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Originally, Classical scholars treated the Iliad and the Odyssey as written poetry, and Homer as a writer, yet by the 1920s, Milman Parry (1902–1935) had launched a movement claiming otherwise. His investigation of the oral Homeric style—"stock epithets" and "reiteration" (words, phrases, stanzas)—established that these formulae were ...
An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Thus according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral-formulaic composition , composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized ...
The Odyssey (/ ˈ ɒ d ɪ s i /; [1] Ancient Greek: Ὀδύσσεια, romanized: Odýsseia) [2] [3] is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into 24 books.
The climax of Analysis came with Wilamowitz, who published Homerische Untersuchungen ("Homeric studies") in 1884 and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus ("The homecoming of Odysseus") in 1927. The Odyssey, he argued, was compiled about 650 BCE or later from three separate poems by a Bearbeiter (editor).
Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the cyclic epics survive only in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.
The principle of Jørgensen's law traces to a 1904 article by the Danish classicist Ove Jørgensen, in which he proposed that Homeric characters typically use generic terms, particularly θεός (theos: 'a god'), δαίμων and Ζεύς (), interchangeably to refer to the action of gods, whereas the narrator and the gods themselves always name the specific gods responsible: [2]
Homer and His Guide (1874) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Today, only the Iliad and the Odyssey are associated with the name "Homer". In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, several epigrams, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic ...
Ancient Roman writers were acutely aware of the ancient Greek literary legacy and many deliberately emulated the style and formula of Greek classics in their own works. The Roman poet Vergil, for instance, modeled his epic poem the Aeneid on the Iliad and the Odyssey. [152]