EPIC INTERACTIONS

jasper griffin, ma (Oxon.), fba was until his retirement in September

2004 Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of
Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. He was Public
Orator for the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2004. His books
include Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), Latin Poets and
Roman Life (Oxford, 1985) and Homer : Iliad IX (Oxford, 1995)
 Epic Interactions
Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic
Tradition
Presented to Jasper GriYn by
Former Pupils

E d i t e d by
M . J. CLA R KE , B. G . F. CU R RI E,
AN D R. O. A . M . LYN E

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With oYces in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
ß Oxford University Press 2006
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Epic interactions : perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the epic tradition : presented
to Jasper Griffin by former pupils / edited by M. J. Clarke, B. G. F. Currie, and
R. O. A. M. Lyne.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-927630-1 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-19-927630-7 (alk. paper)
1. Epic poetry. Classical–History and criticism. 2. Homer–Criticism and
interpretation. 3. Homer–Influence. 4. Virgil–Criticism and interpretation.
5. Griffin, Jasper. I. Clarke, M. J. II. Currie, B. G. F. III. Lyne, R. O. A. M.
PA3022. E6E75 2006
809. 1’32–dc22 2006007427
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn
ISBN 0–19–927630–7 978–0–19–927630–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 Preface

This collection of essays dedicated to Jasper GriYn aims to investi-

gate the vibrancy of the classical epic tradition. The book as a whole
considers the uses made by writers at widely diVerent times and
places of a single literary form to explore the author’s place in literary
and cultural history.
Jasper GriYn retired as Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College and
Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University
in autumn 2004. Six of the chapters (Chs. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11) were
presented at a conference on 11 September that year to mark his
retirement; all speakers at the conference, and all contributors to this
volume, were pupils of Professor GriYn. A volume of essays by
former pupils on Homer, Virgil, and their reception seemed a Wtting
tribute to a scholar distinguished for a teaching career spanning more
than forty years and for numerous publications on Greek and Latin
literature in which Homer and Virgil consistently occupied pride of
place. The range of this volume—whose chronological limits are the
eighth century bc and the nineteenth century of our era, encompass-
ing literature written in ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Old Irish,
Italian, and modern English—is intended as a tribute to GriYn’s own
extraordinary range in teaching and research, while also catering to
the interests and expertise of the contributors.
The choice of chapter subjects and of contributors is hardly arbi-
trary, but it necessarily gives only a selective representation of the
subject matter and (no less embarrassingly for the editors) only a
selection of the professional classicists who have been pupils of
GriYn. The volume oVers sequential readings of several signiWcant
moments in the classical epic tradition. While the chapters can very
well be read in isolation, they are meant to bear reading as a mean-
ingful sequence. Unavoidably, signiWcant moments in the tradition
have not been included (the Latin historical epic of Ennius, Lucan,
and Silius is a notable absence); but there are, we hope, compensa-
tory gains. The book is, predictably enough, more and less than a
history of a genre.
vi Preface
The book’s tripartite structure will be evident at a glance. It
considers ‘epic interactions’ Wrst within ancient Greek literature
(Chs. 1–4); second, within Latin literature (Chs. 5–8); and last, in
the vernacular literatures of medieval, renaissance, and modern
Europe (Chs. 9–11). There are more detailed correspondences
between the Wrst and second parts, on epic interactions in the Greek
and Roman worlds. The Wrst chapters of each part (Chs. 1 and 5)
consider how the foundational epics of Greece and Rome, those of
Homer and Virgil respectively, interact with earlier epic tradition. The
second chapters (2 and 6) consider the interaction of these founda-
tional epics with a cultural phenomenon: Homer with Greek religion,
and Virgil with the monuments of Augustan Rome. The third chap-
ters (3 and 7) explore how non-epic literary genres interacted with the
foundational epics: how Herodotus’ Histories interact with the Iliad
and the Odyssey, and how Horatian lyric and Propertian and Ovidian
elegy (and Ovidian epic) interact with the Aeneid. The fourth chapters
(4 and 8) explore how epic poems once considered ‘post-classical’,
Hellenistic and ‘Silver’ Latin epic (especially Apollonius’ Argonautica
and Statius’ Thebaid), interact with the foundational epics.
Despite its great range, we see the book—and conceived it at the
outset—as having a uniWed subject, conveyed for us in the concept of
‘epic interactions’. We have tried not to impose the theme heavy-
handedly on the individual chapters, but to let it emerge from the
contributors’ own treatments. A concluding Epilogue explores com-
mon ground and diVerences between the chapters, and considers
ways in which they form a continuous or an interlocking sequence.
Neither term in the book’s main title, we are aware, is straightfor-
ward. We have favoured ‘interaction’ as a non-technical word
without any Wxed theoretical implications. No dogma is envisaged
by it. For us, ‘interactions’ suggests an open-ended set of related
questions that can be asked of the texts handled. As used by the
writers in this volume, ‘interaction’ has aYnities to notions of liter-
ary history, reception, intertextuality, and cultural poetics; but it is
identical with none of these, and that is the word’s chief recommen-
dation to us. There are well-known problems in deWning ‘epic’, too;
and it is well known that these have an ideological as well as a literary
aspect. This Preface is not the place to explore these; they will
resurface in the chapters that follow.
 Preface vii
This is the place, however, to pay tribute to another Fellow and
Tutor of Balliol College and Professor of Classical Languages and
Literature at Oxford University. Oliver Lyne died aged 60 in March
2005 when the editorial process of this book was entering its closing
stages. At the time of his death Professor Lyne, who had been a
colleague of Professor GriYn’s for over thirty years (but not a
pupil), was about to start writing the Epilogue for the book. His
input into the book had already been considerable: since the summer
of 2002 he had, together with his younger co-editors, determined the
book’s conception and shape, and in the months from September
2004 to March 2005 edited several of the chapters. Many of the
contributors to the volume were pupils of Lyne as well as GriYn,
and this is an intellectual debt too that is recognized in the following
pages.
Finally, we thank Hilary O’Shea of Oxford University Press for
encouraging the project, our copy-editor Heather Watson, and
proof-reader Anne Marriott. Katrin Stelter gave us the benefit of
her critical acumen throughout.
M.J.C. and B.G.F.C.
Dublin and Oxford
July 2005
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Conventions and Abbreviations xi

Contributors xii

1. Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 1

Bruno Currie
2. Homer’s Religion: Philological Perspectives from
Indo-European and Semitic 47
Simon Pulleyn
3. Homer and Herodotus 75
Christopher Pelling
4. Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 105
Gregory Hutchinson
5. The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 131
Rebecca Armstrong
6. The Epic and the Monuments: Interactions between
Virgil’s Aeneid and the Augustan Building Programme 159
Stephen Harrison
7. Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 185
Matthew Robinson
8. Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 217
Matthew Leigh
9. Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn: Continuity
and Analogy from Homer to the Medieval North 243
Michael Clarke
10. Quantum Mutatus ab Illo: Moments of Change
and Recognition in Tasso and Milton 273
Emily Wilson
x Contents
11. The Idea of Epic in the Nineteenth Century 301
Richard Jenkyns
12. Epilogue 331
Bruno Currie

References 375
Index of Passages 413
General Index 433
 Conventions and Abbreviations

For abbreviations of Greek and Latin sources we have followed The Oxford
Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (3rd revised edn.,
Oxford, 2003), pp. xxix–liv. Note in addition the following standard abbre-
viations of non-classical texts:
ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament,
ed. J.B. Pritchard (2nd edn., Princeton, 1955)
AV Atharvaveda
GL T. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata
PL J. Milton, Paradise Lost
RV Rigveda
TBC Táin Bó Cúailnge
Not in OCD3:
Buc. Eins. Bucolica Einsidlensia
Cic. Opt. Gen. Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P.G.W. Glare (Oxford, 1982)
Phld. Poem. Philodemus, De Poematis
SGO Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, ed.
R. Merkelbach and J. Stauber, i–v (Stuttgart, 1998–2004)
 Contributors

Rebecca Armstrong, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Fellow and Tutor of

St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Ovid and his Love
Poetry (London, 2005) and Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne, and
Phaedra in Latin Poetry (Oxford, 2006).
Michael Clarke, BA (Dublin), D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Lecturer at the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of Flesh
and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: A Study of Words and Myths
(Oxford, 1999).
Bruno Currie, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel
College, Oxford. He is the author of Pindar and the Cult of Heroes
(Oxford, 2005).
Stephen Harrison, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is Professor of Classical
Languages and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and
Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His books include Vergil:
Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991) and Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford,
2000).
Gregory Hutchinson, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is Professor of Greek
and Latin Languages and Literature, University of Oxford, and
a Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford. His books include
Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford, 1988) and Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commen-
tary on Selected Larger Pieces (Oxford, 2001).
Richard Jenkyns, MA, M.Litt. (Oxon.) is Professor of the Classical
Tradition, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Lady
Margaret Hall, Oxford. His books include The Victorians and Ancient
Greece (Oxford, 1980) and Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History;
Times, Names, and Places (Oxford, 1998).
Matthew Leigh, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Fellow and Tutor of St
Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Lucan: Spectacle
and Engagement (Oxford, 1997) and Comedy and the Rise of Rome
(Oxford, 2004).
 List of Contributors xiii a
yOliver Lyne, BA, Ph.D. (Cantab.) was until his death in March
2005 Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of
Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. His books
include The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace (Oxford, 1980),
Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1987), and Horace: Behind
the Public Poetry (Oxford, 1995).
Christopher Pelling, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is Regius Professor of
Greek, University of Oxford, and a Student of Christ Church,
Oxford. His books include Literary Texts and the Greek Historian
(London, 2000) and Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies (Swansea,
2002).
Simon Pulleyn, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a solicitor in the City of
London. He is the author of Prayer in Greek Religion (Oxford, 1997)
and Homer: Iliad 1 (Oxford, 2000).
Matthew Robinson, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Lecturer at Univer-
sity College, London. He is the author of a commentary on Ovid
Fasti book 2 (Oxford, forthcoming).
Emily Wilson, MA (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Yale) is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Classics, University of Pennsylvania. She is the
author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to
Milton (Baltimore, 2004).
This page intentionally left blank
 1
Homer and the Early Epic Tradition
Bruno Currie

I am concerned in this chapter to establish what kind of interaction

was possible between the Homeric poems and other early Greek
epics.1 The question is crucially aVected by our recognition that the
early Greek epic tradition is oral-derived traditional poetry. It seems
obvious that we must judge the interaction of the early Greek epic
poems by diVerent standards from the interaction of, say, Virgil’s
Aeneid with the epics that preceded it; but just how diVerent will be a
theme of the chapter. The question cannot be addressed without
considering the relationship between the Homeric epics and the
poems of the Epic Cycle, and the diVerence between an oral poetics
and the literary criticism of a written poem: two themes with which
Jasper GriYn is particularly associated.2
We must reckon in general with three types of limiting factors on
interaction in the early epic tradition. First, in the wake of A. B.
Lord’s comparative work on ancient Greek and Yugoslavian oral
traditions, Homeric scholarship has consistently emphasized
the phenomenon of composition in performance in oral poetic

For Jasper: il miglior fabbro.

1 This has been a particular concern of neoanalytical Homer scholarship. See, for
the Iliad, Kullmann (1960); for the Odyssey, Danek (1998). Note too Dowden (1996),
who also favours the term ‘interaction’: pp. 47, 47–8, 61. For deWnitions of neoana-
lysis, see Rutherford (1996) 91–3; Willcock (1997) 174–5.
2 GriYn (2001 [1977]); (1980), esp. p. xiv (much quoted: see e.g. de Jong (1995)
131; Nagy (1996) 31 n. 7).
2 Bruno Currie
traditions.3 On this view, a song is recreated in every performance; an
oral poetic tradition is characterized by Xuidity, so that there is no
concept of a Wxed or original text.4 Where there is no (Wxed) text
there can be, it seems, no intertextuality.5 But Wxity and Xuidity are
vague terms.6 How much textual Wxity should we require for allusion
to become possible? And how much Wxity was there in the early
Greek epic tradition?7 We do have some controls. The Wrst nine lines
of the fourth and the eighteenth poems in our corpus of Homeric
Hymns are evidently an attempt to give the ‘same’ version of a hymn
to Hermes.8 It is, admittedly, possible to emphasize the divergence
between these two versions: as one scholar notes, ‘only three lines are
shared, exactly, between them’.9 But, on the other hand, the corres-
pondence is extremely close: there would not seem to be any diY-
culty in alluding to a poem whose text Xuctuated within such
parameters. Moreover, the indications of linguistic Wxation in the
early Greek epic tradition suggest a relatively high level of textual
Wxity, whether or not this was underpinned by written texts.10 The
Yugoslavian comparanda may have led scholars to overemphasize
Xuidity in the early Greek tradition; R. Finnegan has emphasized the
existence of oral poetic traditions where ‘near word-for-word repro-
duction’ (in other words, Wxed texts) was important.11 Finnegan

3 Lord (1960 and 1995), developing the work of M. Parry (1971, 1st pub.
1928–37).
4 Lord (1979) 314; (1960), esp. 99–101, 149; cf. Garvie (1994) 6 and references in
his n. 17.
5 Burgess (2001) 133; Danek (2002) 3; R. Fowler (2004b) 228. For the problems
posed for allusion by the absence of a ‘Wxed text’, cf. further Willcock (1997) 186;
Danek (1998) 6, 13; D. L. Cairns (2001) 35.
6 Cf. Lord (1995) 20–1.
7 A relatively high degree of stability is argued for by Kirk (1960) 278–9; Dowden
(1996) 47–8, 49–50; (2004) 188; D. L. Cairns (2001) 36; cf. Hainsworth in Heubeck,
West, and Hainsworth (1988) 29. For this question in relation to Serbo-Croatian
epic, cf. Lord (1981).
8 So Hainsworth in Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) 29–30. DiVerently,
M. L. West (2003c) 4–5, 18, seeing Hymn. Hom. 18 as an ‘excerpt’ from Hymn. Hom.
Merc. For another control, compare attempts to reproduce the ‘same’ passage within
the Iliad: Janko (1990) 332–3.
9 Hainsworth in Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) 30.
10 See Haslam (1997) 80, on the Wndings of Janko (1982).
11 Finnegan (1977) 73, 75, 144, 148. On the whole, though, this goes for ‘shorter
forms of poetry’, rather than ‘lengthy epic poetic narrations’: ibid. 78. Cf. Lord (1981)
459–60.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 3
insisted that one cannot deduce the Xuidity of one oral poetic
tradition from the Xuidity of another; each tradition must be
approached on its own terms. Accordingly, our need is less for
theorizing about the behaviour of oral tradition in general than for
empirical study of the dynamics of a particular tradition.12 This
generates—far from a blanket prohibition on the search for inter-
textual relationships in oral poetic traditions—a positive spur to
investigate possible interaction in the early Greek epic tradition.13
A second inhibiting factor on interaction in an oral tradition
concerns the audience. For two reasons the audience cannot be left
out of my account. First, because the public of early Greek epic was
(I assume) a listening, not a reading one: even if the Homeric poems
were committed to writing at the moment of their composition,
readers are unlikely to have been a signiWcant factor in their contem-
porary reception.14 Until as late as perhaps the fourth century bc only
a minority of Greeks were probably coming to know poetry through
writing.15 Epic poetry—internal and external evidence concurs on
this point—was intended for a large public, which it can only have
reached through performance.16 The second reason why I emphasize
the role of the audience is that I take the interaction of one poem
with another only to be really interesting when it enters into the
poem’s meaning: that is, when it is there to be appreciated by
the poem’s public. Neoanalytical methods have often been valued
for the insight they give into the poet’s manner of composing.17 If,
however, the interaction is to have literary signiWcance, our focus
should more properly be on the act of reception by the public than

12 Finnegan (1977) 152.

13 DiVerently, Allan (2005) 14 ‘the pursuit of speciWc dependence or inXuence . . .
is, in the pre-textual stage of early Greek epic, a misleading methodology’.
14 Cf. diVerently, R. B. Rutherford (2001) 125; (1992) 45; (1996) 14–15; Blümer
(2001) i. 70 and n. 148, 81–3, 147–51.
15 For reading of tragic texts, cf. Ar. Ran. 52–3; Arist. Poet. 1462a12–18. Still
eccentric in the late 5th cent. bc: Dover (1993) 34–5.
16 See Taplin (1992) 42; M. L. West (1998) 98. For the internal evidence, cf.
Od. 9.6
B –ÆÆ, 17.383
Øæª , and for the external evidence, cf.
Heracl. fr. 104 DK

ø IØ
EØ; Sim. 564.4 PMG (ap. Athen. 4.172e) oø ªaæ
 …æ M
b Æ æ ¼Ø ºÆE .
17 Esp. Willcock (1997) 175, 183, 187, 188; cf. (1987) 185; J. T. Kakridis (1949)
7. This ‘neglect of the audience’ is deprecated by Scodel (2002) 4.
4 Bruno Currie
that of composition by the poet.18 But if we embrace the audience’s
perspective, we must face the question how an audience could have
been receptive to interaction between poems experienced only in
performance. The problems here are not negligible. But they are
not necessarily greater than with tragedy and comedy in the Wfth
century, where intertextuality was likewise, at least for most theatre-
goers, a relationship between plays known only from performance,
not texts.19 We tend to think of intertextuality as a property of written
or printed texts. But modern audiences also appreciate intertextual
relationships in music and in Wlm without ever seeing a score or
script, and they may do so without the beneWt of repeated listenings
or viewings.20 The fact that early Greek epic was destined for
an audience need not militate against there being meaningful inter-
action in the early epic tradition.
The third problem concerns our ability to identify when a poem
may be interacting with another. The language of early Greek epic is a
traditional one.21 But if so, how can we tell when two poems employ
the same or a similar phrase or motif that the one poem is alluding to
the other, rather than that both are drawing independently on a
common stock of forms of expression? This has long been an ideo-
logical battleground between scholars of neoanalytical and of oralist
persuasion.22 Neoanalysts try to discover a ‘history of motifs’ for the
early epic tradition: where a motif was used Wrst and where it was
used derivatively; hence ‘motivgeschichtliche Forschung’ has been
proposed as an alternative name for ‘neoanalysis’.23 Yet where neo-
analysts see a relationship of dependence, trying to establish which
poem was the donor and which the recipient, oralists deny any direct
dependence between speciWc poems and ascribe the similarity
instead to the independent use of a common tradition, in which

18 The audience’s perspective is emphasized by Taplin (1990) 109; R. B. Rutherford

(1992) 35, 36; D. L. Cairns (2001) 41, 43; Danek (1998) 1, 6, 506.
19 Cf. Easterling (1997b) 168–9. Also, Hutchinson (2004).
20 Cf. D. P. Fowler (2000) 132.
21 The classic demonstration is by M. Parry (1971).
22 From an oralist perspective: Notopoulos (1964) 36; Fenik (1968) 231–40;
Hainsworth (1969) 30–1; Nagy (1979) 42; (1996) 133; cf. Janko (1982) 195, 225–8.
From a neoanalytical perspective: Kullmann (1992b) 140–55, esp. 144; D. L. Cairns
(2001) 35–7, 41; R. B. Rutherford (2001) 124–6; Danek (1998) 13–14.
23 Kullmann (1992c).
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 5
there can be no one ‘archetype’.24 It should be noted that, in an
extreme form, this view may have the unwelcome consequence of
impugning intratextuality as well as intertextuality.25 But in fact
recognition of the traditionality of the language of early Greek epic
need not preclude the possibility of speciWc allusion. In the Wrst
place, allusion between poems might be defended on the grounds
that there was, alongside the traditional language, much scope for
untraditional, unique, forms of expression which could be the vehicle
for allusion.26 Secondly, it can be argued that allusion is possible even
through the medium of traditional language: it might be possible for
one poem to allude to the distinctive use by another poem of a
traditional formula or motif or theme.27 Finally, and more generally,
we should arguably not think of allusion, the transferral of motifs
between speciWc contexts, as being the preserve of literary traditions,
while oral traditions operate only with type-scenes. There is the
possibility that allusion is itself a technique of traditional oral poetry.
G. Danek has argued, with regard to Yugoslavian oral epic (the
comparative material that has been so inXuential in the development
of oral poetry theory), that intertextual reference to other ways in
which a song had previously been sung—either by oneself or by
others—was part of the singer’s traditional art.28 If so, we should

24 Lord (1960); Fenik (1968); Hainsworth (1969). J. M. Foley’s more recent

explorations of ‘traditional referentiality’ and ‘immanent art’ in Homer also privilege
the role of the tradition over that of individual poems within the tradition: see Foley
(1991) and (1999), and cf. n. 48 below.
25 A. Parry (1971) p. liv; R. B. Rutherford (2001) 126; cf. Schwabl (1982) 14, 32–3. On
intratextuality in Homer, cf. Macleod (1982) 16–35; Rutherford (1985); Reichel (1994).
26 This is the approach of Usener (1990); cf. Kullmann (1992c) 120. Cf. Dowden
(1996) 59 ‘identify non-formular verbatim quotations’, cf. n. 65.
27 Cf. Schwabl (1982); Taplin (1990) 112; Usener (1990) e.g. 12, 210; R. B. Ruther-
ford (2001) 140 n. 42; cf. Danek (1998) 53 on Od. 1.96–102; D. L. Cairns (2001) 42.
Korenjak (1998), esp. 142–3, argues for the possibility of Homeric intertexuality
obtaining both by redeployment of formulas and between non-formulaic passages.
28 Danek (1998) 10 ‘The . . . technique of signalling an alternative development of
the plot is recognizable in countless cases in Muslim heroic song. What stands out is
the general principle of signalling alternative directions of the plot; and the large
number of occurrences leaves it in no doubt that we are dealing not with an ingenious
discovery by individual singers of the possibility of intertextual references, but the
regular application of a traditional technique’ (trans. from the German; my italics). Cf.
ibid. p. viii ‘the referencing which is postulated here to rival versions within an oral
tradition . . . can possess the status of a traditional technique’ (trans; my italics).
6 Bruno Currie
not discount interaction with other singers’ compositions—or one’s
own—in the early Greek epic tradition, where competition between
singers was so prominent (compare Hesiod, Works and Days 26).29
This brief discussion does scant justice to the complexity of
the theoretical issues involved, but I must move on to the three
test cases which I mean to bear the brunt of my argument for
interaction in the early Greek epic tradition. I approach these in
what I take to be order of increasing controversy, although all in
fact are controversial. Before my test cases, however, I set out Wve
possible indices of interaction to which I will frequently recur in my
discussion.
(A) Quotation of an earlier poem. Allowing for the complications
arising from the traditional nature of the language of early Greek
epic, there may be a case for seeing one poem as quoting another if
the correspondence is both close and signiWcant. The actual wording
may be evoked (a verbatim quotation), or else a motif or narrative
sequence may be quoted without any verbal correspondence. Both
possibilities are of course less problematically evidenced in Virgil’s
interaction with the Homeric poems.30
(B) Explicit acknowledgement of the poem interacted with.31 The
Odyssey seems to acknowledge the Argonaut saga as its model for
various of Odysseus’ wanderings through its reference to the Argo at
Od. 12.70.32 Similarly, with its reference to the labours and especially
the katabasis of Heracles at Od. 11.601–26, the Odyssey seems
to acknowledge the model for Odysseus’ katabasis.33 Again the
technique may be paralleled in Virgil: at Aen. 10.469–70, for example,
the reference to Sarpedon explicitly acknowledges the Iliadic
model.34

29 Cf. M. W. Edwards (1987b) 60; (1990) 314–16; M. GriYth (1990); R. B. Ruther-

ford (2001) 126; Danek (1998); D. L. Cairns (2001) 38. Compare Scodel (2004).
30 Cf. Knauer (1990) 395–6; Wigodsky (1972) 8–12.
31 Cf. Danek (1998) 506–7.
32 R. B. Rutherford (1992) 2; Dräger (1993) 17–18; Danek (1998) 23, 252–3, 255–
7. DiVerently, Hölscher (1988) 170–85.
33 Kullmann (1992c) 131; Danek (1998) 23–4, cf. 247. Cf. Hölscher (1988) 120–1.
34 On Aen. 10.469–70, cf. Knauer (1964) 299; Barchiesi (1984) 18–19. Other Virgil-
ian examples include Aen. 8.382–4 (see below) and 11.662 (Lyne (1987) 136 n. 57). In
general, Lyne (1987) 103 and n. 5 and ‘Index’ s.v. ‘ ‘‘Signals’’ to other texts’.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 7
(C) Narrative inconsistency. There may be interaction of one
poem with another when two alternative versions are evoked in a
text in such a way that ‘the poet is consistently following one version
while playing on his audience’s awareness of another’.35
(D) Reference to the constraints of fate (EæÆ, ÆrÆ) or to the will
of the gods. These may be used to convey either the dictates of the
received poetic tradition or, conversely, the poet’s own innovative
design.36
(E) Elliptical reference. Pointed exclusion of material familiar to,
and in some sense expected by, the audience may constitute an
allusion: this may be a way of making reference by refusing reference.37

INTERACTION OF THE O DY S S E Y WITH THE I L I A D

My Wrst test case concerns the interaction of the Odyssey with the
Iliad. Only here do we have the terra Wrma oVered by two extant epic
texts. (Regrettably there is no scope in this chapter to consider
the interaction of Hesiodic poems with the Homeric poems, of the
Hesiodic poems with one another, or of the Homeric hymns with
the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, although all have a bearing on our
question.)38 It will not be possible here to demonstrate that the
Odyssey interacts with the Iliad; that demonstration has, to my
mind, already been suYciently made.39 Here I must take it for
granted that the Iliad pre-dates the Odyssey and that the Odyssey
responds to the earlier poem. The priority of the Iliad over the

35 R. B. Rutherford (1996) 71.

36 S. Richardson (1990) 194; Nagy (1979) 40 and §17 n. 2; Janko (1994) 6.
37 Cf. Dowden (1996) 53; D. L. Cairns (2001) 36–7.
38 Interaction between Hesiod and Homer is sceptically viewed by G. P. Edwards
(1971) 166–89; diVerently, Rosen (1997). SpeciWcally Hesiodic inXuence on Homer is
argued by M. L. West (1978) on Hes. Op. 656; Blümer (2001) ii. 213–24. On the
interaction of Hes. Op. with Theog., cf. Most (1993) 76–91; Blümer (2001), esp. i.
93–106, ii. 137–200. On the interaction of the hymns with Homer and Hesiod, cf.
Richardson (1974) 30–41.
39 See especially R. B. Rutherford (2001); cf. (1992) 2–7; (1996) 58–61; Burkert
(1997); also, Usener (1990), but see the criticisms of GriYn (1991); Blößner (1992)
389; Danek (1992).
8 Bruno Currie
Odyssey is suggested Wrst by a diachronic study of epic diction.40
There are also compelling literary arguments that the Odyssey
sees itself as a sequel to the Iliad.41 The converse position, that
the Iliad sees itself (also) as a prequel to the Odyssey, cannot easily
be maintained.42 The Iliad was, surely, familiar with epic treatments
of the subject matter of Odysseus’ homecoming.43 But it does not
follow that it is familiar with the Odyssey : the subject matter of
the Odyssey was treated repeatedly in hexameter poetry before the
Odyssey itself (see below). The Odyssey, by contrast, shows knowledge
not only of the subject matter of the Iliad, but of the Iliad’s distinctive
handling of that subject matter. I take the interaction of the Odyssey
with the Iliad, then, to be one-directional.44 This excludes the view
that Iliad and Odyssey were not Wxed poems but Xuid poetic tradi-
tions, evolving contemporaneously over an extended period and
inXuencing one another.45 It may, however, be reconcilable with
a more moderate view that there was localized and small-scale
inXuence of the Odyssey on the Iliad: this would amount to a
modiWcation, not a denial, of the Iliad ’s basic priority.46
Taking the Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad for granted, I restrict
myself to a consideration of the nature of that interaction. Much of
the attention has been directed at establishing whether there are
verbatim quotations of the Iliad in the Odyssey.47 This has been

40 Janko (1982).
41 GriYn (1987a) 63–70; (1987b) 101; (1995) 6; Heubeck (1988) 13; R. B. Rutherford
(1996) 58–61; Kullmann (1992c) 121.
42 Cf. Cook (1995) 3–4.
43 Suggested, perhaps, by Odysseus’ (traditional?) periphrases for himself,
ºØ Æ
æ (Il. 2.260), ºØ  º ÆæÆ (Il. 4.354). See GriYn
(1987a) 45; S. R. West (1988) 51; Rutherford (1992) 18–19.
44 Cf. R. B. Rutherford (2001) 146, an ‘additional note’ to the original publication
of 1991–3.
45 Nagy (1979) 8, 41, 42–3; (1990b) 53–4 and n. 8; Pucci (1987) 18; cf. Burgess
(2001) passim. For the ‘evolutionary model’ of the Homeric poems, cf. e.g. Nagy
(1996) 29–63. Criticized by e.g. Finkelberg (2000); Blümer (2001) i. 23–91; cf.
Rutherford (1996) 29 n. 86; D. L. Cairns (2001) 3 n. 12.
46 See Pinsent (1992) 78, 82; N. J. Richardson (1993) 24; cf. GriYn (1991) 291.
47 Usener (1990) 9–182, considering 15 candidate verbatim quotations. Cf. also
Taplin (1990) 109–10. In general, R. Fowler (2004b) 229–30. One of the most
interesting cases is the possible quotation of Il. 6.490–3 by Od. 1.356–64, 21.350–8,
11.532–3. See Usener (1990) 47–66; Kullmann (1992c) 120; R. B. Rutherford (2001)
140–2; diVerently, GriYn (1991) 290; Danek (1998) 61–2.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 9
opposed on the principle that we can only have formular language,
not allusion, in this oral(-derived) tradition.48 Defenders of verbatim
quotation have responded by arguing for the non-formularity of
the Iliadic passage in question; or they have argued the possibility
of quotation even of formular phrases (see above). The possibility of
verbatim quotation of the Iliad by the Odyssey needs to be taken
seriously; I shall focus, however, not on verbatim quotation, but on
the probable quotation of a whole narrative sequence.
The case for the Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad is especially
strong when it concerns not just phrases and scenes evoked in the
Iliad, but also the position and signiWcance that they had in that
epic.49 R. B. Rutherford has demonstrated thematic correspondences
with the Iliad at equivalent points in the Odyssey throughout the
poem.50 One example must stand for many. Od. 2.163–76 (the speech
of the seer Halitherses to the Ithacan assembly) resembles Il. 2.300–32
(the speech of Odysseus to the assembled Achaean host) in at least Wve
respects. First, in wider context: a speaker at an assembly urges (in the
Iliad) continuance of the long war eVort or (in the Odyssey) discon-
tinuance of the long abuse of Odysseus’ household. Second, in
content: a bird omen (recalled in the Iliad, actual in the Odyssey)
and a prophecy given at the time of the Achaeans’ departure for Troy
(Il. 2.303–4, Od. 2.172–3) predicts the length of the coming ordeal
(10 years for the Achaeans, 20 years for Odysseus; in each case, the Wnal
year has arrived) and forecasts eventual success after setbacks. Third,
in narrative form: a prophecy given in the past is recalled (analepsis)
by a secondary narrator (Odysseus, Halitherses), in direct or indirect

48 e.g. Nagy (1979) 42 §1 n. 3, citing G. P. Edwards (1971) 189. It should be noted

that the deadlock between these two entrenched positions is to some extent broken by
the concept of ‘traditional referentiality’, on which see especially Foley (1991), (1997),
and (1999); Graziosi and Haubold (2005). Traditional referentiality Wnds in an
individual employment of formular language an inbuilt allusion to the traditional
uses of that formula. Formular language thus emerges as essentially allusive. But
traditional referentiality allows allusion to obtain only between a poem and an
abstracted epic tradition, which relate to one another much as parole to langue; it
does not allow (as I am arguing) allusion between one poem and another within the
early epic tradition.
49 Compare, exploiting the numerical precision possible in a literary poetics, the
phenomenon of ‘stichometric intertextuality’ in Latin poetry: Hinds (1998) 92 n. 80.
50 R. B. Rutherford (2001) 127–30.
10 Bruno Currie
speech respectively (Il. 2.323–9, Od. 2.174–6). Fourth, in phraseology:
a (
b)
c F Æ ºEÆØ, ‘all these things are now being accom-
plished’, occurs in both passages (Il. 2.330, Od. 2.176). Fifth, in
their position within the poem: both episodes come near the begin-
ning of their respective poems; and both are programmatic, in that
they evoke the beginning and the end of their stories (departure for
Troy and sacking of Troy, Il. 2. 303–4 and 329; departure for Troy and
killing of the suitors, Od. 2.172–3 and 165).51 It is signiWcant that in the
Cypria, if Proclus’ summary (§6 p. 72 West) is not misleading,
the omen at Aulis was narrated about halfway through that poem
and not in an analepsis by a secondary narrator, but by the primary
narrator in a straightforward sequence in which the story coincides
with the fabula.52 The Odyssey poet thus evokes not just a traditional
episode which happened to appear in the Iliad, but the distinctive
way in which it was handled in the Iliad. We should note, too, that
a speciWc allusion is eVected even though the building-blocks are
traditional: the ‘recalled prophecy’ is a traditional motif and
the phrase a (
b)
c F Æ ºEÆØ is formular.53 Finally, this
interaction of the Odyssey with the Iliad serves a purpose: the Odyssey
equates its action, the return of Odysseus and vengeance on the suitors,
with the action of the Iliad. A competitive literary relationship seems
to be signalled.
But the Odyssey does not just evoke the Iliad at comparable
points in each poem. The beginning of the Odyssey also picks up the
end of the Iliad.54 The similarities involved are not to be explained
as resulting from the use of shared traditional language.55 The

51 R. B. Rutherford (2001) 128; Danek (1998) 75.

52 For the terms ‘story’ and ‘fabula’, see conveniently de Jong (2001) pp. xiv and
xviii.
53 The ‘recalled prophecy’ motif comes 6 times in the Odyssey, 5 times in the Iliad:
de Jong (2001) 54. a ð
bÞ
c F Æ ºEÆØ comes twice in the Iliad, 4 times in
the Odyssey.
54 e.g. Schwabl (1982) 18–22; R. B. Rutherford (2001) 131–2; N. J. Richardson
(1993) 21–4; Cook (1995) 37–42. Cf. Danek (1998) 51. Again, this is a feature more
readily associated with later epic. In a signiWcant respect, the beginning of Apollinus’
Argonautica also recalls the last part of the Iliad: see Hutchinson, Ch. 4 below. Com-
parable, but also diVerent, is the way the ending of post-Virgilian epics (Statius’ Thebaid
and Silius’ Punica) recall the beginning of the Aeneid: Hardie (1993) 13–14, cf. 62.
55 See N. J. Richardson (1993) 24.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 11
Table 1. Odysseus’ entry into Scheria compared with Priam’s journey to Achilles’
tent
Iliad 24.281–508 Odyssey 6.255–7.154

1. Priam drives a chariot to the Achaean
camp; in front, Idaeus drives a cart
bearing Hector’s ransom (265–80,
322–7).
2. They stop at a location appropriate to
an epiphany of Hermes, Ilus’ grave
(349–51).a
3. Priam receives the disguised Hermes in
the likeness of a young man (347–8)
as his escort (437, 461).
4. Hermes gives Priam advice on how to
approach Achilles (465–7).
5. Hermes departs for Olympus
(468–9).
6. Within Achilles’ tent they are con-
cluding a meal when Priam arrives
(475–6).
7. Priam makes a dramatic, sudden
appearance and supplicates Achilles
(477–9).
8. The Wrst reaction is amazement (482–4).
9. Priam makes a speech of supplication
(486–506).
10. The verbal response is delayed (507–12).
11. The supplication is successful.
a
On the appropriateness of Hermes’ appearance at Ilus’ grave, see GriYn (1980) 23.
Odysseus goes by foot to the Phaeacians’
city; in front, Nausicaa drives a cart bearing
the laundry (6.252–3, 260–1, 317–20).
They stop at a location appropriate to
an epiphany of Athena, Athena’s grove
(6.291–6, 321–2).
Odysseus receives the disguised Athena in
the likeness of a young woman (7.20) as his
guide (7.30).
Athena gives Odysseus advice on how to
supplicate Arete (7.50–77).
Athena departs for her temple in Athens
(7.78).
Within Alcinous’ palace they are conclud-
ing a meal when Odysseus arrives (7.49–50,
137–8).
Odysseus makes a dramatic, sudden
appearance and supplicates Arete
(7.142–3).
The Wrst reaction is amazement (7.145).
Odysseus makes a speech of supplication
(7.146–52).
The verbal response is delayed (7.154–5).
The supplication is successful.

intertextuality between Odyssey 1 and Iliad 24 might be seen as an

extension of the intratextuality between Iliad 24 and Iliad 1.56 Iliad 24
signals closure by echoing the Wrst book of the poem; Odyssey 1 marks
out the Odyssey as a sequel of the Iliad by echoing the ending of that
poem. I shall analyse under this heading the relationship between two
narrative sequences which have had less attention than others: Odys-
seus’ entry into Scheria (Od. 6.255–7.154) and Priam’s journey to
Achilles’ tent (Il. 24.281–508) The correspondences between the two
sequences are set out in Table 1.57

56 Macleod (1982) 32–4; N. J. Richardson (1993) 1–14, esp. 4–7.

57 The parallels are noted by Hainsworth in Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth
(1988) 321; N. J. Richardson (1993) 309, 321.
12 Bruno Currie
The similarities between the two narrative sequences are striking
and not diminished by the diVerences—for instance, that Athena,
unlike Hermes with Priam, does not reveal herself to Odysseus (the
reason is given at Od. 6.329–31 and 13.339–43).58 The decisive
situational similarity consists in the sudden appearance of a suppli-
ant who by divine assistance has managed to inWltrate a society of
diners without being noticed (items 6, 7, and 8 in the table). But the
similarities extend both forwards and backwards. The same degree of
similarity between two passages within a single epic, Iliad or Odyssey,
would surely justify talk of intratextuality and the same degree
of similarity between a passage in the Aeneid and a passage in Iliad
or Odyssey would warrant talk of intertextuality.59 (Our Odyssean
passage, Od. 7.18–154, indeed has Apollonian and Virgilian inter-
texts, with which it may in turn be compared: Arg. 3.210–41 and Aen.
1.314–493, 586–613.) It seems natural to speak of quotation (A) here,
but of narrative structure, not wording. The question then is how far
Homeric epic’s traditional formulaic character should inhibit this
way of thinking about the Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad. The
similarities between the two sequences are not adequately accounted
for by supposing that we have two instantiations of a type-scene.60
Even if they were, a case for an Odyssean allusion to the Iliadic scene
would still remain (see above). It is relevant, too, that we are dealing
with one of the most powerful scenes of the Iliad and doubtless a
strong candidate for allusion.61

58 Cf. on a diVerent correspondence, Burgess (2001) 75 ‘the diVerences do not negate

the correspondence’; Taplin (1990) 110 (on Od. 23.233 V. and Od. 5.394 V.).
59 Stephanie West queries (per litteras) whether Odysseus’ entry into Scheria
might not look to Jason’s entry into Colchis in lost Argonautic poetry rather than
to Priam’s entry into the Achaean camp. For a later telling of Jason’s entry into
Colchis, cf. Ap. Rhod. Argon. 3.210–41. But it is notoriously diYcult to establish how
much Apollonius owes to a non-Homeric Argonautic tradition and how much to the
Odyssey itself: see Hölscher (1988) 178; Garvie (1994) 21. I Wnd it hard to imagine
another model for Odysseus’ dramatic supplication of Arete (item 7 in the table) than
Priam’s supplication of Achilles in Iliad 24.
60 Hainsworth (1988) 321 seems to think in terms of a type-scene or theme:
‘Thematically the closest parallel . . . ’(my italics). The ‘visit type-scene’, on which cf.
de Jong (2001) 17 and n. 39, does not go far in accounting for the similarities in
question. Nor does the ‘supplication-scene’: cf. de Jong (2001) 178 ‘Supplications are
not type-scenes . . .’.
61 The scene arguably inspired Archaic artists: Friis Johansen (1967) 127–38;
Kossatz-Deissmann (1981) 158–9 (cf. LIMC s.v. ‘Alexandros’ no. 71 ¼ ‘Priamos’
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 13
The end of the Iliad addresses the problem of how the body of
Hector is to be released from Achilles and restored to his loved ones
in Troy. The Wrst books of the Odyssey (taken to include books 1, 5, 6,
and 7) tackle the problem of how Odysseus, who is ‘dead’ to his
family (Od. 1.161–2, 235–43, and elsewhere), is to be released from
Calypso and the Phaeacians and restored to his loved ones in Ithaca.
In both poems the resolution comes in two movements. The Wrst
movement involves, in the Iliad, a council of the gods, Apollo’s
championing Hector’s cause, Zeus sending Iris to Thetis, Thetis
speaking to Achilles (Il. 31–140); and, in the Odyssey, a council of
the gods, Athena championing Odysseus’ cause, Zeus sending
Hermes to Calypso, Calypso speaking to Odysseus (Od. 1.22–87,
5.1–224). The second movement involves, in the Iliad, Priam going
to the Achaean camp, Hermes acting as his escort, Priam supplicating
Achilles; and, in the Odyssey, Odysseus going to Scheria, Athena
acting as his escort, Odysseus’ supplication of Arete. We are
concerned here with the second movement.
Here, characteristically for Odyssean allusions to the Iliad, there is
inversion.62 The hero of the Iliad receives the supplication, the hero
of the Odyssey makes it. This suits a general inversion of the active
heroism of the Iliad to the passive heroism of the Odyssey :
Achilles inXicts pains (Il. 1.2 ¼ºª ŁŒ, compare 22.422); Odysseus
endures them (Od. 1.4 Ł ¼ºªÆ).63 In other supplications by
Odysseus in the Odyssey, the Iliad is also evoked with inversion:
Odysseus’ supplication of Nausicaa is preceded by a lion-simile that
evokes the Iliad (Od. 6.130–6), and Odysseus’ supplication of the
Cyclops juxtaposes an evocation of the Achaeans’ great heroism at
Troy with their helplessness in the Odyssey (Od. 9.263–7).64
Characteristic of the Odyssey too is the heightened female
presence. In place of Idaeus as the human charioteer, Hermes as
no. 64); Shapiro (1994) 38–45. DiVerently, Snodgrass (1998) 133; Burgess (2001)
68–70. For a Herodotean interaction with this scene (Hdt. 1.88.1), see Pelling, Ch. 3
below.
62 Cf. in general GriYn (1987a) 64, 68, 93–8.
63 See S. R. West (1988) 67; R. B. Rutherford (2001) 128 for comparison between
Od. 1.4 and Il. 1.2; but there is also a contrast. Not that Achilles does not also suVer
pains, or Odysseus inXict them; but the basic comparison stands. On ‘active’ and
‘passive’, see further Hutchinson, Ch. 4 below.
64 See R. B. Rutherford (2001) 139–40 on Od. 6.130–6.
14 Bruno Currie
divine escort, and Achilles as the person supplicated, we have
Nausicaa, Athena, Arete in these roles. Odysseus in the Odyssey
moves in a world of important females: Athena, Calypso, Nausicaa,
Arete, Circe, and Penelope.65 The Odyssey’s distinctive presentation
of the heroic world is highlighted by its interaction with the Iliad.
It is notable here that the allusion works not on the level of
wording, but of narrative structure. This is suggestive of what an
audience in the early epic tradition might above all be expected to
remember and to recognize.66 This example of the Odyssey’s inter-
action with the Iliad cannot be seen in isolation, but needs to be
set alongside others which have already received scholars’ attention.67
We thus have here one good case, among others, for the interaction
between two speciWc poems—Iliad and Odyssey—in the early epic
tradition. The technique of allusion employed is quotation (A),
though on the level of narrative sequence, not verbatim quotation.
It may not be inappropriate to speak (in the language of neoanalysts)
of a ‘transferred motif ’: an extended Iliadic motif has here been
transferred to the Odyssey, and the audience’s recognition of the
original context of the motif is of fundamental importance to their
appreciation of the Odyssean scene. Here is a counter to the view that
it is not, as a rule, the speciWc Iliadic context that matters in the
Odyssey’s allusions to the Iliad.68 Another general feature to note in
this interaction (it is one to which we will return) is its ‘multiple
correspondence’: not only does Odysseus correspond to Hector
(as the ‘dead’ person to be restored to his loved ones), he also
corresponds to Priam (as the suppliant).69 Likewise, Hermes in

65 On women in the Odyssey, cf. GriYn (1987a) 84–6; R. B. Rutherford (1996) 69–
74; Schein (1995); Felson and Slatkin (2004).
66 Cf. Danek (1998) 26; Korenjak (1998) 142 ‘Although the epic formula repre-
sented one of the most important means for the aoidos of creating intertextual
references within the Homeric epics, he was not exclusively dependent on these for
this end. He saw himself as thoroughly capable of suggesting such references also
through verbal echoes and, especially, through similarities of content and context.
One could also entertain the possibility of deliberately free paraphrase’ (trans. from
the German).
67 Esp. R. B. Rutherford (2001).
68 Contrast Danek (1998) 26–7, 62 (on Od. 1.96–102), 63 (on Od. 2.1–14), 367,
469, 509–11; (2002) 17.
69 I borrow the term ‘multiple correspondence’ from D. West (1990).
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 15
Odyssey 1 and 5 corresponds to Hermes in Iliad 24, but Athena
in Odyssey 1 also corresponds to Hermes in Iliad 24.70

I N T E R AC T I O N OF TH E O DY S S E Y WITH AN EARLIER
POEM ON ODYS SEUS’ H OMECOMING

The Odyssey, I have argued, adapts motifs from the Iliad. It

interacts also with other lost epics: most overtly, with epic poetry
on the voyage of the Argo (Od. 12.70) and on the labours of Heracles
(Od. 11.601–26).71 It interacts besides with earlier poetry on the
homecoming of Odysseus which, like the nostoi of other Achaeans,
had been a frequent subject of song before the Odyssey.72 The
invocation to the Muse in the Odyssey’s proem acknowledges earlier
treatments of the subject matter: ‘from some point in this story,
goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak to me too’ (Od. 1.10).73 At the
beginning of his account of his Wanderings, Odysseus is made
to show awareness of himself as a subject of song: ‘I am Odysseus
son of Laertes, an object of concern to all men for my tricks’ (Od.
9.19–20, where compare AØ . . . IŁæØØ ºø with Od. 12.70
æªg AØ ºıÆ, ‘the Argo, an object of concern to all’). It is the
Odyssey’s possible interaction with an earlier poem on Odysseus’
homecoming that I wish to consider next. Here we lack the external
control provided by a second extant text; the contours of the earlier
poem(s) with which the Odyssey may be interacting must be
inferred from features inherent in the text of the Odyssey itself.
Naturally, the conclusions from such an approach will be tentative
and hypothetical.

