Homerica

Of all metaphors applied to Homeric poetry by ancient criticism, the figure of Ocean afforded the broadest horizons. The epic image of a circumfluent river encompassing the known world and feeding all interior waterways (Iliad 21.193-197) aptly captured Homer’s status as the original source and terminus ultra quem non of the literary cosmos.

The poems of the Greek Epic Cycle are best known for what they are not: Homer. In the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts the many plots of the Cypria and the Little Iliad with Homer’s superior sense of unity (1549b). Likewise, Horace warns against the sprawling promises of the scriptor cyclicus (Ars P. 136-39). These pronouncements have dominated modern assessments of the Cycle and its legacy (Griffin, Horsfall).

At the end of her lament for Hector in Book 24 of the Iliad, Andromache grieves that Hector has not left her a πυκινὸν ἔπος, “a wise word.” In this paper I examine the range of contexts in which πυκ[ι]νός appears to show how this word provides a backdrop of density that applies to disparate aspects of a scene.

Helen and Priam’s curious conversation in Book 3 of the Iliad, the so-called Teichoskopia, is a perpetual puzzle for students of Homeric poetry. In a seminal 1994 article, Stephanie Jamison, a scholar of Sanskrit literature, endeavored to explain some of the oddities of the question-and-answer exchange between the captive Spartan queen and her Trojan abductor’s father by comparing it to a corresponding episode in the Mahabharata, the primary Indian poetic equivalent of the Greek Epic Cycle (Allen 2002b, West 2005–2006, 2006, and 2009).

It is well-established that Diomedes’ attack on Aphrodite and her subsequent complaint on Mt. Olympus in Book V of the Iliad draws on Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Gresseth 1975; Burkert 1992; Andersen 1997; West 1997; Burkert 2004; Currie 2016). However, the discussion has mostly stalled at the “parallelomania” stage, and there has been little discussion of the purpose of the adaptation (Burkert 1992: the borrowing is “without function”).