Homer

Odysseus’ itinerary appropriates locations and themes from an Indo-European myth about dangerous giants who live in three communities at varying levels of civilization, enjoy year-round agricultural productivity, and face a prophesied destruction by the god who wields the trident.

This paper aims to explain the position of Ajax’ speech as last in the embassy to Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad. Prior to Ajax’ speech, Phoinix, recounting the myth of Meleager, mentions a sequence of suppliants at Ι.575-85.

Bakhtin’s chronotope is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships…artistically expressed in literature” (1981, 84). This means that “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (85).

The Odyssey presents a striking series of situations in which the protagonist is reduced to the status of a helpless spectator, watching the action unfold but unable to act. These situations include a number of episodes in the apologoi (paradigmatically, Odysseus’s escape from the sirens, but also parts of the encounters with the cyclops, Scylla, and the winds of Aeolus), as well as several times when Odysseus constrained by his disguise on Ithaca (when Odysseus watches the reunion of Telemachus and Eumaeus, and when Odysseus sees the dog Argos).

aēr in Homer has rarely been discussed; the few studies that do address it usually focus on the word’s semantics and scope of reference in the world of physical objects (Louis 1948). This paper argues that that approach is misguided, and that we should focus instead on how aēr works and what aēr does, both for the poet responsible for composing the Iliad and the Odyssey and to characters within these poems.