The Tradition Of The Trojan War In Homer And The Epic Cycle

Presents a challenge to Homer's authority on the history and legends of the Trojan War, placing the Iliad and Odyssey in the larger context of the entire body of Greek epic poetry of the Archaic Age.

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.

West presents all the source material and provides the first comprehensive commentary on the lost Troy epics, making full use of iconographic as well as literary evidence. Discussing the individual fragments and testimonia, he endeavours to reconstruct the connections between them and to build up a picture of the plan and course of each poem.

Composed in the third century A.D., the Trojan Epic is the earliest surviving literary evidence for many of the traditions of the Trojan War passed down from ancient Greece. Also known as the Posthomerica, or "sequel to Homer," the Trojan Epic chronicles the course of the war after the burial of Troy's greatest hero, Hektor. Quintus, believed to have been an educated Greek living in Roman Asia Minor, included some of the war's most legendary events: the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse, and the destruction of Troy. But because Quintus deliberately imitated Homer's language and style, his work has been dismissed by many scholars as pastiche. A vivid and entertaining story in its own right, the Trojan Epic is also particularly significant for what it reveals about its sources—the much older, now lost Greek epics about the Trojan War known collectively as the Epic Cycle. Written in the Homeric era, these poems recounted events not included in the Iliad or the Odyssey. As Alan James makes clear in this vibrant and faithful new translation, Quintus's work deserves attention for its literary-historical importance and its narrative power. James's line-by-line verse translation in English reveals the original as an exciting and eloquent tale of gods and heroes, bravery and cunning, hubris and brutality. James includes a substantial introduction which places the work in its literary and historical context, a detailed and annotated book-by-book summary of the epic, a commentary dealing mainly with sources, and an explanatory index of proper names. Brilliantly revitalized by James, the Trojan Epic will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in Greek mythology and the legend of Troy.

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

In this new volume, Jan Haywood and Naoíse Mac Sweeney investigate the position of Homer's Iliad within the wider Trojan War tradition through a series of detailed case studies. From ancient Mesopotamia to twenty-first century America, these examples are drawn from a range of historical and cultural contexts; and from Athenian pot paintings to twelfth-century German scholarship, they engage with a range of different media and genres. Inspired by the dialogues inherent in the process of reception, the book adopts a dialogic structure. In each chapter, paired essays by Haywood and Mac Sweeney offer contrasting authorial voices addressing a single theme, thereby drawing out connections and dissonances between a diverse suite of classical and post-classical Iliadic receptions. The resulting book offers new insights, both into individual instances of Iliadic reception in particular historical contexts, but also into the workings of a complex story tradition. The centrality of the Iliad within the wider Trojan War tradition is shown to be a function of conscious engagement not only with Iliadic content, but also with Iliadic status and the iconic idea of the Homeric.

The poems of the Epic Cycle are assumed to be the reworking of myths and narratives which had their roots in an oral tradition predating that of many of the myths and narratives which took their present form in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The remains of these texts allow us to investigate diachronic aspects of epic diction as well as the extent of variation within it on the part of individual authors - two of the most important questions in modern research on archaic epic. They also help to illuminate the early history of Greek mythology. Access to the poems, however, has been thwarted by their current fragmentary state. This volume provides the scholarly community and graduate students with a thorough critical foundation for reading and interpreting them.