels from the contemporary world (from the dialects of English used in popular music, to the prosodic strategies employed in live sports commentary, to the neuroscience of jazz improvisation). Aimed at Classics students and specialists alike, this book provides thorough and accessible introductions to the main debates in Homeric poetics, along with new and thought-provoking ways of understanding Homeric creativity.
Report from the Battlefield: How to Translate Battle Descriptions in the Mahābhārata This article discusses the problem of scene construal in translation, based on a selected description of the battle scene in the Mahābhārata. It is an old Indian epic (c. 400 BCE–400 CE), the greatest epic of mankind (c. 100,000 stanzas), composed in Sanskrit, most likely orally, and certainly distributed in this way. Its main theme is the war between related families. In Indology, descriptions of battles have been treated as conventional because of their orality, however, a closer analysis shows their well- thought-out structure. The article discusses examples of zooming-in/out strategy (Langacker 2005) as one of the methods of active scene building. I show how the authors of the Mahābhārata construed doubly dynamic scenes in which both the content of the description (i.e. the fight) and the description itself is dynamic, reflecting the narrator’s movement. I also discuss the difficulties it presents to the Polish translator and consider the extent to which Polish inflection allows for a similar construal, thus meeting the translation requirements proposed by Tabakowska (1993). My hypothesis is that in many cases such doubly dynamic scenes can be successfully reflected in Polish, as opposed to an English translation (Cherniak 2008–9), thus preserving the extraordinary value of the original.
Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character’s perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of a character, and/or root for a character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.
Just as the story of an epic poem is woven from characters and plot, so too the individual similes within an epic create a unique simile world. Like any other story, it is peopled by individual characters, happenings, and experiences, such as the shepherd and his flocks, a storm at sea, or predators hunting prey. The simile world that complements the epic mythological story is re-imagined afresh in relation to the themes of each epic poem. As Deborah Beck argues in this stimulating book, over time a simile world takes shape across many poems composed over many centuries. This evolving landscape resembles the epic story world of battles, voyages, and heroes that comes into being through relationships among different epic poems. Epic narrative is woven from a warp of the mythological story world and a weft of the simile world. They are partners in creating the fabric of epic poetry.
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.
In this book, Aubrey Buster demonstrates how methods adapted from cultural and social memory studies and the new formalism can illuminate the communal function of biblical and extra-biblical historical summaries in Second Temple Judaism. Refining models drawn from memory studies, she applies them to ancient texts and demonstrates the development of Judah's speech about their past across the Second Temple period. Buster's wide-ranging study demonstrates how and where the historical summary functions in the book of Psalms, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles, as well as the Qumran Psalms Scrolls, Words of the Luminaries, Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus, and Pseudo-Daniel. She shows how the historical summary proves to be a generative, replicable, and ultimately productive form of memory. Crossing the boundaries of genre categories and time periods, liturgical performances, and literary works, historical summaries crafted a highly selective but broadly useful mode of commemoration of key events from Israel's past.
It is widely agreed that Parmenides invented extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration, a transformative event in the history of thought. But how did he manage this seminal accomplishment? In this book, Benjamin Folit-Weinberg finally provides an answer. At the heart of this story is the image of the hodos, the road and the journey. Brilliantly deploying the tools and insights of literary criticism, conceptual history, and archaeology, Folit-Weinberg illuminates how Parmenides adopts and adapts this image from Homer, especially the Odyssey, forging from it his pioneering intellectual approaches. Reinserting Parmenides into the physical world and poetic culture of archaic Greece, Folit-Weinberg reveals both how deeply traditional and how radical was Parmenides' new way of thinking and speaking. By taking this first step toward providing a history of the concept method, this volume uncovers the genealogy of philosophy in poetry and poetic imagery.
The paper focuses on a specific aspect of the ‘Homeric heritage’ in Herodotus’ work, and it is based on a ‘functional’ approach. Some Homeric elements, which depend on the cognitive and oral communication system typical of epos, can be found even in Herodotus and their presence could clarify certain aspects related to the composition and publication of the Histories. The Histories are a written work, but they still show characteristics of oral communication. These characteristics may depend both on the oral sources, used by Herodotus, and on a probable oral publication of the Histories. One element,which is related to oral communication, is the typical scene. In particular, the analysis focuses on the battle scenes: to describe the battles of the Histories, Herodotus uses recurring situations and elements, which can be reused in different contexts and combined in various ways. Another element related to oral communication is the function of Herodotus’ speeches. The speeches of the Histories, like the Homeric ones, are not a rhetorical and literary exercise, but explain, motivate and generate the events: they are the ‘driving force’ of the action. This functionality of speeches reflects a still oral culture, in which spoken words have the same - and sometimes even greater - importance than the action. In conclusion, the comparison with the Homeric model highlights some ‘traces’ of orality, which influenced the composition of the Histories and could be connected to the oral context of publication, through performance, of Herodotus’ work.
The publication of Milman Parry’s and, later, Albert Lord’s important work gave rise in the latter years of the 20th century to a number of questions about oral poetic composition: first, how did an oral poet prepare himself for composition in performance? second, what understanding did he, as a professional storyteller, have of memory and its functions? and, third, how did the poet exploit those functions of memory to assist him as he sang? These questions were at the time considered to be ‘askable’, because of a revived research interest in cognition, in how the mind stores information and how it retrieves it. Research into cognition in its many aspects has been a valuable resource for Homerists, not only for the insights it has provided into the processes of oral traditional composition. It has allowed us insight, too, into the poet’s own understanding of the operations of memory and into the way he has built that understanding into his communication of both the motivations and the responses of his characters: the very impulses and reactions, that is, that drive the action of the poems. In this paper I offer an overview of how mind-based studies, when applied to the Homeric epics, can serve as tools for understanding. The two case studies that I include will illuminate, from different perspectives, the poet’s compositional methods and communicative strategies, revealing something of the essential economy that underpins oral storytelling.
