A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey, Volume 1: Introduction and Books I-VIII
Alfred Heubeck, Stephanie West, J. B. Hainsworth
Language: English
Pages: 407
ISBN: 2:00238881
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This 1st book of a commentary compiled by an international team of scholars includes an introduction discussing previous research on the Odyssey, its relation to the Iliad, the epic dialect, and the transmission of the text.
Gabinete de curiosidades griegas: Relatos extraños y hechos sorprendentes
Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom
Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece (Beitrage Zur Altertumskunde)
Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric
*Kpeaaa) with a shortened in hiatus, or Kpea' from Kptaa with elision. T h e Odyssey also has several places where, as here most or all M S S give another form o f pi., K p e a r ’ , which m ay well be ancient (cf. ix 162, 557, x 184, 468, 477, xii 30, xiv 109, mostly in the formula rjfj.e8a Saivv/ievoi Kpea t ’ aanera *ai fj.edv -qSv). See further Ebeling, Lexicon s.v. Kpeas, Chantraine, Grammaire, i 209-10 § 89. ff- T h e whole com pany welcomes the new arrivals: contrast Mentes’ reception at
island embarks on the craft he has built himself, the son leaves his home to find news o f his father in the world outside. W e thus have here two opposite courses o f action which are destined to come together and to culminate in common endeavour and achievement; in other words, they are two aspects o f the same process: that o f bringing Odysseus home. This device was surely the poet’s own invention, and he must have been delighted by it, all the more perhaps because he could have found no
few days spent at Sparta, in which Telem achus m ay achieve the purpose with which he set out, cannot be so described. W e know already that Telem achus intends to fulfil A th en a’s instruction to go to Sparta (i 93, 285, ii 214, 359), but he has not told Nestor this, and there is no discrepancy in the latter suggesting it to him now. e$ MeveXaov: es is unusual with a person. 318. veov: in fact, nearly three years before. aXXoBcv: ‘from abroad’ , cf. xvi 26. 319. ck tu v avOputruv further
presence in the neighbourhood is not allowed to affect our sense o f their isolation (though the arguments by which Eurycleia dissuades her mistress from seeking her father-in-law’s help m ay strike the reader as hardly cogent (iv 735 ff., 754 ff.) ). C on versely, Telem achus does not react to M entes’ words as if he were aware o f an implied reproach for neglecting his grandfather; Laertes’ misery is not treated as any direct concern o f his. T h e poet has had to strike a delicate balance to
least as much influence on him. Indeed, it can be shown that in m any ways the Iliad provided the inspiration for the Odyssey, whose poet to a great extent took his bearings from the earlier work and modelled his writing on it. F. Jacob y42 aptly described this process as ‘conscious rivalry’ and ‘creative mimesis’ . T he terms underline both the affinity between the two poems and their differences: while the Iliad set the standards against which the poet o f the Odyssey felt obliged to measure