70 R. B. Rutherford (2001) 131.

71 In these passages, the Odyssey acknowledges a lost early Argonaut epic (see now
M. L. West (2005)) and a lost early Heracles epic as models for the wanderings and for
the katabasis of Odysseus respectively.
72 Cf. S. R. West (2003) 303.
73 With Od. 1.10 H ±Ł ª . . . N, cf. 1.339 (Penelope to Phemius) H  ª . . .
¼Ø
; cf. 8.500 Ł º. With Od. 1.10 E of the bard, cf. Il. 2.486; Hes. Theog. 1, 36;
Hymn. Hom. Ap. 174–5. On Od. 1.10, see Burkert (2001) 100–1; Foley (1997) 172; Danek
(1998) 36–7. Cf. on Od. 8.500, Hardie (1993) 11–12.
16 Bruno Currie
The most important feature of the Odyssey’s text as a possible
pointer to interaction with an earlier poem is narrative inconsistency
(C). We are here treading ground Wrst mapped by scholars of the ‘old’
analytical persuasion, who put the inconsistencies they discovered
down to the imperfect combination of independent texts from
diVerent authors.74 For scholars of the oral-formulaic school, a
diVerent explanation was at hand: from a unitarian perspective,
they were able to ascribe the inconsistencies to the singer’s imperfect
combination (due to the pressure of composition in performance)
of independently occurring traditional ‘themes’.75 A not dissimilar
explanation was available to neoanalytical scholars: the poet was
modifying a source or sources (perhaps a version which he had
himself sung), but inadvertently leaving some details unassimilated
to the new context.76 A reWnement on this last position incorporates
the audience’s perspective: the inconsistencies are not an unwitting
by-product of the process of composition (whether conceived along
oral-formulaic or neoanalytical lines), but a deliberate strategy of
allusion.77 On this view, the narrative inconsistencies are there for the
beneWt of the audience, and the poet is not culpable of carelessness or
incompetence.78 It is this last view, positing a meaningful interaction
of the Odyssey with an earlier poem (or poems), which I will
develop here.
I concentrate on a single narrative sequence of the Odyssey which
has attracted attention and controversy: Od. 19.96–604. Inconsisten-
cies have long been felt here.79 The postulate of a lost earlier version
with which the Odyssey is interacting can go some way to explaining
peculiarities of the Odyssey’s narrative. In Table 2 I use square
brackets in order to emphasize that all elements of the hypothetical
earlier poem are unattested.

74 Cf. on Od. books 18–19 Page (1955) 123–4; Kirk (1962) 246–7; Merkelbach
(1969) 1–15.
75 Cf. in general Lord (1960) 94; Fenik (1974) 50–3.
76 See GriYn (1987a) 31–2. Cf. in general J. T. Kakridis (1949). Summarized by
Russo (1992) 7–9; Fernández-Galiano (1992) 183–4.
77 R. B. Rutherford (1992) 35, 36; (1996) 71; Danek (1998) passim.
78 Compare the approach taken by Morrison (1992) on ‘Homeric misdirection’,
esp. p. 3.
79 Esp. Page (1955) 123–4, 126–8; for a survey of views, see Russo (1992) 7–12;
R. B. Rutherford (1996) 80 n. 56.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 17
Table 2. Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus compared with a hypothetical earlier
recognition of Odysseus by Penelope
Hypothetical earlier poem on Odysseus’ Odyssey 19.96–604
homecoming

1. [Penelope and Odysseus converse;
Penelope recognizes garments which
Odysseus is wearing as being of her
own making.]
2. [Penelope washes Odysseus’ feet.]
3. [Penelope recognizes Odysseus.]
4. [Odysseus and Penelope plot the killing
of the suitors.]
5. [Odysseus tells Penelope to propose the
contest of the bow, so that he may kill
the suitors.]
Penelope and ‘the beggar’ converse; she
recognizes the garments that ‘the beggar’
describes Odysseus as wearing 20 years
ago on Crete as being of her making
(19.104–334).
Eurycleia washes Odysseus’ feet
(19.386–467).
Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus; Athena
prevents Penelope from recognizing him
(19.467–81).
Penelope has dreamt of the return of
Odysseus and the killing of the suitors; but
she does not believe it (19.537–69).
Penelope moots the contest of the bow,
believing that she must take a new husband
(19.570–87).

This reconstruction of the lost poem is necessarily speculative. If,

however, it is correct in outline, then the sequence in the Odyssey
would adhere to it so closely that we could reasonably talk of the
Odyssey ‘quoting’ it.80 As with Odyssey 6–7 and Iliad 24 (see above),
we might think of a narrative sequence being quoted, not the words
themselves. Unlike with Odyssey 6–7 and Iliad 24, however, we are
not dealing here with a motif that has been transferred from a
diVerent poetic context: the context in the Odyssey is the same as
that of the poem with which the Odyssey is interacting.
The reconstruction needs explanation. Regarding item (1),
an earlier poem which described the recognition of Odysseus by
Penelope will doubtless have featured an initial conversation between
them: this is a regular element in the recognition type-scene.81 We
cannot be sure that Penelope recognized garments of her making on
Odysseus in the earlier poem. A parallel passage, however, is import-
ant: at Od. 7.234–97 Arete recognizes that Odysseus is wearing

80 Cf. Danek (1998) 380–1 ‘Our text cites . . . the possibility that the recognition
takes place at this stage in the plot’ (trans.).
81 For the ‘type-scene’, cf. Emlyn-Jones (1998) 131; de Jong (2001) 386–7.
18 Bruno Currie
clothes from her loom.82 A number of signiWcant correspondences
have been noted between Odysseus’ sojourn among the Phaeacians
(books 6–8) and his experiences on Ithaca (books 13–22): this should
be counted among them.83 Then Od. 7.234–97 foreshadows Od.
19.213–60. Or rather: it creates the expectation of a comparable
scene to come on Ithaca—a scene the audience are expecting anyway
from their familiarity with an earlier version.84 But in Odyssey 19 the
motif ‘Penelope recognizes her clothes on Odysseus’ has been made
remote in various ways. First, the clothes feature only in a narrative of
Odysseus, as secondary narrator; they are not seen by Penelope.
Second, Odysseus’ narrative is set 20 years in the past. Third, the
token of the clothes does not help Penelope to realize that she is face
to face with Odysseus, merely that her interlocutor (supposedly the
beggar Aethon) once entertained Odysseus on Crete—in any case a
Wctional story. On the hypothesis that the motif of Penelope recog-
nizing her own clothes on Odysseus featured in an earlier poem, the
Odyssey would interact with it, twice. In Odyssey 7 it would have been
transferred to a diVerent person and setting (Arete among the Phae-
acians) and would therefore necessarily have assumed a quite diVer-
ent narrative function. In Odyssey 19 the motif would be applied to
Penelope, but would have become multiply remote, signifying for her
not recognition and reunion with her husband, but continuing
ignorance and isolation.
Concerning item (2), it might be thought beneath Penelope’s
dignity to wash a visitor’s feet. But noblewomen in the Odyssey do
wash feet.85 Important light is again thrown on our scene by an

82 The motif of a woman recognizing a returning male relative by a garment of her

making occurs with Electra and Orestes (Aesch. Cho. 231–2, whence Eur. El. 539–40),
and is perhaps a folktale motif: cf. Thompson (1955–8) H110–19. On clothes in
general in Od., see R. B. Rutherford (1992) 176.
83 For other correspondences, see R. B. Rutherford (1985) 140–4.
84 Odysseus removes his clothes (made by Calypso) at Od. 5.372 and puts on the ones
(made by Arete) given him by Nausicaa at 6.228. Thus the narrative contrives a scene
between Odysseus and Arete capable of recalling a (traditional?) scene between Odys-
seus and Penelope. One might compare the way the Iliad apparently contrives an
encounter between Achilles and Hector each in divinely made armour so as to recall a
(traditional?) scene between Achilles and Memnon in divinely made armour: see below.
85 See S. R. West (1988) 189 on Od. 3.464 V. and 210 on Od. 4.252. On the general,
paradoxical, tendency for heroes and heroines to engage in menial tasks, cf. GriYn
(1992) 29–30.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 19
earlier passage in the Odyssey. At Od. 4.240–64, Helen recounts to
Telemachus and Menelaus how Odysseus once entered Troy as a
beggar, unrecognized by the Trojans; how she alone recognized him
and questioned him; how he evaded her with guile; how she washed
and clothed him; how Odysseus swore her to silence and then told her
the Achaeans’ plans; and how he Wnally killed many Trojans and
returned safely to the Argives. This story, too, foreshadows events in
Ithaca.86 Or rather again it anticipates not so much how events will
actually turn out in the Odyssey as how they had turned out in our
hypothetical earlier poem. ‘Old’ analytical scholars argued that
Eurycleia’s foot-washing and recognition of Odysseus in the Odyssey
were taken over wholesale from an earlier version of the story, in which
the recognition of Odysseus by Penelope immediately ensued.87 This
is unlikely: it would involve a serious anticlimax to have Penelope’s
recognition of Odysseus mediated by Eurycleia.88 It is more attractive
to see the foot-washing and recognition as having been transferred
from Penelope in an earlier poem to Eurycleia in the Odyssey: we
might then see an explicit acknowledgement (B) of the earlier poem at
Od. 19.476–9: ‘she [sc. Eurycleia] glanced over to Penelope with her
eyes . . .’.89 Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus (unlike Penelope’s) is
notably without consequence for the plot—as one might expect of a
scene standing in for a more consequential one.90
Regarding item (3), Athena’s intervention to prevent Penelope’s
recognition of Odysseus is very contrived.91 In epic, the gods some-
times function as embodiments of the poet, directing the course of
events within the poem (D).92 Athena’s intervention here, dispens-
able as it is, arguably serves to draw attention to the fact that the poet
is denying the audience an expected recognition between husband
and wife at this point. The poet’s decision not to have Penelope

86 Andersen (1977) 9 and n. 11, 12; S. R. West (1988) 209; Olson (1995) 154; de
Jong (2001) 102.
87 e.g. Page (1955) 128. Cf. also GriYn (1987a) 31.
88 Danek (1998) 380.
89 What, in Virgil, Oliver Lyne has called ‘signalling’: cf. Lyne (1987) 103 and
(1989) 151.
90 Danek (1998) 380.
91 Cf. GriYn (1987a) 31.
92 Esp. ‘table of contents’ speeches: de Jong (2001) 15; cf. Macleod (1982) 28 n. 1.
Cf. Easterling (1993): the gods in tragedy as
Ø
ŒÆºØ, ‘play directors’.
20 Bruno Currie
recognize Odysseus until after the killing of the suitors is Wgured in
the poem here as Athena’s intention, a function frequently exercised
by Athena in the Odyssey.93
Concerning item (4), in an earlier poem Odysseus’ recognition by
Penelope would reasonably have been followed by a conspiracy to kill
the suitors. In the Odyssey, there can be no conspiracy between the
couple as there has been no recognition. Yet a plan to kill the suitors
is arguably alluded to in Penelope’s dream, in which an eagle killed
geese in the palace, which Odysseus interprets to her as portending
Odysseus’ vengeance on the suitors. A conspiracy between Odysseus
and Penelope is thus evoked, but again made remote by being
relegated to a dream, and one which Penelope does not even believe.
(A comparable use of a dream comes at Od. 20.88–94.)
On (5), we may assume that Odysseus in an earlier poem con-
ceived the contest of the bow as a trap for the suitors. In the Odyssey,
Penelope proposes the contest of the bow herself, not as a trap, but in
the genuine belief that she must take one of the suitors. In place
of complicity, there is resignation and desperation: Penelope cries
herself to sleep, thinking of her absent husband (Od. 19.571–81,
602–4; cf. 21.56–7).
Narrative inconsistency has played an important part in this
reconstruction. The Odyssey poet has, I have suggested, retained
scenes and narrative sequences from an earlier poem while radically
changing their signiWcance. This combination of close adherence to
an earlier poem (‘quotation’?) with pointed departure from it should
be seen as a deliberate narrative strategy, not a Homeric ‘nod’,
an unwitting by-product of oral composition. The earlier poem
arguably remains vestigially present in the text in order that the
innovation of the Odyssey may be apparent to, and may be appreci-
ated by, the audience.94
The assumption here of a deliberate narrative strategy is supported
by the apparent self-consciousness of the interaction. One way this
comes out is through the use of Athena (see above). Another is the

93 Olson (1995) 141–2, 156; de Jong (2001) 11, 73. Rather diVerently, Schwinge
(1993) 27–8, 159.
94 A parallel argument has suggestively been made vis-à-vis the interaction of
Hymn. Hom. Cer. with earlier poetry on the subject of the rape of Persephone: see
Clay (1989) 205–6, 224–5, 259.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 21
use of Amphimedon’s shade at Od. 24.124–85.95 Recounting his fate
to the shade of Agamemnon, this dead suitor oVers a retrospect on
the action of the Odyssey, comparable to that given by Odysseus in
his pillow talk with Penelope at Od. 23.310–41.96 Amphimedon’s
account faithfully reports the events of the Odyssey, except in three
points.97 First, he implies that Penelope contrived the murder of the
suitors (Od. 24.127). Second, he elides the time that elapsed between
the discovery of Penelope’s trick of the web and Odysseus’ return
(Od. 24.149). Third, he states that Odysseus put Penelope up to
propose the contest of the bow to bring about their murder (Od.
24.167–9). Strictly speaking, none of this is narrative inconsistency,
since the discrepancies between Amphimedon’s version and the
action of the Odyssey are adequately explained by the subjective
perspective of the internal narrator.98 Yet it is intriguing how close
Amphimedon’s version is to that of the reconstructed hypothetical
forerunner of the Odyssey, especially in his insistence on a recogni-
tion between husband and wife before the killing of the suitors and
on Penelope’s complicity in that slaughter. ‘Old’ analysts supposed
that the poet of this part of the Odyssey had failed to integrate his
version of the Homecoming with the (main) version of the Odyssey.99
More attractively the Odyssey poet is exploiting the dead suitor’s
perspective in order, once again, to juxtapose his version of Odys-
seus’ homecoming with that of an earlier poem.100 The two versions,
that of the Odyssey and its putative predecessor, would coexist in
Amphimedon’s ‘mirror-story’ so as to highlight the story the Odyssey
poet could have told, but did not.101 A nekyia may be an especially

95 I assume the authenticity of Od. 24. For a balanced account of the problems of the
end of the poem, see R. B. Rutherford (1996) 74–7. If Od. 24 is not authentic, we should
still assume a ‘continuator’ well attuned to the concerns of the rest of the poem.
96 Cf. de Jong (2001) pp. xv, 571, seeing both as ‘mirror-stories’.
97 Danek (1998) 478; de Jong (2001) 571.
98 So Erbse (1972) 76–7; GriYn (1987a) 30; Heubeck (1992) 374; Danek
(1998) 479–81; de Jong (2001) 571–2. In general on the narrator’s perspective, cf.
R. B. Rutherford (1996) 94–5.
99 Page (1955) 120–3.
100 Danek (1998) 478–84.
101 Compare the way the lying speech of the ‘Merchant’ at Soph. Phil. 591–7, 603–21
evokes a traditional version of the myth—that of the Little Iliad (Proclus §2 p. 120
West) and of Euripides’ lost Philoctetes (Dio Chrys. 52.14)—by way of contrast with the
version which Sophocles has actually dramatized.
22 Bruno Currie
Wtting place for a poem to explore self-reXectively its relationship to
earlier poetry: to confront its own literary ghosts.102
Can we assume that the Odyssey really was interacting with a poem
with the contours that we have reconstructed for it here?103 An
alternative might be to suppose that the Odyssey poet exploits, not
knowledge of an earlier poem, but the audience’s familiarity with
type-scenes: for example, of recognition.104 We might then just have
an example of Homeric ‘misdirection’.105 But this type of explanation
perhaps does not do justice to the range of indices of interaction
argued for here: (A), (B), (C), and (D). Those prepared to accept an
interaction between the Odyssey and the Iliad along the lines argued
above in my Wrst test case may be the more willing to accept a similar
interaction between the Odyssey and an earlier poem on Odysseus’
homecoming. Here too the interaction will be a creative one; and
here too there will be inversion, motifs turned on their head. In both
cases, an earlier poem would be evoked to point up the individual
treatment of the present one. In this case, the narrative elements that
in an earlier version conduced to a recognition between husband and
wife and to their conspiracy against the suitors will have been given a
quite diVerent signiWcation in the Odyssey. A major challenge facing
the singer was, one may assume, to oVer a diVerent interpretation of
a familiar plot: compare the diVerent tragic treatments of, say, the
Electra or the Philoctetes theme. The innovations of the Odyssey
created enormous potential for dramatic irony, and enabled the
climactic recognition of Odysseus by Penelope to be kept back
in reserve. They also had major implications for characterization:

102 Cf. Most (1992); Hardie (1998) 53 n. 1. Note that, in the so-called Deutero-
nekyia, Od. 24.196–202 ‘comes very close to self-reference’: R. B. Rutherford (1996)
60. At Od. 11.482–91 (in the Wrst Nekyia), the Odyssey is implicitly compared with the
Iliad through comparison of their respective heroes, Achilles and Odysseus. A similar
comparison is entailed by the rapport of Od. 24.36–7 with 24.192–3 and of Od.
24.93–4 with 24.196. The Odyssey confronts an earlier lost *Herakleı̈s at Od. 11.601–
26, and an earlier lost *Catalogue of Women at Od. 11.225–332: cf. Danek (1998) 231
‘Odysseus shows himself . . . as a hero who could potentially be brought into contact
with every heroic story known to the listener, and our Odyssey presents itself as an
epic which could potentially take up the material of all known epics and thus
ultimately replace all other epics’ (trans.).
103 Cf. Danek (1998) 381–2.
104 Cf. Emlyn-Jones (1998) 133.
105 Cf. Morrison (1992).
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 23
Penelope becomes exceptionally isolated and long-suVering, a near-
tragic Wgure in her own right; Odysseus becomes excessively
cautious, almost addicted to disguise. Innovations in plot typically
entail innovations in character.106

INTERACTION BETWEEN THE IL IAD A N D A N E A R LY

EP IC ON MEM NON

The Iliad interacts with a wide range of earlier poetry, Greek and
Near Eastern.107 I will consider here, as my third test case, the
question of its interaction with a lost epic on the Ethiopian hero
Memnon. Uniquely, the Iliad can be argued to engage in the recep-
tion not just of isolated motifs, but of a whole, extensive, narrative
sequence from an epic on Memnon. As with our previous test case,
the argument here for the interaction with a lost poem must depend
on features of the extant poem, here the Iliad. But, unlike with the
previous case, these arguments may be supplemented here by testi-
mony to a poem on Memnon, the Aethiopis. There are virtually no
extant fragments, but the existence and basic contents of this poem
are known, chieXy from a summary made by Proclus in the second or
the Wfth century ad.108 I will refer to Proclus’ summary in the
paragraph numeration of M. L. West’s recent Loeb edition of
the Greek Epic Fragments.109 The Aethiopis was current in the Archaic
and Classical periods; it was known to the artists of that period, the
lyric poets (Alcman, Pindar), and the tragedians. At some point (not
later than the Hellenistic period, but perhaps not before) it was
incorporated into a ‘Cycle’ along with other Archaic epics; it
may have undergone some modiWcation in the process.110 It was

106 Cf. GriYn (1995) 20–1; (1990a) 139–40; cf. (1980) 73–4; (1986) 56.
107 Kullmann (1992c) 104–8; R. B. Rutherford (1996) 6–8. For Near Eastern motifs
in the Iliad, cf. Burkert (1992) 88–120; M. L. West (1997a) 334–401.
108 See Huxley (1969) 123; Burgess (2001) 12.
109 M. L. West (2003a) 108–17. Cf. Bernabé (1987) 65–71; Davies (1988) 45–8.
110 An apparent terminus ante quem for the existence of the ‘Cycle’ is Callim. Epigr.
28.1 (¼ Anth. Pal. 12.43.1) e  Æ e ŒıŒºØŒ. See Burgess (2001) 8; Fantuzzi and
Hunter (2004) 96 n. 30. M. L. West (2003a) 3 dates its creation to the 4th cent. bc.
24 Bruno Currie
accessible in this form to the scholars of Alexandria and arguably to
Virgil (see below); it was still being read in the second century ad,
when it is cited by Pausanias and Athenaeus.111 The Aethiopis is, on
the conventional dating, later than the Iliad and Odyssey. However,
the Odyssey is clearly already familiar with (some of) the subject
matter of the Aethiopis (Od. 4.187–8, 11.522).112 It has therefore
become conventional to refer to the poem which was clearly known
to the Odyssey (and, arguably, to the Iliad) as the *Memnonis.113
The *Memnonis, then, is, like the Aethiopis, a lost early epic; but,
unlike the Aethiopis, its existence is only hypothesized, not attested
(I use an asterisk to signal this fact). This hypothetical lost poem is
assumed to have the same subject matter as the later Aethiopis,
although the story of the Amazon Penthesilea, prefaced in that
poem to the story of Memnon (Proclus §1), may be alien to the
*Memnonis.114 This conceptual distinctness of *Memnonis and
Aethiopis is important: the (perhaps only oral) poem known to the
Odyssey (and perhaps the Iliad) is taken to be the *Memnonis, while
the poem known to Classical and later authors (Pindar, Virgil, and
others) is taken to be the Aethiopis. However, it cannot be entirely
excluded that we are dealing with one poem, if it turns out that the
Aethiopis is after all earlier than the Homeric epics.115
The interaction of the Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis) has
received a great deal of attention, especially from neoanalysts and
their critics. There has been much disagreement about the nature of
the interaction. The *Memnonis (Aethiopis) has been claimed as a
‘source’ for the Iliad; it has been seen as derivative on the Iliad; and
any interaction between Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis) has been
denied, both epics being seen as instances of the same ‘oral
typology’.116 The similarities between the *Memnonis (Aethiopis)
and the Iliad are indeed striking, on both a grand structural level
and on the level of small detail. Tables 3 and 4 show just the most

111 M. L. West (2003a) 4; Burgess (2001) 198 n. 29.

112 Cf. Heubeck (1992) on Od. 11.467–70, 24.16–18.
113 See R. B. Rutherford (1996) 92; M. L. West (2003b) 3.
114 Pestalozzi (1945) 5; M. L. West (2003b) 13, cf. 14.
115 Cf. Kullmann (1992c) 105.
116 For the last view, cf. Notopoulos (1964) 35; Hainsworth (1969) 31. DiVerently,
e.g. Dowden (1996) 56.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 25
Table 3. *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and Iliad: I. Achilles in *Memnonis (Aethio-
pis) corresponds to Achilles in Iliad
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) Iliad

1. Achilles receives a prophecy from Thetis
about Memnon (Aethiopis Proclus §2)
[and withdraws from battle].
2. [Antilochus Wghts in Achilles’ absence.]
3. Memnon kills Antilochus (Aethiopis
Proclus §2).
4. Achilles kills Memnon (Aethiopis
Proclus §2).
5. Paris and Apollo kill Achilles (Aethiopis
Proclus §3).
Achilles is enraged with Agamemnon and
withdraws from battle (Il. 1.240–4).
Patroclus Wghts instead of Achilles
(Il. 16.64–817).
Hector kills Patroclus (Il. 16.818–57).
Achilles kills Hector (Il. 22.322–63).
Paris and Apollo will kill Achilles
(Il. 22.359–60: prolepsis).

Table 4. *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and Iliad: II. Achilles in *Memnonis (Aethio-

pis) corresponds to Patroclus in Iliad
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) Iliad

4. Achilles kills Memnon (Aethiopis Patroclus kills Sarpedon (Il. 16.480–505).

Proclus §2).
5. Achilles falls at the hands of Paris and
Apollo [at the Scaean gates] (Aethiopis
Proclus §3; Apollod. Epit. 20.1; cf. Il.
22.360).
6. Battle over the corpse of Achilles,
removed by Ajax and Odysseus
(Aethiopis Proclus §3).
7. Mourning for Achilles by Thetis and
Nereids and Muses (Aethiopis Proclus
§4; cf. Od. 24.47–62).
8. Funeral and funeral games for Achilles
(Aethiopis Proclus §4; cf. Od. 24.85–92).
Patroclus falls at the hands of Euphorbus
and Hector and Apollo (at the Scaean
gates?) (Il. 16.788–857).
Battle over the corpse of Patroclus,
removed by the two Aiantes with Meriones
and Menelaus (Il. 17.715–61).
Mourning at Patroclus’ death by Thetis and
the Nereids (Il. 18.35–71).
Funeral and funeral games for Patroclus
(Il. 23.110–897).

fundamental similarities. I put the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) in the left-

hand column, without yet committing to a view on priority. The
situation is further complicated as the interaction seems to come in
two overlapping episodes: one in which the part of Achilles in the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) corresponds to the part of Achilles in the Iliad,
and one in which the part of Achilles in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis)
corresponds to the part of Patroclus in the Iliad. Again, I put in
square brackets those details which are not actually attested.
26 Bruno Currie
The argument that the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is a ‘source’ for the
Iliad has been a cornerstone of neoanalytical scholarship and has
increasingly gained acceptance in English-language scholarship.
(D. L. Cairns has called it ‘established beyond any reasonable
doubt’.)117 But there have been notable recent dissenters.118
J. Burgess denied that the Iliadic theme of Achilles’ vengeance on
Hector for his killing of Patroclus is modelled on Achilles’ vengeance
on Memnon for his killing of Antilochus in the *Memnonis (Aethio-
pis), questioning whether the killing of Memnon was presented as an
act of vengeance in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis).119 This amounts to a
denial of the correspondences in Table 3, but an endorsement of
those in Table 4; crucially, it would entail that Antilochus in the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) is not a model for Patroclus in the Iliad.
Burgess is keen to deny that the Iliadic Patroclus is modelled on the
Antilochus of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), given that he is modelled on
Achilles in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis).120 Burgess is concerned that
the Iliadic Patroclus should not simultaneously have two prototypes
in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis): this concern will be addressed below.
For now it may suYce to note that a parallelism between Patroclus
and Antilochus is signalled in the Iliad: Antilochus’ tearful approach
to Achilles at the beginning of book 18 echoes Patroclus’ tearful
approach to him at the beginning of book 16.121 It would be highly
suggestive if this intratextual relationship in the Iliad between Patro-
clus and Antilochus were building on an intertextual relationship
between the Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis). It is striking, moreover,
that Antilochus is juxtaposed with Patroclus in this part of the Iliad:
arguably a way in which the Iliad explicitly acknowledges (B) the role

117 D. L. Cairns (2001) 42.

118 The criticisms made by Burgess and M. L. West (below) are endorsed by Allan
(2005) 14 n. 61.
119 Burgess (1997).
120 M. L. West (2003b) 10–11 also contests the signiWcance attached by neoanalysts
to Antilochus in the Iliad.
121 Il. 18.1–2 S Q b æÆ . . . j  º
 غBœ . . . ,18.17
ŒæıÆ Łæa
ø: compare 16.1–3 S Q b . . . : j —挺
 غBœ . . . j
ŒæıÆ Łæa
ø. Cf. M. W. Edwards (1991) 143 on Il. 18.17 ‘
ŒæıÆ Łæa ø. . . is formu-
lar . . . but perhaps we should recall its last occurrence, when Patroclus pleaded for
permission to enter the battle (16.3)’: another important illustration that intratextual
allusion might be eVected through formulas.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 27
of the Iliadic Patroclus as a surrogate of Antilochus in the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis).122 Finally, an equivalence of Patroclus in the Iliad and
Antilochus in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is deWnitely assumed in the
Odyssey (Od. 24.77–9; compare 11.468 ¼ 24.16): the Odyssey here
acknowledges the literary relationship between Iliad and *Memnonis
(Aethiopis).123 Tantalizingly, though, it remains unclear (for us, but
presumably not for a contemporary audience) whether the Odyssey
assumes that Antilochus in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) provided
the model for Patroclus in the Iliad or vice versa.124
M. L. West has more radically than Burgess contested the relation-
ship between the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and the Iliad maintained
by neoanalysts.125 Rather than the Iliad reacting to a pre-Iliadic
*Memnonis (Aethiopis), he reverts to the view that the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis), along with its hero Memnon, are post-Iliadic creations.
On West’s view, the Iliad would be interacting instead with a diVerent
earlier poem on the same theme by the Iliad poet himself. West
himself, however, is less inclined to speak in terms of an ‘interaction’
than a poet’s ‘change of mind’.126 For West, crucially, neither Hector
nor Sarpedon in the Iliad will be modelled on Memnon in an earlier

122 Cf. Willcock (1987) 190–2; cf. (1983).

123 Kullmann (1960) 42; A. T. Edwards (1985) 223–7; M. W. Edwards (1990) 312;
Heubeck (1992) 368; Danek (1998) 475.
124 The Odyssey insists on the priority of Patroclus over Antilochus as Achilles’
dearest friend: Od. 24.77–9. But this may be a playful reversal of the known literary
chronology of Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis), rather than just a limpid restatement
of it. It is diYcult also to establish the literary relationship between Il. 23.82–92, Od.
24.71–84, and a hypothetical passage in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) which would have
outlined the funerary arrangements for Achilles and Antilochus.
125 M. L. West (2003b). Cf. (2003a) 14–15. Contrast e.g. J. T. Kakridis (1949) 93–4;
Dowden (1996) 56.
126 M. L. West (2003b) 7–8 the poet ‘suddenly [sc. at Il. 22.385] changes his mind’.
DiVerently, Macleod (1982) 28 ‘This is no doubt a planned surprise’. West has
repeatedly argued for a similar view of the composition of epic poetry, always
controversially. See, apropos of Od. 1.93 and 1.285: West (1998) 100 ‘As he wrote
this Wrst portion of the poem, the poet had it in mind to send Telemachus to Pylos
and Crete . . . Later . . . he changed his plan’; diVerently, Danek (1998) 48 ‘the thesis is
implausible that Homer changed his mind in the course of the narrative’ (trans.).
Similarly, West (1978) 41–59, esp. 44 ‘We can often see them [sc. the epic poets]
having new ideas as they go . . .’; diVerently, Heath (1985) 247 ‘West oVers us a Hesiod
who is constantly having to extricate himself from the tight corners in which he has
trapped himself by failing to think more than a few lines ahead; the composition of
the poem is thus portrayed as a sequence of cliV-hanging escapades.’
28 Bruno Currie
epic. West makes a number of fundamental objections to a pre-Iliadic
*Memnonis, which cannot be systematically addressed here.127
Instead, I will focus on two speciWc points of contact between
Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and try to determine the likely
direction of inXuence: these are the armour made by Hephaestus
and Thetis’ prophecy.
First, the armour made by Hephaestus. In the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis), Memnon had a suit of armour made by Hephaestus
(Proclus §2), and so too, doubtless, did Achilles, though Proclus
does not explicitly say so. In the Iliad, Achilles likewise receives
arms made by Hephaestus (Il. 18.369–19.13). In West’s view, divine
armour ‘ought to be the special property of one hero, not two, and
Achilles’ set, fully and naturally accounted for as it is in the Iliad, is
clearly primary, Memnon’s wantonly derivative’.128 Yet the set of arms
Achilles receives at Il. 19.12–13 is his second set, and the second to
have been made by Hephaestus.129 The Wrst was a gift of the gods to
Peleus at his wedding and was given by him to his son (Il. 17.194–7,
18.84–5). It was then lent by Achilles to Patroclus (Il. 16.130–44), lost
by Patroclus to Hector (Il. 17.125), and Wnally recovered by Achilles
when he killed Hector (Il. 22.368). The lending of the arms to
Patroclus and their subsequent loss is demonstrably untraditional:
it has as a famous consequence that Achilles, after Hector’s death,
ends up with two sets of arms made by Hephaestus—leaving no
scope for the traditional contest of Achilles’ arms between Odysseus

127 Against the argument that the developed mythology of the Ethiopians in
general and of Memnon in particular is post-Iliadic (M. L. West (2003b) 6–7, 9), see
Kullmann (1960) 43; (1992) 114–15; and (questionably) R. D. GriYth (1998), arguing
for the possible antiquity of Memnon. Although the Ethiopians are removed from the
world of the heroes in the Iliad, this does not necessarily reXect an older strand in the
epic tradition. Ethiopians are listed alongside real regions and peoples at Od. 4.83–5:
Cyprus, Phoenicia, the Egyptians, the Sidonians, and the mysterious Erembi, all
visited by Menelaus on his travels; see Morris (1997) 615, also mentioning possible
attestations of the proper name `NŁ ł in Mycenean (A3-ti-jo-qo; see Aura Jorro and
Adrados (1985) s. v.). As a matter of principle, of course, we are not entitled to assume
that a mythical tradition passed over by Homer is unknown to him: see Davies (1989)
4; Dowden (1996) 52–3. In the case of the Ethiopians, suppression by the Iliad seems
more likely than ignorance: cf. GriYn (2001 [1977]) 367–8.
128 M. L. West (2003b) 10.
129 Peleus’ set was made by Hephaestus: P. J. Kakridis (1961) 290 and n. 2.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 29
and Ajax.130 This Iliadic innovation has various poetic advantages.131
One of these is to bring Achilles and Hector face to face each in
armour made by Hephaestus: it is thus by means of a demonstrable
innovation that the Iliad creates a scene which is central to the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis).132 It is reasonable, I think, to see this as a
way in which the Iliad ‘quotes’ the *Memnonis (Aethiopis). It is,
moreover, likely that in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) the divinely
made armour was impenetrable, and that this was the rationale of
divinely made weapons in the epic tradition.133 The Iliad then has
retained the motif of the divinely made weapons and the divine
mother’s concern to furnish her son with them (cf. Il. 18.189–91).
Yet the Iliad insists that the value of the divinely made weapons is
aesthetic, not functional (Il. 18.144, 18.191, 22.323).134 Above all, the
arms made by Hephaestus cannot, in the Iliad, protect Achilles from
his death (Il. 18.464–7).135 We seem to have here an inversion of
motifs comparable to that argued for above with the Odyssey. There
are, moreover, reXections in the Iliad of the notion that divinely made
armour was impenetrable (Il. 20.264–6, 20.268, 21.594): here we have
a case of narrative inconsistency.136 Again, though, we should not
suppose that the poet is unhappily straddling two versions.137
As above with the Odyssey, this may be more attractively seen as a
way for the Iliad poet of pointedly evoking an earlier poem (the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis)) while in the act of diverging from that
poem. The Iliadic treatment of the arms made by Hephaestus is
consistent not only with the priority of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis)
over the Iliad, but also with the Iliad’s interaction with that poem.
Second, Thetis’ prophecy. In the Iliad, Achilles is warned by Thetis
that his death is fated to follow ‘straight after Hector’s’ (Il. 18.96). In

130 See P. J. Kakridis (1961) 289; cf. Pestalozzi (1945) 51–2; M. W. Edwards (1991)
40; Janko (1994) 310.
131 Cf. M. W. Edwards (1987b) 57–8; Janko (1994) 311.
132 Cf. M. W. Edwards (1991) 19.
133 Cf. Berthold (1911) 37–8; P. J. Kakridis (1961); GriYn (2001 [1977]) 368;
Slatkin (2001) 417.
134 GriYn (2001 [1977]) 368.
135 Cf. M. W. Edwards (1991) 140.
136 Cf. also Il. 16.793–804, 22.322–7. See P. J. Kakridis (1961) 291–4; M. W. Edwards
(1991) 322, cf. 139.
137 Contrast P. J. Kakridis (1961) 297.
30 Bruno Currie
the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), Thetis probably foretold to Achilles that
he would die if he killed Memnon—if that is what is meant by
Proclus’ clipped sentence, ‘Thetis foretold to her son the matters
pertaining to Memnon’ (Proclus §2). West sees the prophecy of
Thetis in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) as having been inspired by
Il. 18.96.138 Yet the theme of Thetis’ prophecy in the Iliad is handled
allusively and elliptically. The possibility that Achilles has withdrawn
from the Wghting out of reverence for a prophecy from Thetis is
raised, signiWcantly, by secondary narrators (Nestor and Patroclus)
(Il. 11.794–7 ¼ 16.36–9: in a conditional clause); it is emphatically
repudiated by Achilles himself (Il. 16.50–1). The Iliad thus insists
that Achilles is not inXuenced by a prophecy from his goddess
mother, but at the same time arguably reminds the audience of an
earlier poem (presumably the *Memnonis (Aethiopis)) in which he
was. The prophecy from Thetis and the choice facing Achilles are not
as central to the plot of the Iliad as they apparently were to the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis); yet the Iliad constantly evokes their sig-
niWcance in the other poem. At Il. 9.410–16, for instance, Achilles’
choice is between death at Troy with undying fame or a long life lived
out at home without fame: this is not identical with the choice we
infer from Proclus for the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), but it is close
enough to recall it. Further details of Thetis’ prophecy to Achilles
are leaked out, elliptically, at Il. 18.8–11 and 18.95–6. The Wrst two
allusions in the Iliad to the prophecy are typical of the Iliad’s allusive
treatment of it. In book 1, Achilles’ short life is not conditional, but
taken for granted as a fact: Il. 1.352 (Achilles to Thetis) ‘since, mother,
you bore me for a short life’, 416–18 (Thetis to Achilles) ‘since your
destiny is short, not at all long . . .’.The short life of Achilles is,
arguably, a ‘fact’ because the audience knows—from its familiarity
with an earlier version—which way Achilles is ultimately going to
make up his mind: ‘destiny’ here (Il. 1.416 ÆrÆ) is synonymous with
poetic tradition (D). Note, too, that Thetis’ words at Il. 1.416, ‘now
you are above all people quick to die (TŒæ )’, presuppose as a
foregone conclusion the choice that Achilles is actually going to make
only after the death of Patroclus: Il. 18.95 (Thetis to Achilles) ‘you
will be quick to die (TŒæ ), child, in the light of what you say’:

138 M. L. West (2003b) 10.

 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 31
that is, in the light of Achilles’ resolve to kill Hector. The treatment of
Thetis’ prophecy in the Iliad thus makes good sense on the view that
the Iliad is interacting with an earlier poem (one assumes, the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis)) which was known to the audience.139
It has been argued that the Iliad cannot show familiarity with the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) at Il. 18.96, because, if Achilles’ death is to
follow ‘immediately’ after Hector’s, this leaves no scope for the
arrival of Memnon, his killing of Antilochus, and his own death at
Achilles’ hands.140 The argument is not compelling. As with the
Iliadic innovation of two sets of arms for Achilles (leaving no scope
for the ‹ºø Œæ Ø ), the poet need not always have his eye on how a
putative continuation of his song could be reconciled with tradition.
It is even conceivable that Il. 18.96 ‘quotes’ the *Memnonis (Aethio-
pis), while simultaneously negating its plot: this might have a parallel
in Il. 16.444–7, which arguably both ‘quotes’ a scene in the *Memno-
nis (Aethiopis) and simultaneously negates the possibility of its
realization (see below). In that case, we would have another instance
of playful interaction of the Iliad with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis).
In short, the traditional neoanalytical position seems fully viable:
that the Iliad interacts with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and not vice
versa. Then the relationship between the two poems is correct as
given in Tables 3 and 4, and the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) rightly
occupies the left-hand column as the earlier poem. The striking
parallels between Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis) can be considered
a way in which the Iliad ‘quotes’ the *Memnonis (Aethiopis). As in my
other two test cases, this is ‘quotation’ of a narrative sequence, rather
than a speciWc phrase or motif.
In this light, we might also consider the Iliadic reception of a
speciWc motif from the *Memnonis (Aethiopis): the hero’s translation
from the battleWeld and his immortalization by his divine mother.
This motif was employed twice in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), at two
climactic moments. First, the goddess Dawn immortalized her son
Memnon after he had been killed by Achilles: Proclus §2 ‘and Dawn
gives him [Memnon] immortality, after begging for it from Zeus’.

139 DiVerently, M. W. Edwards (1991) 158–9 (suggesting the prophecy that the
hero will die if a condition is fulWlled was a traditional motif).
140 R. B. Rutherford (1996) 93; M. L. West (2003b) 7. But cf. D. L. Cairns (2001) 43.
32 Bruno Currie
Second, in a parallel scene, Thetis immortalized Achilles after his
death: Proclus §4 ‘and after that Thetis snatched up her son from the
funeral pyre and conveyed him to the isle Leuke’. The latter scene
may, like the former, have followed a supplication of Zeus by Thetis,
if indeed Pindar is indebted to the Aethiopis at Ol. 2.79–80 (‘and his
mother brought Achilles [to the Isle of the Blessed], after she had
persuaded the heart of Zeus with her entreaties’).
The Iliad very probably plays with this motif. Achilles’ death and
all that comes after it lie outside the action of the Iliad. But it
is arguable that a scene of Thetis entreating Zeus for Achilles’
immortality from the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is evoked at Il. 1.496–
530.141 (Compare Il. 1.502 ºØ with Pindar, Ol. 2.80 ºØÆE , if
Pindar is following the Aethiopis.) The object of Thetis’ supplication
in Iliad 1 is, however, emphatically not Achilles’ immortality, as
Achilles’ early death is taken for granted in that supplication
(Il. 1.505–6). And the scene in Iliad 1 is paralleled, with inversion,
in Iliad 24. In the Wnal book, Thetis does not, this time, seek out
Zeus, but is summoned; the scene is no longer a private one (Il. 1.498,
541–2), but occurs in the presence of all the gods (Il. 24.98–102); and
Thetis does not extort a reluctant favour from Zeus, but receives
instructions from him (Il. 24.112). Throughout this part of book 24,
the accent is on the imminent death of Achilles and the grief of the
mother (Il. 24.84–6, 93–4, 104–5). The scene from the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis) seems to be evoked in both Iliad 1 and 24 in order to be
powerfully inverted.
The scene between Dawn and Zeus in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is
evoked at Il. 16.431–61. Sarpedon, son of Zeus, is well placed to
evoke Memnon, son of Dawn.142 In the *Memnonis (Aethiopis),
Dawn carried oV Memnon’s corpse from the battleWeld and brought
it to Ethiopia.143 In the Iliad, Sarpedon’s body is Wrst removed from
the battleWeld by Apollo (Il. 16.678), then translated by Sleep and

141 Schoeck (1961) 59.

142 Cf. Janko (1994) 313, 371; Burgess (2001) 218 n. 95; Scodel (2002) 27.
143 This episode is not mentioned by Proclus. But the Aethiopis is probably the
source for the episode in the Psychostasia (or Memnon) of Aeschylus (or his son
Euphorion: see M. L. West (2000) 345–6): TrGF iii. 375. It is probably likewise the
source of iconography—vases, mirrors, etc.—showing Dawn carrying oV a lifeless
Memnon: LIMC iii. i. 783–7, vi. i. 456–8, 460–1. See Janko (1994) 372.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 33
Death to Lycia (Il. 16.453–7, 671–5, 681–3). The motif of the abduc-
tion and translation of a mortal by an immortal probably typically
signiWed immortalization or heroization.144 (It does not do so—save
exceptionally—in the Iliad.)145 This was certainly the signiWcation of
Dawn’s abduction and translation of Memnon in the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis): her grant of immortality to him will have followed
(Proclus §2). The Iliad has retained the motif of divine abduction
and translation for Sarpedon; yet it insists on a purely routine burial
for him: Il. 16.457 ¼ 675 ‘for that is the honour of the dead’
(apparently formular: compare Od. 24.296). There is no suggestion
here that Sarpedon is anything more than ordinarily dead.146 It
is hard to determine, beyond the shared motif of abduction and
translation, how closely the scene with Sarpedon in the Iliad may
have ‘quoted’ a scene with Memnon in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis). It
is possible that Dawn in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) bathed Mem-
non’s corpse, as Apollo bathes Sarpedon’s (Il. 16.667, 679).147 Per-
haps Sleep and Death assisted at Dawn’s removal of Memnon’s
corpse, as they do at Apollo’s removal of Sarpedon’s.148 The duo of

144 In the early epic tradition, cf. Aphrodite with Phaethon, Hes. Theog. 987–91;
Athena with Erechtheus, Il. 2.549–51; Artemis with Iphigeneia (Iphimede), Cypria,
Davies, EGF p. 32 ¼ Bernabé, PEG p. 41 and ‘Hes.’ Cat. fr. 23a.17–26; Zeus with
Ganymede, Hymn. Hom. Ven. 202–6. See Rohde (1925) i. 68–90; Strecker (1962)
465–70; Larson (2001) 66–70.
145 In the Iliad, Trojan heroes are snatched out of mortal danger by gods: Paris, Il.
3.380–2; Idaeus, 5.23; Aeneas, 5.311–18 and 20.291–340; Hector, 20.443–4; Agenor,
21.597; etc. But this is a temporary rescue from an immediate death, without any hint
of immortalization. Is this a bold Iliadic transformation of a traditional motif, or a
type-scene, as maintained by Fenik (1968) 12, 36–7; Hainsworth (1969) 30? An
exception is the allusion to the translation to Olympus of Ganymede at Il.
20.234–5. But this comes in a secondary narration (spoken by Aeneas) and Gany-
mede belongs to an earlier generation: arguably, therefore, the Iliad contrives to evoke
the traditional version concerning Ganymede (cf. Hymn. Hom. Ven. 202–6) in order
to point up its own habitual transformation of this motif.
146 The verb ÆæıØ (Il. 16.456, 674) is sometimes etymologized as ‘heroize’,
‘deify’: see Chantraine (1968–80) 1095; Nagy (1990a) 131–3, 138–9; but, diVerently,
Janko (1994) 377; Janda (1996). If that was the original meaning, then it has been
reinterpreted in the Iliad to mean just ‘bury’: Il. 7.85; cf. Hsch. ÆæØ: ŁØ;
KÆØØ.
147 Schadewaldt (1951) 160, 165; Janko (1994) 313, 395.
148 The presence of Sleep and Death in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is argued by
Kullmann (1960) 34, 319; Clark and Coulson (1978) 71–3; Weiss (1986), esp. 780, 783
nos. 320, 321; Janko (1994) 313, 395. It is rejected by Kossatz-Deissmann (1992)
448–9, 456, 456–7 on no. 69, 460–1; Simon (1992) 238, 240.
34 Bruno Currie
Sleep and Death suggests the reversibility of the hero’s condition, the
possible conversion of his death into a sleep: heroization, perhaps.149
If so, the motif will have belonged in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis),
where Memnon was indeed made immortal. In the Iliad, by contrast,
Sleep and Death will have been relegated to non-functional, if hon-
oriWc, pallbearers. (Compare, perhaps, the Iliadic transformation of
divinely made weapons into aesthetic, non-functional artefacts.) In
the Iliad, Wnally, Sarpedon’s interment includes his anointment with
Iæ  and his dressing in ¼æÆ ¥ÆÆ (Il. 16.670 ¼ 680), both
suggestive of immortalization.150 It is probable that both featured in
the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), and there constituted Dawn’s act of
‘giving immortality’ (Proclus §2) to Memnon. The state of our
knowledge of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is too incomplete to make
this argument more than hypothetical; this argument, however, runs
parallel with my previous arguments that the Homeric poems may
‘quote’ earlier poems in some detail. On this hypothesis, we would
have here again a narrative inconsistency. The Iliad would insist that
Sarpedon is not immortalized or heroized, unlike Memnon in the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis); but it would retain details evocative of that
immortalization, transferred to a diVerent hero and given a quite
diVerent signiWcation. Again, we should not assume that the
Iliad poet was simply caught between two versions: the vestiges of
the version of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) in the Iliad serve to high-
light the diVerences in poetic treatment. The Iliadic inability (or
refusal) of a divine parent to save their oVspring is even generalized
into a principle in that poem: see Il. 15.138–41, 16.521–2, 18.117–19,
21.109–10.

