This book offers five readings of the Homeric poems through five different postures, actions, or gestures: falling, running, leaping, standing, and reaching. It argues for a connection between formularity and embodiment in Homeric epic by tracing, in each chapter, the story of a particular gesture through one or both of the poems. In doing so, it presents a new understanding of what the body does and suffers in Homer alongside original readings and arguments about the structure and meaning of the poems themselves. It revises our understanding of formula and type scenes in the Iliad and Odyssey by reading repetition through the body, identifying a relationship between familiar epic movements—learned through repetition, reinforced by muscle memory, and culturally engrained—and the verbal formulas through which many of the movements are conveyed. As a result, the book suggests a different way of thinking about epic repetition, both insofar as it relates to the sequencing of action through time, and in relation to the autonomy and agency of the Homeric body and its role within the narrative.
“Muscle memory” not mediated by myonuclear number? Secondary analysis of human detraining data
