Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women

Archaic Greek epic exhibits a pervasive eristic intertextuality, repeatedly positioning its heroes and itself against pre-existing traditions. In this article, I focus on a specific case study from the Odyssey: Homer’s agonistic relationship with the Catalogue of Women tradition. Hesiodic-style catalogue poetry has long been recognized as an important intertext for the Nekyia of Odyssey 11, but here I explore a more sustained dialogue across the whole poem. Through an ongoing agōn that sets Odysseus’s wife against catalogic women, Homer establishes the pre-eminence of his heroine and—by extension—the supremacy of his own poem.

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.

Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring their performance contexts when papyri published in 1992 and 2005 yielded fragments of such long poems by Simonides and Archilochus. Another chapter argues against the widespread view that Sappho composed and performed chiefly for audiences of young girls, suggesting instead that she was a virtuoso singer and lyre-player, entertaining men in the elite symposia whose verbal and musical components are explored in several other chapters of the book. Two more volumes of collected papers will follow devoted to later Greek literature and culture.

Long-Term Trends (1994–2011) and Predictors of Total Alcohol and Alcoholic Beverages Consumption: The EPIC Greece Cohort

The aim of this study was to evaluate the longitudinal changes in alcohol consumption (total alcohol and types of alcoholic beverages) of the Greek EPIC cohort participants (28,572) during a 17-year period (1994–2011), with alcohol information being recorded repeatedly over time. Descriptive statistics were used to show crude trends in drinking behavior. Mixed-effects models were used to study the consumption of total alcohol, wine, beer and spirits/other alcoholic beverages in relation to birth cohort, socio-demographic, lifestyle and health factors. We observed a decreasing trend of alcohol intake as age increased, consistent for total alcohol consumption and the three types of beverages. Older birth cohorts had lower initial total alcohol consumption (8 vs. 10 g/day) and steeper decline in wine, spirits/other alcoholic beverages and total alcohol consumption compared to younger cohorts. Higher education and smoking at baseline had a positive association with longitudinal total alcohol consumption, up to +30% (vs. low education) and more than +25% (vs. non-smoking) respectively, whereas female gender, obesity, history of heart attack, diabetes, peptic ulcer and high blood pressure at baseline had a negative association of −85%, −25%, −16%, −37%, −22% and −24% respectively. Alcohol consumption changed over age with different trends among the studied subgroups and types of alcohol, suggesting targeted monitoring of alcohol consumption.

The Composition and Transmission of the Homeric Poems: A Summary

If the modern oral hypothesis, beginning in the 1920s (see 17 below), about the composition of early Greek epic poetry is correct (a ‘paradigm shift’ in Homeric studies according to Casey Dué), there were many poets who over centuries, beginning perhaps in the middle-to-late Bronze Age, composed in performance many different versions of epic poems, including poems about the Trojan War, and including the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey, vestiges of which survive on papyrus fragments and in the manuscripts of later authors. But the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have were not the work of many poets but, for the most part, of a single poet. The overall unity of the poems cannot be explained, or explained away, by any theory that posits multiple, successive authorship spanning many years.

The Mind as Container

One of the most widespread and natural ways of conceiving of the human mind in European culture is the image of the mind as a container for thoughts, images, memories, reasonings, etc. In this article, we explore the evidence of this metaphor in the Ancient Greek epic poems, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and, for comparative purposes, the evidence of the analogous metaphor in the Ancient Indian epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. We examine how the metaphor is used, what its functions are and what it implies for the conception of mind in both ancient traditions. Additionally, we offer a brief comparison with the image of the mind-container that emerges from the use of this metaphor in modern English.

THE DIPYLON OINOCHOĒ AND ANCIENT GREEK DANCE AESTHETICS

This article asks what the graffito incised on the Dipylon oinochoē (IG I2 919, eighth century b.c.e.) reveals about the nature of the dance competition that it commemorates. Through a systematic analysis of the evaluative and descriptive meaning of the adjective ἀταλός and its cognates in early Greek epic, it is argued that a narrower definition compared to previous suggestions can be established. The word refers to the carefreeness that is specific to a child or young animal, and its uses typically imply a positive evaluation which is connected not only to the well-being that this carefreeness entails but also to the positive emotion of tenderness and the sentiment of care that it engenders in a perceiver. It is concluded that, when used to specify the criterion by which a dance contest will be adjudicated, the term refers to an aesthetic property that is repeatedly praised in archaic Greek texts in other words: that of dancing with the adorable but short-lived carefree abandon of a child.