149 See Pestalozzi (1945) 13–14; Kullmann (1960) 34; Albinus (2000) 92. DiVer-
ently, Rohde (1925) i. 86 n. 1. In general for death as ‘sleep’, cf. Lattimore (1962)
78, 82, 164–5, 307.
150 For the immortalizing power of ambrosia, see also Pulleyn, pp. 66–7 below. Cf.
e.g. Hymn. Hom. Cer. 237; Pind. Ol. 1.62–3, Pyth. 9.63, and see N. J. Richardson
(1974) 238–9. In Homer, the uses of ambrosia are more liberal. It is given to mortals
at Il. 19.38 (Thetis with the dead Patroclus), 19.347, 353 (Athena with the living
Achilles), 23.186–7 (Aphrodite annoints the dead Hector KºÆ fiø j Iæ fiø); cf. Od.
4.445, 18.193. For the immortalizing quality of ‘immortal clothes’, cf. Janko (1994)
396; cf. Thieme (1952b), esp. 22. In Homer: Od. 7.259–60, 265 (Calypso with
Odysseus, where it may be relevant that she aimed to make him immortal, Od.
5.136, 5.209, 7.256–7, 23.336); Od. 24.59.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 35
The conference between Zeus and Hera on Sarpedon’s fate also
deserves attention (Il. 16.431–61). Zeus’ dilemma here dramatizes—
draws attention to—the poet’s choice (D). (Compare the frequent
role of Athena in the Odyssey.) The question whether the Iliad is to
immortalize its Memnon is thus insistently raised: the references to
‘fate’ (Il. 16.433 Eæ , 441 ÆYfi ) suggest that the Iliad poet is self-
consciously shaping up to the poetic tradition. It is then all the more
striking that the Iliad poet Xies in the face of what the audience must
expect for a Memnon surrogate; the poet seems to pass oV a bold
innovation as what, in his version, ‘must be’.151
There is a possibility that the Iliad explicitly acknowledges its
interaction with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) at Il. 16.444–7:

¼ºº
 Ø Kæø; f
 Kd æd ºº fiBØ:

ÆY Œ g łfi Ææ
Æ n
b

;
æ 
Ø ØÆ ŁH KŁºfiØ ŒÆd ¼ºº
Ø n  º ıƒe Ie ŒæÆæB   .
And I will tell you something else: you lay it in your heart.
If you send Sarpedon alive to his home
take care that no one else of the gods may want hereafter
to send their own son from the mighty battle.

Hera alarms Zeus with talk of setting a precedent. In literary terms,

though, this is a hysteron proton.152 The Iliadic scene looks forward to
Zeus’ discomWture when Dawn (and Thetis) will ask for the immor-
tality of their sons. For an audience familiar with the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis), Il. 16.446 ‘take care that no one else (ŒÆd ¼ºº )153 of the
gods may want hereafter to send their own son from the mighty
battle’, cannot fail to bring to mind Dawn (and Thetis) in the

151 Compare and contrast S. Richardson (1990) 193–5.

152 Od. 24.76–9 (implying that Antilochus became Achilles’ dearest friend only
after Patroclus’ death) may be another such hysteron proton: see above. This proton
hysteron is typical of ‘secondary’ epic: cf. Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.1028, where the
Apollonian Medea is prior to the Homeric Nausicaa in terms of the fabula, posterior
in terms of their literary relationship: cf. Hunter (1993b) pp. xxiv–xxv. Similarly the
subject matter of Milton’s Paradise Lost—man’s fall—is antecedent to the subject of
the classical epics. Cf., in lyric, Pind. Ol. 1. 43–5; in tragedy, [Eur.] Rhes. 974–7.
153 For the metapoetic implications, cf. Hardie (1993) 17 ‘Alius . . . is one of a
number of words of iteration, alius, alter, iterum, rursus, etc. whose occurrence in
epic is always worth attention’.
36 Bruno Currie
*Memnonis (Aethiopis).154 What is already known to the audience as
a literary ‘fact’ from the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is presented by the
Iliadic Hera as a future possibility (ØÆ, ‘hereafter’), and one to be
prevented. This interaction with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is play-
ful: the earlier poem is simultaneously evoked and negated. There is
also inversion: Zeus now is the parent concerned for his son and the
goddess is opposed. And, crucially, the outcome is the opposite one
for the mortal son. (For the reversal of roles, compare above on
Odyssey 6–7 and Iliad 24.)
An intriguing sidelight is thrown on this by Virgil’s transferral
of this same motif to Hercules and Jupiter contemplating the fate
of Pallas at Aen. 10.464–73.155 I have argued that the Iliad poet
acknowledges in ŒÆd ¼ºº the poem from which the motif has
been transferred. Virgil, in turn, explicitly acknowledges his Iliadic
source by making Jupiter refer to Sarpedon:
Troiae sub moenibus altis
tot gnati cecidere deum, quin occidit una
Sarpedon, mea progenies . . .
beneath the high walls of Troy
fell many sons of gods; indeed, there fell along with them
Sarpedon, my offspring . . .

Here, too, we have a transferred motif with inversion. The realign-

ment brings us closer to the Aethiopis; the outcome for Pallas,
however, is the same as for Sarpedon in the Iliad. Another inversion
is that, instead of Hera’s fear of setting a precedent, Jupiter stresses
the necessity of following one. The Aeneid, moreover, seems here
to subscribe to the Iliadic rule that gods do not save their sons. Yet
this is undercut through being addressed by Jupiter to Hercules, a
son of his who has been deiWed in the Aeneid (compare also Aen.
8.301 decus addite divis); undercut too because the apotheosis of a
son of Venus, and of her much more distant progeny, hangs over the
whole poem (Aeneas: Aen. 1.259–60, cf. 12.794–5; Julius/Augustus
Caesar: 1.286–9).
154 Cf. Schoeck (1961) 25. Cf. Eustathius on Il. 16.432 (1069.23–9) ‘Hera
complains . . . saying in a way that not even Achilles will die in the future, as he is
the son of an immortal mother, Thetis’.
155 The intertextuality of the two passages is discussed by Barchiesi (1984) 16–30.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 37
I have thought the Virgilian passage worth dwelling on because the
Aeneid oVers a unique extant poetic commentary on the relationship
of Homer and the Epic Cycle.156 Jasper GriYn has emphasized the
value of the ancient Greek critics for guiding our interpretation of
Homer.157 Virgil is no less valuable. In his reception of the Iliad (and
Aethiopis) in Aeneid 10, Virgil is doing something remarkably similar
to the Iliad poet in his reception of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis).158
There may be two ways of making sense of this.
One possibility is to suppose that Virgil found the techniques in
Homer and learned them from him, namely quotation with inver-
sion (A), explicit acknowledgement of the model (B), and the gods as
representatives of the poet’s will (D). In that case, Virgil turns out to
be an unexpectedly useful guide on how to read Homer. At least three
subsidiary questions would then arise. First, had Virgil read the
Aethiopis in a non-epitomized form?159 Second, is Aen. 10.464–73 a
‘contamination’ of the Iliad with Aethiopis (as, for instance, Aen.
8.382–4 seems to be)?160 Third, did Virgil, as a reader of both Iliad
and Aethiopis, take Homer to engage in a reception of the Cyclical
poem (as modern neoanalytical scholars have assumed) and not vice
versa, the Cyclical poets responding to Homer? This possibility is
suggestively raised by the above reading of Aen. 10.464–73. But it
seems to run counter to other considerations.161 In particular, one

156 Cf. N. J. Richardson (1993) 43; Hardie (1998) 55. In general on Virgil’s self-
conscious relationship with the Epic Cycle, cf. Barchiesi (1994) 117–18, on Aen.
1.456–7.
157 GriYn (1980) p. xiv. Cf. Pelling, p. 104 below.
158 Cf. Burrow (1997) 90, on Milton’s interaction with Virgil: ‘One way, and
perhaps the most powerful way, of imitating a predecessor is to imitate his methods
of imitation, and to treat his text as he had treated his own sources.’
159 As supposed by Fraenkel (1932) 247–8, cf. 242; KopV (1981), esp. 920–1;
Burgess (2001) 45. DiVerently, Heinze (1993) 159; Horsfall (1979) 46–7.
160 On ‘contamination’, cf. Hinds (1998) 141–2. On Aen. 8.382–4, see KopV (1981)
932, 935; diVerently, M. L. West (2003b) 9 n. 42.
161 Alexandrian scholarship (especially after Aristarchus) was generally insistent
that the poets of the Cycle were ‘later’ (æØ) than Homer (see Severyns (1928)
99–100); and Virgil’s relationship to Alexandrian scholarship was close (cf. Schlunk
(1974); Schmit-Neuerberg (1999)). The ancient, and Virgilian, view of Homer as
‘Ocean’ apparently presupposes that Homer was the wellspring of all other poets: see
Williams (1978) 88–9, 98–9; Morgan (1999) 32–9. But that was not a universal view
in antiquity: Apollonius, for instance, seems to have recognized that Homer was
interacting with an earlier Argonaut epic (Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 90). Various
38 Bruno Currie
scruples to ascribe the technique of quotation with inversion,
so fundamental and pervasive a feature of Virgilian imitation, to
Virgil’s observation speciWcally of how Homer engaged with his
epic predecessors.162
An alternative would be to suppose that Homer and Virgil each
interacted with earlier poems in surprisingly similar ways, but inde-
pendently of one another. The technique of the oral poet would then
turn out to be unexpectedly close to that of the literary poet.163 That
would give us a startling rapprochement between an oral and a
literary poetics—and an additional reason to rethink any classiWca-
tion of Homeric epic as primary, Virgilian as secondary.164
A further signiWcant feature of the interaction of the Iliad with
the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is the many-to-one and one-to-many
correspondence between the two poems.165 The Iliadic Patroclus
has a prototype in both Antilochus and Achilles in the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis), the Iliadic Hector in both Memnon and Paris in the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis).166 Conversely, Memnon in the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis) is reXected in both Hector and Sarpedon in the Iliad,
Antilochus in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) in both Antilochus and
Patroclus in the Iliad.167 We observed above multiple correspondence
in the Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad. Burgess has called this
feature ‘confusing’.168 What is perhaps especially surprising is how
closely it recalls the practice of Virgil, a literate poet with a reading

predecessors of Homer in hexameter poetry are elsewhere acknowledged by name:

Eumolpos, Olen, Pamphos, Orpheus, Musaios, and Hesiod (note the entry of Suda
under ‘Eumolpos’: ‘an epic poet among those before Homer’; and already Hdt. 2. 23,
2. 53. 3; see e.g. M. L. West (1966) 40). Virgil need not, it seems, have taken Homer’s
priority for granted.
162 On Virgilian ‘opposition in imitation’, see Hardie (1993) 118, and cf. (1986)
158–67, 233–6; (1998) 31, 44, 51; Farrell (1991) 207–72. I am grateful to Philip
Hardie also for discussion of this point.
163 Cf. D. P. Fowler (2000) 134.
164 Cf. Feeney (1998) 57–60. The Odyssey has, of course, long been regarded as
secondary to the Iliad.
165 Pestalozzi (1945) 41V.; J. T. Kakridis (1949) 60–1; Schoeck (1961) passim, e.g. 11,
15, 16, and cf. the subtitle, ‘kyklische Motive in homerischer Brechung’ (my italics).
166 DiVerently, Allan (2005) 16 eschews ‘recourse to extraneous non-Iliadic
‘‘parallels’’ ’.
167 Note the intratextuality associating Sarpedon and Hector in the Iliad (16.431–
61
22.166–87), as well as Patroclus and Antilochus (16.1–3
18.1–2, 17: see above).
168 Burgess (1997) 15.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 39
public.169 In another connection, M. W. Edwards (thinking not of the
interaction of the Homeric poems with speciWc pre-existing poems,
but of Homer’s transformation of traditional poetic topoi), commen-
ted: ‘the closest parallel that comes to mind is the use Virgil
constantly makes of his great predecessor’s work’.170 Here we have
another striking common ground between an oral and a literary
poetics.171 The many-to-one and one-to-many correspondence
between characters and their prototypes argues a sophisticated,
and self-reXective, interaction with earlier poems in the early epic
tradition.172
The Iliad ’s interaction with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) is a crucial
part of the meaning of the former poem, just as the Odyssey’s
interaction with the Iliad is a crucial part of its meaning.173 We
should assume a ‘competitive’ relationship of the Iliad with the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis), as of the Odyssey with the Iliad: a ‘conscious
rivalry’ or ‘creative mimesis’.174 This kind of competition may be
respectful; it may even be highly complimentary to the model, as
with the Odyssey’s ‘rivalry’ with the Iliad and Virgil’s imitatio
of Homer. This kind of competitive relationship need not even
rule out joint authorship of Iliad and *Memnonis (Aethiopis), as the
relationship of the Odyssey with the Iliad need not rule out joint
authorship of those poems. The provocatively diVerent world-view
taken by the Iliad vis-à-vis the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) (Iliadic gods
and goddesses do not save their sons; divinely made armour does not
in the Iliad render the wearer invincible; Iliadic transportation from
battle and anointing with ambrosia does not entail immortalization)
should be seen (like the contrasting heroism and theodicy of the
Odyssey vis-à-vis the Iliad) as a poetic response, not as the poet’s
personal expression of his world-view.175

169 Cf. GriYn (1985) 193–7. Cf. Armstrong, p. 136 below.

170 M. W. Edwards (1987b) 60. Cf. Dowden (1996) 49 n. 14, 58 and n. 62.
171 Cf. Dowden (1996) 49; Foley (1997) 173.
172 Contrast Schoeck (1961) 25–6 (assuming an unreXective interaction).
173 SigniWcance is eVectively denied by Schoeck (1961) 25–6, 30. Cf. Burgess
(2001) 218 n. 92 on the diVerent neoanalytical interpretations of correspondences
between Iliad and *Memnonis.
174 Heubeck (1954) 100 and (1988) 13, after Jacoby (1961) 109 ‘schöpferische
Imitation’; cf. Usener (1990) 205.
175 Contrast Heubeck (1954) 100; (1988) 21–3. DiVerently, Cook (1995) 43.
40 Bruno Currie
Another important point emerges from the comparison between
the Iliad’s interaction with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and the Odys-
sey’s interaction with the Iliad. It is striking that the Iliad does
not overlap in content with the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and never
mentions Memnon, despite frequent prolepses of Achilles’ death. The
Odyssey likewise does not overlap in content with the Iliad, despite
frequent analepses of the Trojan war (‘Monro’s law’).176 D. L. Page
used the latter observation Wfty years ago to argue that the Odyssey
poet was wholly ignorant of the Iliad.177 M. L. West has very recently
invoked the former to argue that the Iliad poet was ignorant of the
*Memnonis.178 Yet given, in both cases, the evidence for interaction
between the two poems, the avoidance of overlap is much better seen
as itself a form of allusion: a way of making reference by refusing
reference (E).179
I have said nothing about verbatim quotations of the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis) in the Iliad; a number have been proposed.180 Of these the
most suggestive is the idea that the striking (non-formular?) phrase
ªÆ ªÆºød ðŒEÞ was used to describe the prostrate corpse of
Achilles in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) and taken up from there at Il.
18.26 (of Patroclus’ death, transferred from Achilles’ death in the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis)) and at Od. 24.40 (in the context of an
account of Achilles’ own death, apparently following the version of
the *Memnonis (Aethiopis)).181 In passing I mention an intriguing

176 Cf. Monro (1901) 325 (who in turn cites Niese!).

177 Page (1955) 159 ‘This curious fact, that the Odyssey shows no awareness of the
existence of the Iliad . . .’, ‘the reason why the Iliad is ignored by the Odyssean poet is
simply that the Iliad was unknown to him’.
178 M. L. West (2003b) 6 ‘The Iliad contains not the slightest hint that the story of
Achilles will involve such a person [sc. Memnon], or that such a person exists’, 7 ‘The
conclusion is plain and unavoidable. The Iliad poet . . . did not know the Memnon
episode . . .’.
179 On Od. and Il. cf. Usener (1990) 205; R. B. Rutherford (2001) 120–1; Danek
(1998) 27.
180 Cf. Pestalozzi (1945) 20, on Il. 17.289–90; J. T. Kakridis (1949) 84, on Il. 23.13–14.
The issue is controversial. Contrast e.g. Kullmann (1960) 36, 40 with M. W. Edwards
(1991) 17.
181 Pestalozzi (1945) 18; J. T. Kakridis (1949) 84–5; Kullmann (1960) 38–9;
Schadewaldt (1951) 168; Dowden (1996) 59 and n. 63; Willcock (1997) 177; Danek
(1998) 468–9 and (2002) 17. Cf. Janko (1994) 408. DiVerently, Usener (1990) 104–8,
arguing that Od. 24.40 quotes the Iliad, and that Il. 16.776 is the original context;
diVerently, Danek (1998) 468–9.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 41
fact: the epithet ƺŒŒæı
is used only of Memnon, Hector, and
Sarpedon in extant hexameter verse.182 Could it have been trans-
ferred from the Ethiopian hero, whose divinely made armour was so
important, to his two Iliadic surrogates?183

C ON C LU S I ON

The Homeric poems clearly aspire to be new songs.184 Familiar

episodes are transferred to novel settings: Priam’s supplication of
Achilles is transferred in the Odyssey to Odysseus’ supplication
of Arete; Achilles’ killing of Memnon is transferred in the Iliad to
Patroclus killing Sarpedon and to Achilles killing Hector. Plots are
changed in their essential elements: the recognition of Odysseus by
Penelope is transposed in the Odyssey to come after the killing of
the suitors. The traditional signiWcation of scenes is radically altered:
Penelope’s conversation with Odysseus and his foot-washing in the
Odyssey do not entail Penelope’s complicity in the killing of the
suitors; nor do Sarpedon’s translation, washing, and interment in
the Iliad entail his immortalization. The premium placed on innov-
ation in the early epic tradition is suggested by Telemachus’
statement that ‘men celebrate that song more which echoes freshest
in the ears of the listeners’ (Od. 1.351–2).
The Homeric poems certainly oVer support for this picture of
restless innovation. The Iliad, I have argued, interacts with the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) in transferring the pivotal role of Antilochus
(the friend whose death Achilles will die to avenge) to Patroclus.
Neoanalytical scholars have sometimes wondered whether Patroclus
is an invention of the Iliad poet.185 But the Iliad seems to show a

182 Hes. Theog. 984 Æ ƺŒŒæı

; Il. 15.221  ‚ŒæÆ ƺŒŒæı

(cf. Il. 16.536, 16.654); Il. 5.699 ! ¯ŒæØ ƺŒŒæıfiB (cf. Il. 6.398, 13.720, 15.458,
16.358); Il. 6.199 Ææ
Æ ƺŒŒæı
.
183 Analogously, one might compare æ æø ¯P挺ØÆ (Od. 19.357, 491,
20.134, 21.381) and æ æø —ºØÆ (41 times in Od.).
184 For the importance attached to ‘new songs’ in the early epic tradition, cf.
perhaps ‘Hes.’ fr. 357.2 M–W.
185 See, sceptically, Janko (1994) 313–14.
42 Bruno Currie
further stage of innovation. Arguably, the Iliad has transferred the
(familiar?) role of Patroclus to Phoenix, who thus becomes a surro-
gate for Patroclus even while he is a surrogate for Antilochus. As
Jasper GriYn has already given a balanced discussion of the problems
of the Embassy of Iliad 9, I may perhaps be excused for presenting a
one-sided view of this most controversial episode which is consonant
with the arguments of this chapter.186
The Iliad very likely interacts with an earlier version of the embassy
to Achilles; it may even do so in a way comparable to that in which I
argued the Odyssey interacts with an earlier poem on Odysseus’
homecoming. In an earlier version of the embassy, Odysseus and
Ajax may have gone as sole ambassadors to Achilles; Patroclus, from
inside Achilles’ tent, may have echoed their pleas, and Wnally prevailed
on Achilles to let him go into battle in his armour. In the Iliad’s
Embassy, Patroclus’ expected intervention does not occur, the em-
bassy fails, and we wait Wve books (discounting the Doloneia) for
Patroclus’ pivotal intervention.187 (Similarly in the Odyssey, the
expected recognition between Odysseus and Penelope does not
occur in book 19, but is put oV for three books.) The Iliad implies
in a couple of places after book 9 that an embassy to Achilles has
yet to take place (Il. 11.608–10, 16.72): this is another instance of
narrative inconsistency, by which the Iliad arguably recalls the
earlier version from which it is departing.188 We may take a similar
view of the most famous of all Homeric narrative inconsistencies:
the duals of Il. 9.182–98 remind the audience that in an earlier
version two ambassadors, not three, went to Achilles from Agamem-
non. Phoenix himself is both an untraditional Wgure and an anomal-
ous presence in Agamemnon’s train rather than in Achilles’ tent (Il.
9.168: compare 617–22). It is tempting to think that the role formerly
played by Patroclus has been transferred to this old retainer.189
(Comparably, in Odyssey 19 the recognition of Odysseus by Penelope

186 See GriYn (1995) 51–3.

187 For the failed embassy to Achilles as an innovation of the Iliad poet, cf. GriYn
(1995) 21. Epic tradition, as Adrian Kelly reminds me, knew of other failed embassies:
cf. Il. 4.384–98, 5.803–8, 7.345–420.
188 Cf. GriYn (1995) 25.
189 Cf. M. W. Edwards (1987a) 228; R. B. Rutherford (1996) 86–8. Phoenix himself
is unlikely to be an Iliadic invention: S. R. West (2001) 4, 10–11.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 43
is transferred to the old nurse Eurycleia.) In Iliad 9, Phoenix tells a
story of Meleager in which the hero’s wife is called ‘Cleopatra’: both
her (untraditional?) name and her role in persuading the hero to
return to the battle evoke the role of Patroclus in the Iliad.190 (This
secondary narrative of Phoenix, foreshadowing albeit imprecisely the
plot of the poem as a whole, may be compared with Helen’s secondary
narrative at Od. 4.240–64: see above.) The fact that it is Phoenix who
is the secondary narrator may be an implicit acknowledgement that
Phoenix is a surrogate for Patroclus.
This reconstruction, like the others, is speculative and hypothet-
ical. If correct, it would entail that the Iliad interacts not just with the
*Memnonis (Aethiopis), but with another, intervening, earlier poem
on Achilles and Patroclus that interacted with the *Memnonis
(Aethiopis). The early epic tradition would then seem to be in a
state of permanent Xux: you could not step twice into the same
river of oral song.
Yet Xux can only be part of the picture. The interactions we have
looked at presuppose the existence of poems in a stable enough form
to be interacted with.191 For the interaction to work, familiarity is
required on the part of the audience (and not just the poet) with
fairly well-deWned poems: familiarity which in a performance culture
must depend on repeated exposure to (essentially) the same songs.192
The Epic Cycle perhaps oVers some support for this possibility. It is a
premiss of neoanalysis that the post-Homeric poems (according to
the conventional dating) of the Epic Cycle preserve the subject matter
and the plot of lost pre-Homeric poems: the post-Iliadic Aethiopis
preserves the plot of the pre-Iliadic *Memnonis. Whereas the Iliad
and Odyssey interact so vitally with forerunners of the Cyclical epics,
the Cyclical epics may, in the Archaic period, have been surprisingly
indiVerent to the Homeric poems.193 We can hardly suppose
the Homeric poems and the Epic Cycle to have been independent
traditions, given that the Iliad and the Odyssey show themselves to be
heirs to the same tradition as the Cyclical epics. We might, however,

190 Cf. Willcock (2001 (1964)) 449; GriYn (1995) 135–6; Edmunds (1997) 431.
191 Cf. Usener (1990) 210.
192 Cf. Usener (1990) 208, focusing, however, on the poet, not the audience.
193 Esp. Burgess (2001) 132–71.
44 Bruno Currie
suppose that the Iliad and Odyssey represent a particularly innovative
or interactive strain of the early epic tradition, but that the poems of
the Epic Cycle (especially, perhaps, Cypria and Aethiopis) represent a
conservative and reproductive strain.
Such duality would be paralleled in the other main genres of
Archaic and Classical Greek poetry: lyric and tragedy. Lyric poetry
evidently prized new compositions. The locus classicus is Pindar’s
injunction to ‘praise an old wine, but garlands of songs that are
newer’ (Ol. 9.48–9). And in several other places lyric poets advertise
their compositions as ‘new’.194 But this emphasis on ‘new songs’
presupposes a context where ‘old songs’ were a possibility; and in-
deed, we hear of a strong conservatism in the lyric tradition whereby
old songs were reperformed.195 And similarly with tragedy. Innov-
ation was rated highly, for competition at the City Dionysia in the Wfth
century was, as a rule, with new plays. But old tragedies were regularly
revived in the Wfth century, both at ‘Rural Dionysia’ (in the Attic
demes) and outside Attica.196 After Aeschylus’ death, ‘old’ tragedies
were increasingly admitted at the City Dionysia.197 Within both the
lyric and the tragic tradition, then, we see the creation of the new and
the preservation of the old being valued side by side.
Within the epic tradition we are accustomed to thinking of active
creation and passive reproduction as the provinces respectively of the
IØ
 and the ÞÆłfiø
 . This distinction is often diachronically
conceived: rhapsodes ‘replaced’ aoidoi in (perhaps) the late sixth
century bc.198 But we should consider the possibility that the

194 Alcm. 3.1–3 (with Page’s supplements), 14(a).1–3 PMG; Pind. Nem. 8.20–1,
Ol. 3.4–6, Isthm. 5.62–3; Bacch. 9 (Dith. 5) 9; Timoth. 791.202–36, esp. 202–5, 211–12
PMG; Ar. Lys. 1295.
195 Hdt. 4.35.3; Timoth. 791.211–12, 791.216–17, 796 PMG; Pl. Leg. 802a; Athen.
14.632f (in Sparta); Polyb. 4.20.8–10 (in Arcadia). Cf. Pl. Symp. 187d1–2. See
Herington (1985) 207–10.
196 Pl. Resp. 475d. Cf. Whitehead (1986) 212, 222 n. 74. Cf. Hdt. 6.21.2: banning of
reperformances of Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus. Csapo and Slater (1994) 14–17.
197 After 456 bc: cf. Ar. Ach. 9–11, Ran. 868; schol. Ar. Ach. 10c; cf. Radt, TGrF iii
T 1.48–9, 51–2, T 133. In 387/6 bc, competition with an ‘old play’ became a regular
feature of the City Dionysia: IG ii2. 2318 col. 8 ¼ TGrF i p. 24 (Fasti); cf. IG ii2.
2319–23 ¼ TGrF i pp. 25–7 (Didaskaliai for 341–339 bc).
198 e.g. Burkert (2001) 101; cf. Hainsworth in Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth
(1988) 30; Latacz (2001) 947–8. Rhapsodes’ creativity is stressed by Nagy, e.g. (1996)
82; cf. Finkelberg (2000) 1.
 Homer and the Early Epic Tradition 45
distinction was also a synchronic one. Comparative study of oral
poetic traditions suggests that ‘creative’ and ‘reproductive’ singers
often exist side by side.199 R. Finnegan has warned against adopting a
‘monolithic theory’ of oral poetry, an exclusive model of either
composition in performance or the reproduction of Wxed texts.200
My account of interaction between poems in the early epic tradition
presupposes both Xux and stability in the tradition. Although it was
only in the late sixth century in Athens that rhapsodic performance
of the Homeric poems became institutionalized and an ‘oYcial’ text
of Homer was established (the ‘Pisistratean recension’), these eVorts
to ensure the faithful reproduction of a ‘Wxed’ text of Homer may
have been formalizations of something present less formally in the
tradition much earlier. We see this kind of development for tragedy:
there had been a practice of reperforming old tragedies since the
(early) Wfth century bc, but their reperformance only became insti-
tutionalized at the City Dionysia in 386 bc and oYcial texts of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were established only in c.330
bc.201 Thus, an interest in reperforming old songs and in ‘Wxed’ texts
could comfortably pre-date their formalization. This way of envis-
aging the early epic tradition oVers a complementary perspective on
what GriYn called the ‘uniqueness of Homer’.202 Whereas the Iliad
and Odyssey would represent the output of highly gifted, creative,
singers in the tradition, the Cyclical epics would reXect its more
reproductive side.203

199 Kirk (1960) 278–9; Finnegan (1977) 57, cf. 83–4, 142–3.
200 Finnegan (1977) 86, cf. 139–53, esp. 153.
201 Cf. Easterling (1997b) 213, on the 4th-cent. formalization of a long-standing
practice of tragic reperformance. Cf. Csapo and Slater (1994) 4 and 10 no. 14 on the
establishment of oYcial tragic texts in c.330 bc.
202 Cf. GriYn (2001 [1977]).
203 My thanks are due to all who contributed to the discussion following the oral
version of this paper delivered at Balliol on 11 Sept. 2004; and especially to my
student Sarah Cullinan, Prof. P. R. Hardie, Dr A. Kelly, Prof. C. B. R. Pelling,
Dr N. J. Richardson, Dr R. B. Rutherford, Dr M. L. West, and Dr S. R. West, for
commenting on written drafts. As always, responsibility for any errors and for the
argument remains the author’s own.
This page intentionally left blank
 2
Homer’s Religion

Philological Perspectives from

Indo-European and Semitic

Simon Pulleyn

In this chapter I intend to examine some aspects of the religion of the

Homeric poems in a manner which it is hoped will reveal some
signiWcant interactions.
The epic tradition as it came down to Homer was shaped over
many centuries, so that the contents of the poems represent an
accretion of elements belonging to quite diVerent periods. The
linguistic and material traces of this are plain to see. A prominent
linguistic example is the coexistence of the ancient genitive form
in -Ø beside the more recent one in -ı.1 Another example is the
phenomenon of tmesis (the separation of a preverb from its verb, as
at Iliad 1.25 Kd FŁ ºº): in Homer, this must constitute the
retention of an archaic linguistic feature of great antiquity.2 Certain
metrical anomalies, too, can only be explained on the assumption
that they reXect the state of the Greek language before the date of the

1 The form in –Ø appears in Mycenaean texts and is thus of high antiquity; –ı
seems to have evolved from it by reduction of the intervocalic glide and subsequent
vowel contraction. See Chantraine (1958) 193–4; but cf. Sihler (1995) 259–60. For the
Indo-European background, cf. Szemerényi (1996) 182–8.
2 The separation of preverb from verb is found in other Indo-European (Vedic and
Hittite) texts, but it is absent from our earliest attested Greek, the Linear B texts of
around 1200 bc.
48 Simon Pulleyn
Linear B tablets, some Wve centuries before Homer.3 On the material
side, it is striking to Wnd in a narrative relating to the Trojan War in
the Late Bronze Age (c.1200 bc) mention of items belonging to the
poet’s own Iron Age (c.1000–750 bc). Notably, Pandarus is said to
use iron arrowheads and Areithous has an iron club.4
This phenomenon is extremely signiWcant for the study of the
religious aspects of the Iliad and Odyssey. It will be the purpose of
this chapter to examine more closely what religious concepts the
Greek epic singers found in the epic tradition that came down to
them and what changes they made to that tradition. It is a question
easier to ask than to answer which of these changes may be laid at
the door of the monumental poet, ‘Homer’; but that question will be
posed wherever appropriate.
The techniques of comparative philology will be central to my
approach, as they oVer an access (albeit not unproblematic) to the
Indo-European inheritance of the Greek epic poets.5 In what follows,
accordingly, I shall have recourse to the Old Indic Vedas and other
comparative material. Equally suggestive, though from an importantly
diVerent angle, are various Semitic texts from the Near East, which are
evidence for a non-Indo-European tradition, also of great antiquity.
Whereas the Indo-European comparanda point to inherited, native

3 See M. L. West (1997b) 229.

4 Il. 4.123, 7.141. See in general Sherratt (1992).
5 The term ‘Indo-European’ was originally used to describe a group of related
languages (Müller (1888)). There has been extensive debate as to whether it makes
sense to think of there having been an Indo-European culture in an identiWable
homeland: contrast Renfrew (1987) 75–98 and passim with Lehmann (1993) 258–88.
For maps setting out the diVerent conjectures for an Indo-European homeland,
see e.g. Baldi (1999) 40. Arguably, the Indo-Europeans were a people originally at
home probably somewhere in what is now Southern Russia; towards the end of the
third millennium bc, they began a series of migrations that took them as far aWeld
as India and Ireland; and they probably entered the Greek peninsula during the Wrst
half of the second millennium bc: see Palmer (1980) 3; Mallory (1989). The Indo-
European linguistic heritage is seen in the fact that the words for ‘mother’, ‘father’,
‘sister’, and ‘brother’—to take only the most obvious examples—are etymologically
cognate in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Tocharian, Gothic, and Irish: Baldi (1999) 10. But
there are not only cognate words; there are cognate stories and rituals
as well (Puhvel (1989)). Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the original Indo-
European religion, just as they reconstruct the grammar and lexicon of the
Indo-European language. However, this process is inevitably much more complex
and controversial (Burkert (1985) 16–19).
 Homer’s Religion 49
material preserved within the Greek epic tradition, the Near Eastern
Semitic comparanda tend to point rather to non-native material
imported into the Greek-speaking community from outside.6 In the
interplay of these two fundamentally diVerent types of comparative
material, we might see evidence of Greek poets’ modiWcation of their
inherited tradition. However, it remains unclear when such modiWca-
tion occurred, and whether the Near Eastern material would have
been keenly felt as a foreign import or was assimilated more or less
imperceptibly into the Greek tradition.7
My discussion of these issues will focus on three Greek words:
˘ , Iæ , and ŒÆæ. These will oVer the opportunity to
reXect on the nature of the Greek pantheon through its supreme
ruler and on the relations between gods and men as presented in the
Greek epic tradition.

˘

The case of the Greek god Zeus is particularly instructive for the
study of this kind of interaction between inherited Indo-European
material and ideas imported from the Near East. His name, at least,
is ‘the only name of a Greek god which is entirely transparent
etymologically’—to such an extent, indeed, that ‘it has long been
paraded as a model case in Indo-European philology’.8 Comparative
philology here aVords modern scholars an insight denied to the
ancient Greeks if, as Wilamowitz claimed, the Greeks themselves
did not understand the name Zeus.9 The key to the matter is that
˘ , with its genitive ˜Ø , has a parallel in the name of the Indic

6 It has long been recognized that Greek religion exhibits numerous inXuences
from the Near Eastern peoples with whom the Greeks came into contact at one time
or another: see especially Burkert (1992) and M. L. West (1997a). Extensive Egyptian
inXuence is controversially claimed by Bernal (1987) and (2001).
7 See e.g. Burkert (1988); Mondi (1990); M. L. West (1997a) 33–60.
8 Burkert (1985) 125.
9 Wilamowitz (1984 (1931)) 220. Wilamowitz does not substantiate his remark;
for an example of the conjectural etymologies of later Greeks, see Fraenkel on Aesch.
Ag. 1485–6. See also Dunbar on Ar. Av. 570 and Leumann (1993) 288–90.
50 Simon Pulleyn
god Dyaus, with its genitive Divas. Both names appear to derive from
a common Indo-European form, reconstructed as *dyews, with a
genitive *diwos. When one recalls that Zeus is sometimes called
‘father’, in the Homeric formula ˘F æ (e.g. Iliad 1. 503), the
parallel with Latin Iup(p)iter is arresting.10 In Sanskrit, too, we Wnd
the collocation Dyaus pitar (‘Father Dyaus’).
The morphology of ˘ and its cognates has been elucidated
elsewhere.11 The meaning of the name has also long been agreed
by philologists. It seems beyond doubt that ˘ =˜Ø is etymologic-
ally cognate with Latin dies (‘day’).12 This is particularly apparent
when one takes into account the Latin name Diespiter13 alongside
Iup(p)iter. Zeus is thus the ‘Father of the Day’ or, in other words, lord
of the bright sky. That the three sister-languages, Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit, should agree with each other so closely suggests that Zeus is
indeed a god the origins of whose name are to be found in the remote
Indo-European past.14
We know remarkably little about Indo-European religion. In an
attempt to apply a comparative approach, scholars have turned to the
evidence of the Old Indic Vedas. The Rigveda comprises more than
a thousand sacriWcial hymns composed over a period of many cen-
turies, the oldest of which are unlikely to be later in date than the
thirteenth century bc.15 The Atharvaveda contains spells and other
magical texts and is somewhat later in date than the Rigveda,
although its oldest parts are contemporary with the later material

10 Cato, Agr. 132.1; for spelling see OLD.

11 Sihler (1995) 194, 337–9.
12 Sihler (1995) 338–9 with 195–6. Whilst dies is from the same root as deus (‘god’)
and divus (‘divine’), it is important to realize that none of these words is related to
Greek Ł : Sihler (1995) 1.
13 Paulus, Fest. p. 103M.
14 Already appreciated by Müller (1875) 221–2 ‘Does not this one word [sc. Zeus]
prove the union of those ancient races? Does it not show us, at the earliest dawn of
history, the fathers of the Aryan race, the fathers of our own race, gathered together in
the great temple of nature, like brothers of the same house, and looking up in
adoration to the sky as the emblem of what they yearned for, a father and a God.
Nay, can we not hear in that old name of Jupiter, i.e. Heaven-Father, the true key-note
which still sounds on in our own prayer, ‘‘Our Father which art in heaven,’’ and which
imparts to these words their deepest tone, and their fullest import?’ (It ought to be
noted that Müller’s use of this word has no racist overtones at this period: ‘Arya-’ was
simply the word which speakers of Sanskrit used to refer to themselves.)
15 Macdonell (1917) p. xi.
 Homer’s Religion 51
in the Rigveda.16 In the Rigveda we Wnd that Dyaus has a somewhat
lower proWle than one might expect of a deity whose name would
appear to indicate that he presides over the whole bright vault of
heaven.17 Nevertheless, his name is frequently found in a compound
with that of the goddess of the Earth, Prithivi (RV 1.159, 1.160,
1.185, 4.56, 6.70, 7.53). Furthermore, in the Atharvaveda, there are
references to Dyaus as ‘all-knowing’ or ‘father’ (AV 1.32.4, 6.4.3).18
The former greatness of Indic Dyaus is apparently reXected in the
Homeric portrait of Zeus. It would seem reasonable to suppose that,
in so far as this is derived from an Indo-European original, it is
an inheritance of the religious tradition as it was when the Indo-
European ancestors of the speakers of Greek and Sanskrit still formed
a cultural unity.
Like Dyaus, Zeus is said to be a god of the sky; he lives in the ÆNŁ
æ,
‘heaven’ (Iliad 2.412, 4.166).19 What is striking, however, is that Zeus
is not simply a god of the clear, bright vault of heaven as the
etymology of his name would imply. In Homer, he is particularly
associated with clouds and storms. He is Iæ
, ‘the lightner’
(Iliad 1.580, 12.275), ºªæÆ, ‘cloud-gatherer’ (Iliad 1.560,
4.30), and łØæ , ‘high-thundering’ (Iliad 1.354, 14.54). The
epithet PæÆ, applied to Zeus, appears to be a reference to his
‘wide voice’ and thus another reference to thunder (Iliad 1.498).20
Homer refers to ˜Øe Zæ , ‘the rain of Zeus’ (Iliad 5.91), and
Hesiod speaks of Zeus as ‘raining’ in the late autumn (Works and
Days 415).
Martin Nilsson explained this state of aVairs by saying that the
clear bright heavens were meaningless to primitive men. What they
understood were dynamic atmospheric phenomena such as thunder
and lightning.21 Burkert conjectures that this is why Dyaus was

16 Whitney (2000) p. xvi.

17 Durante (1976) 38.
18 The word for ‘all-knowing’ might equally mean ‘all-possessing’: see Mayrhofer
(1995) 579–81. I am obliged to Dr Elizabeth Tucker for bringing this reference to my
attention.
19 It is possible that this word is etymologically connected with the idea of
brightness, if LSJ are correct to associate it with the verb ÆYŁø (‘to burn’). See also
West on Hes. Theog. 697 and Kirk on Il. 8.15–16.
20 Pulleyn (2000) ad loc.
21 Nilsson (1967) 391.
52 Simon Pulleyn
already overshadowed by more active gods in the Vedic texts.22 It is
not clear that the attempt to explain religious phenomena by an
appeal to the notion of the primitive mind has much to commend
it. In any event, we can discern a much more obvious source for
the idea of Zeus as a weather god: that source is Semitic rather than
Indo-European.
Ugaritic texts dating from the second millennium bc and discov-
ered at Ras Shamra in Syria in 1928 have much to say about the
exploits of the Canaanite god Baal.23 This Baal was already known
from references in the Bible.24 In the Ugaritic texts, he is commonly
given the epithet rkb ‘rpt.25 This is generally taken to mean ‘rider on
the clouds’.26 The image presumably compares the thunderous noise
of Baal riding over the clouds with the noise of a warrior riding on
his horse. If that is the correct meaning, then one may discern a
parallelism between Baal and Zeus. Both are pre-eminent among the
gods and both are storm gods (although it is questionable whether
Zeus’ epithet ÆNª  refers to that function).27
It has also been suggested that the original meaning of the Semitic
root rkb was ‘to harness’ or ‘to yoke’.28 If that is the case, it would
appear that there is an even closer parallelism between Baal and Zeus.
Baal is ‘harnesser of the clouds’ and ºªæÆ ˘ is ‘gatherer of
clouds’. Whichever interpretation is correct, it is clear that the origin
of Zeus as a god of storms rather than of the clear skies is to be sought
in the Semitic, non-Indo-European milieu of the Near East.

22 Burkert (1985) 126.

23 On the discovery of these texts, see Bauer (1930a, b); Doblhofer (1961) 203–26.
24 On Baal and his attributes, see van der Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst
(1999) 132–9. On Ugarit in general, see M. L. West (1997a) 84–90. For translated
Canaanite texts, see ANET 129–55, and Gibson (1978).
25 e.g. in the text known as ‘Baal and Yam’ in Gibson (1978) 43, col. iv, line 8.
26 In the Old Testament, too, we read that God rides on the storm clouds: Psalm
68: 4.
27 M. L. West (1997a) 115 takes ÆNª  to mean ‘he who rides on a goat’. He
argues (cf. West (1978) 366–8) that the ‘goat’ in question was actually a homonymous
bird—a species of snipe—the vibrating noise of whose tail feathers was taken to
presage a coming storm. But West makes this conjecture because he believes that it is
linguistically impossible for the word ÆNª  to mean what it would appear to mean
at Wrst blush, namely ‘he who bears the aegis’. It is not, however, certain that these
linguistic objections are well founded: see Pulleyn (2000) on Il. 1.202.
28 UllendorV (1963–4) 242–4; Brock (1968) 395–7.
 Homer’s Religion 53
There is an ambiguity, then, in the Greek epic tradition whether
Zeus is conceived as the god of the clear skies or as a storm-god,
an ambiguity that seems to arise from the combination of Indo-
European and Semitic conceptions. A comparable ambiguity seems
also to aVect the dwelling-place of Zeus. In Homer we frequently
hear that Zeus lives in heaven. At Iliad 21.199, for example, he is said
to send down his crashing thunder from heaven; at Iliad 8.18–27
Zeus memorably tells the other gods that they could never overpower
him, not even if they were to attach a golden chain from heaven and
strive together to pull him down. If we remember the celestial Dyaus
of early Indic religion, nothing seems more natural than the idea of a
supreme deity who lives in the sky. Indeed, Homer has Poseidon tell
of a threefold division of the cosmos between himself, Zeus, and
Hades. Poseidon took the sea, Hades took the dark netherworld, and
Zeus took the heavens (Iliad 15.184–92).29
He goes on to say that the earth is common to them all, together
with Mount Olympus. But we are frequently told in Homer that Zeus
lives on Olympus. At Iliad 1.420, it is to Olympus that Thetis says she
will go in an attempt to persuade Zeus to help Achilles. At Iliad 21.505,
Leto goes up to Olympus ˜Øe d ƺŒÆb
H (‘to the house of
Zeus with its brazen threshold’). Zeus is often given the epithet
 ˇºØ (Iliad 1.609). In fact, his association with Olympus is
so complete that he is sometimes simply called  ˇºØ (‘the Olym-
pian’) without the name Zeus being needed at all (Iliad 1.353, 18.79).
In the same way, the other gods are collectively referred to as
 ˇºØØ (Iliad 1.399, 20.47). But they are sometimes also called
ˇPæÆ ø , ‘heavenly ones’ (Iliad 24.547). This conXation of heaven
and Olympus as the home of Zeus and the other gods is pervasive in
the Homeric poems. At Iliad 1.497, we have an account of the ascent
of Thetis, who Mæ 
 I ªÆ PæÆe ˇPºı  (‘went up
early in the morning to the great heaven and Olympus’).30 Olympus
and heaven are here run together as though they were the same place.
She Wnds Zeus sitting alone on the highest peak of Olympus, apart
from the other gods (Iliad 1.498–9).

29 Here, too, a Near Eastern source has been argued: Burkert (1992) 89–91;
M. L. West (1997a) 109–11.
30 On the meaning of Mæ , see Pulleyn (2000) ad loc.
54 Simon Pulleyn
It is hard not to feel that the scenery of Olympus is much more
fully worked out than that of heaven. It is a concrete location that
shakes when Zeus nods his head (Iliad 1.530). It is there that Thetis
goes for one of the most important and memorable scenes in the
Iliad. It is also on Olympus that the gods feast after that scene. The
gods are referred to as  ˇºØÆ
Æ  , ‘having their homes
on Olympus’ (Iliad 2.13, and elsewhere). Zeus also refers to them as
‹Ø Ł N K  ˇºfiø, ‘as many gods as are on Olympus’ (Iliad
1.566, and elsewhere). Given that Indic Dyaus was a sky-god, it is
reasonable to suppose that the inherited Indo-European tradition
had the gods living in the sky. In that case, we have to ask what was
the source of the idea of the gods living on Olympus. Once more,
questions arise of a Near Eastern inXuence.
When Israel went out of Egypt, the Bible tells us that God led the
Israelites through the wilderness towards the Red Sea, going before
them as a pillar of cloud by day and as a pillar of Wre by night. At the
beginning of the fourteenth chapter of the book of Exodus, we read:
Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the people of Israel to turn back and
encamp in front of Piha-Hiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of
Baal-Zephon; you shall encamp over against it by the sea.’31
Those of us who do not have the geography of Egypt in the exilic
period at our Wngertips might wonder at these place-names. It may be
conjectured that they were Egyptian frontier fortresses. Whatever
might be said of Piha-Hiroth and Migdol, Baal-Zephon is plainly a
most suggestive toponym. It means ‘Lord of Mount Zaphon’. In the
North-West Semitic languages, Zaphon is Wrst attested in the Ugaritic
texts as a name for Jebel al-Aqra , a mountain some 25 miles to the
north of Ugarit.32 In Classical Hebrew, the word sāpôn means ‘north’.
˙
It appears to be connected etymologically with the root sāpâ (‘to spy’).
˙
Thus we have an image of Baal sitting atop a mountain in the
north—a sort of lookout post that allows him to view the doings
of others.33

31 Cf. Numbers 33: 7.

32 van der Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst (1999) 927–9; cf. Eissfeldt (1932).
33 Jenni and Westermann (1997) iii. 1093. It is interesting semantically that Zeus is
called Πat Aesch. Supp. 381.
 Homer’s Religion 55
It is obvious that the reference to Baal-Zaphon in Exodus cannot
be referring to the mountain in Syria because the Israelites were not in
Syria. But it has been suggested that the image of Mount Zaphon
as the divine mountain par excellence in North-West Semitic
religions was responsible for the application of this toponym to
Baal sanctuaries outside Ugarit.34 Such a transference is not without
parallel; Dodds has remarked how the holy Mount Nysa was hard to
pin down geographically and that Hesychius enumerated Wfteen local
Nysas.35
The idea of the great god Baal living on a mountain in the north
doubtless inXuenced Israelite ideas of the divine abode. At Psalm 48:
1–2, we Wnd:
Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy
mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in
the far north (sāpôn), the city of the great King.
˙
Mount Zion is in fact one of the hills upon which Jerusalem was
built.36 The old Jebusite city is referred to at 2 Samuel 5: 7 as mesūdat
siyyôn (‘fortress Zion’).37 The writer glosses this as  ı̂r dāwı̄d (‘city of
˙
David’). The location of ‘fortress Zion’ is today taken to be at the
southern end of the eastern hill of Jerusalem.38 This has nothing to
do with the north, of course; but this psalm, doubtless under the
inXuence of Canaanite beliefs, conXates Mount Zion with Mount
Zaphan, the mountain in the north.
So in the Semitic sources we have the idea of a divine mountain in
the north. Mount Olympus, of course, is in Macedon, in the north of
Greece, albeit the massif of which it is part stretches somewhat
further south into Thessaly. It is a tempting inference that the
inspiration for the idea that the divine abode was a mountain rather
than the sky was an inXuence from Canaanite and other Near Eastern
sources. It is plainly alien to the Indo-European idea of gods living in
the sky. Furthermore, we may conjecture that this inXuence on the

34 van der Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst (1999) 152.
35 Dodds (1960) 146.
36 Smith (1907) 134–69; Vincent (1912) 142–6; Dalman (1930) 126–30; Simons
(1952) 60–4.
37 Cf. 1 Chronicles 11: 5.
38 Jenni and Westermann (1997) ii. 1072.
56 Simon Pulleyn
Greek epic poets was operating quite some time before Homer’s day.
Olympus is so frequently referred to in the poems and so well
supplied with formulae that it is unlikely that this innovation was
the work of the monumental composer (‘Homer’).
Also likely to be of Near Eastern and, more speciWcally, Semitic
origin is the epic picture of the gods meeting in assembly on their
mountain. We hear nothing of the kind from the Vedic sources; the
silence might be taken to indicate that the idea is not Indo-European
in origin.39 In the Old Testament, by contrast, we Wnd (Psalm 82: 1):
God has taken his place in the divine council ( adat  ēl); in the midst of the
gods he holds judgment.40
The idea of there being an assembly of gods, that is, a plurality, is not
consistent with the developed theology of the Old Testament, accord-
ing to which there are no other gods but Yahweh. It reXects an earlier
polytheistic phase out of which the monotheistic beliefs of Judaism
were later to develop.
The idea of a divine council appears again at Psalm 89: 7, where
there is a reference to God being feared in the assembly of the holy
ones (qehal qedōšı̂m). There is a similar idea in Babylonian texts,
where the assembly of gods is called puhru(m),41 as well as in Ugaritic
˘
texts, where the corresponding term is  dt.42
Martin West has pointed to Iliad 8.2–4:43
˘f
b ŁH Iªæc Ø
Æ æØŒæÆı
IŒæfi  ŒæıfiB ºı
Øæ
 ˇPºØ:
ÆPe
  Iªæı; Łd
 e  ¼Œı:
Zeus who delights in the thunderbolt assembled the gods
On the highest peak of many-ridged Olympus:
He himself spoke to them, and all the gods listened to him.

