Synopses & Reviews
The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are among the world's foremost epics. Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer--a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems composed--at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it.
In Homeric Responses, Nagy presents a series of essays that further elaborate his theories regarding the oral composition and evolution of the Homeric epics. Building on his previous work in Homeric Questions and Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond and responding to some of his critics, he examines such issues as the importance of performance and the interaction between audience and poet in shaping the poetry; the role of the rhapsode (the performer of the poems) in the composition and transmission of the poetry; the irreversible mistakes and cross-references in the Iliad and Odyssey as evidences of artistic creativity; and the Iliadic description of the shield of Achilles as a pointer to the world outside the poem, the polis of the audience.
Synopsis
This book, much of which has been previously published in different formats, presents a series of essays in which Nagy examines the oral origins of Homeric epic and explores the relationship between the poet, and his poem, and his audience. This largely philological and linguistic reading of the Iliad and Odyssey is targeted at undergraduate level. Extracts are in Greek and in English translation.