On the premise that cross-linguistic comparisons are a suitable tool for investigating the mechanisms of the ‘oral’ communicative system within the linguistic structure of historical texts, the paper undertakes a comparison between the Homeric tradition and Middle High German (MHG) heroic and courtly epics. Based on a revision of traditional accounts of ‘orality’ in older stages of language and an analysis of different grammatical features which are commonly seen as ‘oral’, this paper shows that the main difference between the investigated texts is not primarily shaped by medial aspects of ‘orality’, but rather by the pragmatic presupposition of the poet with respect to narrative truth. This will allow for a more fine-grained view of both the communicative triangle SPEAKER - ADDRESSEE - WORLD as a historically variable constellation as well as of the relationship between the different dimensions of orality and their diachronic mechanisms.
An epic ekphrasis, being a self-contained narrative unit, interacts with time in multiple ways, and the intensity, depth, and complexity of this interaction depends on the familiarity of the readers/focalisers with the theme of the ekphrastic narrative. Virgil’s longer ekphrases (the murals in Juno’s temple, the sculpture of the temple of Apollo Cumanus, and the Shield of Aeneas) exemplify three diverse experimentations with narrative temporality. All three consist of several smaller individual depictions that are thematically independent and narrate a complete story. Each of these units may be interpreted independently, with the emphasis set on the particular historical moment that is pictorially dramatised, or functions as a section of a longer historical sequence. The rules that govern narrative chronology in each ekphrasis vary: they are distinguished by the disruption or cancelling of linear time, due to regular intertextuality including the discourse with contemporary politics. Finally, the lingering on specific narrative details over others in several panels, on all three ekphrases, in combination with chronological regressions and violations of linearity, underlines the self-referential character of these pictorial compositions.
The purview of this paper is twofold: to set the theoretical framework to ground a fruitful dialogue between oral theory and neuroscience and to apply neuroscientific findings to the Homeric model of communication as shown particularly in the Odyssey,where a singer or storyteller (Phemius, Demodocus, and Odysseus) sing to an audience gathered in a banquet. A primary concern of the paper is to explore the bearing of neuroscientific research on aspects of cognition involved in interactive communicative settings, where verbal and emotional aspects are involved. It is shown that Homeric passages identify silence, enchantment and pleasure as the three interconnected factors of successful and attuned verbal communication and that they make perfect sense when seen from the perspective of neuroimaging studies, which further illuminate the cognitive articulation underlying those factors. In the enriched hermeneutic framework provided, the Homeric idea of singing, sharing and acquiring knowledge as a deeply emotional experience is shown to possess a firm ground in neurophysiology. Some prospective methodological remarks on the meta-dialogue between Classics and neuroscience conclude the paper.
The aim of the paper is to show how conceptual metonymy, metaphor and blending, as discussed in cognitive linguistics, can be used in the investigation on the beginning of abstraction in philosophical thinking. The analysis is based on selected stanzas from the Ṛgveda (ca. 13 th BC), the Atharvaveda (ca. 10-9 th BC) and the Mahābhārata (ca. 4 th BC-4 th AD) composed in Sanskrit. I discuss how the notion of riding in a chariot, used in the earliest texts for expressing ontological, epistemological and ritual issues, is transformed into an abstract concept of the wheel to express the concept of time. The use of cognitive models allows showing the conscious and rational nature of this transformation performed by the early Indian thinkers, and thus qualifies as a form of philosophy.
The construction of space in Xenophon's Ephesiaca deviates from that in other novels in a number of ways: the narrator's own space in this novel is invisible and there is a conspicuous absence of interaction with the literary tradition and, accordingly, of metaphorically evoked frames. Moreover, Xenophon is innovative in comparison to Chariton in his construction of not just two but four independent story-lines. Xenophon differs from the other novelists in that by far the most important function of space in his novel is thematic: whereas other novelists widely explore other functions of space too, the act of travelling is of central importance; just as in the Odyssey, space is instrumental in effecting a recognition; and spatial descriptions mainly provide analogies to major themes, such as love, chastity and marriage. Occasionally, space also has characterizing and psychologizing functions.Keywords:characterizing function; Ephesus; psychologizing function; space; symbolic function; thematic function; Xenophon
This chapter explores the form and function of the chronotope as well as other manifestations of space employed by Plutarch in his narrative strategies in the Lives. It summarizes Banta's research to arrive at a comprehensive analysis of space in the Lives. The chapter discusses those key elements that are of the greatest significance narratologically and those key Lives that most strongly reflect Plutarch's awareness of space. One necessary key to understanding Plutarch's conception of the importance of space is his own narratorial statement regarding the psychological impact on the narratees of space and literary representations of space. A comprehensive analysis must take into account the Life of Theseus, however, that is paired with the Romulus. Control of the space of the polis is a strong theme in the Lives of Solon and Lycurgus and their legislative activity imposes significant restrictions on the use of space by citizens and non-citizens.Keywords:Life of Theseus; Lycurgus; Plutarch; Romulus; Solon
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