Here the fusion is complete between the idea of the mountain of the
gods and the assembly of the gods. Both of these ideas in the tradition

39 Note, however, the gods living together and holding assemblies on a mountain
in Old Norse tradition.
40 Cf. Mullen (1980).
41 Lambert and Millard (1969) 191.
42 Gordon (1947) iii. 255 (glossary entry no. 1455).
43 M. L. West (1997a) 178.
 Homer’s Religion 57
of Greek epic poetry seem to have a Semitic provenance. On the
ground, in practised Greek religion, the picture is rather diVerent: the
individual gods have their individual cult-centres in speciWc loca-
tions.44 In the Linear B tablets, for example, we Wnd references to
Hera receiving oVerings at Pylos (PY Tn 316 v. 9).45 Even the Greek
epic poets reXect this local nature of divine cult from time to time.
Hera has the epithet æª , ‘Argive’ (Iliad 4.8)—a reference to the
major centre of her cult between Argos and Mycenae.46 Athena
is, of course, especially associated with Athens.47 Whether the word
a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja on a Linear B tablet from Cnossus means ‘Lady of
Athens’ is debatable;48 but in Homer, the centre of Athena’s cult is
plainly Athens (Iliad 2.547, Odyssey 8.80–1). Examples could be
multiplied, but we need only note further that Zeus was said to
have a  ø  Łı
Ø , ‘sacred enclosure and smoking
altar’ at Gargarus on Mount Ida (Iliad 8.48), and that Aphrodite
had the same on the island of Paphos (Odyssey 8.363).
However, once the epic tradition has brought all the gods together
on Olympus (with only a few outliers),49 it is much easier for the idea
to emerge of Zeus as pre-eminent lord of the gods. A leader arises
more readily from the framework of a coherent group than in
circumstances where the gods are geographically scattered. Thus
Zeus can make that striking speech at Iliad 8.17–27 where he asserts
his absolute primacy over all the gods. The gods listen to him
in stunned silence. None of them denies what has been said. Athena,
in fact, admits that Zeus’ strength is irresistible (Iliad 8.32). Whilst it
is, of course, notorious that Zeus is capable of being diverted from
his purpose by his wife’s sexual blandishments (Iliad 14.153–360), it

44 See Kearns (2004) 61–3.

45 See Gérard-Rousseau (1968) 94–5.
46 Waldstein (1902–5); Amandry (1952).
47 It cannot be established whether the city’s name or the goddess’s was the earlier:
cf. Burkert (1985) 139.
48 KN V 52
Il. 6.305. See Gérard-Rousseau (1968) 44–5; Palmer (1963) 239.
49 Thetis is sometimes said to live in the briny depths of the sea (Il. 1.358) and
sometimes in the house of her husband Peleus (Il. 18.59–60; cf. 1.396). Compare Ino-
Leukothea (Od. 5.335) and Calypso (Od. 5.55). At Il. 20.4–6, Homer depicts Themis
summoning the gods to an assembly. She does so ‘ranging everywhere’ (fi j
Ø
ÆÆ)—that is, she has to go beyond Olympus to call in the rivers and nymphs.
But Wgures such as these, divine as they might be in some sense, do not Wgure as great
gods in the epic poets’ vision of the pantheon.
58 Simon Pulleyn
is never seriously in doubt in the Homeric poems that Zeus is the
most powerful of the gods.
A Wnal aspect of the Homeric Zeus to consider is his family life on
Olympus. Perhaps the most striking feature is that he is married
with children. Although scholars have noted a number of parallels
between the text of Homer and the Old Testament,50 it is unthinkable
that the God of the Old Testament might be married, much less have
lots of children. Whilst Canaanite and Babylonian sources tell us of
the loves of Baal and the wife of Anu, it seems that none of these
sources depict the dynamics of divine society quite as subtly as
Homer does.
Zeus is married to Hera, who also happens to be his sister. She is
not under his thumb, however, and is openly critical of him. This
seems to be a traditional element, since, when he promises to Thetis
that he will aid her son Achilles, he is already concerned about what
will happen when Hera Wnds out, saying that Hera will surely
provoke him with reproachful words. Indeed, as things are, she
always upbraids him and accuses him of giving too much help to
the Trojans (Iliad 1.518–21). Here is a picture of a husband who, if
not henpecked in the comic sense, is at least wary of the temper of his
shrewish wife. The scene on Olympus which closes the Wrst book of
the Iliad is drawn with much psychological insight and presents a
powerful contrast with the tragic events unfolding on earth: human
disputes are not so easily put to one side. One might well feel that this
facet of the poems bears the distinctive stamp of the monumental
composer Homer, forming as it does part of the consistent moral
outlook of the Iliad.
The one place where the family life of Zeus is drawn in a manner
closest to what we Wnd in Near Eastern sources is also the most
surprising. In book 5 of the Iliad, Aphrodite comes down from
Olympus and saves her son Aeneas from death at the hands of
Diomedes; he, however, encouraged by Athena, wounds her in the
wrist and insults her for beguiling young girls to suit her amorous
schemes (Iliad 5.339, 349). Aphrodite, unlike her Near Eastern
counterpart, is no warrior and immediately returns to Olympus to
complain to her parents.

50 Bogan (1658); Gordon (1965); M. L. West (1997a) passim.

 Homer’s Religion 59
One of the many curious things in this scene is that Aphrodite’s
mother is said to be Dione (Iliad 5.370, 381). This is the only place in
either epic where Dione appears. Aphrodite, according to an epic
formula, is a daughter of Zeus.51 But the presence of her mother
Dione in Olympus, alongside Hera, is perplexing. Kirk thought that
Homer ‘wished to gloss over the savage old tale of her birth in the sea
from Ouranos’ genitals (cf. Hes. Theog. 188–93)’.52 Etymologically, at
any rate, the name ˜Ø is a feminine proper noun built to the same
root as ˘ , ˜Ø . It has been suggested that the presence of Dione
in this scene was in fact motivated by a similar episode in the
Babylonian Gilgamesh epic.53 In the latter poem, Ishtar, goddess of
love, asks the hero Gilgamesh to have sex with her. Like Diomedes to
Aphrodite, Gilgamesh reproaches her with her sexual wantonness.
Ishtar immediately speeds oV to heaven and complains to her
parents. Her father is called Anu and her mother Antu. Apart
from the general thematic similarity between the two passages, it is
striking that Antu is nothing other than the feminine of Anu. In
other words, Antu is to Anu as Dione is to Zeus. The parallel seems
exact and compelling.
Jane Harrison thought that Zeus was originally the god of some
northern tribe with a patrilinear system. His original wife would have
been Dione. But in passing southwards, he left Dione at Dodona
and married Hera, an indigenous Wgure representing a matrilinear
system.54 This is the purest speculation, of course, and beyond
proof—save to say that Dione is recorded as Æ (‘temple-
sharer’) with Zeus at Dodona.55 Gilbert Murray also believed that
Dione was an earlier wife of Zeus, before Hera came on the scene.56
Burkert seeks to refute Murray by pointing out that, in the Linear B
texts (PY Tn 316 v. 8–10), Hera is already presented as the consort of
Zeus sharing his sanctuary at Tiryns.57 But it remains possible that

51 ˜Øe Łıªæ æ
 occurs 8 times in the Iliad, once in Odyssey, and 3 times
in Hymn. Hom. Aphr.
52 Kirk (1990) 99. See also Heubeck (1965).
53 Gilgamesh vi 1–91; ANET 83–5 or George (1999) 48–54. See Burkert (1992) 96–8.
54 Harrison (1963) 491. Assumptions about transitions from female to male control
are challenged by Sourvinou-Inwood (1988); but see Maass (1993) 3 and 238 n. 19.
55 Strabo 7.7.12, p. 452.
56 Murray (1925) 77.
57 Burkert (1985) 205.
60 Simon Pulleyn
the Iliadic ˜Ø looks back to a phase of Greek religion even
earlier than that recorded in the Linear B tablets.58 There is in the
Linear B texts a deity called di-wi-ja, whose name might at Wrst
blush appear to be a feminine version of the name of Zeus.59 How-
ever, she does not share his sanctuary, but has one all to herself called
di-u-ja-jo.60
It is likely that the scene with Dione commended itself on account
of its striking content to a poet composing in the Greek epic trad-
ition. We cannot say for sure whether or not this poet was the
monumental composer Homer. My own feeling is that the name
˜Ø is not likely to have been called into being by this poet simply
in order to render into hexameter verse the Babylonian name Antu.
Just as Babylonian can form feminine nouns by means of the inWx /t/,
so Greek can do the same by means of the suYx -ø, which was still
productive in the Archaic period.61 The name Dione could perfectly
well have been of high antiquity, formed within the Indo-European
tradition, as is indisputably the case for ˘ =˜Ø .62 Furthermore, we
know that Zeus already had a cult at Dodona—hence his epithet
˜ø
øÆE (Iliad 16.233). Strabo (7.7.12, p. 452) tells us that Dione
shared Zeus’ temple at Dodona in his day (Wrst century ad). It is
conceivable that Dione was already a Æ of ˘f ˜ø
øÆE
when the early Greek epic poets were at work.63 It seems unlikely
that one of these poets invented the name ˜Ø under the inXuence
of the Gilgamesh epic and that her cult at Dodona sprang into being
as a result of that literary reference. Given that there was already a
cult of Zeus at Dodona, it is perhaps more plausible to suppose that
the goddess Dione already existed there too and that her name was
thus available to the poet who fashioned this scene.
The story of Dione is an example of a Greek epic poet taking a
scene from an Akkadian poem and putting it to striking and apposite
eVect in its new context. This is a clear example of interaction with
Near Eastern sources, although we cannot determine whether the

58 Cf. Dunkel (1988–91) 17.

59 Gérard-Rousseau (1968) 67–70; cf. Dunkel (1988–91) 15–16.
60 Gérard-Rousseau (1968) 66–7.
61 Cf. Danae Akrisione at Il. 14.319 and Hera Argeione at Hes. fr. 23 a 20.
62 Ploix (1868) 213–22; Usener (1896) 16, 35–6, 326; Dunkel (1988–91).
63 Cf. Huxley (1969) 29.
 Homer’s Religion 61
original audiences would have perceived it as such. But we may at
least suspect that the same poet was relying on the inherited Indo-
European tradition when he reached for the name ˜Ø to render
the Babylonian Antu.

Iæ 

The episode of the wounding of Aphrodite is interesting to students

of Homeric religion not only because it motivates the visit to Dione.
It also tells us more than perhaps any other passage about the
physical nature of the gods as it could be conceived in the Greek
epic tradition.
When Diomedes’ spear grazes Aphrodite’s skin, Homer tells us
(Iliad 5.339–42):

Þ
 ¼æ ÆxÆ ŁE

Næ, x æ  ÞØ ÆŒæØ ŁEØ:
P ªaæ E 
ı , P  ı ÆYŁÆ r ,
hŒ IÆ  NØ ŒÆd IŁÆØ ŒÆºÆØ.
The immortal blood of the goddess Xowed—
Ichor, such as runs in [sc. the veins of] the immortal gods.
For they do not eat bread nor do they drink sparkling wine;64
Therefore they are bloodless and are called immortal.

First of all, it is noteworthy that the gods are not invulnerable. They
might not be able to be killed, but they certainly can be wounded.65
But what is more striking is the direct authorial explanation about
divine bloodlessness. Such asides are uncommon in Homer and it is

64 The epithet ‘sparkling’ (ÆYŁÆ) probably refers to the glint of light on wine in a
goblet. The adjective, of course, is being used descriptively rather than restrictively
(cf. Devine and Stephens (1999) 27); all wine is ‘sparkling’.
65 Admittedly, gods might die according to some traditions: Zeus on Crete (Ennius,
‘Euhemerus’ fr. 11 p. 228 Vahlen; Callim. Hymn 1.8–9); Apollo at Delphi (Euhemerus
T4f FGrH; Porph. Pythag. 16; see Fontenrose (1959) 86–9, 381); Dionysus
(Orphic Theogony frr. 301–17 Bernabé; Callim. fr. 643). But the closest Homer
seems to come to such traditions is the unreal condition of Il. 5.388: ‘then Ares
might have died, if . . .’.
62 Simon Pulleyn
thus all the more signiWcant that the narrator should step in here to
explain a crucial diVerence between men and gods.
Eating and drinking are fundamental human characteristics;
the gods do not eat and drink as men do. A correlate of this is that
they do not have blood; instead, ichor runs in their veins. Elsewhere,
too, the epic tradition describes human beings in terms of their
particular food. We see this in a phrase such as (æHÞ Q
Iææ ŒÆæe 
ıØ (‘[sc. mortals] who eat the fruit of ploughed
land’).66 There is also the epithet Iº
. It is not found in the
Iliad and only three times in the Odyssey, but always referring to
Iæ (‘men’).67 If, as seems likely, it means ‘who eat grain’, then it
is another piece of evidence for the idea that men are distinguished
by the food they eat.68 Odysseus comments that the Cyclops was a
monster, not at all like an I
æ ª تfiø, ‘a man who eats corn’
(Od. 9.191).
It is especially revealing that the passage set out above begins by
referring to the ¼æ ÆxÆ of Aphrodite. It is worth pausing to
consider the meaning of ¼æ. The IE root signifying death was
*mrt-.69 The Latin cognate is mors, mortis.70 From this root was
˙
formed a denominative adjective *mr-to-s, ‘mortal’ (the reXex of
˙
which in Greek is æ ).71 The initial /a/ in ¼æ is privative.
It derives from IE *n-. Thus an original IE *n-mr-to-s yields ambrotos.
˙ ˙ ˙
Whereas initial *mr- becomes *br-, medial *-mr- becomes *-mbr-.
The adjective ¼æ therefore means ‘immortal’.72

66 Il. 6.42; cf. Hymn. Hom. Ap. 365.

67 Od. 1.349, 6.8, 13.261.
68 On the etymology, see further S. R. West on Od. 1.349 in Heubeck, West, and
Hainsworth (1988) 119; M. L. West on Hes. Theog. 512.
69 In some of the daughter languages, the noun is built as an i-stem: Lithuanian
mirtı̀s and Avestan m@r@ ti-.
70 Latin also shows an i-stem treatment. Within Latin, the evolution was probably
*mrtis > *mortis > *morts > mors. See Sihler (1995) 318.
˙ The presence of /b/ might seem hard to explain at Wrst sight, but there is in fact a
71
well-established assimilative tendency under which initial *mr- becomes *br-. Thus
*mr-to-s > brotos (Gk. æ ). There is a parallel in Greek æÆ , Latin brevis. The
˙
original Indo-European /m/ is vouchsafed by Avestan m@r@zu-, from which the
Indo-European original *mrghu is reconstructed. See Sihler (1995) 212.
72 According to Thieme˙(1952b), there were in Greek two homonyms ¼æ
I and ¼æ II meaning ‘conferring vitality’ and ‘immortal’ respectively. He seems
to come to this position chieXy because he believed that it did not make sense to
describe as immortal things such as night (Od. 11.330) or olive oil (Od. 8.364–5) or a
 Homer’s Religion 63
Although the Greek epic tradition is at pains to make it clear that
the gods are ‘bloodless’ (IÆ  ), this cannot be done without
referring to blood. So we are told that Aphrodite has ¼æ ÆxÆ
(‘immortal blood’), but then that this is not actually blood at all, but
a special immortal Xuid with a name of its own, Næ.
Does all of this mean that the gods do not eat or drink at all,
or rather that they eat and drink diVerent things from mortals?
According to Homer, what the gods eat is called Iæ .73 This
word appears etymologically quite transparent; it must mean either
‘immortality’ or ‘immortal [sc. food]’.74 The root is the same as
that seen in ¼æ ; the intervocalic sigma is the result of the
coalescence of the /t/ of the root with the /y/ found in the common

loom (Od. 10.222) or armour (Il. 17.193–6). But it is not clear why it should be any
easier to think of these as ‘Lebenskraft spendend’ (conferring vitality). The armour of
Achilles was made by a god at the request of a goddess and given to the son of a
goddess; it is not diYcult to imagine that the poet could Wguratively describe as
immortal something so closely associated with divinity. The loom of Circe might
likewise be explained: is it any more plausible to suppose that a loom confers vitality
than to say that it is immortal because it belongs to an immortal? The same is true of
the olive oil: the immortal Graces apply it to the body of the immortal Aphrodite and
we are speciWcally told that the oil is intimately connected with immortality as it
Łf K
Ł ÆNb KÆ , ‘surrounds the everlasting gods’ (Od. 8.365). Night
presumably is immortal because the gods are responsible for it (Od. 23.242–3,
Il. 16.567) as they are for the day (Il. 19.1–2); it is less plausible that night ‘confers
vitality’ because it is the time for restorative sleep (cf. S. R. West on Od. 4.429). The
use of the related adjective IæØ to describe sleep might also owe something to
the personiWcation of Sleep as a quasi-divine power that can overcome all gods and
men, even Zeus (Il. 14.233–7, 352–3).
73 The precise nature of ambrosia has been the subject of much scholarly discus-
sion, chieXy focused on whether it was a liquid or a solid. See Roscher (1883); Onians
(1951) 292–9; M. L. West on Hes. Theog. 640. At Il. 5.777, Simois is said to ‘send up’
ambrosia for horses to feed on (ŁÆØ); it is instructive to compare Il. 13.35,
where, if IæØ r
Ææ is the same as Iæ , the use of the verb 
ÆØ
suggests solid food. At Od. 5.94, Circe puts out nectar and ambrosia for Hermes
and we are told ÆPaæ › E ŒÆd qŁ (‘and he ate and drank’). Given that nobody
really doubts that nectar is a liquid, it would appear from this that ambrosia is a solid
food. But when the Cyclops describes the wine that Odysseus gives him as
Iæ  ŒÆd ŒÆæ . . . Iææ%, ‘a drop of ambrosia and nectar’ (Od. 9.359),
it sounds almost as though the two could be mixed to form a Xuid.
74 Iæ  is either a feminine abstract noun in its own right (the feminine
gender is perfectly normal for abstract nouns in Greek) or else it is an adjective and
there is an ellipse of a noun such as K
ø

. The former view was taken by Buttmann
(1840) 133 and Durante (1976) 56–7; the latter favoured by Güntert (1919) 158.
64 Simon Pulleyn
adjectival suYx -Ø .75 So the gods have a special food that in its very
name recalls their immortal nature.76
In spite of this apparently straightforward Indo-European etymol-
ogy, Walter Leaf thought that Iæ  had nothing to do with
immortality but meant ‘fragrant’. He thought that it was a loanword
from Semitic amara, meaning ‘ambergris, the famous perfume to
which Oriental nations assign mythical miraculous properties’.77
Following his line of argument, it may be noted that ambrosia is
sometimes described as something used to anoint the body, or as a
cleanser. At Iliad 16.670, we are told that the corpse of Sarpedon is to
be anointed with ambrosia. It does not follow, however, that its
primary characteristic is that of a perfume; indeed, it is more likely
that its role here is that of a preservative. At Iliad 14.170–1 Hera uses
ambrosia to clean oV dirt from her skin (Ie æe ƒæ j
ºÆÆ Æ ŒŁæ). But there is no mention here of any perfume.
It is true that the Greeks do appear to have associated ambrosia with
an agreeable fragrance,78 but it does not follow from this that it was
originally a perfume or unguent.
A more fundamental obstacle to Leaf ’s theory is that no word
amara is attested in any Semitic language at the appropriate period.
It is not even clear to what Semitic language(s) Leaf was referring.79
W. B. Stanford considered another loanword: not amara, but ‘Baby-
lonian amru ’.80 Garvie has described this notion as implausible.81 The
situation is, in fact, worse than that, since there is no Babylonian

75 Sihler (1995) 149.

76 Thieme (1952b) 28 thought that Iæ  was derived from his ¼æ I
(‘conferring vitality’) and so took it to mean ‘vitality’. For the reasons given above,
I do not believe that there were two wholly diVerent meanings of ¼æ and so I
view Iæ  as primarily denoting immortality.
77 Leaf (1886) i. 38 on Il. 2.19.
78 Hymn. Hom. Bacch. 36–7 (and with the epiphany of gods Hymn. Hom. Merc.
229–32; Hymn. Hom. Dem. 277–8; Thgn. 8–9; [Aesch.] Prom. 115). At Od. 4.445–6,
we are told that Iæ  has the power to suppress bad smells.
79 Arabic has a term  anbara meaning ‘ambergris’ but it is of the wrong shape and
not attested until around the 8th cent. ad. Akkadian murru and Hebrew mōr/môr
both mean ‘myrrh’ rather than ‘ambergris’. But, even if one allowed for some very
considerable semantic slippage, it is not clear that either could yield Gk. Iæ . In
any case, they already have their counterparts in the Greek ææÆ=æÆ (see LSJ).
80 Stanford (1947) 281 on Od. 4.445; cf. on Od. 18.192–4.
81 Garvie (1994) 222.
 Homer’s Religion 65
word amru with an appropriate meaning. Once, certainly, an
Akkadian ideogram (ŠIMþKUŠU) was tentatively read as šimam-ru-
um and interpreted as ‘ambergis’.82 But the more accurate reading of
the ideogram seems to be kukru.83 In an alphabetic script, it is scarcely
possible to imagine such an error arising; but where ideograms are
involved, a mistaken reading can easily result in a wholly
wrong pronunciation being assigned. Stanford thus seems to have
had in mind a vocabulum which has subsequently been shown
not to exist.84 Only the Indo-European etymology of Iæ 
remains viable.
So the gods eat an immortal food. This digniWed notion of divine
diVerence is undermined by a unique but signiWcant passage in
which the gods are portrayed as dining on the hecatombs oVered
to them (Iliad 9.535). Elsewhere in the Homeric epics, we never Wnd
the gods feeding upon sacriWcial portions, nor even upon the fatty
Π that rises to heaven from burning victims.85 Indeed, Zeus says
that sacriWces are the ªæÆ of the gods (Iliad 4.49). And ªæÆ is
nothing other than the physical expression of one’s Ø
or ‘worth’ in
the eyes of others. The gods do not need sacriWce to survive; they
demand it as a mark of respect.
This avoidance of the idea that the Olympian gods might need to
feed on roast meat and fat is in marked distinction to the picture we
Wnd in some parts of the Near Eastern tradition. One may contrast
the revolting scene where the Babylonian gods are said to gather like
Xies around a sacriWcal victim—such was their hunger after the
Xood interrupted the usual stream of sacriWcial oVerings from
humans on earth.86 Likewise, when the Hittite god Telepinus
disappeared, a famine arose and the gods started to perish from
hunger (ANET 126).87 There is also a marked contrast with other

82 See von Soden (1965) i, s.v. ‘amrum II’, referring to Landsberger and Krumbie-
gel (1934) 120.
83 See Gelb et al. (1956–), s.v. ‘amrum’.
84 There are other words in Akkadian that appear as amrum in the lexica but they
do not have an appropriate meaning—one means ‘seen’ or ‘chosen’ and the other
means ‘beam’ or ‘timber’.
85 See Pulleyn (2000) on Il. 1.66.
86 Epic of Gilgamesh xi 162 ¼ George (1999) 94.
87 Contrast the similar version of Hymn. Hom. Cer., where, however, the gods are
not starved, but just deprived of their ‘honoriWc privileges and sacriWces’ (311–12).
66 Simon Pulleyn
parts of the Greek epic tradition itself. The whole story of Zeus and
Prometheus at Mecone only makes sense if Zeus actually wants to eat
the best portions of the sacriWcial animal (Hes. Theog. 535–60). In
the Homeric Hymn to Hermes we are told that the infant god was
Wlled with desire to eat the meat that he roasted (130–2). We can see
clearly how the Iliad and the Odyssey diVer on this point both from
some Near Eastern ideas and from other parts of the native Greek
epic tradition.
It is likely that the reference to the gods eating meat at Iliad 9.535
represents the survival of an earlier, perhaps cruder, conception of
their nature. By the time the Iliad and Odyssey reach their Wnal form,
this has been all but entirely suppressed. Whether we can lay this
change in outlook at the door of the monumental composer is
unknowable. It is, however, improbable that such a fundamental
change can be attributed to one person. It is deeply established in
the fabric of the poems and seems to go beyond the sort of stylistic
choice that one might ascribe to one individual.
This state of aVairs in not unlike what we Wnd in the Old
Testament. Whilst it is true that the Pentateuch contains a wealth
of detailed instructions concerning the abundant sacriWces that God
required to be made every day at the Temple in Jerusalem, there is no
sense that He needed these for sustenance. They are oVerings
demanded by God’s majesty for the maintenance of good relations
with humanity. But even this view comes to be reinterpreted, as when
the psalmist says:
For thou hast no delight in sacriWce; were I to give thee a burnt oVering,
thou wouldst not be pleased.
The sacriWce acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51: 16–17).88
Whilst Iæ  is food for the immortals, it is not clear that it
confers immortality, or that the vital power of the gods somehow
depends on it. There is in Homeric epic no episode like that in
Wagner’s Das Rheingold, where the gods become weak for want of
the life-giving apples cultivated by Freya. Indeed, we have already

88 But there is in the Psalms at least a glance at the idea that angels eat a food
diVerent from that of mortals: Psalm 78: 25. Briggs and Briggs (1986) ii. 193 see a
reference here to ‘a late conception, like the Greek ambrosia’.
 Homer’s Religion 67
seen that nectar and ambrosia were given to Achilles; but he did not
thereby become immortal. For all that, the bard of the Homeric Hymn
to Hermes speaks of three large larders in the Cyllenean cave where
the nectar and ambrosia were kept under lock and key (247–8).
Where these substances ultimately came from is not clear. Simois
could generate it spontaneously for the horses of Hera and Athena
(Iliad 5.777), but one imagines that the gods had other supplies.
There is a reference in the Odyssey to doves bringing nectar to Zeus
and having to take a detour to avoid the Clashing Rocks (12.61–3).
Overall, there does seem to be a sense in Homer that the words
Iæ  and IæØ have a special prestige. They are piled up in
certain episodes so as to give the impression that the poet perceives
them as especially emblematic of the gods. Thus, when Aphrodite is
wounded by Diomedes, we hear that not only her blood but also her
very clothing is IæØ (Iliad 5.338). The aura of immortality
permeates the dress as well as the wearer.89 In the case of Hermes, this
extends even to his sandals (Iliad 21.507). Even more markedly,
when Hera is beautifying herself to inveigle Zeus into bed, we
hear that she puriWes her skin with Iæ  (Iliad 14.170), that she
anoints herself with IæØ olive oil (Iliad 14.172), that her hair
is IæØ (Iliad 14.177), and that her clothing is IæØ
(Iliad 14.178). Perhaps the word is to be understood within the
tradition to denote anything that is infected by the charisma of
the deathless gods. Their food is just the most striking example
of that phenomenon.

ŒÆæ

When Euripides’ chorus of Bacchants sing of the earth Xowing with

the ‘nectar’ of bees (Bacchae 141), they are of course referring to
honey. But nectar in the Homeric poems is not honey; that is ºØ. In
the epics, people consume honey in the normal course of events

89 There are similar references to ¼æÆ ¥ÆÆ at Od. 7.259–60, 265, 24.59.
Currie, p. 34 above, perceives a link between ¼æÆ ¥ÆÆ and the conferment of
immortality at Iliad 16.670 ¼ 680.
68 Simon Pulleyn
together with cheese and wine.90 Nectar, on the other hand, is usually
reserved for the consumption of the gods. It is therefore natural to
consider it in connection with ambrosia.
The very Wrst mention of nectar in the Iliad is in the scene at the
end of book 1 where the gods are feasting and Hephaestus is acting as
their waiter (Iliad 1.597–8):
ÆPaæ › E ¼ººØØ ŁE K
%ØÆ AØ
NØ ªºıŒf ŒÆæ Ie ŒæBæ Iø.
Then he, going from left to right, to all the other gods
Poured out sweet nectar, drawing it from the mixing bowl.

There are several features worthy of note here. First, nectar is de-
scribed as a drink. This might seem an obvious point, but plainly it
was not universally understood because in later Greek we Wnd refer-
ence to the gods eating nectar rather than drinking it.91 Secondly,
nectar is said to be sweet. The root of the adjective used (ªºıŒ ) is
also applied to honey (Odyssey 20.69 ªºıŒæ ). But wine is also said
to be sweet, although the adjective is a diVerent one (
 : Odyssey
10.519, 11.27).92 The sweetness of honey is plainly connected with
that of wine—thus wine is often referred to as ºØ

, ‘honey-
sweet’ (Iliad 6.258, Odyssey 18.151). Thirdly, it is striking that
Hephaestus serves nectar just as though it were wine. Thus, it is
mixed in a mixing-bowl and the verb used (Nø) means literally
‘to pour wine’. Elsewhere, nectar is said to be red (Iliad 19.38), just
like wine (Odyssey 5.165).93
In fact, the consumption of nectar is one of the chief ways in which
gods and humans are diVerentiated in the epics. For all that Hephaes-
tus is described in language more appropriate to a wine-waiter, the

90 Il. 11.624–31, Od. 10.234, 20.69.

91 Alcman fr. 100 Bgk ¼ fr. 42 Davies. Either this was an alternative (and possibly
parallel) conception or else a misunderstanding; cf. Hes. Theog. 640, ŒÆæ 
Iæ  ;  æ Łd ÆPd 
ıØ. On its face, this is a reference to eating nectar,
but the verb might be being used zeugmatically.
92 Wine is never described as ªºıŒ or ªºıŒæ , but as 
 . This word is
etymologically cognate with Latin suavis. It is likely that, even in the context of
taste, ªºıŒ and 
 have a slightly diVerent semantic range. The diVerence is
perhaps clearest at Od. 20.69, where both wine and honey appear in the same line
with diVerent adjectives.
93 Honey, on the other hand, is ºøæ, ‘pale’: Il. 11.631.
 Homer’s Religion 69
gods are never depicted drinking wine in Homer.94 We have already
looked at the bloodlessness of the gods in the context of Iliad 5.339–
42. There is an elegant symmetry in the idea that Olympian gods do
not drink wine and do not have blood. But when Homer describes
Hephaestus as an N using a ξ
æ, are we to suppose that
this is a metaphor? It is a little hard to see what would be the point
of describing divine potation in human terms. An alternative is to
posit an earlier stage in the epic tradition in which the gods did
indeed drink wine. When we hear of Ganymede being taken up to
Olympus to be Zeus’ cup bearer, the verb used of him is Nø;
but this time, there is no mention of nectar (Iliad 20.234). On its face,
this passage suggests that Ganymede’s job was to serve wine.
Later, however, this idea has been abandoned in favour of a
more rareWed and digniWed conception of gods who drink only
nectar. We cannot tell for sure when this conception entered the
Greek epic tradition; on balance it is probably unlikely that such a
fundamental change in religious outlook was the innovation of the
monumental composer.
That it was once felt that gods somehow wanted wine may be
inferred from the practice of libation, of pouring wine onto the
ground before drinking or onto sacriWcial animals.95 We never Wnd
it said in Homer that the gods actually drink the wine that is poured
out for them. There is thus a parallelism in the way that the Homeric
poems present ambrosia and nectar. Although we are once told that
the gods feed upon hecatombs, elsewhere they eat only ambrosia.
Likewise, although some scenes involving the consumption of nectar
are inXuenced by the paraphernalia of the sommelier, the prevailing
picture is of gods who drink something very diVerent from wine.
We have seen that the food of the gods was, by its very name,
immortal. It is natural to ask what can be gleaned about ŒÆæ by
considering its etymology. Two main theories have been put forward.
According to the Wrst, ŒÆæ is of Semitic origin, being derived from
the root qtr, which denotes ‘smoke’ or ‘incense’.96 The theory is that

94 But there is probably a reference to it happening in the past at Il. 20.234:

see below.
95 For a sacriWcial context: Il. 1.463 with Pulleyn ad loc.; for a non-sacriWcial
libation, Il. 10.579.
96 See Levin (1971); followed by M. L. West (1997a) 39 n. 157.
70 Simon Pulleyn
Greek ŒÆæ is derived from a passive form of qtr 97 (formed by
preWxing /n/) meaning ‘incensed’ and refers to a ‘supernal beverage
(not necessarily wine) scented with myrrh or other incense from the
altar’.98 Morphologically, this is possible. There is certainly a passive
of this sort of shape (if we do not worry about the vowels)
in Hebrew,99 Akkadian,100 and Ugaritic.101 But the problem is
that the root qtr is never found in any Semitic source in this N-pas-
sive form before the time of Rashi,102 and even then not in a context
where it applies to a drink that was somehow connected with the
gods. It is hard to believe that a word that was supposedly important
enough in Near Eastern civilizations to be borrowed into Greek
to describe the drink of the gods can simply have disappeared
without trace.
However, there is a perfectly respectable alternative etymology
for ŒÆæ.103 Various scholars have demonstrated that such an
Indo-European etymology for the word is possible.104 A number of
conjectures have been made. The old-fashioned view was that the
word was made up of a supposed negative preWx =-,105 followed by
the Œ- seen in Œ ø (‘I kill’).106 The meaning would be ‘unkillable’
or, eVectively, ‘immortal’. The obvious defect with this is that the root
of Œ ø is Œ- and the /n/ cannot simply be ignored. On another
analysis, the word is made up of the preWx =- followed by a zero
grade of the root found in the word ξ , found only in Hesychius
and glossed by him as Œæ (‘corpses’). The meaning would be
something like ‘un-death’. We do not know where Hesychius found

97 For Hebrew qtr, see Baumgartner (1958) 835–6; for Akkadian qatāru, see Black,
˙ (2000) 286; for Ugaritic qtr, see Gordon (1947) iii. 266 (glossary
George, and Postgate
no. 1778). ˙
98 Levin (1971) 34.
99 Genesius, Kautzsch, and Cowley (1910) 137–9, 510.
100 Huehnegard (2000) 358.
101 Sivan (2001) 132.
102 Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, b. ad 1040, d. ad 1105. See Levin (1971) 35.
103 The range of views is indicated by Frisk (1960–72) s.v.
104 Thieme (1952a) 5–15; (1961) 88; (1974) 158–63; Watkins (1995) 391–7.
105 Cf. æ
(‘unerring’< ±Ææø), 
 (‘windless’< ¼ ). Note that,
with the widespread acceptance of laryngeal theory, Greek æ
; 
 cannot
now be related to a putative privative preWx, nē-/ne. See Sihler (1995) 106.
106 Autenrieth (1984 (1873)) s.v.
 Homer’s Religion 71
the word Œæ and nowhere is there attested a word *ŒÆæ- exhibit-
ing zero-grade vocalism and meaning ‘death’. Although that is not of
itself fatal to the etymology, one strongly suspects that Hesychius’
gloss was based on a mistaken back-formation from the Homeric
word Œæ ø, deWned by LSJ as ‘to bury with due honours’. One can
see how somebody might suppose that a verb with that meaning was
built on a noun meaning ‘corpse’; but the likelihood is that it refers
rather to grave goods and was built on the root ξ- seen in the
noun ŒæÆ , ‘possession’ (Iliad 10.216, 24.235). The verb would thus
mean something more like ‘deck with possessions’, an appropriate
term in a society that uses funeral gifts. The etymology based on
ξ is therefore not secure. Of all the Indo-European etymologies
put forward to date, the best is undoubtedly that according to which
the word is built from *nek- þ*terH2 . The Wrst element means ‘death’,
reXected in Latin nex; the second element is a verb meaning ‘to
overcome’ and is attested in other Indo-European languages.107
Thus nectar is that which ‘overcomes death’.
Not only is this etymology satisfactory on the formal level, but the
idea of transcending death by special food or drink appears to go
back to the inherited Indo-European poetic tradition, to judge from
the evidence of Vedic. The Atharvaveda contains a number of spells
and magical recipes; in particular this line:108

ténaudanénā´ti tarāni mrtyúm

˙ ˙
by that rice-mess let me overpass death109

Paul Thieme showed that Iśopanisad 14 is also directly relevant:110

˙
vināśéna mrtyúm tı̄rtvā´ sámbhūtyāmŕtam aśnute
˙ ˙
having crossed death by destruction, he reaches immortality
by becoming

As Watkins observes,111 this line contains three inherited Indo-

European lexical items:
107 See Watkins (1995) 343–4. ReXexes are seen in Hittite tarhta (‘vanquished’)
˘
and Vedic atārı̄t (‘overcame’). Greek -Ææ must represent a zero-grade -trH2.
108 AV 4.35.1. 109 See Schmitt (1961) 88. ˙
110 Thieme (1965). 111 Watkins (1995) 392.
72 Simon Pulleyn
vināśéna112 . . . tı̄rtvā´ . . . amŕtam
˙
that are etymologically identical to, and recapitulate in the same
order, the elements of Iliad 19.347:

mœj-taq  ŒÆd Ilbqos 

This is a most elegant demonstration.113 I would only add that it is

highly satisfactory to have an Indo-European etymology both for the
food of the gods and their drink that places both words in the same
readily understandable semantic Weld.
We have already seen how the prestigious term IæØ
was sometimes used to refer to the clothing of the immortals.114
Interestingly, the word Œæ is also used of garments—but not
those belonging to gods. It is used to describe the clothing that
Achilles deWles in his mourning by pouring down ashes over his
head when he learns of the death of Patroclus (Iliad 18.25). It is
also used of the dress worn by Helen, at which Aphrodite tugs to
attract her attention (Iliad 3.385). Are these clothes ‘deathless’ or
somehow divine? It is possible that Achilles’ chiton acquires some
divine association if we are to think of it as having been among the
clothes that we are told his mother Thetis packed up for him in a
trunk (Iliad 16.221–4). Helen, of course, is a daughter of Zeus, and so
has divine associations. It certainly seems more appropriate to think
of ŒæØ clothes as being somehow associated with immortality,
like IæØØ ones,115 than as deriving their peculiar character from
having been censed or likened to wine that has been smoked by
incense.116

112 nāś is etymologically connected with Latin nec- and IE *nek-; that /ś/ is the
Sanskrit reXex of inherited IE */k/ can be appreciated if one looks at the /ś/ in Skt.
daśa (‘ten’) beside the /k/ in Lat. decem and Gk.
ŒÆ. This is the so-called ‘centum/
satem’ division; see Szemerényi (1996) 59.
113 It also goes some way answering Levin’s criticism that there is no Sanskrit or
other cognate for ŒÆæ. Whilst there is no single word, the collocation of Skt.
vināśéna . . . tı̄rtvā´ is highly suggestive and might reXect the ultimate source of the
Greek word in the inherited Indo-European poetic tradition.
114 Il. 5.338, 14.178, 21.507.
115 See above, n. 89.
116 Notwithstanding the Hesychian gloss ŒæŁ _ KŁıŁ.
 Homer’s Religion 73
Given that the chief thrust of my analysis of the terms Iæ 
and ŒÆæ has been to concentrate on their immortal aspects,
it is instructive to ask what happens when these substances are
administered to humans.
After the death of Patroclus, Achilles fasts relentlessly. He will not
eat because he cares now only for killing and blood and the groans
of the dying (Iliad 19.205–14). This is a terrible image of the warrior
who is single-minded and so set apart from his comrades that he does
not even recognize the basic human need for food. Odysseus, on the
other hand, is far more practical (albeit far less mighty in battle) (Iliad
19.217–19). He tells Achilles Wrmly that no soldier can ignore the
needs of his belly (Iliad 19.230–2). As he memorably puts it, the
Achaeans cannot mourn the dead with their stomachs (Iliad
19.225). But Achilles will not eat. It is therefore eventually Zeus who
has to tell Athena to go to Achilles and instil117 nectar and ambrosia
into his breast ¥Æ 
Ø ºØe ¥ŒÆØ, ‘lest hunger come upon
him’ (Iliad 19.348). One might detect a delicate undermining of the
image of Achilles’ robustness here; but, at the same time, it is surely
only the most extraordinary mortals who are to be fed on the food
of the gods.
Just as nectar and ambrosia can save Achilles from starvation, so
they can preserve the corpse of Patroclus from corruption. Thus
Thetis instils a mixture of the two into Patroclus. Homer rather
interestingly says that she pours it into his nostrils (Iliad 19.39);
doubtless this is a touch of delicacy to avoid the grotesque image
of a sort of food being forced into the mouth of a dead man. The
purpose, after all, is not to feed but almost to embalm.118
All of this emphasizes the enormous physical gulf that separates
humans from gods. But, as GriYn has pointed out, there is a
corresponding moral gulf.119 When Aphrodite visits the battleWeld,
she does so safe in the knowledge that she has a return ticket to
117 The verb % at Il. 19.348 suggests a liquid mixture.
118 It cannot necessarily be inferred from this that Homeric Greeks were familiar
with that part of the Egyptian practice of embalming described by Herodotus (2.86.3)
that involved the removal of the brain via the nostrils and the pouring in of
preservative preparations.
119 GriYn (1980) 93 ‘It is the pressure of mortality which imposes on men the
compulsion to have virtues; the gods, exempt from that pressure, are, with perfect
consistency, less ‘‘virtuous’’ than men.’
74 Simon Pulleyn
Olympus. She can be a tourist, a spectator on the struggles and death
of others, safe in the knowledge that she is never in hazard of her life.
The contrast between her dilettante excursion to the battleWeld and
the heroic bravery of Hector and Patroclus is absolute and arresting.
It is sometimes said that mortal warriors are digniWed or ennobled
when, at the peak of their powers, they become
Æ Ø r (‘like a
god’). But one might in the end conclude that the human world of
bread, wine, comradeship, and real moral courage is more admirable
than the shining allurements of Olympus.
 3
Homer and Herodotus
Christopher Pelling

Let us start not with Homer or with Herodotus, but with tragedy.
Jean-Pierre Vernant famously suggested that the ‘tragic moment’, the
combination of circumstances that made tragedy so dominant a
Wfth-century genre, came at a time when the sense of a past heroic
age and code of values coincided with a new sensibility for the
community and the rule of law.1 That individualistic world needed
to be distant, but not too distant, just as the role of interventionist
gods needed to be distant, but not too distant, from everyday experi-
ence. The whole created a conceptual mix where the relation, often
the clash, of these two worlds of thought and action could be
explored with particular urgency and force. This is not the place to
engage directly with Vernant’s analysis of tragedy, though thinking
about Herodotus in a similar way may suggest some reXections
that apply to tragedy too. Perhaps, indeed, the world of the great
individuals may not be so distant from Wfth-century culture after all;
and perhaps, whatever we Wnd happening in Herodotus or indeed in
tragedy, we may Wnd that Homer was already doing himself.
Vernant’s analysis certainly provides a thought-provoking set
of ideas to play with, and this chapter will play with them in
historiography too. The Herodotus I shall portray is one who
asks questions which overlap with the ones that Vernant suggests: a
Herodotus who operates with some idea of a distinctive set of
1 Vernant (1988 (1972)). Since Vernant these ideas have been much discussed:
particularly helpful in diVerent ways are Goldhill (1986), esp. ch. 6, Gould (1996),
and Easterling (1997).
76 Christopher Pelling
Homeric values, and one who is interested in questioning how distant
any such way of thinking is from the world of Wfth-century politics.
The answer suggested by the text is doubtless that it varies; that is
always the answer with Herodotus. But if at times Herodotus
presents us with people who are thinking and acting in ways surpris-
ingly close to their Homeric counterparts, that suggests a way
in which he read Homer as well as an interpretation of the more
recent past.
Nor is it a bad way. Not merely does the Homeric text itself look
back to an earlier generation, and weigh how much things
have changed;2 it also must have raised for its early hearers, just as
for all hearers and readers since, the question how diVerent the world
of these heroes really is from the world around them. There is all the
glamour, all the wonder of a grand expedition on that scale, all
the peculiarly visible role of the gods: men then were so much stronger
than men are now (Il. 12.445–9). Yet so much comes closer to home,3
and not just the perennial contrast of good kings and bad, nor even
the love of Hector and Andromache. One of the lasting paradoxes of
the Iliad is that, in that world which is apparently so diVerent, even an
Achilles—apparently the most special of special cases—faces di-
lemmas and makes choices and is wracked by guilt which we all can
understand, which are indeed counterparts of dilemmas and choices
and guilt-feelings that can be felt in the world we know.

