Abstract
By predicating the epic on the notion of influence and inter-textual dynamics, we can trace the genre along a retrospect of influence to the eighth century BC — that is, to the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. Even then, it must be borne in mind that these Greek epics, which we attribute to Homer, were not composed in a vacuum. They were the result of an oral tradition of narratives telling of the creation of the world and of significant events in early human history. They are comparable — indeed, intimately related — to a body of stories circulating in the neighbouring Near East, among them a narrative often thought of as the earliest recorded epic: the epic of Gilgamesh. We begin our history of the epic, then, with Gilgamesh, before addressing Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Homeric influence would of course extend well beyond later classical Greek literature and thought into the age of the Roman Empire, when Homer’s monumental achievements inspire, primarily, Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil’s conscious and often meticulous imitation of Homer is the generic genuflection that establishes the epic as a living genre in the first place. Further innovation follows, and would comprise works such as Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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Notes
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982) 70.
For more on the textual history of Gilgamesh, see Benjamin Caleb Ray, ‘The Gilgamesh Epic: Myth and Meaning’, Myth and Method, ed. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) 304–6 and Andrew George, Introduction, The Epic of Gilgamesh, ed. George (London: Penguin, 1999) xiii-lii.
Johannes Haubold, ‘Greek Epic: A Near Eastern Genre?’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48 (2002): 8.
As opposed to earlier readings of Gilgamesh as the result of a single poetic vision, particularly of conscious innovations by Babylonian, or Akkadian, poets on Sumerian material, see Charles G. Zug, ‘From Sumer to Babylon: The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic’, Genre 5 (1972): 217–34.
Donald H. Mills, The Hero and the Sea: Patterns of Chaos in Ancient Myth (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2003) 46.
Sarah Morris, ‘Homer and the Near East’, A New Companion to Homer, ed. Ian Morris and Barry Powell (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 606–7; Charles Rowan Beye, The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1968) 16.
J. B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 11–12.
Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) 41.
Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) 113–41.
Barry B. Powell, ‘Homer and Writing’, A New Companion to Homer, ed. Morris and Powell, 26–8.
Milman Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style’; Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147; rpt. in The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 272.
Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (1979; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) rev. edn, 3.
For a detailed discussion of this, see Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) esp. 51–89.
Ford, Homer, 128–9; Richard Rutherford, Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 58–9.
William G. Thalmann, Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974) 248; see also Segal, 88–9.
Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 92.
Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 7.
Susanne Lindgren Wof ford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963) 61–85.
Xenophanes fr. 1 and 11, qtd. in G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (London: Methuen, 1965) 8.
H. T. Swedenberg, The Theory of the Epic in England 1650–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944) 8.
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986) 276.
Hainsworth, 80; Duncan F. Kennedy, ‘Virgilian Epic’, The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 145.
Richard Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique, trans. Hazel and David Harvey (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993) 202.
Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 38–9.
David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) 83.
Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imaginarion: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. Charles Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 141–85.
Susan H. Braund, introduction, Civil War by Lucan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) xiii-xvi.
Lucan, Civil War, ed. Braund (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); references are to book and line numbers.
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© 2006 Adeline Johns-Putra
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Johns-Putra, A. (2006). The Classical Age: Beginnings. In: The History of the Epic. Palgrave Histories of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595729_2
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