The Augment in the Fragments of the Epic Cycle and Other Fragmentary Greek Epic

I discuss the use of the augment in fragmentary hexametric Greek texts outside of early epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns) and the mock-epic works (such as the Batrakhomyomakhia). I quote them after West 2003 but also analyze fragments that are not found in West. I determine the metrically secure forms, discuss previous scholarship on the meaning of the augment in epic Greek, and then proceed to the actual analysis. For my investigation, I divide the fragments in three categories: first, those that can be analyzed; second, those that have fewer forms and that allow for an analysis but require more caution than those of the first category; and third, the ones that have no or not enough metrically secure forms but are still intellegible. The starting point for my investigation is that the augment had near-deictic/visual-evidential meaning and that it was used in focused and highlighted passages as well as to emphasize new information. This is confirmed by the fragments, but as was the case in the larger epic corpus, there are exceptions to the rules in the Cycle as well.

Retour sur l’hymne homérique comme proème : la pragmatique de l’hymne 6 à Aphrodite

For the necessary anthropological return to ‘native’ categories, Thucydides (3.104) helps us for our modern understanding of the Homeric hymns. These poems in epic diction are prooimia to musical competitions. They are composed for a ritual recitation on the occasion of different cultic festivals in different cities. With the example of the second Homeric hymn consecrated to Aphrodite in our modern corpus, the study tends to show the different enunciative procedures aiming at such a ritual function, such a pragmatics through an astonishing portrait of the goddess of erotic desire. The procedure opens the possibility of re-performances of the hymnic poems in other ritual circumstances, in other cultic spaces.

Joan Maragall: creació, traducció i reescriptura

What is the role of translation in Maragall’s work? If his first goal was to bestow cultural support to Catalan literature with the addition of the European authors of Modernism, the second stage of the Catalan poet’s agenda becomes more ambitious, delving into the origins of Western literature and culminating in the translation of the Homeric Hymns. My contribution analyzes how, on the one hand, the Catalan rewriting of the works of Nietzsche, Goethe, Novalis, or Dante draws a progressive and continuous line within Maragall’s ideas; and, on the other hand, what impact these versions have on his own literary creation, through the loanwords that spread across his translations, and his poetry.

‘The Being That is in a Manner Equal With God’ (PHIL. 2:6C): A Self-Transforming, Incarnational, Divine Ontology

This article challenges the consensus that τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ (Phil. 2:6c) means ‘equality with God’ and denotes a status. Linguistic analysis, contextual considerations, and a thorough investigation of an inventory of 149 extant Greek references to divine equality (ἴσος /ἴσα + θεός) show that Phil. 2:6c means ‘being (that is) in a manner equal with God’. Although it evokes well-known language for the status of rulers who received ‘honours equal to the gods’, it has a distinct, rarely attested, but Homeric syntax (cf. Iliad 5:441–2; 21:315), for which the closest parallel is Homeric Hymns 5, line 214. As such, it denotes a dynamic ontology, a mode of being expressed, or actualized, in Christ’s incarnational self-transformation (vv. 7–8). The words also serve a creative affirmation and subversion of the middle Platonic distinction between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (as that was expressed in Plutarch and Philo): Christ exists and acts from ‘being’ (ὑπάρχων … τὸ εἶναι v. 6) and is misperceived in the realm of ‘becoming’ (γενόμενος … γενόμενος vv. 7–8). But, against the Platonists, he has a divine ‘being’ that ‘becomes’.