2 Cf. Strasburger (1972) 28–9, who also wonders if the past generation that Nestor
and others look back to (e.g. Agamemnon and Diomedes at Il. 4.370–418) has some
counterpart in the portrayal of the gods too, themselves so much more sleek and
fashionable than the rugged mortals of an earlier age—and, we might add, than the
more rugged past of immortals too: e.g. Il. 1.396–406, 590–4, 5.383–404, 15.18–24.
Divine violence like that in the past may still be threatened, e.g. 8.10–17, but the
threat is now enough to impose order.
3 Perhaps, indeed, more comes close to home than can be suggested here: van
Wees (1992) argues that much of the poem’s social construction reXects conditions of
the Dark Age or early Archaic period rather than (or as well as) a heroized distant past
(e.g. 58, ‘the economic organisation of the household, the social organisation up to
the level of the town, and the political organisation up to the level of the state
appear not only coherent but also entirely compatible with what we know of
conditions in Greece in the eighth and early seventh century’). van Wees also argues
forcefully for a degree of idealization in the Homeric presentation of the princes, able
as they so often show themselves to turn battles in a way that may justify their elite
privileges: that too is in line with what I am suggesting here, as the other, more
glamorous side of the coin.
 Homer and Herodotus 77

‘ M OS T H O M E RI C ’

For Longinus Herodotus was  ˇæØŒÆ , ‘most Homeric’ (13.2);

in the new Halicarnassus inscription he is ‘the prose, historical
Homer’.4 It is easier to make, and indeed to accept,5 those grand
generalizations than to be sure that ‘Homer’ is what comes to
Herodotus’ listeners’ minds every time he occurs to us, or indeed
that ‘Homer’ would have meant to Herodotus what he means to us.6
Some Homeric phrases doubtless became more general clichés, and
perhaps were already proverbial or colloquial when Homer used them
himself;7 other thematic patterns that we Wnd in Homer and in
Herodotus we can doubtless Wnd in tragedy or comedy too, or indeed
just in life. But this chapter will focus on the why and the where
of Homeric touches, and will therefore concentrate on passages
where Homeric ‘touches’ are reasonably uncontroversial, either
because they are particularly roistering or because they come in

4 Isager (1998): see also Lloyd-Jones (1999) and now Isager and Pedersen (2004).
5 For what Longinus in particular may have had in mind cf. Russell (1964) 115,
quoted and discussed by Woodman (1988) 3–4. Among the many more general
discussions I have found Huber (1965), Strasburger (1972), Hornblower (1994b)
63–9, and Boedeker (2002) particularly illuminating, along with the commentaries of
Stein.
6 On this last point see esp. Graziosi (2002), showing that ‘Homer’ would in
Herodotus’ day have meant considerably more than the poet of the Iliad and
Odyssey —though Herodotus himself rejects Homeric authorship in the case of the
Cypria and is suspicious in that of the Epigoni (2.117, 4.32 with Graziosi (2002) 124
n. 82, 181, 193–5). In general on Herodotus’ critical approach to Homer, especially as
a historical source (a topic I cannot go into here), cf. Neville (1977), Marincola (1997a)
225–6, Ford (2002) 146–52, Graziosi (2002) 110–18, and the works they quote. Nor is
this the place to debate the diVerent ways that a background of oral tradition may be
relevant for both authors: there is much of interest here in Luraghi (2001).
7 See e.g. Macleod (1982), index s.v. ‘colloquial phrases’. This sort of language
traditionality can in principle be distinct from the traditionality of the epic formula,
for such proverbs can be independent of metrical form: thus Bruno Currie points out
to me the proverb constructed around
æF and æ reXected at Il. 22.126, Od.
19.164, and Hes. Theog. 35, each time with a diVerent metrical shape. That said, the
metrical shape given to proverbs by canonical literature can itself help to Wx their
form as clichés, even if the precise metre is sometimes lost (as Shakespeare’s ‘the
winter of our discontent’ became ‘the winter of discontent’ when endlessly applied to
the events of 1978–9). This has something in common with the ‘almost-but-not-
quite-metrical’ phenomenon mentioned in n. 40 below.
78 Christopher Pelling
clusters: this, presumably, should trigger in readers or listeners a
greater readiness to think distinctively of ‘Homer’, whatever or who-
ever they would take ‘Homer’ to be.
If we ask ‘why’ (or, if we prefer to speculate about audience
response rather than author’s intention, ‘what eVect does Herodotus’
text have’), some of the answers will doubtless be very general ones,8
answers that cover the whole work: the suggestion that the theme is
as important and as grand as Homer’s, that the Persian War is the
new Trojan War—the equivalent of those claims that his war is
the biggest and bloodiest that Thucydides makes in the Archaeology,
or indeed that Herodotus himself makes at 7.20; or of the Homeric
resonances in the new Simonides elegy, where the death of Achilles
and the eternal fame that Homer brought him are brought into
parallel with Simonides’ own immortalization of the Spartan heroics
at Plataea (fr. 11 W2);9 the equivalent too of other cases where a lyric
poet aspired to play the Homeric role in conferring fame on his Wfth-
century laudandus (e.g. Pind. Isthm. 4.37–44). In Herodotus’ case
those suggestions are already there in the proem, with the initial
stress on epical fame—these things must not become lacking in kleos
(glory), IŒºÆ—working round to the speciWc resonance of the
Odyssey—Herodotus will ‘move through the cities of humans,
small and big alike’ now in his work as he earlier did in his travels.10
(One theme indeed that links Herodotus and the Odyssey is that

8 Though not as general as Dion. Hal. Pomp. 3 might suggest, Herodotus ‘wished
to give variety to his writing by imitating Homer’ (ØŒ º Kıº
Ł ØBÆØ c
ªæÆc  ˇ
æı ºøc ª ): true, but the ‘variety’ at stake is more than
stylistic.
9 ‘Simonides proposes to do for the Persian War what Homer did for the Trojan
War’, Parsons (2001) 57, cf. (1992) 32; ‘surely the point of the Achilles paradigm
is . . . the fact that his war was a panhellenic eVort, like the Plataea campaign, and that
his exploits were immortalized in song, just as Simonides promises to immortalize
the Plataiomachoi’, I. Rutherford (2001) 38. There are further interesting ideas on the
way Simonides marks out his relationship to Homer in several of the other contri-
butions to Boedeker and Sider (2001): e.g. Obbink (2001) 71–2; Aloni (2001) 93–5;
Stehle (2001), comparing Herodotus at p. 119; Boedeker (2001a) 124–6 and (2001b)
153–63; Shaw (2001) 165, 180–1; Clay (2001); Barchiesi (2001a) 257. See also M. L.
West (1993) 6–7; Lloyd-Jones (1994); Bowie (2001).
10 Cf. e.g. Krischer (1965); Nagy (1987); Moles (1993) 92–8; Marincola (1997b);
Bakker (2002); but We˛cowski (2004), esp. 155–6, argues that the Herodotean stress
on the transience and instability of greatness marks an important diVerence.
 Homer and Herodotus 79
immense sense of space as well as of time that we get from both.)11
Already there is an elevation of Herodotus himself as of his subject:
he is the new Odysseus, a man who has travelled and talks about
those travels, as well as the new Homer; the ‘things put on display’,
I
ŁÆ, of the people he writes about are matched, indeed
dependent on, his own ‘putting on display’, I
%Ø .12 And that
insertion of his own person not just into the proem but also
frequently into the narrative, partly as the one with the insight and
knowledge to give authority (no need for the Muse for him, then),13
partly as the one whose curiosity and human understanding are so
infectious—that is an important new step. He and his heroes make a
team, and they each have a role to play.
There are some similarly ‘elevating’ passages mid-text, though
there may be a twist. When the Athenian ships sent to help the Ionian
Revolt are the ‘beginning of evils (Iæc ŒÆŒH) for Greeks and
barbarians’ at 5.97.3, that starts this new equivalent of the Trojan
War: and again it is ships, as with those ‘well-balanced ships which
started the ills’ (BÆ K Æ j I挌ı ) ‘for the Trojans and for
Paris himself ’ at Iliad 5.62–3.14 The twist there is that in the Iliad
‘the Trojans’ were after all on the same side as ‘Paris himself ’; in

11 Marincola (1997b).
12 e.g. Erbse (1956); Nagy (1987); Dewald (2002) 269–71: cf. also Dewald (1999).
Thomas (2000) 221–8, 267–9 gives a diVerent and equally valid perspective on
Herodotus’ I
%Ø , stressing its links with other contemporary forms of agonistic
performance; cf. Bakker (2002).
13 Cf. e.g. Krischer (1965) 162, 166–7; Stambler (1982) 210–11; Giraudeau (1984);
Boedeker (2002) 100. This is another link with Simonides’ Plataea, where Stehle
(2001) emphasizes that the poet himself is now the principal validator of the poem’s
truth: the Muse is his ‘ally’, no more. Cf. Boedeker (2001a) 133–4 and Bowie (2001)
58 and 62–4, both with interesting remarks on the diVerences as well as the similar-
ities between Simonides and Herodotus here. Pindar too vouches for truth himself
(e.g. Nem. 7.62–3), and co-operates with the Muse (e.g. Nem. 3.9) as an ‘ally’ (Ol.
13.96–8). (I am again grateful to Bruno Currie here.) Of course, within Odyssey 9–12
Odysseus himself becomes a sort of prototype for this, with his own experience rather
than the Muse validating his narrative, and the character at times approximating to
the poet: Alcinous explicitly compares Odysseus’ knowing narrative to that of a bard,
11.368. Cf. Strasburger (1972) 21–2. For the external audience, though, the ultimate
authority in that part of the narrative remains the Muse.
14 Interesting remarks on these Homerically signiWcant ships in R. Fowler (2003)
317. Of course things do not really start with these ships in the Histories, as the
momentum leading to war has been traced much more fully: in a way this is closer
80 Christopher Pelling
Herodotus these evils are ‘for Greeks and barbarians’—the two
diVerent sides, now linked by their shared suVering. Just so did
Herodotus’ own proem bring Greeks and barbarians together, there
for doing rather than suVering: a b  ‚ººØ; a
b ÆææØØ
I
ŁÆ—some of those achievements were put on display by
Greeks, some by barbarians. But even that Herodotean uniWcation is
in a deeper sense fully Homeric: the similarity of the suVerings of
both sides is basic to the insight of Achilles in Iliad 24.15
We have already seen that Herodotus can be like the characters in
his text in his magniWcent ‘display’: and so also can his characters be
like Herodotus. Thus such ‘elevation’ may be what those characters
are adding to the events, not (or not just) Herodotus himself.16 When
the Ionian Revolt is reaching its decisive moment and the Ionians
had gathered at Lade,
. . . there were some public meetings. Doubtless others too made speeches
(Mªæø), but in particular Dionysius the Phocaean general spoke as
follows: ‘Everything stands on a razor’s edge (Kd %ıæF . . . IŒB ), men of
Ionia, whether we are to be free or slaves, and runaway slaves at that
(j rÆØ KºıŁæØØ j
ºØØ, ŒÆd ØØ ‰
æfiØ)’ (6.11.1–2).
That ‘on a razor’s edge’ may already be a cliché, but even if it is the
hint of Nestor’s speech in the Doloneia may still be felt:17
to Il. 11.604, where Patroclus’ involvement is the beginning of evil for him
(ŒÆŒF
 ¼æÆ ƒ º IæfiB). But even in Homer the causal chain goes back earlier
than Paris, even in this same passage: Paris acted as he did because he ‘did not know
the gods’ decreed will’, 5.64. The important point is that isolating such ‘beginnings’ is
always dealing in half-truths, and that is so in both Herodotus and Homer, as we shall
see in the next section. A half-truth can still be insightful, and a good deal better than
no truth at all.
15 And not just to that: see the perceptive remarks of R. B. Rutherford (1986)
155–6 on Od. 8.530–1, where Odysseus’ weeping is like that of a bereaved wife as her
city falls: ‘he realises, like Achilles, the common ground between friend and foe. This
is the lesson of shared and common suVering, common not just to friends and allies,
but to all mankind.’ Soph. Ajax 124–6 is the most famous articulation of that insight
in tragedy: other examples are collected by R. B. Rutherford (1982) 158–9.
16 So Hornblower (1987) 28–9, coupling Dionysius’ case with Thucydides’ Melesip-
pus, who marks the importance of the coming conXict with this same Iæc ŒÆŒH
allusion at 2.12.3 (as, to judge from Ar. Pax 435–6, he did in real life). In the Herodotean
context Mªæø may be a pointer to Homer too: Hornblower (1994) 66–7.
17 Rather as Hinds (1998) 26–34 develops for Roman literature the axiom that
‘[t]here is no discursive element . . . no matter how unremarkable in itself, and no
matter how frequently repeated in the tradition, that cannot in some imaginable
circumstance mobilize a speciWc allusion’.
 Homer and Herodotus 81
F ªaæ
c Ø Kd %ıæF ¥ÆÆØ IŒB
j ºÆ ºıªæe ZºŁæ ÆØE Mb ØHÆØ.
For now it stands on a razor’s edge for all the Achaeans, whether to die
grimly or to live (Il. 10.173–4).
If so, the stylistic enhancement of the moment is part of Dionysius’
own rhetoric. He is trying to stir the troops into taking things
seriously, and the mismatch between the grand language and their
slack behaviour is precisely his point. What is more, he is right—
things are that serious. And if what lay on each edge for Homer’s
Nestor was ‘life’ and ‘grim death’, for Herodotus’ Dionysius ‘to be
free’ or ‘to be slaves, and runaway slaves at that’, that too captures
something important: freedom is indeed to matter to the Greeks as
much as life itself. As in so much of this pre-play, they are not
thinking that way yet; but they will be soon, and the next time we
hear language like that it will have more impact and eVect.18

EXP L ANATION

Let us go back to the proem, indeed to the proems of both Homer

and Herodotus. Both swiftly focus on causes, blame, ‘who started it’:
in Herodotus, ‘the reason why they came to Wght one another’,

Ø m ÆN  KºÆ Iºº
ºØØ; in the Iliad, ‘Which of the gods
threw the two men to Wght with one another in strife?’,   ¼æ ø
ŁH æØ
Ø %ıŒ ŁÆØ; (Il. 1.8). Both passages link closely
with their contexts too: the Persians (Herodotus’ text continues)
say that the Phoenicians were ‘the reason’ or ‘to blame’, ÆYØØ, that

18 Consider for instance the similar language used by Miltiades to Callimachus

before Marathon at 6.109.3: ‘It is up to you now, Callimachus, either to enslave
Athens or to make her free, and leave a memorial even greater than that left by
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one that will last as long as humans live . . .’.There too,
so Miltiades’ rhetoric suggests, Homeric Œº can still be won in a much more
modern world, and inspiration and parallels can be sought from the recent (Harmo-
dius and Aristogeiton) as well as the distant past. Such language itself swiftly becomes
exemplary: it is echoed by Mnesiphilus at 8.60a, and given a tellingly diVerent twist
on the Persian side at 8.118.2. (I am indebted here to a comment made by Lionel
Scott in discussion at Balliol.)
82 Christopher Pelling
is, that they started it; Homer’s question picks up the call to the Muse
two lines earlier to begin at the point when Agamemnon and Achilles
‘separated in strife’,
ØÆ
 Kæ Æ.19 And the proem of the
Odyssey too focuses quickly on blame and causation: Zeus exclaims
in indignation at the habit of mortals of blaming the gods for
everything, when so often it is their own outrageous behaviour that
brings them down (Od. 1.33–43). Zeus cites a clinching case to prove
his point, that of Aegisthus, about to suVer vengeance at the hand of
Orestes: and it is all his own fault, for he was warned.
So in the Iliad the initial assumption is that it will be one of the
gods that started things; in the Odyssey, that we should look Wrst to
mortals. But in both cases (and also in Herodotus, as we shall see)
the attempt to deWne where the troubles really begin is swiftly
complicated. For in the Iliad Apollo’s role is itself triggered by
human action, by the behaviour of Agamemnon; and there is a
good deal more in book 1 to suggest that, on the human level, this
is a quarrel waiting to happen. Nor are we lacking in divine back-
story too, even if it takes till book 24 for the judgement of Paris to be
mentioned.20 In the Odyssey the movement goes the other way:
despite Zeus’ initial declaration, within forty lines he is explaining
that Odysseus’ troubles are coming from the gods, more speciWcally
from Poseidon (64–75)—and that the gods can now set things right
(76–9). Yet that is complicated too: Poseidon’s anger goes back to
Odysseus’ own action in blinding the Cyclops (68–71); and, whatever
its application to Odysseus’ present troubles, Zeus’ programmatic
declaration is certainly appropriate to the Odyssey as a whole, where
the suitors will indeed pay, as Aegisthus has paid, for their ‘outrages’,

19 Krischer (1965); Nagy (1987) 179–80, 184; Bakker (2002) 7.

20 Il. 24.22–30: Reinhardt (1938); Davies (1981); GriYn (1980) 8–9, 66, 195 and
n. 49. This issue naturally relates also to the question raised by the mention of Zeus’
will (˜Øe . . . ıº
) at Il. 1.5, a question which is itself complicated by the recurrence
of the same half-line in the proem to the Cypria, where Zeus’ plan to relieve the world
from over-population is made clear: is that the plan to which the Iliad refers? Or is it
some other plan which encompasses the whole war and has orchestrated this quarrel
too, perhaps as a way of generating still more destruction, perhaps to start the
movement that will bring the war to an end? Or is it a plan that simply starts at
1.528–30 after Thetis’ intercession, and is it only at that point (whatever Hera may say
as a partisan, 1.519–20) that Zeus targets the slaughter on Greeks in particular? No
reader or hearer can yet be sure, and that is part of the provisionality.
 Homer and Herodotus 83
IÆŁÆº ÆØ (the word that is used here at 34, and that so often recurs
with the suitors), and this is indeed their own fault. So in both poems
we can begin with a set of assumptions of what sort of cause, human
or divine, we might be looking for: but causal explanation is a very
complicated business, and the interaction of gods and humans is
bound to be complex too. There has to be a provisionality about any
explanations in a narrative as subtle as this.
The movement in Herodotus’ proem shows a similar provisional-
ity. The Wrst sentence suggests that this may be a godless story,
a ªÆ K% IŁæø, the ‘things originating from humans’.
That Wts the way the initial myths are told too, with no divine lovers
for Europa or Io, no magical arts for Medea, no beauty contest for
Paris.21 It is a feint towards writing as Thucydides was to write. But
within a few chapters we are discovering that we cannot leave out the
gods, or something like them: ‘it was necessary that things would
turn out badly for Candaules’ (1.8.2), and Gyges begins that ancestral
curse (1.13.2).22
Similar patterns reassert themselves on several other occasions
when Homeric echoes are most felt. When news arrives of the fall
of the Acropolis, the frenzied rush to the ships at 8.56 is clearly
modelled on Iliad 2.149–54: and notice that the source-passage in
Homer is one of human weakness and terror, bad leadership and
misunderstanding, not one of uplift and ‘heroism’. Someone needs to
take a hand. In Homer it is Athena, Wrst inspired by Hera and then
in what she herself says to inspire Odysseus. In Herodotus the
Athena-Wgure is Mnesiphilus, who puts ideas into Themistocles’
mind:23 for the moment the divine role has been taken over by
human inspiration, and that says something about the qualities
that explain the Greek victory. But only for the moment; one cannot
leave the gods out of this completely any more than one could at the

21 On this ‘determined rationalization’ of the Wrst chapters see esp. S. R. West

(2002) 8–15: she revives Rawlinson’s suggestion that Herodotus here draws on
Phrynichus’ Phoenician Women.
22 Pelling (1999) 334 –5; cf. We˛cowski (2004) 153, ‘[i]n his abduction stories, he
light-heartedly dismisses the tendency of some of his predecessors and contemporaries
to deprive the world of its ethico-religious aspect’. Cf. Pelliccia (1992) on the abduc-
tion-stories as a ‘false-start recusatio’; Lateiner (1989) 38; Thomas (2000) 268–9.
23 Pohlenz (1937) 144; Huber (1965) 39.
84 Christopher Pelling
beginning of book 1; we have already seen them active in Delphi and
before, and we shall very soon see them again.24 Ultimately, we will
have to move closer to a Homeric divine register after all.
In that case, as (we shall see) in some others, it is tempting to view
Herodotus as plotting how traditional story-patterns come to operate
in a diVerent world, rather as Thucydides’ juxtaposition of the Melian
Dialogue and the Sicilian expedition oVers a version of a traditional
moral pattern, but indicates secular and human explanations for it.25
And there is much in that view, even though in Herodotus we would
not limit those newer explanatory strands to the human and secular.
Indeed, one of the points that links him to Homer is the way that he
may strip away a great amount of the fabulous, as GriYn showed that
Homer’s epics shed a good deal of the more miraculous baggage we
see in the Epic Cycle;26 but the divine element that is left renders
things more credible, not less.27 Would it after all be more credible to
have an Odysseus surviving a storm like that without divine assist-
ance? Or Priam Wnding his way unaided through enemy lines to
Achilles’ tent? Or Achilles just managing to restrain himself, thinking
of all the extra gold that he might gain that way, rather than knowing
that when Athena pulls you by the hair the wise person decides that it is
time to draw back? Would it be more credible to have Greece surviv-
ing the Persian invasion without some divine dimension? Or the
shower of rain that saves Croesus being just a meteorological coinci-
dence? Or all those oracles coming out so true just because Delphi has
a particularly good sense of which long-odds horse to back? Try the
human dimension Wrst, and you will always Wnd something, and

24 Divine involvement will indeed be clear very soon, with the earthquake that
follows at the next dawn (64.1) and the dust-storm from Eleusis with its eerie
accompaniment (65.1–2). Earthquakes and dust-storms are natural phenomena—
but they are as unlikely to be coincidental here as the rainstorm, precisely on cue, was
at 1.87.2. 8.77 then gives Herodotus’ most explicit statement of belief in oracles. And
once the Wghting starts the supernatural is again sensed, with the possible (though
not explicitly preferred) version that a supernatural female stirred the retreating
Greeks into action (8.84.2).
25 Connor (1984) 161–2. Those patterns were naturally central to the argument of
Cornford (1907) for a Thucydides Mythistoricus, esp. 220: ‘What need of further
comment? Tychê, Elpis, Apatê, Hybris, Eros, Phthonos, Nemesis, Atê—all these have
crossed the stage and the play is done.’
26 GriYn (2001 [1977]).
27 Strasburger (1972) 32 makes this point very well.
 Homer and Herodotus 85
usually Wnd enough; but there are times when you will not, just as
there are times when those Thucydides-like gestures have to be aban-
doned as only feints.

PAT TE RN S O F E X P E R I E N C E

If we go back to the proem we shall Wnd more of those feints and

redirections. The strong phrasing of 1.5.3—‘I am not moving with
any intention to say that these things happened in this way or any
other way; I shall indicate the man who I myself know began unjust
deeds against the Greeks, and then go forward to the rest of my
narrative . . .’—may seem to dismiss all those early stories, not (it
seems) because they are irrelevant but because he cannot be sure that
they are true;28 he will turn to the man who he knows started the train
of injustices—another Thucydides-like move, dragging the story into
limits imposed by Wrm knowledge and into a world much closer to
his own. Yet the story turns out to be distinctly Homeric after all.
Like the Iliad—Chryseis, Briseis, and Helen—it starts with a woman:
this may look like a typical male strategy (a woman’s place is in the
wrong), yet there is more to it than that, for—again as in the Iliad—it
is when the men take over that the conXict becomes shattering. It is
not the beautiful woman, but the male’s assertion of proprietorial
pride, that makes the real diVerence.29
There are some interesting further redirections in the narrative of
Croesus: moments when it seems that a diVerent sort of story, driven
by diVerent motives and values, may assert itself—one of fear and
expansion, say, rather than pride and revenge; and yet the story of the
Lydian dynasty ends by reverting to something like a Homeric
pattern, with bereaved fathers, a wealthy country destroyed by
a more eVective Wghting force, a divine perspective which cannot
be avoided and personalized gods who negotiate with one another to
do the best they can for their favourite. At the end ‘Cyrus released

28 Gould (1989) 64.

29 A point not too far from that suggested in the abduction-stories at 1.4.1–2,
precisely in the context of the Trojan War.
86 Christopher Pelling
Croesus, invited him to sit close to him, and took great care of him:
he marvelled as he looked upon him, he and all those around him’
(1.88.1): this is very much the ‘marvel’, the Ł with which
Achilles so memorably gazed upon Priam ‘and the others marvelled
too’, at Iliad 24.480–4.30 That presages, indeed partly reXects, a
deeper union of perspective of conqueror and conquered, as Cyrus
and Croesus discover they can understand one another rather well.
Indeed, Cyrus’ reading of the lesson is closer both to Solon’s own
words (1.32) and, in part, to Iliad 2431 than to anything Croesus has
explicitly said:
Cyrus, reXected that he too was a human, and now it was another human,
one who had been no less fortunate (P
Æ ø) than himself, whom he was
consigning alive to the pyre . . . (1.86.6).
The victor and the king who is losing everything sense the human
vulnerability that they share, and in Croesus’ fate Cyrus sees a version
of what might be his own.
There have also been those strands in the Croesus-logos that would
seem to suggest a more ‘modern’ world to Herodotus’ audience, just
as they do to us—themes of pre-emptive strikes, of land-hunger, of
leaders who understand a good deal less than they think they do, of
fear triggering exactly the consequence most feared. Yet even in
diVerent worlds the same insights can apply: that last theme of
disastrous fear itself came out in two very diVerent registers, Wrst in
the Atys episode and then in Croesus’ move against the growing
Persian threat. Jasper GriYn has brought out similarly that themes

30 The parallel is noted by Stein: cf. e.g. Chiasson (2003) 27–8 n. 78. The same
context was evoked at the beginning of the Atys–Adrastus episode (1.35.1), one of
many close links between the two sequences: Croesus’ Wnal pity for Adrastus (1.45.2)
also has something in common with Achilles’ for Priam (Il. 24.516, 525–6) and
Adrastus as the ‘ÆæııæÆ of any man he knew’ (1.45.3) with Priam’s
words at 24.505–6; and if it is the killer in Homer and the bereaved father in
Herodotus who pities, and the bereaved father in Homer and the killer in Herodotus
who is so marked out by disaster, that reXects the unity of loss and suVering that both
parties share. This is not to deny the presence of tragic elements too, as argued
elaborately by Chiasson (2003); the disentangling of ‘epic’ and ‘tragic’ components is
a complex question, and one that is largely unreal in view of so much ‘tragic form and
feeling’ already in the Iliad itself (R. B. Rutherford (1982); cf. GriYn (1980), esp. ch.
iv; Macleod (1983) 157–8; and R. B. Rutherford (forthcoming)).
31 So R. B. Rutherford (1982) 158–9.
 Homer and Herodotus 87
can be borrowed from fable, and still have application in the hard,
cynical world of aggressive nations and cities.32 There are indeed
many more inXuences than Homer at play here, as GriYn stresses
in that paper, but now we are seeing some similar adaptation of
Homeric patterns too. Nor is that just a literary game, a ‘Xourish’,33 a
way of bonding with a cultured reader who conspiratorially delights
in recognizing a clever allusion. If these patterns held for Homer,
then that goes with the way that they have held earlier in Herodotus’
own narrative and—we can add—may go on to hold in the audi-
ence’s contemporary experience as well. All that makes them,
indeed, ‘patterns’: not necessarily universal ones, for not everyone
need fall into every peril and some may have good luck as well
as bad, but patterns which universally threaten, universally have
potential validity.

HISTORICAL CONTINUITY AND HISTORICAL

CHANGE

(a) Psammenitus
This is not to say that Herodotus plays down historical change;
perhaps it is saying only that Herodotus felt what we all feel,
that the insights of Iliad 24 are eternally moving, even true, no matter
how the world may change. (That, indeed, is why we can use
such readings of Herodotus to ‘interact’ with our reading of
Homer, conWrming—perhaps also occasionally renuancing—‘what
we all feel’.) But there are ways too in which Homer can be used by
Herodotus to plot historical development. Homer’s Priam is recalled
on another occasion, one where memories of Cyrus and Croesus
are not far to seek. After Egypt has fallen another king, this
time Cambyses, tries a gruesome experiment of his own with
his defeated enemy. At 3.14–16 Cambyses ‘made trial of the
soul of Psammenitus’ by—once again—setting up a ceremonial

32 GriYn (1990a).
33 ‘Floskel’ is the favourite word in the German literature.
88 Christopher Pelling
execution.34 Psammenitus is brought to tears, not by the sight of his
daughter carrying water in the dress of a slave nor even of his son
being led oV to execution, but by the sight of his old drinking-
companion reduced to beggary ‘on the threshold of old age’,
Kd ª
æÆ P
fiH (14.10): that ‘threshold of old age’ that Priam dwells
on when contemplating his own coming death at Iliad 22.60. Even in
Homer that may be a proverb and certainly seems to be a formula,
but that need not exclude the speciWc allusion in Herodotus.35 What
makes this particularly clear is the way that Priam went on gloomily
to foresee ‘his sons being killed and his daughters being dragged
away’ into slavery (22.62), very much the previous elements in
Psammenitus’ misery here.36 Then Croesus himself is introduced
unheralded to the scene, itself a pointer to the contact with his own
parallel experience.37 Croesus gets the pathetic point, and weeps; so
do the Persians; Cambyses himself is touched by pity, and like Cyrus
before him orders a stay of execution, this time of the son who has
been led to his death.
But this time everything misWres. The attempt to save Psammeni-
tus’ son is too late, for he has already been killed by the time the
message arrives; Psammenitus is accepted Croesus-like to Cambyses’
entourage, but starts plotting and has to take his own life; and,

34 On the taste of Herodotus’ kings for experimentation, sometimes gruesome,

Christ (1994); on Cambyses as a particularly perverse experimenter, Munson (1991)
58–62.
35 Cf. above, p. 80 and n. 17. The phrase’s formulaic and perhaps proverbial
character is suggested by Il. 24.487, Od. 15.348, and, less closely, 15.246 and 23.212.
But even within the Homeric poems the climactic character of Il. 22.60–5 may allow it
to be recalled pathetically in later passages: 24.487–9 is explicitly drawing a parallel
between Peleus’ misery and Priam’s own, and the ‘aZictions’ imposed on the
defenceless Peleus ( æıØ, 489) are a peacetime version of those that await Priam;
and Priam may well also be recalled at Od. 15.348 as a parallel to Laertes, left helpless
by Odysseus as Priam was by Hector. (This note is again indebted to Bruno Currie.)
36 Huber (1965) 33. The daughter is ‘dressed in slave-clothing, carrying a pot to a
well’. The commentators rightly Wnd a further reminiscence there of Il. 6.457–8,
Hector’s vision of Andromache in slavery. The Homeric passages complement one
another, as husband and father both foresee the collapse of the family dearest to them;
and the contrast with the present regality once again points the universality of such
human vulnerability, for Psammenitus is not alone in suVering so much.
37 Another pointer may be Psammenitus’ addressing Cambyses as t ÆE ˚æı at
14.10.
 Homer and Herodotus 89
despite that echo of Homer’s Priam, Cambyses is far from the insight
of Iliad 24 in his vicious vindictiveness towards the dead Amasis
(16).38 That may recall the Achilles who maltreats Hector; but this is
not the Achilles who reaches his calmer insight with Priam. As in
Croesus’ case in book 1, the echo of Iliad 24 and the other king’s
archetypal miseries underlines the universal vulnerability of any
human, however prosperous. That point was grasped by Cyrus and,
at least for the moment, he allowed it to guide and restrain his
own conduct; but it is not grasped by Cambyses, even though the
destruction of his own house and descent will indeed have something
in common with Psammenitus’ own, not least because it is caused
by the same person (himself). Croesus and Cyrus come to some
sort of shared understanding; Cambyses and the Egyptian king
miss one another.39
So the Homeric touch again points to a level of universal truth,
one marked by the recurrence of a pattern both from the Iliad and
from Herodotus’ own earlier narrative. In one way it marks historical
change, as Cambyses is already a lesser Cyrus and Psammenitus a
lesser Croesus, failing morally and intellectually where the earlier
men did not; in another it marks continuity, as the lesson is still
the same and still there to be learnt, by Herodotus’ readers if not by
Cambyses himself.

(b) Gelon
One of the reasons why old patterns Wt so well is that sometimes the
old world has not changed that much—even if the participants think
it has. Take one of the most famous Homeric moments, when Gelon
of Syracuse suggests he ought to have supreme command if he is to
Wght at all. q Œ ª N%Ø › —º
 ªÆø, cries the
horriWed Spartan ambassador, ‘Agamemnon descendant of Pelops

38 Yet even that may misWre, as his victim may not have been Amasis at all, 16.5–6.
Even though this Egyptian version is rejected, §7, it contributes to the air of
uncertainty and misapprehension.
39 Asheri (1990) 228 notes the parallels between the scenes, but not the diVerences
of tone: ‘the Wgure of Cambyses shows humane features and is not fundamentally
diVerent from that of Cyrus in his conversation with the captured Croesus’.
90 Christopher Pelling
would indeed cry loudly’ (7.159.1)—not merely Homeric phrasing
(Il. 7.125) but almost, not quite,40 a full hexameter too. What a
terrible travesty of Greece’s past that would be, how unworthy of an
epic hero.
Yet would it? After all, jealousies over leadership issues, with the
leader being one person, the man who was making the greatest
contribution another, and the Panhellenic cause suVering for it—
that is what the Iliad and its Agamemnon are about. The very source-
passage in the Iliad again comes in a not specially heroic setting,
after the Greeks have been notably reluctant to respond to Hector’s
challenge and Agamemnon himself has urged Menelaus not to risk
his life: ‘Old Peleus the horseman would indeed cry loudly’ to see
such craven behaviour. It is a moment when Achilles is particularly
missed: no wonder that Achilles’ father Peleus is the man who comes
to Nestor’s mind.41
Not that the Athenians in Herodotus are any more respectful than
the Spartans. When Gelon raises the question of commanding either
the sea-force or the land-force, the Athenian envoy immediately
jumps in, rather more wordily than the Spartan, appealing to Athens’
unique autochthony and to—Homer, and the complimentary men-
tion of Menestheus in the Catalogue of Ships (2.552–4).42 This is not
the only time where we will see characters in the Histories striking

40 Cf. Hornblower (1994) 65–9 on that almost-but-not-quite, esp. 66 on this

passage. An epic Xavouring may already be introduced by another near-hexameter
at 7.156.2, when under Gelon Syracuse Ia  
æÆ ŒÆd ºÆ: so Stein ad loc.,
suspecting an epic original Ia  
æÆ M
 IºÆ. The closest Homeric
parallels again concern Achilles: Il. 18.56, 437. Further examples of ‘hexameters and
hexameters manqués’ are collected by Boedeker (2001a) 123–4, who like Stein is in
most cases inclined to believe that they reXect adaptations from speciWc epic or
elegiac originals (she thinks poetic narratives of these events). I am not convinced.
For Agamemnon as a Spartan symbol of Panhellenism, cf. 1.67 with Asheri (1988)
310 ad loc., and Stein and How–Wells on 7.159.1.
41 The scholia observe, and are concerned by, the way that Peleus is not otherwise
relevant in the Homeric passage. ‘Peleus was a respected Wgure who typically Wlled the
role of the father sending oV his son to Troy, and whom Nestor once visited’, Kirk ad
loc.; but there is more to it than that. There is a similar point in Agamemnon’s own
remarks at 7.114–15, claiming that even Achilles used to shy from Wghting Hector:
not it seems true (cf. Hera at 5.788–9 as well as Achilles himself at 9.352–5), just
‘persuasive exaggeration’ (Kirk), but still typically and tellingly defeatist.
42 Compare the similar (though more perfunctory) Athenian appeal to the Trojan
War at 9.27.4, in an episode that multiply recalls Gelon. Loraux (1986) 70–2 points
 Homer and Herodotus 91
Homeric poses or postures in ways which are disquieting, characters
who may try like Dionysius of Phocaea (above, p. 80) to ‘elevate’ their
rhetoric or their cause but manage only to suggest a lack of stature.43
But once again it is not as if these squabblings among Greeks are
themselves un-Homeric. Indeed, by this stage of the debate the
smooth approach of the Spartans and Athenians, pleading for ‘all
Greece to come together’ and approaching Gelon as a Greek—‘as
ruler of Sicily not the smallest part of Greece is yours’, 7.157.2—is
beginning to be unmasked; he is now asked to ‘help the Greeks’ as an
outsider (159.1, cf. 161.1).44 And it is interesting how much of the
unmasking deals in terms and ideas familiar from the Iliad, and
particularly from the initial quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles.
Now Gelon can reasonably, if less wrathfully than Achilles, protest
that he deserves to be treated with more respect: the Greeks’ neglect
of his reasonable claims in the past is a matter of ‘dishonouring’,
IØ  (158.4, cf. Il. 1.171, 356, 507, 9.111, etc.); their treatment of
him now is dishonouring too (æ ÆÆ, 160.1, cf. Il. 1.203, 214,
9.368), and, even though the Athenians may deny it, ‘insult’ (ZØ
 ,
161.3, cf. Il. 1.211, 291). And Gelon’s Wnal parting message—tell
Greece that the spring has gone out of the year, 162.1—not merely
acknowledges that Greece is one thing and he is another. It also
suggests more than its surface meaning45 that the Greeks had lost
the hope of their choicest forces; for its more natural application is
the one which we are told Pericles gave it in a funeral speech,46 that

out that Trojan War rhetoric is noticeably played down in the later epitaphioi, and
relates this to its Panhellenic Xavour: that taste was lost once Athenian aspirations
became more hegemonic. That seems right—but in both Herodotean passages
the emphasis still falls on how such rhetoric is annexed for local civic pride, and it
shows the Panhellenic cause as threatened and fragmented rather than uniWed and
strengthened.
43 Lateiner (1989) 100.
44 A small but signiWcant diVerence from 157.2, where the invitation was ‘to
help’—ŁØ, the same word as at 159.1—‘those who are Wghting for Greece’s
liberty, and join them in that Wght for freedom’.
45 This point holds whether or not we follow Wesseling and Hude in deleting the
explanation of that surface meaning at 162.2. Rosén keeps the passage in his 1997
Teubner text, I think rightly.
46 Arist. Rhet. 1365a31–3, 1411a2–4. The context may be the speech on Samos in
440/439 bc (Plut. Per. 8.9, 28.4: so e.g. Treves (1941), and Stadter (1973b) 119 and
(1989) 110) or the historical counterpart of Thuc. 2.35–46 in 431/430 (so Fornara
92 Christopher Pelling
the city had lost in combat its Wnest young men in their prime. The
one meaning, the pigheadedness which leads to the loss of the most
valuable contribution, can so easily lead to the other, the massacre of
the Xower of Greece’s youth. And that happened in the Iliad too.
So it happened in the Homeric past; it happened in 480; and—
especially pointedly if the particular allusion to Pericles is sensed47—
overreaching hegemonic ambitions and inter-polis jealousies were
continuing to devastate Greece still. Later in this chapter we shall
see further ways in which the backward glances aVorded by Homer
can go closely with forward glances to Herodotus’ own day.

(c) Leonidas
Sometimes questions of continuity or change can be more compli-
cated and enigmatic. The battle over Leonidas’ corpse at the end of
book 7 shows Herodotus ‘at his most Homeric’,48 as this sequence

(1971) 83 n. 12). But Girard (1919) may be right in assuming that both ‘Gelon’ and
Pericles are echoing a proverb, or Stein ad loc. in supposing a poetic allusion (‘und
jedenfalls hat es Perikles zutreVender angewendet als Gelon’), or Hauvette (1894) 337
in suggesting a poetic quotation that became proverbial: not that this need exclude a
Periclean hint in Herodotus as well.
47 So Treves (1941) and, with diVerent interpretation, Fornara (1971) 83–4;
Munson (2001) 218–19. In the Samian speech (see last n.) Pericles claimed that his
own achievement was greater than Agamemnon’s (Ion of Chios FGrH 392 F 16 ¼
Plut. Per. 28.7). That contrast too—if the Periclean context is the Samian speech and
if it is recalled here—gives an extra perspective: Pericles’ point was to exalt the
achievement of the present (cf. Thuc. 2.36.3), Herodotus’ to stress its continuity
with the past. The implications of this lead in a diVerent direction from the emphasis
of Treves, Wnding here ‘further evidence of the Periclean and pro-Athenian leanings of
the historian’ (322).
48 Boedeker (2003) 34–6; cf. Munson (2001) 175–8. Particular Homeric echoes or
parallels include the dawn-light glimmering through, just as the crucial days of the
Iliad Wghting begin with dawn-breaks (7.217.2, 219.2
Il. 11.1–2, 19.1–2); the same
phrase will recur before Salamis and before Plataea, linking the three great episodes
with one another (8.83.1, 9.47); the description of the struggle as an
TŁØe . . . ºº (225.1
Il. 17.274, see p. 97, below); the corpses falling on one
another (223.2, 225.1
Il. 17.361–2); the Greeks valorously % æıÆ the corpse
and turned the enemies four times (225.1
the Trojans were turned three times and
the Greeks thankfully —挺 bŒ ºø KæÆ j ŒŁÆ K ºØ, Il.
18.232–3); the Greeks seeing that the battle is turning to the enemy (225.2
Ajax’s
perception at Il. 17.626–33); the stele with the lion (
‘Leonidas’) ‘standing ’
emblematically where the Greeks took their Wnal stance (225.2
Il. 17.434–5, and
 Homer and Herodotus 93
replays the struggle over Patroclus’ body in Iliad 17–18. It is a
particularly good opportunity to face up to the question put, per-
fectly fairly, by Tony Woodman: ‘What about battle-scenes? If they
are in some sense Homeric, does this mean that Herodotus believed
that history repeats itself, and, if he does, what implications does this
have for his work as history?’49 The answer to the Wrst part of
Woodman’s question is ‘yes and no’; to the second, I hope, ‘interest-
ing ones’.
When Leonidas insists that it would be dishonourable for Spartans
to leave their post, Herodotus explains why: ‘if he stayed there, great
glory (kleos) would be left for him, and the prosperity of Sparta
would not be wiped away’ (Ø
b ÆPF Œº ªÆ Kº ;
ŒÆd  æ P
ÆØ  PŒ K%º ),50 7.220.2—phrasing that
recalls Herodotus’ own proem, and the link there between preserving
kleos and ensuring that deeds did not ‘fade away’.51 In a microcosm of
that proemial interplay of heroes and writer, Leonidas and Herod-
otus himself both have their roles in monumentalizing that kleos, one
in doing, the other in describing; and Leonidas is as self-conscious
about the immortality he is securing as characters within the Iliad
itself, Helen and Achilles prime among them (more on this in a
moment). He, like them, even has insight into the divine scheme of
things: here it is the oracle, promising that Sparta will either be
destroyed or will lose a king (220.3–4). That enables him to see his
own role in the broader plot.

lion-imagery is specially frequent in this Iliad sequence); Xerxes’ decapitation of

Leonidas’ corpse (7.238
Hector’s desire to do the same to Patroclus, Il. 17.126–7,
18.176–7, below, n. 62). Even the wording of the oracle at 220.4 has more in common
with the Iliad sequence than its metre: cf. its last two lines with Il. 17.502–4. Also
perhaps I , 223.4: Stein cites Il. 20.332, apparently the only Homeric instance
(but the Homeric reading is not secure).
49 Woodman (1988) 3. The questions raised, again in the context of the Therm-
opylae narrative, by Dillery (1996) 217 are not too diVerent.
50 An almost Gorgianic jingle, as Gregory Hutchinson points out to me, both in
the balance of its clauses and its near-rhyme: and the poised interlinking of individual
μ and the public prosperity reXects a balance and connection of substance as well
as of style. Compare Alcibiades’ link of his own
%Æ and the public Tº Æ at Thuc.
6.15.1, where again future memory becomes important (16.5): but the claimed
balance of public and private is there more sinister (Macleod (1983) 70–6).
51 Cf. Nagy (1990b) 221–7, Munson (2001) 177. It may also allude to Simonides
PMG 531 on, precisely, the dead of Thermopylae: ÆæıæE
b ŒÆd ¸ø
Æ , j
94 Christopher Pelling
It is indeed natural to use such language of ‘role’ and ‘plot’, for
Leonidas and the Spartans are almost writing their own script,
carefully ensuring that everything looks right (hair nicely combed
for these modern equivalents of the Homeric ‘long-haired
Achaeans’,52 208.3; memorable lines about arrows and shade as
‘memorials of himself ’, 226.2). Leonidas wanted to ‘lay down the
kleos of the Spartans alone’ (7.220.4) (ŒÆÆŁŁÆØ: another poetic
allusion, it seems, as in the hexameter quoted or made up53 at Plato,
Symp. 208c, ŒÆd Œº K e Id æ IŁÆ ŒÆÆŁŁÆØ), and the
allies must be sent away. Everything must be just Spartan, just right.
And it works. There is indeed something magniWcent about
Leonidas and the three hundred. Xerxes may have ‘laughed’ at
Demaratus when he Wrst told the king about Spartan obedience to
the rule of law (7.105.1, cf. 209.1–2); he is not laughing now, and he
treats Demaratus with new respect (234–7). MagniWcent, and ‘heroic’
too: the kleos Leonidas wins is virtually immediate, and has eVect
within the later phases of the narrative itself. Before Plataea Mardo-
nius scornfully asks, with echoes both of Demaratus and of Leonidas,
what has happened to that kleos of the Spartans: where are these
people who never desert their post? (9.48).54 Are they afraid to square
up against the Persians, equal numbers against equal numbers

æÆ Æغ ; IæA ªÆ kekoip¿r j Œ IÆ  jkœor (‘Leonidas, king
of Sparta, bears testimony, who left behind a great adornment of valour and
everlasting kleos’). Or perhaps it is just that Simonides and Herodotus are both
‘making the case’ in similar ways for the heroization of Leonidas and his men (so
Dillery (1996) 246–9).
52 Œæ ŒøÆ ÆØ , Il. 2.11 etc: I owe this nice point to Stephanie West.
53 Dover (1980) 152 ad loc. assumes it is a citation; Bury (1932) 118 ad loc. thinks
‘it is just as possible that Diotima herself is the authoress—rivalling Agathon’. Either
way, it is a most un-Homeric hexameter, not least in its use of the deWnite article
(e Id æ). Even if it is a citation, it need not follow that Leonidas is thinking
speciWcally of the hexameter which Diotima quotes; both may be reXecting trad-
itional epic diction. That is also likely to be the case at 7.178.2, where the Delphians
reveal to the Greeks the oracle to pray to the winds, and K%ƪª ºÆ æØ IŁÆ
ŒÆŁ: the hexametric rhythm there is noted by Stein, How–Wells, and Stehle ap.
Boedeker (2001a) 123. The language is in its turn echoed by Lampon at 9.78.2:
below, p. 98. The pattern of inspiring language, and the heroic behaviour it inspires, is
indeed instantaneously becoming a tradition. Cf. also Brasidas’ resonant conclusion
at Thuc. 4.87.6.
54 On Mardonius’ taunts cf. esp. Dillery (1996) 242–4. The story of Lampon (last
n. and p. 98 below) is another pointer to this immediate monumentalization.
 Homer and Herodotus 95
(9.48.4)—these people who, Demaratus had claimed (7.103–4) and
Leonidas had shown,55 would not be cowed even if outnumbered
ten to one? Nothing could contrast more with Leonidas than the
shambles of the Spartan troop-movements at Plataea, to and fro in
front of the enemy’s eyes. That heroic past, however recent, is already
coming to seem monumentalized and distant.
Still, even in the Thermopylae narrative itself there was a hint of
the less glorious world that they are living in, the need to orchestrate.
Remember that concern ‘to lay down the glory of the Spartans alone’:
better to send the allies away than to have them squabble and melt
away dishonourably, for that is the alternative that looms. There are
other points, too, that suggest that glamour is not quite what it used
to be. Now the kleos to be ‘laid down’ is that ‘of the Spartans’: it is no
longer a matter just of individual glory, but to be part of a group, one
of Three Hundred Spartans. And 220.2 is again telling, Ø
b
ÆPF Œº ªÆ Kº , ŒÆd  æ P
ÆØ  PŒ K%º 
(‘if he stayed there, great glory would be left for him, and the
prosperity of Sparta would not be wiped away’): individual glory
still matters—this is kleos ‘for him’—but it is more directly, or at least
(if one thinks about Hector) more explicitly, intertwined with the
fate of his community.56 Then the response of the Spartans to the one
man who missed the battle through ophthalmia is one of menis,
‘wrath’ (229.2). In Herodotus as in Homer—except of course for
Achilles—that word is generally used of gods or heroes, as a few
chapters earlier at 7.197.3.57 The relation of menis to staying out of

55 For the echoes of the Xerxes–Demaratus scene at Thermopylae notice especially

7.223.3, where the Persians are driven into battle by whips: for Xerxes at 7.103.4 that
was the feature that focused the diVerence between his disciplined army and that of
the free Greeks. Demaratus’ own comment—speciWcally about the Spartans, as he
emphasizes (104.1)—is that their fear of the law will not let them Xee from battle, and
they will stand their ground and win or die (104.5). Thermopylae will show as much.
56 It is no coincidence that this intertwining should be particularly focused in this
narrative of Spartan virtue, for, as Bruno Currie points out to me, it seems that in real
life rewards for individual achievement were a feature of Sparta. Thus it is there that
Themistocles goes to get his crown and other honours (8.124.2–3 with Jordan
(1988)); and notice the (somehow formalized?) ‘praise’ of Brasidas at Sparta in 431
bc (Thuc. 2.25.2) and of the theios aner (Pl. Meno 99d, Arist. EN 1145a27).
57 On the connotations of BØ in Homer see now D. L. Cairns (2003) 31–3,
improving on Watkins (1977), esp. 189–90, and Muellner (1996): Cairns emphasizes
that mortals too feel BØ , but still ‘[t]he preponderance of ‘‘supernatural’’ applications,
96 Christopher Pelling
the battle is turned on its head from the Iliad: now it is the collective
who feel the wrath—extreme, perhaps excessive wrath—when an
individual is not where he ought to be, there in the front line; and
later ‘the Athenians’, all of them, will feel menis at ‘the Spartans’ for
letting the broader Greek cause down (9.7b.2).58 And the object now
of this Spartan wrath, the unfortunate and shamed Aristodemus,
ends by plunging into the battle-line at Plataea and wanting to die
‘openly’ (ÆæH ), raging (ºıHÆ) and abandoning his post in
the line (7.231, 9.71.3–4). That is a version (but with a diVerence,
that rage, that abandoning of post) of Thermopylae, and a version of
Achilles too, yet in this case a death driven by others’ menis rather
than his own.
So the Homeric themes are there, but indeed with a diVerence: and
we should not talk simply of ‘contrasts’, rather of more interesting
‘interplays’ of the worlds of then and of now. Menis works diVerently;
perhaps the self-conscious role-playing is more pronounced than in
Homer; perhaps there are diVerent attitudes to standing and dying or
Xight and life (one notices that Xeeing is much more unthinkable for
Leonidas than it is within the Iliad itself);59 and, once we move into

in Homer and after, lends some weight to the view that there is something about menis
that makes it particularly appropriate [his italics] as a term for divine anger . . .’, and
suggests that ‘it is the gravity and intensity of menis that makes it suitable as a term both
for divine wrath and for human anger which exceeds the norm in those two respects’. On
the Herodotean passages note esp. Kurke (2005) 113 n. 94, arguing that at 7.229 bis and
9.7 there are still some suggestions of supernatural wrath: ‘Even the [i.e. these] apparent
exceptions to this usage denote corporate civic anger as a kind of supernatural force.’
Perhaps a thoughtful reader/hearer might initially take it rather ‘as a modern counter-
part’ of such a supernatural force—but such a reader/hearer, attuned to the typical
rhythms of divine–human interaction in Herodotus, would be unwise to exclude the
supernatural dimension completely.
58 There is another story one could tell there about the way that the relevant
‘collective’ is no longer the one the Spartans can understand, that of ‘the Spartans
alone’, but that of the wider Greek alliance.
59 The locus classicus for this praise of discretion comes at the beginning of this
very sequence, with Menelaus at Il. 17.91–105 (see below;
Odysseus at 11.404–10);
then of course Hector’s Xight at 22.135–6; in book 17, also 414–19, 556–9; cf. also
Pind. Nem. 9.27. Perhaps, though, this is no more than an early instance of how the
‘Homeric’ world becomes stereotyped as something more extreme and cruder than
the poems themselves convey (a point particularly familiar from Sophocles’ Ajax,
where ‘Ajax is not just the typical Homeric, the Achillean, hero, but rather one who
carries the implications of the heroic code to the extreme possible point, as no one in
 Homer and Herodotus 97
books 8 and 9, we also see the way that self-centred bickering is
supplanting man-to-man combat—a ‘pushing and shoving of many
words’ (TŁØe ºªø ººH) that takes the place of the literal big
‘push’ which begins the crucial Wghting both at Thermopylae and in
Iliad 17.60
And yet—immediately one starts pressing on these contrasts, they
start to blur and complicate. The group, the Spartans, may now be
the ones to feel menis when their man lets them down: but such
thoughts are not so distant from the Iliad either. Something similar, if
not quite so wrathful, is there in this very sequence, not least in the
indignation that Menelaus anticipates if he fails to rescue the corpse
of the man who had fought for Menelaus’ own honour (Il. 17.91–3),
and it is not hard to Wnd cases elsewhere.61 Indeed, that feeling of rage
at failing to do the right thing by one’s comrades is pretty well
what Achilles himself comes to think about his own behaviour at
18.98–126. Achilles there is conscious of his place in future memory
too—‘now may I gain good kleos’ (F
b Œº KŁºe Iæ ,
121)—even if that is not the only or the main thing that drives
him; so was Helen, as she mused on the fate that the gods had
ordained for her (6.357–8, cf. 3.126–8). She famously thinks of
herself as the object of song, of course including Homer’s own
songs, just as Leonidas is inextricably linked with the Herodotus
text that will ensure that his glory does not fade. And those allies

Homer, and perhaps no one in life, ever did’, Winnington-Ingram (1980) 19). Cf.
D. P. Fowler (2000) 16, on ‘the familiar phenomenon of literary history whereby texts
pass in and out of complexity depending on whether they are serving as target or as
model: the Aeneid of Vergilian scholars is very diVerent from the Aeneid of Lucan
specialists’. Cf. also Hinds (2000), esp. 222–3.
60 tÆ
b ææØ æH º ŒøÆ ÆØ , Il. 17.274; ŒÆd bæ F ŒæF F
¸ø
ø —æø  ŒÆd ¸ÆŒ
ÆØ ø TŁØe Kª  ºº , Hdt. 7.225.1.
Before Salamis the TŁØe ºªø ºº of the generals (8.78.1) intensiWes the
verbal ‘skirmishes’, IŒæºØØ, of 8.64.1. That pattern repeats before Plataea,
with—again—the ºªø ººe TŁØ of the Tegeates and the Athenians at 9.26.1.
It does all come right on the day: there is real pushing and shoving, TŁØ , at
Plataea (9.62.2), just as the ships grappled closely with one another triumphantly at
Salamis. But it only just comes right.
61 Thus in this episode Glaucus symmetrically upbraids Hector at 17.140–68.
Earlier Hector tried to instil some shame into Paris at 6.521–5; then e.g. Poseidon
at 13.120–2. And elements of anger and shame underlie several phases of Agamem-
non’s epipolesis in Il. 4, esp. the exchange with Odysseus and Diomedes at 4.336–421.
98 Christopher Pelling
that would prefer to go rather than stay: are they so diVerent from the
Greeks who race to the ships in book 2? As for the wrangling spent on
words rather than action and fury directed at allies rather than
enemy—why, is that not central to the Iliad, with the menis only
redirected to the enemy once catastrophe has already struck? The
contrast blurs on the Herodotus side too. One at least of these Persian
War bickers is about, precisely, honour: the question of who should
have the station of honour at Plataea (9.26). Perhaps these worlds are
really not so very diVerent after all; perhaps the ‘heroic’ has always
gleamed the brighter for its commingling with the ordinary and the
messy and the humanly frail.

US AND THEM

There is one further echo of Thermopylae in, or rather after, the

Plataea narrative. This is the proposal of Lampon of Aegina at 9.78–9,
urging Pausanias to maltreat Mardonius’ body. This proposal is
immediately stigmatized as ‘most impious’ (IØÆ, 78.1): yet
its phrasing echoes not merely Leonidas but also words of Mardonius
himself several books earlier when he was urging Xerxes to invade
(7.5 and 9). Now Lampon addresses Pausanias as the saviour of
Greece (Þı c  ¯ºº
Æ): that phrase was used of Leonidas
at 8.114.2, and Lampon’s proposal too echoes the heroic language
familiar from Leonidas. For (he goes on) now Pausanias can lay
down—ŒÆÆŁŁÆØ again—the greatest fame (Œº ) among poster-
ity of any Greek in history, so that even greater reputation (ºª )
may attend him; now is the chance to ensure that any barbarian in
future might be on his guard (ıºÆØ) against committing
outrageous deeds against Greeks (æªÆ IŁÆºÆ, the keynote of
the suitors in the Odyssey) (78.2); now is the time to extract ven-
geance for the Persians’ own crimes. Just so did Mardonius urge
Xerxes to exact his own vengeance, so that he might be attended by
good repute among men (ºª . . . IªÆŁ ) and that in future every-
one should be on his guard (ıºÆØ) against attacking his
country (7.5.2). Other points too suggest how closely this ‘vengeance’
would indeed repay the Persians in kind: for the vengeance Lampon
 Homer and Herodotus 99
now urges is to repeat what ‘Mardonius and Xerxes’ did to Leonidas’
body, cutting oV its head and impaling it—as indeed had been done,
though in the narrative of the events themselves there had been no
mention of Mardonius, only of Xerxes and the implacable hatred that
drove him to issue those orders (7.238). Do this, Lampon concludes,
and you will win praise Wrst from the Spartans, then from all the
Greeks: that distinctive ‘what people will say’ mentality again. And,
of course, the maltreatment that Lampon suggests is not wholly alien
to the Iliad, and that is not just a matter of the frenzied Achilles and
his dragging of the dead Hector (22.395–404, 23.24–7, 24.15–22), or
indeed his earlier threat to behead his corpse (18.534–5): beheading a
corpse is also what Hector himself threatened to do to Patroclus
(17.126, 18.176–7).62
But now, in Herodotus, Pausanias will have none of it. Such things,
he Wrmly says, beWt barbarians rather than Greeks (79.1); Leonidas has
been amply avenged. He even trumps Lampon’s Homerics with some-
thing of his own, if we sense the echo of Odysseus’ rebuke of Eurycleia
at Odyssey 22.411–18, ‘it is impious [P › , just as Pausanias
pronounces himself content to ‘do and say holy things’, ‹ØÆ, and
Lampon’s proposal was IØÆ] to gloat over dead men . . . their
outrages [IÆŁÆº ÆØ] have brought them to a bad end . . .’.63 If Greek
speakers are adept at quoting Homeric phrases and concepts, we also
see here how a Lampon has perverted them, just as he perverts the
notion of symmetrical reciprocity that runs so persistently through
the work: so he also now uses that foundation-text of Hellenism to
justify behaviour which, for the moment, is thoroughly un-Greek.
For the moment . . . But there are hints, again not unlike the end of
the Iliad but in a more disquieting register, that the two sides are not
so diVerent: the comforting contrast of Greek civilized behaviour and
Persian barbarity may not last. It is signiWcant that this is Pausanias
talking: this is not the only time in the Histories that a contrast is felt
with the later notorious allegations against Pausanias, when he was

62 Cf. Segal (1971); GriYn (1980), esp. 44–5, 84–5. It is true that such mutilation is
not regular in the Iliad: it marks an intensiWcation of the Wghting’s savagery (esp. in
those cases concerning Hector, but also at 11.146, in a phase where Agamemnon’s
Wghting style is particularly gruesome: Segal (1971) 10–11)—just as it does at
Thermopylae.
63 Stambler (1982) 211.
100 Christopher Pelling
anything but the epitome of un-Persian Greekness.64 It is indeed
strongly felt in the story that follows, where he puts out the Greek
dinner and the Persian dinner, and his conclusion is—not ‘no won-
der we hardy Greeks won’, as we might expect, but ‘why on earth did
they bother to come, to eat meals like this?’ Spartan dinners, one
senses, are already not altogether his thing.65 And in the Lampon
story itself he already has the power of an autocrat: that is clear in the
way he dismisses him—do not come again to me with such advice, be
grateful that you go away unscathed (79.2)—which is not unlike
Xerxes’ parting shot to Artabanus (7.11.1). For the moment, he is
using that power in much less vindictive a way; just as he will be less
vindictive than a Persian might be a few chapters later in sparing the
families of the Theban traitors (9.88: contrast, for example, Darius’
treatment of nearly all of Intaphernes’ family, 3.119, or Xerxes’ of
Masistes’ children, 9.113.2, or Cyrus’ musings on the senselessness of
sparing a victim’s children, 1.155.1). But such torturous cruelty, and
to sons as well as culprits, will by the end of the Histories be emerging
as a trait which Greeks, not merely Persians, may show, in the
exposure of Artayctes and the stoning of his son before his eyes
(9.120.4). We have not got there yet, and we do not get there with
Pausanias in the text itself; but we will get there soon.

T H E H E ROIC , THE HEROD OTE A N, A ND TH E

PRESENT

In Pausanias’ case, and perhaps in Gelon’s (pp. 91–2), we have

already seen how a reading of Homeric ‘echoes’ can come together
with another line of inquiry, one that moves forward from the events

64 Most clearly at 5.32 and 8.3.2: cf. Munson (2001) 68–70; Flower and Marincola
(2002) 12–14, esp. 13, and 247 on the Lampon episode itself, though Flower and
Marincola doubt whether Herodotus would have accepted the anti–Pausanias stories:
scepticism is certainly clear at 5.32.
65 At Pelling (2000) 183–4 I suggest that Athenaeus’ citation of this passage
(4.138b–c) shows him sensitive to Herodotus’ tone. Athenaeus there juxtaposes it
Wrstly with Plato’s ironic passage on Spartan fare at Republic 2.372c–d and secondly
with the Sybarite who thought it no wonder that the Spartans are so brave: anyone in
their right mind would die a thousand times rather than eat meals like that.
Herodotus’ passage has something in common with both sets of ironies.
 Homer and Herodotus 101
rather than backwards, exploring how far the events of 480 were
moving along the same lines as those rather closer to Herodotus’
contemporary world.
The links of the two approaches can become more thought-
provoking still. Take for instance the famous sequence at 5.91–3,
when Soclees of Corinth (if that is his name) talks the Spartans out
of restoring tyranny at Athens. He is warned that the Corinthians will
one day have particular cause to rue the overthrow of the Pisistratids,
when the time comes for them to ‘be pained by the Athenians’
(5.93.1): that surely directs attention to very recent events,
the brushes that led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.66
Then too the Corinthians were locked in debate with the Spartans on
what to do about Athens, though the roles had changed and Corinth
was pressing for action rather than restraint. That time, if we can
trust Thucydides, the Corinthian pressure was cruder, with a threat
to turn to another ally, the sort of menace that left Sparta no real
choice (Thuc. 1.72.4). Something is going on in Herodotus here: the
diYculty is to say what. One way or another, part of the point must
be to suggest how much things have changed, with that switch of
Corinthian role. One of those changes has been the style of logos
itself, how people think and argue67—and threaten.
But we have Homeric echoes in the threats too. There is a Homeric
feel to the beginning, when no one likes what the Spartans are saying
as they mount their threat to Athens, but Soclees of Corinth is the
only one to get up and tell Cleomenes some home truths about the
Spartans’ short-sightedness (and, we might add, selWshness):
rather like all those Homeric silences when all except one is dumb-
struck or spellbound—the way, for instance, that Diomedes speaks
up at the beginning of Iliad 9, when everyone else is struck silent
by Agamemnon’s outburst, and again symmetrically at the end of
the book when Odysseus reports back (9.28–30, 693–5).68 Soclees
knows how to begin an expostulation in style, too: q
c, his Wrst

66 See esp. Strasburger (1955); RaaXaub (1987) 223–4; We˛cowski (1996) 235–58;
R. Fowler (2003) 316–17; Moles in Greenwood and Irwin (forthcoming).
67 Gould (1989) 56–7 comments on the way that Soclees’ ainos is the way people
argued then, not now.
68 Cf. GriYn (1995) ad locc.: ‘In both cases it is the high-spirited Diomedes who
breaks the gloomy silence’ (78); ‘The brave and uncomplicated Diomedes again steps
102 Christopher Pelling
words, are thoroughly epic in manner.69 And here too there is a
symmetry of a sort, with Soclees’ conclusion, ‘We summon the
Greek gods to attend [or ‘against you’] and call upon witnesses70 as
we implore you not to install tyrannies in the cities. Will you then not
desist, but try to bring Hippias back contrary to justice? Be sure that
the Corinthians at least will not approve’ (Y E ˚æØŁ ı ª P
ıÆØÆ , 92.Ł.5). And not just the Corinthians, as the narrative
goes on to make clear, as the other representatives too ‘call upon
witnesses’ and implore the Spartans not to meddle in another state’s
internal aVairs, 93.2.
Do it if you want to, Spartans, but we Corinthians will not
approve: this is very much the way Hera and Athena respond to
Zeus when he thinks of going against divine public opinion (Il. 4.29,
16.443, 22.181), and just as eVective.71 For now that Soclees has
‘spoken freely’, 93.2, the episode ends with Cleomenes and the
Spartans choosing to—or feeling they have no choice but to—defer

in’ (146). Other Homeric cases include Menelaus at Il. 3.95 and 7.92 when no one else
speaks up in response to Hector’s challenges; Diomedes in response to Idaeus’
proposal at 7.398–9, and in response to Nestor’s challenge at 10.218, mirrored by
Dolon at 10.313. Euryalus in the games at 23.676–7 is the less intense equivalent, and
Anticlus at Od. 4.285–6 a quizzical variation inside the Horse. Antinous at Od. 2.82–4
is a more shameless, and Amphinomus at 16.393–9 and Agelaus at 20.320–1 are more
moderate, equivalents among the suitors. At Od. 11.333 (Arete) and 13.1–3 (Alci-
nous) others are spellbound rather than dumbstruck. Johnson (2001) 7, 14–15, 19
discusses the pattern in Herodotus, comparing Artabanus at 7.10–11.
69 As Stein notes. Cf. Denniston (1954) 285.
70 There are some beautiful linguistic peculiarities here. Which witnesses are
summoned in KØÆæıæŁÆ? The gods? The other allies? Both? The echoing
KÆææ of the allies, 93.2, does not seem to limit it to the gods: as in
Homer, human notice matters too. The Corinthians (in the middle, K،ƺØ)
and Hippias (in the active, K،ƺÆ , 93.1) both ‘call in’ the gods. Both middle and
active are normal, but it is not normal, as in the Corinthian case, for the verb to have
a personal dative (E): that suggests ‘over’ or ‘against’ the Spartans (cf. 1.199.3), a
more personal tinge than is usual in such invocations. Then the dative in Hippias’
f ÆPf K،ƺÆ Łf KŒ fiø may be either ‘called in the same gods against
him’ or ‘called in the same gods as he had done’. The eVect of the ambiguities is to
blur issues of human and divine, and personal and civic motivation, while keeping
the focus on the language of shame. If my argument here is correct, the pointers
backwards to Homer and forwards to the Peloponnesian War blur in similar ways.
(Some of the above is indebted to discussion at the 2002 Cambridge conference
which generated the papers in Greenwood and Irwin (forthcoming).)
71 The word in the Homeric passages is KÆØø, here ıÆØø: the subtle
diVerence marks a change in the way that the rhetoric becomes eVective. The ı-
 Homer and Herodotus 103
to the public moral opinion of the other cities, which are now
coming to have the sort of authority and behaviour that in Homer
was shown by individual humans and individual gods. All that the
discomWted Hippias can do is make that prophecy—and he is the
expert on the oracles (93.2), so he should know—that the Corin-
thians, more than anyone, will come to yearn for the Pisistratids
(q b ˚æØŁ ı ºØÆ ø KØŁ
Ø —ØØæÆ
Æ )
when the time arrives for them to be pained by Athens: rich in
contemporary resonance, as we have seen, but again Homer too is
not far away, and no slight passage of Homer at that. It was Achilles
himself who knew that the day would come when all the Achaeans
would yearn for him (q  غºB Łc ¥%ÆØ ıxÆ ÆØH j
ÆÆ ) when the time came for many to die at the hands of
Hector (Il. 1.240–4).
What are we to make of this, and particularly that distinctive ‘do it
if you want to, but we will not approve’? Is it that Zeus really could go
against the public will if he chose, but Sparta cannot, and Herodotus’
Corinthians are just masking a power play as clear-cut as that of 432?
Or is it that it was still a matter of ethical rather than practical
pressure in 504, and it was since then that the world had changed?
Either way, the distant past is as thought-provoking as the immediate
present: putting them together promotes reXection on how, and how
far, and when things had changed. And—to return to the point made
at the outset—that also suggests a way of reading Homer too,
exploring with a Hector, an Odysseus, even an Achilles if their issues
and experiences are really so distant from those which we see around
us every day. They may be extreme; but extremes happen. Indeed, it is
really not too diYcult to Wnd Vernant’s tension of two sensitivities,
one for everlasting kleos and one for what a community needs, all
there already in the Iliad, and hard at work.

implies that the Corinthians, were they to approve, would be ‘joining in with’ (all) the
other states’ approval: in Homer Hera and Athena simply say that not all the other
gods would approve, with ominous vagueness on the extent of the disapproval or the
danger it threatens. Yet in Herodotus that ı- itself paradoxically helps that chorus
of approval to disappear: its rhetorical eVect is to needle the other states’ represen-
tatives with this assumption that they are more acquiescent, and it is unsurprising
that they so swiftly and proudly follow Soclees’ lead.
104 Christopher Pelling

‘ I N TE RACT I O N ’ ?

Is that ‘interaction’, quite? Possibly, in one of several ways. We could

say that, once we have thought about Herodotus in this way, it is
inevitable that our reading of Homer, like all other texts, will be
aVected, and we would be fooling ourselves if we struggled against it:
that is a point more about us and about reading. Or we might dwell
on the pointers to how Herodotus himself read Homer, and what he
found interesting and expected his readers to Wnd interesting: that
recalls the way GriYn has used Homeric scholia as an indicator to
what later antiquity found interesting in Homer.72 If a culture closer
to Homer read him in a particular way, then that can be a guide and a
check to our own responses; so this looks more like a historical siting
of critical insight within Greek culture itself. Or perhaps it is simply
the identiWcation of particular structural or conceptual patterns in
Herodotus’ text that may make us more conWdent in Wnding them in
Homer too.
If those patterns include an interest in cultural continuity and
change, but also a wry and critical scepticism about one-size-Wts-all
explanations, a curiosity and indulgence towards the quirky diversity
of human nature, a reluctance to reduce everything to politics or
power or sex but a readiness to see how all those worlds combine and
mesh—that too is a sensibility that this volume’s honorand would
Wnd familiar. Isaiah Berlin counted Herodotus as a fox rather than a
hedgehog;73 he has something of the GriYn too.74

72 Especially in GriYn (1980).

73 Berlin (1953); cf. We˛cowski (2004), arguing that Herodotus aligns more closely
with Berlin’s Tolstoy, a writer who ‘was by nature a fox, but believed in being a
hedgehog’, striving to impose a uniWed vision of human experience, marked as it is by
transience and instability, on the multiplicity of particularities.
74 Thanks to many, especially Simon Hornblower, Lionel Scott, and Gregory
Hutchinson, for their contributions to discussion in Balliol; and for comments
since then to Christina Kraus, Emily Baragwanath, Judith Mossman, Stephanie
West, Liz Irwin, Roger Brock, Elton Barker, and especially the editors, whose detailed
suggestions I have adopted in many more cases than I have acknowledged.
 4
Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form
Gregory Hutchinson

The main aim of this chapter is not historical: it is not to discover, for
the history of literature and culture, how the poets of the Hellenistic
period made use of Homer. The hope is rather to illuminate Hellen-
istic poems by pursuing what they did with some aspects of Homer
and with some ideas that were connected with Homer in the Hel-
lenistic period. Accordingly, the inquiry will not consider the abun-
dant and important evidence for poems that have been more or less
lost; it will concentrate on one surviving epic, the Argonautica, and
one partially surviving epic, the Hecale. Epic is the most obvious and
natural category in which to place the Hecale. Its brevity may be
provocative when set against the two famously lengthy Homeric
poems; but even the provocation only makes sense from within the
genre. The Argonautica itself may be thought strikingly short when
likewise compared with Iliad and Odyssey. It is at any rate not evident
that poems of twenty-four and four books belong together and count
as epics, while a poem of one book does not.1
It gives me much pleasure to write in honour of Jasper GriYn, and about this subject:
he has inspired me on Homer since my very interview at Balliol. Many thanks to
Dr N. Gonis for assistance with papyri of and relating to the Hecale, and to Professor
M. Fantuzzi for encouragement.
1 Merriam (2001) 1–24, seems, despite 2, in practice to regard the epyllion as a genre
distinct from epic; Gutzwiller (1981) 2–9, views it more as a subset. No argument could
be drawn from Crinag. xi.1 Gow–Page, GP æıe (‘intensively crafted’)  . The
phrase may show surprise, cf. perhaps Antip. Sid. lviii.2 Gow–Page, GP (Erinna’s
ÆØe  , with Anon. Anth. Pal. 9.190.2); but the point is not actually about length,
cf. Dion. Hal. Comp. 25, ii. 132–3 Usener–Radermacher. It is more notable that Erinna’s
own poem of 300 lines is regarded as an ‘epic’, cf. Suda  521.15–16.
106 Gregory Hutchinson
This discussion will concentrate on form, but on form in its
relation to meaning, and on form in diVerent orders of magnitude.
Especially when we are dealing with works of such varied size,
diVerent scales of form quickly begin to interact. The Hellenistic
period, one may add, both pondered the large issues of structure
which the Homeric poems exempliWed and investigated the Homeric
text in extremely close detail. The present discussion in fact begins,
not directly from Homer, but from debate involving Homer. The
procedure is not without value. When we are investigating the rela-
tionship of texts from diVerent periods, we need to look not merely
at the bare texts (i.e. as we see them ourselves), but at the critical
ideas surrounding the earlier text at the later time. In looking at these
critical ideas we also subject our own conceptions of the texts to
scrutiny, in this case not because the critical ideas are unfamiliar but
because they are all too familiar. Of course, the Homeric text itself
remains crucial, especially with writers so intimately occupied by
their model and with so deeply intertextual a genre. The line of
argument will bring us back to the Homeric poems themselves, and
to the Hellenistic poets’ continuation of Homeric form and thought.
Their relation to Homer will emerge as a complicated mixture of
experimental divergence and profound connection.
At the beginning of the Hellenistic period, an account of the epic
genre was produced which eventually came to possess fundamental
importance, Aristotle’s Poetics. The part of Poetics book 1 that con-
cerns the present paper is ch. 8, in which Aristotle discusses what
constitutes one FŁ , ‘plot’. He claims that all those who have
written a Heracleid or Theseid are much in error: the actions of one
man do not make one action, nor does the agency of one man make
the FŁ one. The Iliad and Odyssey are contrasted with such
productions: the Odyssey is not about all the things that happened
to Odysseus but about one action.2

2 The passage is discussed esp. by Heath (1989) ch. 4; the whole book gives a rich
store of ancient material. Hunter (2001) includes the passage in his important
discussion of Apollonius’ structure; cf. Hunter (1993a) 190–5. Rengakos (2004)
connects interestingly with some of the issues considered here (I am grateful
to Professor Rengakos for showing me this admirable article before publication).
Sharrock (2000) oVers a thoughtful discussion of unity and disunity in literary works.
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 107
We must ask Wrst whether these ideas and this formulation were
known and important to third-century authors. It is completely
uncertain whether or not the Poetics was current. Polymath cata-
loguers or librarians like Callimachus and Apollonius will have read
any Aristotle available (cf. Callim. fr. 407.xl Pf.). Aristotle’s three-
book dialogue De Poetis was undoubtedly known (second in the list
of works at Diog. Laert. 5.22–7). It seems to have had a general and
argumentative element (Arist. Poet. 1454b15–18). Certainly Aristo-
tle’s ideas were known to Philodemus (Wrst century bc), shaped and
expressed in a way very similar to, but not identical with, that of the
Poetics (PHerc. 207 and 1581). Aristotle lauded and discussed Homer
in ‘many’ dialogues (Dio Chrys. 53.1 von Arnim); De Poetis certainly
said much more on individual poets than the Poetics. There is thus a
high probability that Callimachus and Apollonius were familiar with
not only the ideas in the Poetics on unity but the exempliWcation of
those ideas through Homer. It is quite likely, for related reasons, that
poems on Heracles and Theseus were familiar in this context. (Arist.
fr. 70 Rose, from De Poetis, makes the same point on Homer and
Empedocles as the Poetics.) It would in any case be likely that such
poems would be drawn into discussion of these issues. Callimachus
himself speaks of the huge number of Heracles’ deeds, in a context of
choosing subjects (see below); he also speaks of a poem on Heracles
wrongly ascribed to Homer (Epigr. 6 Pf.).3
The importance of these issues for the period is also apparent.
Hellenistic criticism was much concerned with the poet’s choice and
handling of plot, and with whether this was the most important of
the poet’s tasks (so Aristotle), or not really a speciWcally poetic task,
and so forth. Homer was usually for critics the supreme exemplar of
excellence. The handling of plots speciWcally in epic was probably
discussed: cf. Andromenides (third century bc?) F 28 Janko ¼ Phld.
Poem. 1.15.21–6 Janko Ø ½
b qŁ  ŒÆd B K'Æ Œ½Æa a

3 Theocritus writes an epigram for a statue of Pisander, whose Heraclea must be

one of Aristotle’s targets. On knowledge of Aristotle, cf. the sceptical treatment of
Sandbach (1985); he cannot remove all signiWcance (cf. (1985) 4–5) from the
crucial passage of Epicurus (127 Arrighetti). At Diog. Laert. 5.26 note Bernays’s
<æ
ÆÆ> ØØŒa Æ
, printed by Marcovich (1999–2002) i. 324. On Philode-
mus and Aristotle on poetry see Janko (1991); Professors D. Armstrong and J. Fish
have kindly shown me their new text of PHerc. 1581 before publication.
108 Gregory Hutchinson
OÆ Æ , ½ŒÆd, ŒÆŁæ ½Kd : B ıŁ: ½'Æ , . . . ‘epic too has its
own character with regard to vocabulary, and just as with the con-
struction of plots . . .’. The detailed handling of the plot interests the
exegetical Homeric scholia; Aristotle originates, or Wrst displays, their
stem (-)ØŒ- (‘handle, arrange’, in the scholia with regard to the
plot). In Polybius we seem to see a striking extension of Aristotelian
language and ideas. His approach to the design of his work is
governed by ideas of proper beginning and ending, and of reXecting
the metaphorically aesthetic unity of Fortune’s metaphorically teleo-
logical achievement in the events of his particular period: a unity as
of a beautiful body, which his readers can perceive.4 Other evidence
suggests that Polybius’ use of such language reXects wider historio-
graphical debate. The criticism that Callimachus’ Aetia is not ‘one
continuous song in many thousands of lines’ (fr. 1.3–4 Massimilla) is
in my opinion directed to the second edition, the second half of
which was discontinuous in form. On this view the ‘one’ connects
clearly with the discussion also seen in Aristotle.5
We have thus seen the signiWcance for this period of these issues, of
Aristotle’s formulation, and of Homer and other epic in relation to
them. We must now engage with Aristotle’s ideas as ideas, in order to
further our own exploration of Hellenistic epic, and of Homer.
Aristotle’s use of the Homeric poems is a powerful persuasive
weapon, in ch. 8 and elsewhere. The reader feels satisfyingly united
with the author and Homer against the wretched poetasters. Yet
Panyassis, whose Heraclea Aristotle must have in mind, was lauded

4 1.3–5, cf. 3.1–5.

5 Cf. ıF ŒÆd ØA at Arist. Poet. 1452a15, and continuity as a possible
criterion for oneness at Ph. 1.185b7, Metaph. ˜ 1015b36–1016a12, ( 1052a19. See on
Callimachus Hutchinson (2003) 48. For diVerent views on FŁØ; ŁØ , and the
poet cf. Phld. Poem. 1.42.5–8 Janko (Pausimachus); 5.x.24–31 Mangoni; 5.xiv–xv
(Neoptolemus). For NŒE, etc. (Arist. Poet. 1453a29), see e.g. schol. Hom. Il.
6.491, 18.312–13a, and Suppl. Hell. 339A.14. On Polybius and other Hellenistic
historiography cf. Walbank (1972) 67–8, Heath (1989) ch. 4, esp. 80–1. Heath
emphasizes doctrine and denies a connection between Aristotle and Polybius; but
the inspiration of language and ideas need not work so rigorously (one might think
similarly e.g. at Dion. Hal. Thuc. 10, ii. 338. 4 –10 Usener–Radermacher). To doubt
that Polybius read at least some Aristotle (Ziegler (1952) 1470) seems perverse in the
light of 12.9.1 (very cautious Walbank (1957–9) ii. 330, 344).
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 109
for his NŒ Æ, his organization of the poem (Dion. Hal. De Imit.
fr. 6.2.4, ii. 204 Usener–Radermacher).6
Aristotle’s account of structure is much more elaborate and subtle
than might appear. His view seems to be that any series of events,
however long, which forms a causal sequence is in fact ‘one’. But the
tragic or epic poet must cut oV for himself a sequence that is not too
long to be perceived as a unity by the audience (note also 1459a30–4).
The poet’s sequence must be deWned too by movement from tension
to resolution and by a great change or changes in fortune. The
emphasis on perception invites the question whether a sequence
which was perceived as a unity but was not in fact so would be
aesthetically acceptable. It seems hard to see how Aristotle could
legitimately answer No. Indeed, he seems to countenance false and
impossible actions which are made to seem probable (1460a11–b5).
His account of causality seems to be weakened to suit either human
events or, more likely, human perceptions;7 his account of what
constitutes a whole must make related compromises.8 If, then, all
that were suVered and done by Heracles could be subjectively felt by
the reader as an entity, aesthetic objections to such a Heracleid might
be unfounded. A voyage of Argonauts with an envisaged objective
and end, with a limited time and a geographical sequence, might
seem even easier.9
From this subjective point of view, the necessity of causal sequence
for a reader’s sense of ‘oneness’ may be doubted. One might further
wonder about ‘oneness’ itself. If the underlying point were the
reader’s pleasure or satisfaction, the basic aesthetic need might be
deemed not a need to experience something that was one rather than

6 Whence Quint. Inst. 10.1.54. Panyassis was not admired only in Halicarnassus:
see the testimonia in Matthews (1974) 1–4, and M. L. West (2003a) 188–92 (for SGO
01/12/02 cf. Isager (1998), Lloyd-Jones (1999)).
7 Poet. 1450b29–30, 1451a27–8 (1455b10); cf. Rhet. 1.1357a22–b1, 2.1402b12–
1403a10.
8 Poet. 1450b29–30; cf. Metaph. ˜ 1023b26–1024a10.
9 Poet. 1451a16 uæ Øb YÆØ is probably a barbed reference to the poets
rather than a disapproval in advance of a unity perceived but not actual. On the
passages in the Rhetoric, cf. Burnyeat (1996). Poet. 1450b29–30 and 1451a37–8 might
suggest that if the causal connection of elements in a æA%Ø is not actual, it is not
really one æA%Ø . On æA%Ø cf. BelWore (1992) 83 with n. 2. The application of the
term ‘one’ depends on perception at Metaph. ˜ 1016a20–4 .
110 Gregory Hutchinson
two, but a need to avoid a lack of cohesion. If cohesion of experience
is the aim, the ways of achieving it are enlarged; they might even go
beyond plot, which is Aristotle’s present subject. Aristotle’s emphasis
on oneness is not eVectively justiWed (1451a31–2 seems to argue from
the nature of imitation). An implicit justiWcation may be found in
the revealing analogy of a beautiful creature (1450b36–51a6): living
beings, evident unities for Aristotle (cf. Metaph. 1077a20–36), are
the starting-point for considering beauty. This apart, some sense of
structure or shape in the audience’s experience, which Aristotle in
practice demands, might be thought to presuppose the idea of a
whole—or at any rate to be expressed by that idea. ‘A whole’ is
naturally, if not perhaps necessarily, seen in singular terms (cf.
Metaph. ˜ 1023b26–36); but concepts like ‘whole’ and ‘complete’
(1450b24, etc.) may be aesthetically more revealing than ‘one’.10
If we pursue Aristotle’s approach, but emphasize perception, we
can see aesthetic risks that are incurred by what can be called
paratactic narrative (a sequence of parallel elements). The material
might seem too diverse to cohere; the whole might have no shape; the
whole might last too long to be grasped as an entity. But the last
problem must also be faced by the poet following Aristotle’s instruc-
tions, and the other two could self-evidently yield to poetic artistry.
A less hostile approach might be needed to paratactic narrative, and,
what frequently coincides with it, to narrative that coheres around an
individual person rather than around a causal sequence of events.11
Interestingly, the Odyssey in particular shows signs of adapting
paratactic sequences (adventures of Odysseus, returns from Troy)
into a hypotactic structure. The work subordinates these sequences
through mise en abyme, and generates a cohesive thematic network,
woven round the idea of homes and hospitality. But it is not that a
paratactic structure would have made such relations impossible. The
speciWc form of the Odyssey’s hypotaxis, which sets true and untrue

10 Cf. Ricœur (1983–5) i. 66. A crucial antecedent to Aristotle here is Pl. Phdr.
264c2–5, 268c2–269a3 (note Madvig’s deletion of ıØÆ in 268d5, not men-
tioned in Burnet).
11 Even the ideas of romance discussed by Quint (1993) suggest a looseness of
connection between episodes, however evaluated (so 34, 179). Immerwahr’s post-
Fränkelian use of ‘paratactic’ for Herodotus’ structure ((1966) 47) should be kept
separate from this discussion.
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 111
intradiegetic narratives in situations of hospitality, underlines this
aspect of the narratives: their relation to hospitality and homes.
A sense of accumulation, through a latent parataxis and through
plurality, is actually necessary to the perception of Odysseus’ and
Penelope’s experience; this is above all the case from their own
perspective. Interestingly, too, the selectivity of the Iliad, praised at
Poet. 1459a30–7, involves centring the action around one predomin-
ant Wgure (or, if we prefer, two). This could be thought positively to
enhance the listener’s sense of powerful cohesion, beyond the criteria
of size and perceptibility which Aristotle emphasizes there.12
We are approaching a more positive conception of paratactic
narrative. One may broadly distinguish between two extremes,
which often blur. These are essentially: active and passive, a distinc-
tion often implicitly deployed by Aristotle. In an active form, the
deeds of the powerful hero mount up, and so as an entity enhance his
glory. In a passive form, the suVerings of a person deprived of power
mount up, and so as an entity create the sense of an unfortunate life.
The two blend in a series of adventures, where suVering is as import-
ant as achievement. It is notable that even the deeds of Heracles, the
archetypal CV of success, are often viewed as a series of suVerings,
from the Iliad on (8.360–9). Conversely, to endure numerous suVer-
ings is in itself admirable. The passive model particularly lends itself
to emotive or (from the suVerer) self-lamenting depictions, uniWed
by the consciousness of the person aZicted. This consciousness may
also give force to accounts of an individual’s life too simple, or too
lacking in internal parallelism, to possess the idea of a paratactic
series. In Homer (and beyond), an individual’s life is for him or her
a primary and all-important narrative, necessarily an entity and
normally perceived as possessing a signiWcant shape. A listener or
reader can share or comprehend this perception through sympathy.13

12 Some passages in the Odyssey stressing the multitude of Odysseus’ and Penelope’s
suVerings: 1.1–5, 4.722–8, 5.221–4, 7.211–12, 8.155, 9.37–8, 12.258–9, 14.196–8
(Cretan tale), 19.129, 344–8, 483–4 (cf. 21.207–8, 23.101–2), 20.18–21, 23.300–9.
Lowe (2000) 135–7 gives a good account of space in the Odyssey (while underexploiting
homes); space should possibly be a more prominent element in the narratology of de
Jong’s valuable commentary (2001).
13 For recent discussion of narrative and perception of one’s own experience, cf.
Fireman et al. (2003). The question of the totality of a narrated life becomes less
central from this viewpoint; cf. Brooks (1984) 52, 60.
112 Gregory Hutchinson
These ideas can form a way of looking at the story of entire poems,
or aspects of it; they also often function on a smaller scale, no less
important for the impact of the work. The Iliad itself can be seen as
endless parataxis, of aristeiai and still more of inXicted deaths; the
point, as in the Catalogue of Ships, is accumulation. (Catalogue—
which virtually begins the Argonautica—is parataxis at its most
elemental.) And crucial to the Iliad and its meaning are the evoca-
tion, not only of Achilles’ life, but of a multitude of lives, each the
thing that matters to its owner.14
We may add that visual art, not least in the classic century of
tragedy, happily depicts paratactic narratives, including the labours
of Heracles and Theseus. So the metopes of the Athenian treasury at
Delphi, c.500–490 bc (both Heracles and Theseus, as in some other
Athenian monuments), and the temple of Zeus at Olympia (Hera-
cles), c.460 bc; and so (Theseus) the Attic red-Wgure cup, Ferrara T.
18 C VP (Beazley, ARV 2 882.35; 72 cm. in diameter!), ascribed to the
Penthesilea Painter, c.460–450 bc, or a calyx-krater, Oxford 1937.983,
ascribed to the Dinos Painter, c.425 bc (Beazley, ARV 2 1153.13). The
conception was continued for Heracles by artists of the stature of
Praxiteles (Paus. 9.11.6), and on into the Hellenistic period. The
synoptic possibilities of art are pertinent to these works; but so too
is clearly delimited and balanced design. Art makes obvious the
formal and cohesive possibilities of parataxis.15
The Hecale concerns itself with the life of Theseus. This was a well-
known series of achievements, originally modelled as a structure on
those of Heracles. The connection with Heracles is evident in the
material and language of the Hecale, with its bull, its club (fr. 69.1
Hollis), and its explicit mention of the Nemean Lion (fr. 101).
Callimachus’ treatment of Heracles’ deeds in the Aetia is in any
case germane. In book 1, after a Muse has told of one of his deeds
(as beWts the selectivity of the Aetia), there is some slightly two-edged
praise of Heracles for the huge number of his actions. This leads to

14 On the Catalogue of Ships, see Visser (1997), who views it as simply part of the
poem, not a pre-existing entity or the like.
15 For the Athenian treasury, see de la Coste-Messelière (1957); there are problems
of arrangement with both these metopes and those at Olympia. In general see Neils
(1987); Boardman (1990); Neils and Woodford (1994) 925–9; Froning (1992).
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 113
the irrepressible narrator telling of another deed. The Aetia is here
interested both in its own form and in the quantity of the actions.
K ÆŒÆ b %ŒØ
Ø, j KŒ
 ÆPƪæ  ººŒØ ººa ŒÆ,
‘you performed six times two labours to order, and many times many
of your own choice’ (fr. 25.21–2 Massimilla), also distinguishes wryly
between deeds inXicted and deeds willed. The distinction has links
with that between active and passive. Further deeds of Heracles
appeared in later books. In the Hecale Æ IŁºı: ½ ‘all labours’
(fr. 17.3) seems to view the series of Theseus’ deeds in advance. But
Callimachus has taken the striking decision to concentrate on only
one deed of this one man, a hyper-Aristotelian solution: Theseus
overcomes the Bull of Marathon. At the same time, other deeds are
brought in hypotactically; and the lives of two characters are handled
in the work. These lives interweave around the simple main action:
Hecale, a poor old woman, entertains Theseus en route to the bull; he
conquers it, and comes back to Wnd her dead; his promised reward
for her hospitality must now be posthumous honours.16
The main sequence seems in fact so simple, the surrounding
material so abundant and so elaborately presented, that we may
wonder if the Aristotelian reading of Homer’s epics (a single action
enlarged with episodes) has been pushed to a point of conscious and
subversive play. It is noteworthy that Aegeus’ recognition of his son
Theseus and rescue of him from a plot by his stepmother was
narrated by the poem, with powerful direct speech (Y, Π, c
EŁØ, ‘stop, my child, do not drink’, fr. 7 Hollis).17 This occurred
either early in the main sequence or in a digression. In Aristotelian
terms, one would expect such an event to form a climax. Presumably
Callimachus’ shaping or selection of the main action was made to

16 For the text of the Hecale see Hollis’s very learned edition (1990) and his tireless
later articles (1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1994, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2000, 2004). On cata-
logues of Theseus’ deeds see Hollis (1990) 209, with 289; the later hymnic catalogue at
Ov. Met. 7.433–50 deliberately answers that of Hercules’ deeds at Verg. Aen. 8.293–
302. Attic vases often pair a deed of Theseus’ with one of Heracles’. Diod. Sic. 4.59.6,
Ov. Met. 7.434, etc., actually make the two bulls the same. On the club (commonly
used in this exploit) see Hollis (1990) 216, 219; Neils and Woodford (1994) 927
no. 43, 937–9 nos. 185, 188–9, 199, 202–10, 214–15. In fr. 17.3 Hollis ]Ø:: looks
possible to me; cf. the Wrst  in line 4. Cf. Hollis (1997b) 47–8.
17 Cf. fr. 79.
114 Gregory Hutchinson
appear unexpected. There seems also some toying in the poem with
Aristotelian aversions: the poem suggests a narrative of the life not
even of one person but of two. In fact the two contrasted lines of
narrative, extended into the main action, gain cohesion precisely by
their relation to each other. This relation may actually be compared
to the relation in Homer himself of the lines of action concerning
Odysseus and Penelope, or to the relation of the lives of old Priam
and the young hero Achilles as they meet and take food together. But
there are diVerences from Homer: Hecale and Theseus have hitherto
existed in greater isolation from each other. The point of all this,
however, is not purely metaliterary or ludic.18
The poem begins and ends with Hecale, and so implies the sig-
niWcance of her life. Her constant hospitality, despite her poverty,
suggests in a way a succession of moral achievements ( ›
EÆØ,
‘all travellers’ fr. 2.1 Hollis; –ÆØ, ‘all’ (travellers) 80.5); one might
possibly compare the series of Theseus’ heroic achievements (cf. fr.
17.3 (above) ‘endure’ (?) Æ IŁºı: ½ , ‘all labours’). Hecale prin-
cipally appeared in one central scene of dining and story-telling: a
hypotactic setting that recalls the Odyssey, but also many a Heracles
poem (and, within the œuvre, Aetia 3?). She narrates her fall, and
successive disasters, which involved the loss of two or probably three
loved ones. Fr. 49.2–3 bring out the terrible series of misfortunes,
with emotive apostrophe: Mæ ¨ÆØ ƺ Æ: Ø ŒÆº  ;
;

IŒFÆØ j c a

 ¥Æ ŒÆd d K ææ
%ÆØØ : øÆ; ‘Was I ;
;

refusing to heed Death, who had long been calling, so that I should
soon after rend my garment over you too?’ The paratactic sequence,
and the narrative form, were more marked than in many pathetic
Homeric speeches on the speaker’s life; but two Iliadic life-stories

18 The centrality of aetiology for Callimachus may have aVected the impact of
the last part of the poem: that is in a sense the true º . But it is noteworthy that
Lehnus (1997) thinks that the poem ended with fr. 80; cf. also McNelis (2003).
The order of events is not guaranteed by the ‘Milan’ Diegesis or by POxy. 2258 A fr.
9 back: cf. frr. 98 and 198 PfeiVer. The contribution of POxy. 3434 is aVected by
whether one takes 6]nƽ½º
Ø as work or character. (One might have some doubts
˙
about the putative kappa; but there are not many examples in the papyrus. Cf.
e.g. POxy. 2216 fr. 1 r. 4.) On Callimachus and ‘one’ note the dispute of Ia. 13
(one metre). The relation to Aristotelian oneness is an aspect of the two actions
in Theocritus 22 that could proWtably be enlarged on (cf. Hunter (1996) ch. 2).
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 115
in particular should be connected. Briseis tells (Il. 19.287–300) of
enduring one woe after another (19.290): the death of her husband
and three brothers at Achilles’ hands, and then the death of
Patroclus. Priam’s story is told mostly but not entirely by himself:
how he was wealthy and then lost many sons, and then Hector, and
endured to come and kiss his killer’s hands (22.416–29, 24.493–506,
543–9).19
Those Homeric speeches show the validity of diVerent viewpoints,
and the importance of one’s own story. Briseis’ unexpected speech
suddenly displays events from her perspective; it is revealingly fol-
lowed by other women weeping notionally for Patroclus, but really
each for her own woes (Il. 19.301–2). Just so Priam weeps for Hector,
but Achilles for Peleus and Patroclus (24.509–12). In Callimachus’
scene, two quite diVerent perspectives combine and are contrasted,
to moving and thought-provoking eVect: the Wgures are contrasted
in age, sex, fortune, and power. The contrast is more extreme than
between Achilles and Priam. But also two lines of plot interlock:
Theseus has killed (at least) a killer of one of Hecale’s family. The
interweaving of paratactic narratives here shows an ingenuity going
beyond the straightforward designs of Aristotle.
We may interject here the characteristically Callimachean refrac-
tion by which a bird tells of its own (and its race’s?) sad life, which
combines with Hecale’s; another tale of drastic peripeteia is thus
brought in. In this case the proliferation of dubiously related but
parallel material shows more a sense of sporting with narrative than
an extension of the ethical point.20

19 Note Priam in Callim. fr. 491 Pf. On the speech and story of Briseis cf. Dué
(2002). Before Patroclus’ death, her many woes were simultaneous rather than
successive; cf. Andromache’s account of losing at once her father and seven brothers,
then her mother, soon to be followed, she fears, by Hector (Hom. Il. 6.407–39). In fr.
49 Hollis, it is probably the second son that dies, in view of the rhetorical preparation
at the bottom of col. i in POxy. 2376 (fr. 48). It seems papyrologically more natural to
let fr. 47 follow fr. 49: it would be suspicious that there is no overlap between frr. 47
and 48 if 47 preceded 49 in the codex POxy. 2377. If 47 is the later side, it is perhaps
less likely that it concerns Hecale’s husband (note fr. 49.2). On the opening of the
poem cf. Hollis (1997a);  in fr. 2.1 echoes Hom. Il. 6.15, but as she is poor
unlike Axylus, the word stresses a more remarkable accomplishment.
20 On ‘refraction’ in Callimachus, cf. Hutchinson (2003) 51 n. 13, 52, 54.
116 Gregory Hutchinson
The life of Theseus before the recognition was probably subordin-
ated in various ways: by hypotaxis in the case of his previous great
deeds, told to Hecale; relative brevity will have been another means of
subordination (notice the fullness of description within the main
action, as in the storm of fr. 18). However, direct speech appeared in
the narrative both of the deeds (fr. 60) and of the childhood (fr. 10;
13?): treatment of the childhood gives a strong indication that
Theseus’ whole life so far is being covered. The deeds are very
much envisaged as a connected series: Theseus wishes, precisely, to
be allowed to go on with the list (fr. 17.2–4).21 These are not imposed
labours but relished opportunities for glory. The active model of
paratactic narrative is implied, by contrast with the passive model for
Hecale. The death of Hecale brings a turn. It contrasts with Theseus’
own escapes from death and reunions with his father (whom his
heroism will eventually destroy); though a relief from sorrow to
Hecale,22 it causes sorrow to Theseus. The humanity and tenderness
already seen in Theseus (fr. 69.4–9) now further enrich and limit the
ethos of heroic triumph.23
Apollonius’ Argonautica is longer, better preserved, and far more
complicated than the Hecale. The narrative occupies the same num-
ber of books as does, in the Hellenistic book-division, the inset
narrative of Odysseus’ travels (Odyssey 9–12). It concerns itself
strictly with a series of ¼ŁºØ. The word conveys the idea of toil
and suVering; Pelias has inXicted on Jason the task, the ¼Łº , of
fetching the Golden Fleece, which itself involves innumerable ¼ŁºØ.
These make a paratactic series. The series forms a whole, a cumula-
tive entity, both as an achievement and as suVering: the double aspect
of active and passive is vital to the poem. The extent of the poem is
entirely deWned by the ¼ŁºØ: after the briefest explanation of the
single cause of the task, the poem starts to tell of how and by whom
the task was executed. (The contrast with the narrative of Pindar’s

21 Cf. Ap. Rhod. 1.149–50.

22 Frr. 49.2–3, 80.1–2.
23 For the childhood cf. Arist. Poet. 1451a25–6; note the external analepsis of
Achilles’ childhood in Hom. Il. 9.485–95. The scene with the rock is sometimes
included on depictions of Theseus’ life (Neils and Woodford (1994) 928–9, nos. 50,
51, 57). On fr. 60 see Hollis (1965).
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 117
fourth Pythian is extreme.) The ending of the series is looked forward
to throughout, and is especially stressed in the last stages of the
poem, where a close is almost lost (4.1275–6, 1307), and then
realized.24
The ¼ŁºØ are felt as a cohesive entity, despite their multitude; or
rather, their multitude helps to constitute the entity. Their number is
perceived as vast by the Argonauts and others (e.g. 4.1319–21, where
Odysseus’ experiences are evoked). They are said to be IØæØØ,
‘countless’, but precisely in a context which deWnes their structural
position. The prophet Idmon tells the Argonauts they are fated
to come back with the Fleece, ‘but countless are the suVerings that
lie in between your departure for Colchis and your return here’,
IØæØØ
Kd fiø (lit. ‘in the middle’) j ŒE 
Fæ  ÆØ
IæØØ ¼ŁºØ (1.441–2: the word-order expresses the pro-
traction). One may compare the structure of Odysseus’ lot: ‘if he is
fated to return, let it be late and wretchedly’, etc. (Hom. Od. 9.532–5).
The Argonauts’ suVerings after the killing of Apsyrtus are planned by
Zeus to be ıæ Æ, ‘innumerable’, but in a context which deWnes their
place: they are to ‘return having suVered many woes Wrst’,
æ  ıæ Æ ÆŁÆ j 
Ø (4.560–1). The adjective, and
the will of Zeus, make evident links with the plot of the Iliad.25

24 In Homer, ¼ŁºØ, save in an athletic context, often has the negative connota-
tions of Ø, though endurance can be praiseworthy: Il. 3.126–8, 8.363 cf. 19.133
(Heracles), 24.734 (verb; servile work), Od. 23.248–50 (with stress on completion;
more positive Od. 4.170, 240–3). Cf. S. Laser (1955). Hes. Theog. [992–1001] is
important (though Apollonius probably had views on where the Theogony ended):
(Jason) ºÆ Æ IŁºı (cf. Mimn. fr. 11.3 West, of Jason) j f
ººf Kºº . . . æØc —º  (cf. Hom. Od. 11.622 of Heracles). . . j
f ºÆ K  ( øºŒe I Œ ººa ª
Æ . Cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.165 F
¼Łº Œg º, and Ap. Rhod. 1.15–16 (singular, as 469, 4.785), 362, 901–3,
2.615–18, etc. The discussion of Apollonius here is meant to complement that in
Hutchinson (1988) ch. 3; for that reason, and because of the particular argument
here, the emphasis is on books 1 and 2, and little is said on book 4. (That whole
chapter has to be read for the argument on book 4 to become clear.) Nyberg (1992),
Pietsch (1999), Wray (2000), Dräger (2001), Hunter (2001), Clare (2002), are gen-
erally relevant; for Apollonius’ use of Homer, cf., among much other work, Knight
(1995), Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) ch. 3 and 266–82, and the invaluable collection
of Campbell (1981).
25 The suVerings of Odysseus, like those of the Argonauts, have essentially a single
cause. For the determination in Hom. Od. 9.526–36 of what ensues, see Schmidt
(2003); but note also 11.110–17, 12.137–41.
118 Gregory Hutchinson
This numberlessness may be contrasted with the exact number of
twelve labours that Heracles has to fulWl (1.1318). Heracles forms, it is
well known, a constant counterpoint to the Argonauts; what matters
here is not only his more active approach to his labours but also the
structural comparison. Theseus highlights a diVerent aspect. He
appears at the start of the poem as one who would have signiWcantly
helped the Argonauts (1.104–5). But later only one adventure is
brought in explicitly, and repeatedly: Theseus’ encounter with
Minos and, especially, his relationship with Minos’ daughter Ariadne.
Ariadne freed Theseus, Jason persuasively observes to Medea, from the
ŒÆŒH . . . IŁºø, ‘grim trials’, imposed by her father (3.997).26
For there is a crucial complication to the ¼ŁºØ and the structure
of the poem. The centre (in terms of the journey) presents an
¼Łº =Ø imposed by Aeetes in the midst of the ¼Łº =Ø imposed
by Pelias. Aeetes’ task, although consisting of two parts, is generally
presented as singular: Jason must plough with bulls that breathe Wre
and sow a crop of warriors. The third book ends º
q ¼Łº , ‘the task was accomplished’ (3.1407), as the fourth
book ends with the Œºıa  æÆŁ . . . j æø ŒÆø, ‘glorious
end of your labours’, when there are no more ¼ŁºØ (4.1775–6). The
confrontation of a central ¼Łº and surrounding ¼ŁºØ is a chal-
lenging development of oneness in the plot and of parataxis. The
separation of the poem into very distinct books (papyrus rolls)
increases the complication. All this in fact enhances the shaping of
the reader’s experience, and the development of the poem as it
proceeds.27

26 Cf. 1.255, 903. On Ariadne cf. Goldhill (1991) 301–6; Korenjak (1997). Note
now POxy. 4640 (hypothesis to a tragedy?), which suggests an elaborate treatment of
relations between Theseus, Ariadne, and Minos. There are other possible or probable
connections with Theseus in Apollonius, like the dragging of the bull by the horn in
3.1306–7 (cf. Callim. Hec. fr. 68 Hollis, with Hollis’s note). See further Hunter (1988)
449–50; Dräger (2001) 99–101. For the ¼ŁºØ of Heracles in the poem, cf. DeForest
(1994) 53, 66–7, 113–14.
27 For  æÆŁ . . . ŒÆø cf. 2.424 Œºıa  æÆÆ . . . IŁºı, of Colchis (411 is
doubtful), 3.1189  æÆ IŁºı (Aeetes thinks Jason will not accomplish it, cf.
4.1275–6, 1307 mentioned above); Pind. Pyth. 4.220  æÆ IŁºø
 Œı
Ææø'ø; Hom. Od. 23.248–50 ø . . .  æÆ IŁºø, not yet reached by Odys-
seus. For Aeetes’ task as an ¼Łº cf. also Naupact. fr. 6.3 West. At Pind. Pyth. 4.229–
33 it is an æª to be Wnished; on 220 see Braswell (1988) 304–5. On 3.1407, see
Hunter (1989) 255.
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 119
The surrounding episodes look forward or backwards to the
central trial, for the reader; the Argonauts are in ignorance of its
nature before Colchis. So the women of Lemnos, wearing armour
and ploughing, evoke Jason carrying arms as he ploughs with the
bulls.28 This confusion of male and female roles links with the
primary importance of the woman in the Colchian ¼Łº .29 The
men that spring from the teeth Jason sows are ˆª , ‘Earth-born’,
at one point actually ª ªÆ , ‘Giants’ (3.1054). There could hardly
be a clearer connection, or contrast, with the defeat of the ˆª
by Heracles and the other Argonauts (1.989–1011): a resumption of
Heracles’ participation in the Gigantomachy. (The episode contains
much evocation of the warfare in the Iliad.) Imagery and other
references greatly augment the connections and distortions. So cattle
begin the second book (2.1); Amycus, the enemy of the Argonauts,
appears like a Giant produced by the Earth (2.38–40), Polydeuces, in
meaningful contrast, like a star of the sky;30 Amycus and Polydeuces
Wght like two bulls (88–9, cf. 91). Or the Argonauts row like bulls
ploughing (2.662–8): Iß
. . . æØ, ‘the breath’ of such bulls
‘roars’ (2.665–6), as, conversely, the Iß
of Aeetes’ bulls resembles
the æ , ‘roar’, of winds feared by sailors (3.1327–9). The central
and other ¼ŁºØ thus join together to form an elaborate and cohesive
thematic texture, woven round ideas of heroic and less heroic
achievement.31
Even in the apparently most paratactic books, books 1 and 2,
interconnections create a sense of cohesion, and form creates a
sense of elegance. Some larger structuring elements may be brieXy

28 1.627–30; 685–8 their ploughing; 867–8 ploughing by the Argonauts if they

remain, with sexual suggestions.
29 Cf. 1.637–8 Hypsipyle in father’s armour, 742–6 Aphrodite with Ares’ shield,
769–72 Atalanta’s spear, 3.623–7 Medea yoking the bulls instead of Jason; cf. e.g.
4.1032–5 for Medea’s all-important role.
30 Cf. also 2.1208–13 and 4.151, Aeetes’ snake too as the oVspring of Earth,
ªª .
31 In further and more disconcerting extensions of the bovine motif, Heracles,
who killed Hylas’ father when he was ploughing with a bull (1.1213–17), runs
distraught at Hylas’ loss like a bull pursued by a gadXy (1.1265–72—a male Io).
Jason kills Apsyrtus like a great bull (4.468–9): Aegisthus’ killing of Agamemnon in
Hom. Od. 4.534–5 and 11.409–11 is plainly recalled. The motif may already be
exploited by Pindar, cf. Pyth. 4.142 (very unusual), 205.
120 Gregory Hutchinson
mentioned here; we will come back to explore them later from a
diVerent viewpoint. Phineus gives a detailed account in advance of
the remaining trials to be faced on the outward journey (2.311–407);
Jason summarizes events so far to Lycus (2.762–71).32 Both these lists
make the totality easier to view as a whole, more P. The
encounter with the sons of Phrixus near the close of book 2 (1090–
1227) helps to bridge the gap between the two halves of the poem.33
The distress of Jason’s parents at the start (1.247–305) helps to
establish the ¼ŁºØ (cf. 1.255) as an entity, a lamentable whole.
The most important of all the structural elements is the division of
the two books. The Wrst is closed through a device that makes it seem
like a distinct Attic tragedy: the sudden appearance of a god to
intervene and settle (1.1310–28: Glaucus). The separation of the
books groups the material into two diVerentiated units, with con-
trasting episodes. In book 1, things tend to go sadly wrong. The
Argonauts dally with the Lemnian women, who had half-heartedly
taken male roles; they are themselves temporarily made soft and
amorous. By contrast in book 2, the Argonauts do not even meet
the warlike Amazons, of whom we hear much; if they had, they
would have fought them (2.985–95). The Argonauts are hospitably
entertained in book 1 by Cyzicus, but then by accident engage in
Iliadic yet pointless and disastrous warfare with their hosts. By
contrast, in book 2 their Iliadic Wghting against Amycus’ people is
entirely justiWed, and the hospitality of Lycus has no calamitous
sequel. In book 1 they lose their greatest hero, Heracles, in awkward
circumstances, which lead to a strife that is characteristic of the book.
The loss of Idmon in book 2, by contrast, is a death in the arms of
friends (833–4), which underlines the harmony more characteristic
of this book, and recently aYrmed (715–19). The Boreadae urge
against returning for Heracles; this is part of a quarrel, and will in
the future cause Heracles actually to kill them (1.1298–1308). In
book 2 the Boreadae rescue Phineus by pursuing the Harpies: a
heroic deed, at the limits of human power. Book 2 is generally
marked, until the blow of Tiphys’ death, by heroic achievement.

32 Cf. 4.730–7.
33 Their warnings end with Aeetes’ snake, like Phineus’ main prophetic speech,
2.404–7; cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.244–6.
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 121
Polydeuces kills Amycus, and the Argonauts pass through the Ple-
gades. Temporary despair at their helmsman’s death (2.858–63, cf.
885–93) marks to some extent a change of direction in the narrative;
but it is evident how the division of books shapes the material into
large masses and patterns. The separate rolls of books 1–4 are fun-
damental to the organization and perception of the poem.34
The structure of the poem is elegant and formalized. The strong
divisions between books, episodes, scenes, do not only disrupt and
express; they also, as in, say, metopes, articulate a design. The design
focuses on the Argonauts and their deeds and experiences: not one
man but many, not their lives but a tightly delimited action and
period. As has become apparent, the structure creates complex ideas
of the Argonauts themselves, as regards heroic achievement. But the
poem also looks beyond the Argonauts, and in doing so broadens its
vision and deepens its thought. All the structuring moments that
were mentioned from books 1 and 2 in fact also display this looking
beyond. The way they combine structuring the poem and enlarging
its meaning demonstrates strikingly the importance of both these
aspects. In complicating the focus of the poem, these passages do not
only show structural daring and experiment; they also lead the poem,
through Homeric forms, into Homeric, and especially Iliadic, com-
plexity and emotional profundity.
Let us look at how other people and lives are developed in these
passages; some Homeric connections will also be mentioned. Phineus’
itinerary particularly recalls Circe’s (Od. 12.37–110); but Phineus has
a more elaborate life-story than the Odyssean Circe (Od. 10.135–9).
His speech presents the future and a new beginning for the Argo-
nauts; about the end of their task, they fail to learn (2.408–25).
( æÆÆ Æıغ  . . . ¼ı   ŒºŁı (310), ‘the end of the
voyage and accomplishment of the journey’, only refers to the out-
ward voyage, it transpires.) Phineus himself, as juxtaposition brings
out, has now had his peripeteia: the Harpies have gone for good. No
further change to his blind old age is possible, and he would like to
die (444–7). The irreversible blindness links him to Polyphemus (Od.
9.542–5): that scene, while determining Odysseus’ future, also opens

34 On the nature of book 1, cf. Clauss (1993).

122 Gregory Hutchinson
unexpected and pathetic vistas on the Cyclops’ ruined life (9.447–
60). The stages reached by Phineus’ and the Argonauts’ stories and
lives are opposed. Phineus is an archetypal old man; the speciWc
designation › ªæÆØ , ‘the old man’ (254, etc.), summons up Iliadic
Wgures. Phineus contrasts with the youthful Argonauts (327).35 He
joins up with the old people at the beginning of the poem, especially
Jason’s father.36 The speech of the old man Phoenix in Il. 9 (434–605)
may be compared: Phoenix’s life, and those of others, are set against
Achilles’.37
In the Phineus episode, the narrator’s and Phineus’ own accounts,
and Wrst-, second-, and third-person perspectives, produce a vivid
and elaborate idea of Phineus’ story. The contrast with his previous
reign and good fortune, before the earlier and unhappy peripeteia,
recalls Priam.38 The general technique too is Iliadic: the Lycaon
episode gives a conspicuous example of perspectives in diVerent
persons on the same narrative (Il. 21.34–114). In the case of Phineus,
for all his and the Argonauts’ mutual goodwill, we see his distinct and
separate viewpoint; the separation is grounded in biography and
biology.39

35 Cf. 1.341 etc. Ø, ‘young men’; 1.448 ŒFæØ, ‘youths’; 2.419–20.
36 1.263–4, cf. 253–5;
ıæ , ‘most unfortunate’, is used in the Wrst two
books of Jason’s father at 1.253, his mother at 286, Phineus at 2.218, and in
connection with old age at 1.685.
37 The name of (a diVerent) Cleopatra at Ap. Rhod. 2.239 may sharpen the
connection with Phoenix’s speech (cf. Hom. Il. 9.556–65, 590–5). That speech is
itself very much an expansion of the Iliad’s usual world. On the narrative of Meleager
there and its relation to Achilles, cf. Alden (2000) ch. 7, Grossardt (2001) 9–43. For
Phineus’ old age cf. e.g. 2.183, 197–201, 221 ªBæÆ I
æı K º ºŒø. The
Kleophrades Painter, with characteristically innovative pathos, shows a blind and
bald old man: Attic r.-f. hydria-kalpis Malibu 85.AE.316, c.480–470 bc (Kahil and
Jacquemin (1988) 446–7 no. 9). For various aspects of the episode cf. Hunter (1993a)
90–5, Knight (1995) 169–76, Manakidou (1995) 203–8, Clare (2002) 74–83, Cuypers
(2004) 60–1. The link across works with fr. 5.4–5 Powell is of interest (cf. Krevans
(2000)).
38 2.236–9; Hom. Il. 24.543–6.
39 Achilles purports to make Lycaon’s story unimportant by speaking of his own
origin and death (Hom. Il. 21.108–12); but any simple adoption of Achilles’ perspec-
tive is averted by 122–35. (126–35 are bracketed in M. L. West’s edition (1998–2000),
cf. West (2001) 258–9; but 122–5 are enough to arouse horror and pathos.) There is
perhaps a metaliterary dimension to the episode too. The blind Phineus recalls not
only the seer Teiresias but the poets Demodocus (cf. 2.257–8 with Hom. Od. 8.480–1,
488) and Homer (cf. M. L. West (1999) 371, and esp. Graziosi (2002) ch. 4). Phineus’
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 123
Jason’s summary to Lycus is immediately followed by Lycus’ own
reminiscences of his youth (2.774–91), in rather Nestorian vein (cf.
Hom. Il. 1.260–72). When Lycus saw Heracles he was just leaving
boyhood (2.779), but now he has a son of his own (homonymous
with his own father),40 who is old enough to be sent with the
Argonauts. He and his people have their own reasons to be delighted
at the Argonauts’ defeat of the Bebryces, with whom they have always
been Wghting.41 A sense of other lives and perspectives is thus built
up, through Wrst-person speech and the adumbration of a biograph-
ical narrative. The Odyssey is very much in point here, not least book
4, where Menelaus both remembers Odysseus and reveals some of his
own story.42
The sons of Phrixus are crucial to the plot and forcefully introduce
us and the Argonauts to the central situation of Colchis. But they also
forcefully bring in their own story, which is part of a longer story
involving their father and their mother, Aeetes’ elder daughter Chal-
ciope. Their story now interlocks with that of the Argonauts, and
there are numerous points of connection and contrast. They are
trying to get back to Greece from Colchis, so as to recover their
property; they are following their father’s (not, like Jason, their
uncle’s) Kø, ‘injunctions’ (2.1152). Their own ship has just
been wrecked (by the father of the Boreadae, 1098–1103); their
despair strongly connects with Jason’s in the poem.43 Though their
fates will now combine, they become a lever for opening up further
divisions of understanding. Their mother has a very diVerent attitude
to their departure, based on her own sex and life-story (3.253–67).
That scene is especially connected with Penelope’s reaction to Tele-
machus’ departure,44 as is the related scene between Jason and his

avoidance of completeness compares and contrasts with the poet-narrator’s own

strategy; the theme of controlling speech, in Apollonius’ version of the myth (cf.
schol. 2.178–82b, Soph. frr. 704–5 TrGF), relates to a concern of the narrator’s
prominent in the poem (cf. e.g. 1.919–21, handled as often with a near-Callimachean
sense of play).
40 776, 803.
41 135–41, 757–8, 796–8.
42 On Lycus’ reminiscences cf. Nelis (2001) 360–2.
43 IÆø ŒÆŒØ, (one son) ‘in despair at their misfortune’, 2.1140; the
same phrase of Jason 2.410, 3.423.
44 Hom. Od. 4.703–66, 17.36–56.
124 Gregory Hutchinson
mother (1.268–305). Book 3 will develop further signiWcant diver-
gences between Chalciope’s perspective and that of her sister Medea,
despite their alliance. Aeetes too has an angle of his own.45
Diverging perspectives are plainly involved in the mourning of
Alcimede and others for Jason before he leaves. The speech of
Odysseus’ mother at Od. 11.181–204, which is evoked in this scene,
brings out the suVering that Odysseus’ absence has caused to diVer-
ent members of his family; but it does not mark the distinctness of
the hero’s own viewpoint with the force of this scene. (Jason, though
sad, is determined, and he has more conWdence than Alcimede in the
gods.) Particularly interesting is the elaborate connection of perspec-
tive and structure. The passage has strong associations with both
opening and closing. S Zº (1.256, spoken by women), ‘if only’
Phrixus had perished on his ram, ÆYŁ Zº (278, spoken by Alci-
mede), ‘if only’ I had died, recall the opening of Euripides’ Medea:
YŁ þº , ‘if only’ the Argo had never been made or sailed. That very
connection marks a diVerent perspective again on the Argonauts.
¼ºªÆ ıæ Æ Ł  (259), (so that Phrixus’ ram might) ‘cause’ Alci-
mede ‘innumerable woes’, strongly recalls the opening of the Iliad;
however, it relates the woes to a Wgure subordinate in the main story,
but with her own viewpoint. The mourning of the parents, and the
attempt to restrain the son, recalls the last part of the Iliad (books 22
and 24). Structurally, a striking inversion of the Iliad’s structure is
implied: the family’s mourning begins the poem. But diVerences in
characters’ viewpoint are much involved too. The idea of ending
relates to Alcimede’s perceived pattern of life, distinct from her son’s:
now she is old, but after joy and prosperity have come a peripeteia
and a sad Wnal period.46 Such a fall in a life is a highly Homeric theme
for speeches, and is seen even in a child and a dog.47 In the Iliad,
lament provides a supreme form for presenting individual perspec-
tive and narrative. Apollonius pursues this Homeric inspiration, but
at a greater distance from tragic Wnality.48
45 3.304–13, cf. 584–8, 594–605. For restraining parents cf. also e.g. Hom. Il.
22.33–92, Callim. Hec. fr. 17 Hollis and Diegesis. Contrast Ap. Rhod. 1.149–50. On
the sons of Phrixus in the poem cf. Nyberg (1992) 62, 86–7, Clare (2002) 104–18.
46 1.251–2, 284–9, cf. 253–5.
47 Il. 22.484–507, Od. 17.312–23.
48 Alcimede is not seen in Pindar; the old father is presented at Pyth. 4.120–3.
In Apollonius the parents appear as fortunate hitherto; Pelias’ treatment of their
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 125
We have already touched on Glaucus’ speech, delivered ex mari
rather than ex machina. It ends a quarrel within the expedition; the
contrast with the opening of the Iliad is made inescapable by BØ
(1.1339), Telamon’s ‘wrath’. There is also a contrast between this
resolution of discord and Heracles’ behaviour: he will later kill his
enemies (something Achilles only contemplated in the heat of the
moment, Il. 1.189–92). Heracles has his own plot, which this one has
been interrupting; his departure fulWls ˜Øe . . . ıº
, as if he had
his own Iliad.49 The Argonautica in fact includes a considerable
number of Heracles’ labours, and his paratactic plot is both separate
from this one and Xeetingly in contact with it. Hylas has already
gained the end of marriage (and immortality); Jason will have to wait
until 4.1121–69 for the former. Even Hylas’ biography has been
brieXy conveyed, with conscious digression (1.1211–20). Other stor-
ies, then, appear, with their own timing and shape.50
These moments bring out how, even as Apollonius is marking the
clarity and cohesion of his paratactic narrative, he is also, in pursuit of
Homer, pointedly opening up a multiplicity of other stories and
perspectives. Such opening up is not in the least conWned to these
moments (cf. e.g. the episodes of Hypsipyle or of the Doliones, or
Hera’s speech to Thetis, 4.783–832); but they bring out with special
force how the poem is not conWned to its central structure, characters,
and ethos. The sense of other lives and viewpoints does not undermine
the sense of structure and of selection; but it enormously enriches the
vision and complexity of the poem. These passages of books 1 and 2
also lead into the great Wssure in the narrative of the poem.

property is not dwelt on (cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.110). The idea that Jason is Alcimede’s only
child is presented in terms of her biography (1.287–9, cf. 97–100 and Helen in Hom.
Od. 4.12–14).
49 1.1315, 1345, cf. 2.154.
50 Heracles in the poem is a complex mixture of lawlessness and lawfulness:
shortly before, his motive with Theiodamas is raised to a concern with justice
(1.1218–19); 2.147–50 more bluntly set Þºfiø against Amycus’ (deplorable)
ŁEØ. Panyassis frr. 19–22 West (¼ 12–14 Matthews) may even seek to improve
Heracles’ image as a drinker; cf. M. L. West (2003a) 207 n. 21. Diverging treatments
of Heracles in poetry were a topic of explicit discussion: cf. esp. Megaclides (early 3rd
cent. bc) F 9 Janko in Janko (2000) 142–3. Zeus’ will is made to play a more
prominent role in Heracles’ story than in the Argonauts’ (even after Apsyrtus’
murder, note 4.576–9); cf. Feeney (1991) 58–69, DeForest (1994) 67–8, 108–9.
126 Gregory Hutchinson
As the poem moves into greater continuity and singleness with the
central ¼Łº , it also splits into two strands and two perspectives (cf.
the Hecale). Not only diVerent values and a diVerent world but
diVerent styles and modes of narrative are seen in the writing on
Jason and on Medea. It is characteristic that Jason has no long
soliloquies.51
Medea’s life appears within and outside the borders of the poem.
Within it, her active deeds and passive suVerings form a challenging
mirror-image of the Argonauts’ (and especially Jason’s). Her deeds
detract from his, her suVerings are his fault. Only a few points need
be mentioned here. It is signiWcant, as was mentioned, that she
dreams of performing Jason’s trial herself (3.623–7). The last line of
book 3 states the accomplishment of the ¼Łº ; the Wrst of book 4
speaks of Medea’s ŒÆ, ‘suVering’ (joined with

Æ, ‘plans’, for
which cf. 4.193); the last sentence of book 4 comes to the end of the
Argonauts’ ŒÆø, ‘labours’ (1776). Her suVerings and their deeds
thus join together. Passionate speeches by Medea emphasize her loss
of her fatherland, parents, and home, which she has restored to the
Argonauts.52 Jason’s, and the Argonauts’, success in ŒÆØ, ¼ŁºØ,
and gaining of the Fleece, are due to Medea, and her suVering is due
to those ŒÆØ and ¼ŁºØ.53 The symmetry, and its disquieting
implications, are made clear.54
The Argonauts’ plot and Medea’s are just about kept together as
stories, in that marriage is a climactic event for her (almost prevented
by perjury from Jason, and brought within the poem’s narrative by

51 The monologue and dream of Medea in POxy. 4712 are interesting even if, as
looks likely, the poem is later than Apollonius.
52 4.361–2, 1036–7, 1038–40, cf. 203 (Jason speaking).
53 4.360–5, 1031–5.
54 For a relatively recent discussion of the relation between Medea’s and Jason’s
roles in the poem cf. Clauss (1997); see also the witty presentation in Calasso (1988)
372–4. Similes oVer another important device for giving Medea’s experience
shape. Two suggest the radical changes in her life that confront Medea within the
poem: 3.656–63, on a bride who has lost her husband before the wedding-night, and
4.1060–7, on a working widow with children, all mourning. As often with similes,
there are also vital diVerences; the changes of life within the similes are in fact more
tragic. (So too at 1.268–77.) The inset mini-narratives of the similes open up yet
further lives. Such resonance is Homeric: especially pertinent is Od. 8.523–30, on
a woman who has lost her husband at the fall of a city and is driven into slavery.
(Cf. Macleod (1982) 4–5, 10–11; Garvie (1994) 339–40; de Jong (2001) 216–17.)
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 127
surprise). But her story, more than Jason’s, is extended before and
beyond the end of the poem; we can see how diVerent a span it has
from the Argonauts’ journey. Her early childhood is recalled, like
Achilles’ in Il. 9.485–95, at 3.732–5. She there borrows language from
Andromache (Il. 6.429–30) to show her closeness to her sister: she is
Wguratively Chalciope’s daughter too (732–3). SigniWcantly this lan-
guage is later transferred to Jason, to whom she is daughter, wife, and
sister (4.368–9): her circumstances have been drastically altered, as
have Andromache’s in very diVerent fashion, and the change has
disrupted all previous relationships. Her earlier life of witchcraft
and power in Colchis is variously indicated.55 Some of her future
deeds and experiences are explicitly signalled: her destruction of
Pelias,56 her eventual marriage to the central Wgure of the Iliad
(4.811–16), now a child himself (cf. 1.557–8). Less explicitly, there
are pointers to her desertion by Jason: so at 3.1105 ¯ ºº
Ø ı

 ŒÆº, ıÆ IºªØ, ‘I suppose in Greece it is thought
good to care about agreements.’ The irony relates to Jason’s near-
breaking of his oath in book 4, but also, as ¯ ºº
Ø shows, to his
actual breaking of that oath in Corinth. Heracles’ puriWcation from
the killing of his own children, mentioned at 4.541, clearly connects
with the puriWcation of Jason and Medea for the killing of her brother
Apsyrtus;57 but it connects too with Medea’s killing of her own
children. The link with Heracles is interesting: just as his story runs
alongside that of the poem, so Medea’s, though in a way part of the
poem, has also its own existence and validity.58
Like the Argonauts’ story, and Heracles’, Medea’s is a paratactic
narrative, of accumulated suVering but particularly of deeds, many of
them in her case wicked. Later literature shows the celebrity of her
series of crimes. The poem makes it clear that she, more than the
Argonauts, is a Wgure of power. To her numerous achievements of

55 So 3.250–2, 528–33, 4.50–65.

56 3.1134–6, 4.241–3.
57 4.541 Øł Æ
ø Oºe, cf. 560, 587–8 . . .  `łæØ j ºÆ
 łØ.
58 On the marriage to Jason cf. POxy. 3698; Spanoudakis (2002) 309–12. The
marriage to Achilles creates a connection and contrast with the ¸ı ˚ Ø (most
likely by Apollonius) and the more disastrous life-story of Peisidice; cf. 4.815 with fr.
12.15 Powell, and Lightfoot (1999) 499. See also Korenjak (1997) 23–5.
128 Gregory Hutchinson
witchcraft (above), the poem adds her decisive help for Jason with
the trial and the Fleece, and her quasi-Iliadic conquest of the bronze
Talos through witchcraft (4.1651–88). The murder of Apsyrtus
brings her into particularly shocking territory. Her fatalistic paren-
thesis at 411–13 suggests the sequence of crimes that are bound to
follow later, just like this one: æØg ªaæ IØŒº ØØ K æªØ j ŒÆd

  ÆŁÆØ, Kd e æH IŁ j IºÆŒ fi, ŁŁ
b ŒÆŒa
XıÆ Ø , ‘it is necessary to bring this about too, to add to my
shameful deeds, since I Wrst acted in folly and error and, because of
the gods, accomplished deplorable plans’ (cf. 3.983). But this crime is
also the responsibility of Jason himself, who weakly swings from
possible oath-breaking to actual murder. It is not only by exposing
passivity and showing pain that the Wgure of Medea raises questions
about the Argonauts.59
The story of Medea, then, presents a paratactic series, based on the
life of one person; this disrupts and problematizes the main narrative
of the poem, itself paratactic but not based on one person or one life.
Far from disunifying the poem, Medea enhances its cohesion, and
thickens its complexity. The same may be seen in many other
enlargements of the poem beyond the Argonauts. In some ways,
the poem might seem to share the uniWed perspective of the Odyssey:
there the sympathetic characters, though all with their own view-
points, are more united and allied than in the Iliad. But these
complications pull the Argonautica towards the more tragic and
terrible poem. The reader perceives the happy ending of the Argo-
nautica, the natural conclusion of its tight formality, as in some
respects a self-consciously artiWcial imposition.
Callimachus and Apollonius treat with the boldest experimental-
ism the fundamentals of design which Homer, in an important
critical tradition, was thought to exemplify. These poets cannot be
thought simply indiVerent to current discussion of the chief epic

59 The idea of Medea’s sequence of misdeeds is wittily exploited at Val. Fl.

8.106–8 (a catalogue which Medea hopes has ended with the putting to sleep of the
snake; cf. e.g. Man. 3.9–13, Sen. Med. 910–15). See further for Medea’s life and image
Moreau (1994), Clauss and Johnston (1997), Mastronarde (2002) 44–70. The image
of the felled tree (4.1682–6) is an important one in the Iliad (Fränkel (1977) 35–7),
here developed with a twist; it also recalls the Argonauts’ conquest of ˆª
(1.1003–5). Contrast Dosiadas, Ara 5–8.
 Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form 129
writer; nor should their poems be considered either less thoughtful
or less eVective than Homer’s in the deployment of structure. But
they do not only diverge from Homer. The detailed texture of their
poems also shows these poets drawing on the Homeric and especially
Iliadic heritage to create narrative which challenges the reader’s
sympathies and values. The relation of these two strategies is evident:
both the treatment of structure and the handling of perspectives
surprise and stimulate the reader. Critically and ethically, the reader
is engaged and provoked.
This page intentionally left blank
 5
The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire
Rebecca Armstrong

The Aeneid is a storehouse of literature, Wlled with references and

allusions not only to other epics, but also to a vast range of diVerent
genres from tragedy, lyric, elegy, and epigram to history and ethnog-
raphy. This very inclusiveness could be said to mark the poet’s
ambition.1 His new epic will respond not just to Homer, but to a
gallery of authors from very diVerent literary worlds. Indeed, Virgil’s
work is not just a response, a reaction, but an act of appropriation
and reshaping. The relationship between the epic and its sources
is not one-way: not only do the older texts inform the way we
read the Aeneid, but the Aeneid also shapes the way we look at the
original works.
Virgil’s poem functions as a kind of treasury of literary history. Just
as the epic’s narrative co-opts and transforms myth and world
history into the history of Rome, so the all-pervasive web of literary
reference makes the Aeneid, the deWnitively Roman epic, a repository
of ‘world’ literature. Before, the Homeric epics deWned great litera-
ture; correspondingly, the Aeneid comes to deWne great literature for

Many thanks to Stephen Heyworth and Oliver Lyne for helpful comments during the
production process, and to the participants at the GriYn Symposium for their
questions and suggestions. I am also grateful to Stephen Harrison for allowing me
to read his work (forthcoming) on the generic inclusivity of the Aeneid, which has
helped me to crystallize my own thoughts.
1 Farrell (1997) 223 deWnes this expansiveness of allusion as part of Virgil’s poetic
signature, encompassing as it does both ‘casual’ reminiscence of a favourite text and
complex, learned allusion to an earlier source.
132 Rebecca Armstrong
a new, Roman world. An epic which will rival Homer is no small
undertaking, and there is no lack of ideology behind this as well as
‘purer’ literary ambition. Like Roman imperialism itself, this project
of cultural redeWnition is a process which involves construction and
assimilation as much as destruction and the brute imposition of new
ideals. If the Aeneid could be seen to adopt and absorb all other great
literature into a more uniWed, glorious whole, its position as deWni-
tive of literature would be unassailable.
In this respect, again, there is an analogy to be drawn between the
substance of the Aeneid, its narrative, and the act of literary
construction which underlies it. Philip Hardie has discussed the
importance in epic narratives of the theme of the single, extraordin-
ary victor. Epic frequently looks for a single dominant hero, the one
out of many who can win through to the end.2 Epic likes its heroes to
be unique, to stand out from the crowd. Similarly, Rome (both as an
epic goal and as a kind of epic hero writ large) cannot be satisWed
with being one among a crowd of other world powers: witness
the destruction of Carthage, so often represented as a necessary
precondition for Rome’s ascendancy, and the recasting of Roman-
dominated Athens as an intellectual training ground for the Empire’s
elite. The Aeneid, as the deWnitive Roman epic—and thus, in some
sense, deWnitive of Rome itself—is also aiming to achieve primacy,
aiming to be unique. And its uniqueness is, paradoxically, achieved
through its assiduous assimilation of other literature. The Aeneid
creates a literary space which can accommodate just about every-
thing. There is, to misuse a famous phrase, nothing outside this text.
(Or so we are led to believe.)
If we regard the Aeneid as building its own kind of literary empire,
we can see how Virgil might circumvent the anxiety of inspiration,
the discomfort of belatedness. Of course other poets got there Wrst.
Indeed, they are necessary building blocks for the work. But the
result is a poem greater than its parts. Virgil adopts the best bits,
which still have resonance, and adapts them to Wt into Roman
culture. The great literature of the Greeks does not have to be
regarded as an unassailable monolith, and their artistic superiority

2 Hardie (1993) 3–10.

 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 133
does not have to be accepted without question.3 In the Tusculan
Disputations Cicero remarks that the Greeks outclassed the
Romans in poetry at a time when it was very easy to do so, since
the Romans were a younger race, busy Wghting for their place in the
world while the likes of Homer and Archilochus were at leisure to
compose great works (Tusc. 1.3). Cicero, as it happens, is content to
admit that the Greeks are better at poetry than the Romans, but
insists that the Romans now outclass the Greeks in the Weld of
oratory (Tusc. 1.5). He shows that it is possible to improve on a
Greek cultural invention. Similarly, the Aeneid is Virgil’s testament to
the Romans’ ability to take a good idea and improve upon it, or at
least make it their own. He just disagrees with Cicero about the area
in which they shine.
In the climax of the description of the glorious heroes of Rome’s
future in Aeneid 6, Anchises oVers a variation on Cicero’s acceptance
of Greek superiority in certain Welds. Here, Cicero’s shameless
championing of his own cause—since, for all the qualities of his
own poetry, it is doubtless true that he was a greater orator than
poet—is wittily undermined by Virgil, who has Anchises assert that
others (for whom read the Greeks) will be better at oratory
than the Romans. However, now the balancing talents turn out
not to be poetic (indeed, poetry is not even directly mentioned),
but political:

excudent alii spirantia mollius aera

(credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
Others will hammer out breathing bronzes more subtly (so I believe), and
draw living faces from marble, they will plead causes better, and mark out

3 For a broad discussion of Rome’s complicated relationship with Greek art, see
Gruen (1992) 84–182. His comment on L. Mummius’ imports of art has some
resonance with my argument: ‘Rome would henceforth be not only the military
and diplomatic centre of the Mediterranean, but the custodian of its cultural heritage’
(p. 130). Virgil, of course, aims to be far more than the mere curator of a literary
museum, but the principle is similar.
134 Rebecca Armstrong
the heavens’ wanderings with the rod and describe the stars rising: you,
Roman, must remember to rule people with your command (these will be
your arts), and to add order to peace, to spare the defeated and war down
the proud (Aen. 6.847–53).

This is often read as a confession from Virgil himself that he knows

the Romans are, simply, not as artistically talented as the Greeks, but
that statecraft is their true forte.4 Yet it could, on the contrary, be a
purposefully one-sided version of what empire means—a limited
imperium of bashing your enemy and imposing some minimal and
utilitarian form of law and order.5 To some, that is what imperialism
means (and the subjectivity of this view is highlighted by Anchises’
qualifying phrase, credo equidem, at line 848).6 To others, whose view
may never be as directly stated, but which, I believe, is strongly
implicit throughout the whole poem,7 an empire is about culture
and the arts as well as about military success. There need
not necessarily be a divide between military conquest and cultural
supremacy; you do not have to choose one or the other. The poet can

4 As Jasper GriYn himself elegantly sums up: ‘It is the price of empire that the
Roman must abandon for this imperial destiny, splendid and yet bitter, so many
forms of beauty’, GriYn (1985) 170. Jenkyns (1999) 311 adapts this view, pointing
out that Anchises uses comparatives—others will be better—and thus does not
absolutely rule out Roman involvement with the arts, just Roman supremacy in the
arts.
5 Rudd (1986) 28–9 argues convincingly that the vision of empire set out here is
limited, and that in this context mos implies nothing more than the imposition of
basic rules to regulate peace, and does not extend to more high-Xown things like art
and literature. Where I disagree with Rudd is in his assumption that these lines deWne
Virgil’s own view on empire.
6 Indeed, we could even see here a character’s dissatisfaction with his author. To
the ghostly Anchises, what seems important about the Roman future is its gloria,
viewed almost entirely in military terms, and the deeds of the heroes of the Republic
(of whom Augustus is the last and best). What Virgil does, however, is oVer only brief
glimpses of this, choosing to spend his time instead on an incredibly learned,
intricate, and poetically aware epic, where literary interaction frequently seems
more important than military. Anchises is not impressed and attempts to direct his
son (whose gaze is several times in this poem occupied in the blissful contemplation
of works of art) to see instead the beauty of stern martial practicality.
7 One might also bear in mind that the philistine Anchises is himself made to
quote a line of Ennius directly before his eschewal of the arts (Aen. 6.846: cf. Enn.
Ann. 363 sk., unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem—‘one man restored the state
for us by delaying’). Cf. Lyne (1987) 214–15.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 135
be an agent of imperial expansion just as much as the soldier: the pen
and the sword can have a shared goal.8

VIRGIL AND HOMER

Any investigation of Virgil’s use of inherited tradition in the Aeneid is

bound to encounter Homer’s inXuence. Much has, therefore, already
been said (and much more, no doubt, will go on to be said) on this
subject.9 I cannot hope even to scratch the surface of the intimate
relationship between Virgil’s poem and the Homeric epics.
What I oVer here are some suggestions for ways of viewing this
relationship as an important part of Virgil’s grand project of literary
appropriation.
We are nowadays used to thinking about the self-doubt that can
aZict an author working in the shadow of the great writers of the
past. Indeed, the picture we gain of Virgil from the biographical
sources seems to Wt this: he often emerges as an anxious, not to say
obsessive, poet, who writes only three lines of verse in a day, who says
it is easier to steal Hercules’ club than to steal a line from Homer,
who asks on his deathbed that the unWnished, imperfect Aeneid
should be burned.10 In the Aeneid itself, he stages a boxing match
between an eager young Wghter and an older man, who reluctantly
knocks the younger one senseless. The anxiety of inXuence writ
large.11 Moreover, those who look for ‘further voices’ have long

8 Here, compare a prediction of American supremacy, which (to my prejudiced

ear) carries echoes both of Anchises’ speech and of the wider argument that culture is
part of empire: ‘We shall be giving the word for everything—industry, trade, law,
journalism, art, politics and religion from Cape Horn clear over to Surith’s Sound,
and beyond it too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole . . . We
shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help
it—and neither can we, I guess’ (Conrad, Nostromo, p. 77 in 1925 reprint). Said
(1993) discusses this passage in his introduction (p. xx).
9 Knauer (1964) is, of course, the locus classicus. See also Barchiesi (1984).
10 Cf. Vita Donati 25 (Virgil took 11 years to write the Aeneid), 39 (the request to
burn the unWnished Aeneid), 46 (stealing Hercules’ club).
11 Dares and Entellus, Aen. 5.362–484. Recent discussions of the episode and its
intertexts include: Nelis (2001) 13–21; Feldherr (2002).
136 Rebecca Armstrong
been exposing the poet’s doubts and uncertainties about the
Augustan project, or at least about its propaganda. Not only is this
poet overawed by his predecessors, but he is also troubled by the
political capital which might be made out of his work. With such a
picture in mind, it can be hard to think of its opposite. And yet there
is a much more conWdent, even arrogant, side to the poet. Virgil, after
all, eventually accepts that he is the one (out of all his prevaricating
and apologetic contemporaries)12 who will embrace—in his own,
carefully negotiated way—the Herculean task of writing The Roman
Epic, and who will wrestle with the ghost of Homer.
The Aeneid, a poem which itself places so much value on narrative
integrity—the strong, unbroken line from past to future—is
markedly cavalier in its approach to the narrative integrity of
the other works it absorbs. The division of the Aeneid into Iliadic
and Odyssean halves is well known, but also rather diYcult to pin
down in its details. Despite the obvious correspondence between the
wanderings of Odysseus and those of Aeneas in the Wrst half,
and between the battles of the Iliad and the war in Latium in
the second half of the Aeneid, there are many exceptions to the
rule: the funeral games for Anchises have more in common with
Iliad 23; Aeneid 4 is more like Argonautica 3 than any particular
book of the Odyssey, and so on.13 Indeed, the boldness of the reversal
of the usual sequence of the two Homeric epics should not be over-
looked. To set an Odyssey before an Iliad is radically to upset the
Homeric order (in more than one sense). Again, the characters of the
Aeneid frequently carry reminiscences of not one, but many earlier
Wgures from literature. Once again, the earlier texts are used, reused,
and fragmented. Homer’s Achilles feeds into Aeneas, Turnus, and
Mezentius; Dido is like Homer’s Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa, and Arete,
but also bears a strong resemblance to Apollonius’ Medea and
Hypsipyle, Catullus’ Ariadne and even to Cleopatra. The intricacy
and intelligence of Virgil’s understanding of his models—and our

12 And even, in a way, his own former self: witness the opening of Eclogue 6, where
Apollo directs the poet away from kings and battles. But this should not be read too
simply as avoiding a Roman epic: cf. Clausen (1994) 174–5.
13 Cairns (1989) 177–214 has even made an argument for seeing the whole thing
as an Odyssey.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 137
admiration for the details—can often distract us from seeing the
conWdence, verging on arrogance, with which he handles those
sources, now reshaped in the image the poet requires.
Like an emperor who has conquered an ancient, rich, and beauti-
ful land, Virgil is truly appreciative of the greatness and glory
of Homer, but not scared to cut up, portion out, and reuse his
work as he sees Wt. By containing the whole of the Iliad and the
Odyssey in the Aeneid,14 the poet absorbs the works which have for so
long been the unassailable emblems of the greatest literature.
The crown which once belonged to Homer can be allowed simultan-
eously to stay with Homer (imitation being the sincerest form of
Xattery) and to be transferred to Virgil’s head. And the authority
which belonged to Homer can be reused by Virgil to shore up his
own poem. Or, to put it more bluntly still, Virgil can piggy-back
on the canonical status of Homer in creating his own, newly
canonical text.
Here I turn to a much-cited passage, the prediction of Aeneas’
future as leader of the Trojan race. First as described by Homer’s
Poseidon, then as reshaped by Virgil’s Apollo:

æØ
 ¥ K IºÆŁÆØ,

ZæÆ c ¼æ ªc ŒÆd ¼Æ ZºÆØ
˜Ææ
ı; n ˚æ
 æd ø  ºÆ Æ
ø,
Q Ł K%ª ªıÆØŒH  Łø.
X
 ªaæ —æØı ªc XŁæ ˚æ ø.
F
b
c `N Æ   æØ I%Ø
ŒÆd Æ
ø ÆE
 ,  Œ ØŁ ªøÆØ.
It is fated for him to be spared, so that the race of Dardanus will not perish
unseen, without issue. Zeus loved Dardanus most of all the children born to
him of mortal women. Now he has come to hate the family of Priam, so it
will be Aeneas’ might that will rule over the Trojans, and his children’s
children, and those born after them (Il. 20.302–8).

14 The question of size is, of course, important here. In just 12 books, Virgil
contains not just the 48 books of the Iliad and Odyssey, but also the Epic Cycle
(e.g. the Iliupersis is replayed in Aeneid 2, the Nostoi in the diVerent return journeys
described at varying lengths in the course of the poem, while the Aethiopis is to be
found both in the appearance of Memnon and Penthesilea in the temple sculptures at
Aen. 1.488–93 and in a new form with Camilla in book 11).
138 Rebecca Armstrong
Dardanidae duri, quae uos a stirpe parentum
prima tulit tellus, eadem uos ubere laeto
accipiet reduces. antiquam exquirite matrem.
hic domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris
et nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis.
Tough children of Dardanus, the same earth which Wrst brought you
forth from your parents’ stock will receive you in her fertile breast when
you return. Seek out your ancient mother. Here will the house of Aeneas
rule every shore and his children’s children, and those born from them (Aen.
3.94–8).

The Homeric prediction of Aeneas’ survival and continuing local

importance in the Troad is Romanized by Virgil to mark Aeneas and
his descendants out for world dominion and speciWcally Roman
imperium. The closest correspondence is clearly between Iliad
20.307–8 and Aeneid 3.97–8, the latter being a more or less direct
translation of the former, with the important change of ‘every shore’
for ‘Trojans’.15 Aeneas is no longer the kind of second-rank hero he
is in the Iliad—a hero who will, by virtue of not being as good as
Hector, as well as being loved by certain gods, survive to lead his war-
ravaged people in the future. This new, improved Aeneas is a true
proto-Roman, who sets his people’s feet on the Wrst rung of the
ladder to global empire. It is worth noting as well that Virgil does
not just limit himself to a near translation of the two most crucial
Homeric lines. He also hints at the wider context of Poseidon’s
speech in the Iliad. First, his oracle names the Trojans as Dardanidae,
pointing to a Trojan ancestor with Italian connections, while also
subtly recalling the Homeric Poseidon’s comments on Zeus’ special
love for Dardanus. More importantly, this prophecy is now taken
from Poseidon and given to Apollo’s oracle instead. In the Iliad,
Poseidon is saving Aeneas from Achilles after Apollo has prompted

15 It seems that Virgil may not be the Wrst to oVer a diVerent reading of
Homer here. Commenting on the divergence of the Homeric prediction from other
traditions of the wanderings of Aeneas, Strabo notes that some read
`N Æ ª Ø I%Ø (‘the race of Aeneas will rule over all’) at Il. 20.307,
referring to the rise of the Romans (13.1.53). Given the importance of the Trojan
myth for Rome, it is hardly surprising that such a variant might have arisen before
Virgil came to write, but his own manipulation of Homer need not therefore be
ignored. Thanks to Stephen Heyworth for this point.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 139
the Trojan to go out and face the greatest Greek hero. Apollo has no
concern to protect Aeneas in the Iliad; it is up to Poseidon to save
him. In the Aeneid, Apollo provides Aeneas with a direct assurance of
his survival and the continuing power of his descendants. Virgil,
therefore, not only appropriates Homeric authority and historicity,
but ‘corrects’ that authority and adds his own spin. Virgil says what
Homer, had he only known the glorious truth, should have said, and
he puts the words in the mouth of an important Augustan god. In the
right hands, Homer can be used to promote the Roman/Virgilian
myth of ‘manifest destiny’.16
And as if to emphasize how new and unexpected this version of a
familiar text is, we Wnd that the old-timer Anchises, stuck Wrmly in a
more Trojan-centric view of the world, misinterprets the oracle.
Rather than turn to the west, he urges everyone to go south to
Crete, where they set about building a new Troy, called Pergamea.
To Anchises, to be divinely directed to live in Crete seems to be a Wne
thing: spes discite uestras (‘learn what you can hope for’, Aen. 3.103).
This is not only a place of great antiquity, boasting connections with
Jupiter, Cybele, and the Trojan ancestor Teucer, but also a fertile land
with a hundred cities. Quite a coup, we might think, and perhaps
already a step up from the vaguer Homeric prediction that Aeneas’
family will survive to rule the Trojans (and stay in Troy). Later,
though, and after the Trojans have been aZicted by a plague, the
Penates appear in a dream to tell Aeneas that they’ve got it wrong and
that their real goal is Italy. Italy, unlike Crete, can oVer them not only
antiquity and a Trojan connection, via Dardanus (Aen. 3.163–8), but
also imperium:

nos te Dardania incensa tuaque arma secuti,

nos tumidum sub te permensi classibus aequor,
idem uenturos tollemus in astra nepotes
imperiumque urbi dabimus. tu moenia magnis
magna para longumque fugae ne linque laborem.

16 Cf. Barchiesi (2001b) 134: ‘It could not be said more clearly that Virgil wants to
continue Homer. But . . . this also implies rewriting Homer. The imitator produces a
‘‘new Homer’’ suited to his needs, not a reproduction based solely on traditional
readings of the Homeric text.’ Barchiesi goes on to note the complications introduced
in this passage by the reminiscences of Callimachus’ Hymns to Delos and Apollo:
Callimachus, after all, warns against imitating Homer.
140 Rebecca Armstrong
We followed you and your weapons when Troy (Dardania) was burned, we
traversed the swollen sea in your Xeet, likewise we will raise your future
descendants to the stars and give empire to their city. You must prepare great
walls for great men, and not abandon the long struggle of your exile (Aen.
3.156–60).

These Trojans can hope for far more than Anchises imagines. In their
correction of Anchises’ misinterpretation of Apollo’s oracle, the
Penates are, of course, oVering a re-voicing of that oracle. Their
version argues that it is not a question of personal interpretation—
Apollo does not mean Aeneas can pick just anywhere with Trojan
connections as their new home—but of an exact, speciWc meaning,
pointing in only one direction. Once again, if more obliquely, the
point is made: one cannot but read the original Homeric prophecy as
transformed into a predictor of empire. The Trojans are not to be
allowed simply to survive and establish a new Troy anywhere they can
Wnd the land: they are to become Romans. And the Romans yet to
be born are destined to have control over every shore (as Apollo says,
Aen. 3.97), and their city will be the seat of their empire (as the
Penates add, Aen. 3.159).
Just as Virgil can change the detailed ‘message’ of his Homeric
model, so he frequently changes the tone. For all its many and varied
glories, the Aeneid is not a work which one is tempted to categorize as
amusing, let alone whimsical.17 Contrast the Odyssey, which has
plenty of moments of pathos and high drama, but which is also
marked out for its gently comical episodes and the wit, as well as
resilience, of its hero. It is as if there is no longer room in the great
Roman scheme of things (or in the great Roman epic) for the
elaborate and delicate plays of manners once found and enjoyed in
Homer. Aeneas may launch into a Homer-style exchange of geneal-
ogies with Evander when he arrives at Pallanteum (Aen. 8.126–74),
but he is notably silent when the old king oVers him a large force

17 The only real joke in the Aeneid (and I use the term loosely) comes when Iulus
points out that the hungry Trojans, recently landed in Italy, are eating their own tables
(that is, they munch the wheat pancakes on which they spread out their meagre
rations): Aen. 7.116–17. Even this moment of hilarity is swiftly made serious again as
Aeneas hails the dire oracle that the Trojans would eat their tables now harmlessly
fulWlled. The mood remains happy, but solemn and religious.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 141
to help against the Latins, including his only beloved son, Pallas
(8.470–519: the oVer; 520–3: the mute/absent response). The project
which lies ahead is too awesome and too burdensome for our hero to
be worried about the niceties of good manners and the rhetorical
balance of a speech met with another speech in reply. Again, despite
the reminiscences of Odysseus’ encounters with, say, Calypso
and Circe in the Dido episode, there is notably little evidence of the
light-handed Homeric treatment, and here the dominant inXuence
on tone is that of Tragedy.18 Another area in which we Wnd a radical
contrast in tone between structurally very similar scenes in the
Odyssey and the Aeneid is in the interaction between the heroes and
the gods. Odysseus has his patron goddess, Athena, as Aeneas has his
mother, Venus, to protect him. But the relationships could hardly be
more diVerent. Although Venus does, from time to time, express her
anxiety about her son (and the future that depends on him), she only
rarely displays any warmth towards him in person.19 Athena and
Odysseus, by contrast, have a very close relationship based on mutual
respect and even aVection.
When Odysseus Wnally arrives back in Ithaca, he meets Athena,
disguised as a young shepherd. His crafty nature prompts him to
make up a story about his adventures as a Cretan wanted for
murder. Athena is delighted by this, removes her own disguise, and
half-scolds, half-praises him for his cleverness. She emphasizes how
alike the two of them are, and congratulates herself on being able to
fool him into thinking she was someone else (Od. 13.287–302). Her
esteem and aVection for him are clear; most of all, she is amused by
him. While the goddess does not always reveal her identity to Odys-
seus, she is undoubtedly on his side.20 Back in Odyssey 7, as the

18 On Dido and Tragedy, see Quinn (1963).

19 She embraces him at 8.615, when bringing him the armour made by Vulcan.
Even there, however, we might be tempted to contrast the brief and business-like
speech she makes (roughly, ‘My husband has Wnished making your armour; now
don’t hesitate to go into battle’, 8.612–14) with the emotionally charged reunion of
Anchises with his son in the Underworld. The connection between these episodes is
emphasized by the fact that they precede the two great visions of the Roman future in
the poem; note also the setting in both—a quiet valley (6.679; 8.609).
20 Indeed, at the end of Odyssey 6, the poet explains that she does not reveal herself
to Odysseus out of deference to Poseidon, who is set on persecuting him until he
reaches his homeland again (6.328–31).
142 Rebecca Armstrong
hero draws near Alcinous’ palace, she disguises herself as a young girl
carrying water, and guides him through the town, shrouding him in a
mist to ensure he will not be bothered by any Phaeacians before he
reaches the king. She gives him a brief history of the royal family,
recommends that he seek queen Arete’s support, and leaves him
without any further fuss. Odysseus is still a little anxious, but there
is also a sense that Wnally he is nearing the end of his travels. Athena’s
cheerful, benevolent presence underlines this mood of tentative
optimism.
These scenes, which obviously mirror each other within the Odys-
sey, are replayed with a diVerence in a famous episode near the start
of the Aeneid.21 When Aeneas arrives in Libya, like Odysseus, he
meets his patron goddess in disguise. And like Athena in Scheria,
she tells him the history of the royal household he is about to enter,
and shrouds him in a protective mist while he goes into the city.
There, however, the similarity ends. Venus is disguised not as a little
girl or a shepherd boy, but as an attractive young woman in hunting
gear. Moreover, Aeneas seems to have worked out that she is a
goddess:

nulla tuarum audita mihi neque uisa sororum,

o quam te memorem, uirgo? namque haud tibi uultus
mortalis, nec uox hominem sonat; o, dea certe
(an Phoebi soror? an nympharum sanguinis una?)
sis felix . . .
I have neither heard nor seen any of your sisters—what should I call you,
maiden? Yours is not a mortal face, nor does your voice sound human; O,
goddess for sure (are you Phoebus’ sister or one of the nymphs’ blood?), be
good to us . . . (Aen. 1.326–30).

Or perhaps we should not take his words too literally. Rather, faced
with a pretty young woman who may be able to help him out, Aeneas
tries his hand at a little Odyssean gallantry. His words recall a
diVerent encounter of Odysseus, this time with the young, eligible,

21 To complicate matters further, there is also a reminiscence of the encounter of

Aphrodite and Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, discussed by Harrison
(forthcoming).
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 143
and non-divine Nausicaa (Od. 6.149–85).22 The situation here, how-
ever, is very diVerent, and the reminiscence is out of place. Aeneas
responds with his own attempt at Odysseus-like gallantry and Xirta-
tion (Odyssey 6) to a situation which in fact demanded the polite,
direct questioning of a disguised goddess (Odyssey 7).23 Once again,
Virgil hints that his Aeneid is not the place for a comedy of manners,
and it is not for his proto-Roman hero to indulge in the kind of idle
banter at which the Homeric hero excels.
In Odysseus’ encounter with Athena in Scheria, it does not matter
that the goddess has not revealed herself; in his meeting with her in
Ithaca, the recognition of the goddess by the mortal is not only
happy (and made happier still by his accompanying recognition of
his own land), but also followed by a prolonged discussion of
the tactics Odysseus should adopt in reclaiming his rightful
position as king, which establishes the pair as a team, a friendly
alliance. In Libya, by contrast, Aeneas is allowed to recognize his
mother, but is given no further opportunity to talk with her. Even
a short moment of the kind of comfortable sociability enjoyed
between Odysseus and the disguised deity is denied him: he is
enveloped in mist after Venus has gone—contrast Odyssey 7, where
the goddess walks with the hero while he is shrouded in magic mist.24
Moreover, the words the disguised Venus does speak to Aeneas
are a no-nonsense way of setting him back on course rather than

22 In particular, cf. Od. 6.149–52, where the hero compares the girl to Artemis. The
fact that Aeneas compares Venus to the virginal Diana is, of course, ironic, but also
anticipates the entrance of the Nausicaa-like Dido later in the book, where she is
compared to Diana (Aen. 1.498–504). This simile echoes Homer’s comparison of
Nausicaa playing with her friends to Artemis and her nymphs (Od. 6.102–9), along
with Apollonius’ comparison of Medea, in Nausicaa mode, to Artemis (Argon. 3.876–
86). Cf. Clausen (1987) 18–21. The clustering of references serves to illustrate again
how odd it is that Aeneas uses on his own mother the sort of line that should be
addressed to the Nausicaa Wgure of the epic. Reckford (1995–6) also discusses the
sexual undertones in this scene.
23 Aeneas uses the Odyssean speech in a more appropriate context at Aen. 1.605–6
(cf. Od. 6.154–5), when thanking Dido for her kind oVers of help. Once again,
however, the lighter tone of the Odyssey is darkened in the Aeneid. The relationship
does not stop at harmless Xirtation (as with Nausicaa and Odysseus), but becomes
tragically tangled.
24 And contrast Od. 13.189–93, where Athena shrouds the land in mist so that she
might have time to discuss plans with Odysseus before he realizes where he is and
wants to rush straight home.
144 Rebecca Armstrong
aVectionate conspiracy: his complaints about how hard his life has
been so far are met with a sharp retort, quisquis es, haud, credo,
inuisus caelestibus auras j uitalis carpis (‘whoever you are, you
do not, I think, enjoy the air of life while being hated by the gods’,
1.387–8), followed by a double injunction to just keep going (perge
modo: 1.389 and 401).25 It is important for Aeneas to know that the
gods (or enough gods) are on his side, but it is not important that he
should feel his individual qualities are actively loved and appreciated
by them. It should be reward enough for a Roman hero that he is part
of the great machine of empire, which stretches not just over every
sea but also into the heavens.26
Virgil takes three Odyssean scenes (the two with Athena and one
with Nausicaa) to make his one encounter between Aeneas and his
mother, and transforms the mood of the Homeric passages utterly.
Encounters between gods and men (even between a divine mother
and her son) become serious episodes.27 The only one who has any
fun here is Venus (if, that is, Aeneas is right in thinking she is
deliberately teasing him, rather than simply being business-like).
The world of the Aeneid, and the task of building empires, is cold
and comfortless. Virgil reshapes the Homeric situation, Wlled with

25 Indeed, the last line of Venus’ speech, though in context simply telling Aeneas to
keep going until he reaches Carthage, could easily be read as a life-rule for her son:
perge modo et, qua te ducit uia, derige gressum (‘just keep going and direct your step
where the road leads you’, 1.401). Being a great Roman hero means you have a path
laid out for you, which you should follow with as little fuss as possible.
26 Personal misfortunes are mere details to the true Roman, whose Wrst concern
must always be his country’s welfare. Cf. Sulpicius’ rather tough consolation to Cicero
on the death of his daughter (Cic. Fam. 4.5). Thanks to Oliver Lyne for this point.
27 The relationship between Athena and Odysseus is, of course, not the only one
which is refashioned in Aeneas’ and Venus’ relationship. In some ways, that of Thetis
and Achilles is more dominant. For example, the Wrst time we see Venus in the poem,
she is interceding, Thetis-like, on her son’s behalf: Aen. 1.227–53 (cf. Il. 1.495–510;
but note, too, that Athena has a similar scene at Od. 5.5–20); again, both goddesses
play an important role in bringing their sons divinely made armour. Even so, similar
observations can be made about the comparative lack of closeness between goddess
and mortal in the Aeneid. Thetis intervenes with Zeus not only on Achilles’ behalf,
but at Achilles’ request, and she spends quite a lot of time with her son as he sits
sulking near the sea. Of course, the kind of jovial friendship that Odysseus enjoys
with Athena is not possible for the doomed Achilles and his distraught mother, but
there is a greater sense in the Iliad of the comfort that the mother brings her son than
in the Aeneid.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 145
delicate humour and warmth, into a discourse on the distance
between gods and men, and the need to keep one’s goal forever in
sight. Paradoxically, the greater the task—Odysseus just needs to get
home, Aeneas to found the world’s greatest nation—and the more
central a role the hero plays in the divine plan and world destiny, the
less intimacy he is allowed with the gods who support him. Homer’s
more ‘trivial’ project of bringing one hero home has time and
space for laughter and light-hearted deceptions; Virgil’s project is
altogether more serious.

VIRGIL AND THE HELLENISTIC POETS

Over the past few decades, critics have placed increasing emphasis on
the importance of Hellenistic inXuence, in particular that of
Callimachus and Apollonius, on Virgil’s epic.28 For the Hellenistic
scholar-poet Callimachus, an attempt to imitate the Homeric epics
too overtly is doomed to failure.29 The poetic qualities he admires—
delicacy of touch, erudition, and economy of style—are more
easily accommodated to the slighter genres than to a grand project
chronicling the fall of one great city in the east and the rise of another,
greater city in the west. The writing of epic becomes problematic
territory which must be trodden very carefully if at all. Much
Hellenistic poetry accordingly prefers to explore the lower genres,
like elegy, epigram, bucolic, and iambic. The self-professed humility
of these poets, however, is hardly to be taken at face value. What
Callimachus and his ilk do with words is ambitious and innovative,
and in itself elevates those ‘lower’ genres, to the status of ‘real’ poetry,
the great poetry of the age.
Again, the well-known mantra that ‘a great book is a great evil’
cannot be taken too literally.30 Callimachus’ own works could be
fairly long—witness the Aetia—while Apollonius, of course, wrote

28 Select references: Clausen (1987); Hollis (1992); Cameron (1995); O’Hara

(1996a); Nelis (2001).
29 Here see the usual suspects: Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1 and Hymn to Apollo 105–13.
30 And may not even be a statement of poetic principle: the context of this (prose)
fragment is unclear.
146 Rebecca Armstrong
a poem that was not only quite long (getting on for 6,000 lines, which
is roughly equivalent to the Wrst 11 books of the Odyssey)31 but also
an epic. The diVerence, very broadly speaking, between this sort of
long poem and a despised imitation of Homer, can be found in its
scholarly attention to aetiological detail and in the move away from
the macho deeds of the hero to focus on more quotidian aspects of
the heroic age.
With this in mind, the Aeneid emerges as a deeply ‘Hellenistic’
poem. Not only does Virgil follow an Apollonian pattern in creating
an epic which engages constantly with Homer32 whilst embracing the
antiquarian and philological obsessions of the learned elite, but
he also takes the comfortable Callimachean paradox of attributing
aesthetic weight to low genres and stretches it to its limits, by
reincorporating lower genres (elevated by Hellenistic roots) into
the traditional highest genre, epic. That is to say, he follows the
allusive and generic logic of the Hellenistic age but takes it further
still.33 The Aeneid, though an epic, includes many elements familiar
from other genres loved by the Hellenistic poets. For example,
Virgil’s occasional digressions on the history of a particular place
and how it got its name recall the poetic local histories of Euphorion
and Rhianus as well as the prose works of Callimachus himself.34 His
interest in etymologies and learned preferences for a particular word
form is also distinctively Hellenistic in Xavour.35 To point to a few
more speciWc correspondences, Callimachus’ Hymns pop up at a

31 As with Virgil, the length of Apollonius’ epic is pointedly shorter than that of
either of Homer’s, yet not inconsiderable. Most critics no longer argue that Apollo-
nius composed his epic in reaction to Callimachus’ strictures about not imitating
Homer; rather, his work is seen as another way of making an Alexandrian mark on
the poetic landscape. Cf. DeForest (1994) and Cameron (1995). Nelis (2001) 382–402
assesses the Apollonian ‘experiment’ from a Virgilian perspective.
32 Indeed, Nelis argues that Virgil views Homer through Apollonius and friends: ‘It
was . . . a Homer who had been studied by poetic imitators as well as learned scholars,
Hellenistic readers often Wlling both roles at once, who was mediated to Virgil’ (Nelis
(2001) 3).
33 Cf. Clausen (1987) 14: ‘the Aeneid represents not an abandonment but an
extension of Callimachean poetics by Virgil, greatly daring, into an area of poetry
precluded by Callimachus’. I would qualify this argument by inserting ‘apparently’
before ‘precluded’.
34 e.g. the list of famous places in Sicily at Aen. 3.692–708 or Evander’s discussion
of the name changes in his part of Italy at Aen. 8.328–32.
35 Cf. O’Hara (1996a); Hollis (1992) 273–5.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 147
couple of points in the Aeneid,36 and there are various echoes of the
Aetia,37 while an epigram of his lies behind the simile of Amata
spinning like a top at Aeneid 7.378–83.38 Theocritus’ praise of
Hiero can be detected in Anchises’ of Augustus,39 while the miniature
‘pastoral’ lament for Umbro also has its Theocritean echoes.40 Even
the healing herbs picked from Crete by Venus to cure Aeneas’
stubborn wound have their echoes of Nicander’s Theriaca.41 In
short, Virgil’s appropriation of earlier literature enables him to
incorporate elements of very diVerent Hellenistic texts into his own
epic. The distinction between small and large and (to some extent)
between high and low genres is eroded: this epic has the capacity and
the Xexibility to subsume all kinds of poetry, however much the
original poets might have squirmed at the thought of their delicate
work being trapped in the amber of Virgil’s imperial text.
Once again, I want to emphasize the boldness of Virgil’s approach.
For all that it is possible to show how the production of an epic poem
can be reconciled with Hellenistic poetics, it is also important
to remember that until Virgil wrote the Aeneid, both he and his
contemporaries had made much of a very diVerent formulation of
the Callimachean aesthetic, which argued quite emphatically that
writing epics was not for the in-crowd. Indeed, the Wrst and,
arguably, the most inXuential version of Callimachus’ poetic
mission-statement to be found in Latin was written by Virgil himself
at the start of Eclogue 6:

36 Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos and Hymn to Apollo inXuence the episode of the
oracle of Delian Apollo at Aen. 3.73–98: cf. Heyworth (1993) and Barchiesi (1994b).
The encounter of Turnus and Allecto at Aen. 7.407–66 recalls that of Erysichthon
and Demeter in Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter: cf. Hollis (1992) 270–3.
37 e.g. Aen. 6.460 reworks Catullus 66.39, translated from the Coma Berenices in
Callimachus’ Aetia; Servius ad Aen. 7.778 says that Callimachus also treated the myth
of Virbius in the Aetia; at Aen. 11.581–2, Camilla is sought after by mothers as a bride
for their sons, much like Callimachus’ Cydippe (Aet. fr. 67.9–10 Pf.). On this last, see
Tissol (1992).
38 Cf. Callimachus, Epigr. 1.9–10. Bleisch (1996) makes a convincing argument for
seeing more than a passing reminiscence here. The context of the epigram (on
choosing a spouse) has a clear connection with this part of the Aeneid, while the
message of the original (‘stick to your own kind’), though favoured by Amata, is
inverted in Latinus’ choice to promise his daughter to Aeneas, the foreign husband.
39 Theoc. 16.76–7 and Aen. 6.798–800. Cf. Hollis (1992) 280–1.
40 Aen. 7.759–60 and Theoc. Id. 1.71–2. Cf. Hollis (1992) 276 and Putnam (1992).
41 Nic. Ther. 500–5, 674–5 and 685–8; Aen. 12.409–19. Cf. Hollis (1992) 283–5.
148 Rebecca Armstrong
cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
uellit et admonuit: ‘pastorem, Tityre, pinguis
pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen’.
When I was singing of kings and battles, Cynthian Apollo plucked at my
ear and warned me: ‘Tityrus, a shepherd should raise fat sheep, but sing a
Wne-spun song’ (Ecl. 6.3–5).

The reference to Callimachus’ own encounter with Apollo (Aetia fr.

1) is clear, as, apparently, is Virgil’s determination to stick to his
project of writing polished and diYcult bucolic verse. Even here,
though, Virgil is not afraid to adapt his model to a diVerent purpose:
the pure Callimachean argument from aesthetics is adopted and
adapted for the practical purpose of saying ‘no’ to a patron’s request
for an epic in praise of his achievements.42 Later on, in the Georgics,
Virgil apparently promises to write an epic with Caesar in the middle
(in medio mihi Caesar erit, 3.16).43 Although in retrospect it is easy to
read this as a prediction of the Aeneid, at the time it could just as
easily have been read as yet another elegant duck away from the yoke
of writing The Augustan Epic.44 The composition of the Aeneid may
not violate the letter of Callimachean law, but it does go against the
spirit of the reluctance of contemporary Roman poets to test that law
and to take on a genre which inevitably, it seemed, required them not
only to violate their aesthetic principles, but also to engage too
closely with current Augustan politics.
So Virgil goes against the stream of contemporary Callimachean-
ism in writing the Aeneid, and thus brings it about that he should
walk a similar tightrope to the one walked by Apollonius before him.
The compromise between writing epic and writing ‘Hellenistic’

42 Oliver Lyne also points out to me a certain arrogance in Virgil’s translation of

the Callimachean º as deductum: this changes the original image of poetic
excellence as a kind of weaving to a diVerent, if similar, image of spinning. And
this is taken not from Callimachus, but from the Roman Callimachean Catullus,
whose Parcae spin so delicately in poem 64 (dextera tum leuiter deducens Wla supinis j
formabat digitis—‘then the right hand, delicately drawing the threads down, shaped
them with upturned Wngers’, 64.312–13). Cf. Lyne (1995) 100–1.
43 For more on the ‘preview’ of the Aeneid given in Georgics 3, see Robinson, below
p. 187.
44 Compare Propertius 2.10, a similar promise to write an epic about Augustus
‘soon’, but one which is not fulWlled. Clausen (1987) 14 makes a similar point.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 149
poetry has to be reforged. And this, perhaps, is one of the reasons
why the interaction between the Aeneid and the Argonautica is so
interesting.45
The character of Dido is, as I mentioned above, built on a good
many other Wgures from both Homer and Apollonius and elsewhere.
The passionate, even dangerous, side of Dido obviously owes a great
deal to Medea (Eurpides’ as well as Apollonius’), but it is interesting
that Virgil includes in her elements of other, calmer kinds of women.
Once again, we see Virgil’s literary annexation in action. In the
Aeneid, Dido is by far the most prominent woman,46 and the one
who contains the most echoes of other Wgures. She becomes The Epic
Woman, subsuming the characteristics of very diVerent females from
earlier works: she has the innocence of Nausicaa, the attractions of
Calypso, the danger of Medea, the pathos of Ariadne, and the
practical wisdom of Hypsipyle.
I shall take a moment here to expand a little on the links to be seen
between Virgil’s Dido and Apollonius’ Hypsipyle, to emphasize
the point that there is more to Dido than just the passionate
and love-scarred woman. Just as Lemnos is the Wrst lengthy stop-
over made by the Argonauts once they Wnally get going on their
journey, so, in terms of the text of the Aeneid (though not its
chronology), Carthage is the Wrst stop for Aeneas and friends.47
The queen of Lemnos, Hypsipyle, has, like Dido, had a violent
past, though this was one in which she was less guiltless than
the Carthaginian queen.48 The women of Lemnos have killed all

45 Nelis (2001) has contributed an impressive amount to the study of Apollonius

and Virgil, but, as he is ready to recognize, even such a long book as his cannot hope
to unravel every detail of each correspondence. It goes without saying, therefore, that
my own observations are but a drop in the ocean.
46 And it is worth noting that other important women, such as Amata and
Camilla, bear certain strong similarities to Dido. She sets the pattern for females in
this poem (and also Wnds a male counterpart in Turnus), and remains a near-constant
presence even after her death.
47 The ways in which the two bands arrive are obviously diVerent: Jason’s calmly
weighing anchor, Aeneas’ shipwrecked and desperate (and more like Odysseus
arriving in Phaeacia). Cf. Nelis (2001) 112–17 on the connections between Carthage
and Lemnos.
48 Nevertheless, it is worth comparing the faint, underlying sense of threat oVered
by the man-killing Lemnian women to the feared savagery of the Carthaginians which
Jupiter takes pains to neutralize (Aen. 1.297–304). On the similarities between Dido
and Hypsipyle, see Nelis (2001) 180–2.
150 Rebecca Armstrong
the men on their island, with the noble exception of Hypsipyle
herself, who rescued her father Thoas and sent him oV over the sea
in a chest. This family loyalty, though given less emphasis by Apollo-
nius, has its similarities with the loyalty of Dido to her dead husband
Sychaeus. Like Dido, Hypsipyle is the leader of her people, and even
goes to the lengths of donning her father’s armour and leading her
army of women to defend their city when they mistake the Argonauts
for marauding Thracians (Argon. 1.630–9). The description of Dido
as dux femina facti (‘female leader of the expedition’, Aen. 1.364)
sets her in a similar context: a woman who has been driven
by circumstance to play the male part and to lead her people in war
and peace.49
Structural and thematic similarities between the two episodes
continue. After Hypsipyle has recommended welcoming the
Argonauts, but keeping them at arm’s length lest they discover the
secret of the mass murder of Lemnos’ male population, her wise old
nurse Polyxo gives a speech in support, but also recommends that
they allow the young men to be close to them to provide defence and
children (Argon. 1.675–96). Dido’s speech to her sister Anna at the
start of Aeneid 4 expresses a similar desire to keep the stranger at a
distance, though for the very diVerent reason that she thinks she may
fall in love with him. Anna’s reply is quite close to that of Polyxo:
think about the children you might have, and think about the
beneWts of having some more men around to defend the city against
hostile neighbours (Aen. 4.31–53).50 Hypsipyle makes an oVer of
joint sovereignty to Jason (Argon. 1.793–833); Dido makes a similar
oVer to Ilioneus (Aen. 1.572–4),51 and clearly hopes that Aeneas will
stay and rule with her. Jason’s polite refusal of the oVer, while
thanking Hypsipyle for her kindness (Argon. 1.836–41) is partially

49 In this respect, it is worth emphasizing how diVerent Dido is from many of her
other models: Ariadne and Nausicaa hardly play the male part, and even the likes of
Circe and Medea, for all their strange powers over men, are not de facto generals and
politicians.
50 Cf. Nelis (2001) 138–9. Although Virgil has replaced a nurse with a sister (and
here, compare the sisters Medea and Chalciope in Argonautica 3), it is worth
remarking that in many ways, Anna herself plays a role akin to that of the nurse
(whether in epic or tragedy).
51 Cf. Nelis (2001) 114.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 151
echoed by Aeneas when he Wnally tells Dido he has to leave to pursue
his destiny (Aen. 340–7).52
When the Lemnian women Wnd out that the Argonauts are about
to leave, they come Xocking to say their fond farewells, like bees from
a rock (1.879–82). When Dido Wnds out that Aeneas is leaving, she
rushes like a Maenad (4.300–4) and harangues him. And yet, there is
a reminiscence of the Apollonian bee simile at an earlier stage in the
Carthage episode: back when the Trojans Wrst arrive, they see
the city being built, its people bustling like bees to do their work
(Aen. 1.430–6).53 Virgil echoes a moment which describes the parting
of lovers in a passage before his lovers have even met. The result is a
bitter-sweet mixture of the hope that this might be a love aVair which
dissolves as painlessly as those of the Argonauts in Lemnos, and the
knowledge (at least on a second reading) that it will not. Hypsipyle
fully understands that Jason wants to go; she simply asks that he
should remember her, and wants to know what to do with a baby,
should it turn out that she has become pregnant by him. There is
an echo of Hypsipyle’s request not to be forgotten (Argon. 1.896–7)
in Aeneas’ assertion that he will not feel ashamed to remember Dido
(nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae j dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus
hos regit artus—‘I will not feel ashamed to remember Elissa as long
as I am mindful of myself, as long as my breath rules these limbs’,
4.335–6), yet it cannot help but ring hollow in the light of Dido’s
speech: she has not asked just to be remembered, but to be treated as

52 Cf. Nelis (2001) 163. It is worth noting that Jason comes out of this episode
rather better than Aeneas does. Jason makes it clear to Hypsipyle from the start that
he does not intend to stay long. Aeneas’ vague quae me cumque uocant terrae
(‘whatever lands call me’, 1.610) is subsequently shown not to have registered with
Dido. The fact that both heroes have to be pushed away from their lovers’ beds with a
gruV reminder of their goals and duties (by Heracles at Argon. 1.861–74 and Mercury
at Aen. 4.265–76) underlines another contrast via correspondence. The result of each
hero’s departure is dramatically diVerent.
53 The bee simile is based on Verg. G. 4.162–9, where the ordered society of the
bees represents a civilized (and Roman) city—the kind of place Aeneas’ descendants
are fated to found, but which he is also so desperate to see in his own lifetime. By
contrast, though, the simile also recalls that at Il. 2.87–90, where Greek troops issue
from their tents like bees. The possible threat of the Carthaginians has, perhaps, not
yet been fully dissipated. The same might be said for Apollonius’ Lemnian bees—
these are, after all, women who have killed men for spurning them before.
152 Rebecca Armstrong
a wife and lover deserve.54 Again, Hypsipyle’s sanguine request for
a forwarding address for any children is reworked in tragic vein to
form Dido’s heart-rending wish that she at least had a paruulus Aeneas
to comfort her (‘little Aeneas’, 4.327–30). Aeneas seems (or wants) to
believe that Dido will be like Hypsipyle—the woman who doesn’t
make a fuss. How wrong could he be! In the end, though, from the
point of view of the plot, Dido is forced willy-nilly into an analogous
position. She is by no means a woman who sensibly accepts that her
hero has to move on, yet move on he does, and the eVect is almost the
same as if she had never uttered a protest nor killed herself.55
Here we might contrast the other major Apollonian model for Dido,
Medea. Medea is certainly not a Wgure who would be airbrushed from
the story of Jason’s exploits. As she is not slow to remind him, he would
have achieved very little worth remembering without her help. In the
Argonautica, Hypsipyle works as a foil for Medea, as a model of an easy
relationship which can be set aside in pursuit of heroic glory. Medea,
by contrast, is a more complicated and diYcult woman for Jason to
deal with, not least because she is central to his success. Dido, as both
a Hypsipyle and a Medea, is both the disposable and the passionate
woman. By collapsing these two Apollonian Wgures together (and
adding several more from other sources too), Virgil contains all the
stories, all the possible outcomes in one woman. Dido, we might say, is
a Wne representative of Virgil’s allusive project: she is at once a coher-
ent and individual character, and a literary construction through
whom we can clearly glimpse pictures of other Wgures from the literary
past. Virgil shows that Apollonius is not the only one who can create
fascinating epic women; indeed, Virgil is able to make them even more
complicated than Apollonius ever dreamed. Dido subsumes a gallery
of other women to create the Virgilian epic woman, a creature whose
complexities are manifold and fascinating. She is a woman who, on the

54 As so often, there is another Homeric passage lying behind the request to be

remembered: as Odysseus leaves Phaeacia, Nausicaa asks him to remember her, and
he gallantly promises never to let a day go by without thinking of her, since she saved
his life (Od. 8.461–8). Again, the contrast with the situation of Dido and Aeneas is
marked. Thanks to Simon Hornblower for reminding me about this.
55 Even the long-lasting and destructive enmity between Carthage and Rome
(threatened by Dido at Aen. 4.622–9) is, by the time of the Aeneid and Augustus,
long Wnished. The last ripple that Dido’s passion sent out into history has died away.
Even this curse cannot outlive Rome and Aeneas’ descendants.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 153
level of the plot, ultimately has to stand aside and play second Wddle to
the greater Roman project,56 yet in her very construction she is also
part of that project, part of Virgil’s collection and appropriation of
literary history.
In a broader, thematic sense, also, the poet’s approach to the
Argonautica at once underlines the earlier work’s importance, and
makes it merely a cog in a very Roman machine. The Argonautica, as
a poem of an epic voyage, becomes, along with the Odyssey, a
precursor to the Great Journey of Aeneas to Rome. Others have
taken a trip around the Mediterranean, and even made a journey
from east to west (alongside Odysseus and Jason, we can place many
other wanderers and revenants—Teucer, Dardanus, Idomeneus,
Antenor, Diomedes, even Dido), yet all of these can be used as a
backdrop, as details to Xesh out and complement the voyage of
Aeneas. His position both as the latest one to make such a journey
and as the one whose journey has the greatest results establishes him
as a kind of Über-voyager, encapsulating the essence of what it is to
be a much-travelled man: the suVering; the endurance of storms,
monsters, and love aVairs; the wrong turns, and, eventually, the
weary but triumphant arrival at the goal. In this sense, Aeneas does
not merely repeat but completes the image. All roads lead to Rome,
indeed. And similarly, all narratives of wanderings and foundation
lead to this, the Virgilian narrative.57

V I RG IL A N D C AT UL LU S

For the greater part of this chapter, I have been discussing Virgil’s
treatment of some of his Greek predecessors, his expansion of the

56 Much as Dido’s city Carthage, which at one point seemed about to eclipse Rome
and cut her down before she became truly great, was ultimately defeated and
consciously conWned to history’s sidelines by the victorious Romans.
57 As Matthew Leigh points out to me, a further example of this practice of making
the Mediterranean into a Virgilian landscape can be found in the epic’s penchant for
(re)naming places after episodes in Aeneas’ story. In particular, note that Caieta,
which is prominently named after Aeneas’ nurse at the start of book 7, was earlier
part of the Argonauts’ story, known then as Aeetes’ harbour (cf. Ap. Rhod. Argon.
4.661; Lycoph. Alex. 1274).
154 Rebecca Armstrong
great Roman epic to absorb the great and the good of Greek
literature. However, his encyclopaedic work does not stop with the
Alexandrians, but encompasses early Roman literature too. This can,
as well, be understood in terms of Virgilian literary imperialism: an
empire, after all, not only conquers and reshapes other lands, but also
redeWnes its homeland, its starting-point. The great works of Roman
literature are, then, just as open to the project of assimilation as the
Greek, if with variations in the details. In the Aeneid, alongside
Homer and Apollonius we Wnd Naevius and Ennius; Greek and
Roman tragedy both Wnd a place in this epic,58 while Lucretius’
inXuence is all-pervasive, whether in terms of language, or in the
form of more speciWc dialogue with his philosophy;59 alongside the
hints of Hellenistic treatises on the origins of various cities, we Wnd
echoes of the Roman ethnographical tradition;60 indeed, even
Roman historiography is woven in.61 There is not space here to
embark on a wider discussion of Virgil’s treatment of his Roman
predecessors, but I would like to Wnish with a few observations on the
redeWnition of Catullus in the Aeneid, in an attempt to illustrate not
only the breadth of Virgilian allusion, but also the very diVerent ways
he can handle other authors.
With Homer (and Apollonius, for that matter), the emphasis is on
swallowing whole, containing the quart of the Iliad and Odyssey in
the half-pint pot of the Aeneid. With the smaller-scale poetry of
Catullus it is diVerent. The most obvious allusions to Catullus
(those most obvious to me, at any rate) come at points of high
emotion.62 So, for example, the most sustained use of Catullan

58 For an overview and further bibliography, see Hardie (1997).

59 See Hardie (1986) ch. 5; Adler (2003).
60 Cf. Thomas (1982) 93–107 and Ando (2002).
61 Once again, Virgil has his cake and eats it. He eschews the annalistic form
adopted by Ennius, where myth was used for Xash-back and illustration of a historical
narrative, and makes myth the main subject of his epic, whilst keeping history ever-
present both through the direct use of Xash-forward, and the indirect paths of
allegory and symbolism. Aeneas is at once a mythical and historical Wgure, at once
an integral part of the epic plot and a useful symbol of the Roman past to throw light
on the Roman present. In this respect, the Aeneid shares a concern of Roman
historiography, to oVer selective views of the past as exempla, promoting the repeti-
tion of the good parts of the past and the avoidance of the bad. Cf. Feldherr (2002).
62 Here, of course, I am omitting any discussion of the broader stylistic inXuences
of Catullus and the Neoterics. Cf. Boyle (1993) 87–8 for a brief outline.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 155
intertexts comes in the Dido episode, as the language of curae,
perWdia, and foedera is transplanted from Ariadne in poem 64 to
the Carthaginian queen.63 Again, in shorter but no less intense
bursts, Catullus reappears as Aeneas is reunited with his father’s
ghost in the Underworld,64 in Anchises’ lament for the younger
Marcellus,65 when Euryalus dies,66 and when Pallas’ lifeless body is
carried away from the battleWeld.67 As far as the Aeneid is concerned,
it seems that Catullus is a poet of intense, painful emotion. Where
here, in Virgil’s literary treasure-house, is the Catullus who threatens
to do unmentionable things to Furius and Aurelius, who calls Lesbia
a goddess68 and a whore? Virgil’s version of Catullus shows us a poet
whose bottomless emotion is communicated with electric immedi-
acy. The power of the Catullan word is so great that it can be used to
transform even a hideous monster into an object of sympathy. The
Cyclops (that Wgure of belated Homeric adventure, already blinded

63 For curae, cf. Aen. 4.1–2 and Catull. 64.250; for perWdia, cf. Aen. 4.305, 421 and
Catull. 64.132–3; for foedera, cf. Aen. 4.339, 520 and Catull. 64.335, along with 76.3,
87.3. For a full list of the links between Ariadne and Dido in book 4, see Pease (1935);
for discussion, see Armstrong (2002), 330–3.
64 Cf. Aen. 6.692–3 and Catull. 101.1–2. As so often, Virgil makes use of a partial
reversal: here it is the living Aeneas to whom the words are addressed, though it is still
the living man who makes the long journey to see the dead. For a longer discussion of
Virgil’s use of Catullus 101 in Aeneid 6, see ch. 7 of Stephen Harrison’s forthcoming
book, Forms of Appropriation. He also remarks on the consistency of tone in these
reminiscences: ‘in each context the recalling of Catullus 101 adds to the gloomy
atmosphere of Aeneid 6 as an enriching allusion to a speciWcally funereal genre’.
65 Cf. Catullus 101 again. In particular, Aen. 6.882–3 and Catull. 101.5–6,
along with Aen. 6.883–6 and the image of making oVerings to the dead in 101 (the
Catullan tristi munere—‘sad tribute’, 8, becomes the Virgilian inani munere—‘empty
tribute’, 885–6).
66 Cf. Aen. 9.433–7 with Catull. 11.21–4 where a Xower is cut by the plough. The
additional reminiscence in the image of the poppy of the death of Gorgythion at Il.
8.306–8 is also important. (For a detailed discussion, see Lyne (1989) 149–59.)
Perhaps through the connection of the two images—one drawn from an epic
death, the other from an erotic death—Virgil is showing that elements of the Catullan
aesthetic can be found in Homer too.
67 Cf. Aen. 11.68–71 with Catull. 62.39–44.
68 As Stephen Heyworth reminds me, Virgil does give us a beloved woman ‘as’
goddess at Aen. 1.498–504, where Dido is compared to Diana. While the more
obvious allusions are to Od. 6.102–9 and Argon. 3.876–86, there is possibly a faint
echo via the Eurotas of Catull. 64.89, where Ariadne’s state of blissful innocence
before Theseus’ arrival is described using a simile of myrtles gracing the banks of that
river. (Neither Homer nor Apollonius mentions the Eurotas in their similes.)
156 Rebecca Armstrong
by Ulysses) is a monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen
ademptum (‘a terrible, ugly, huge monster, whose light/eye had
been taken’, 3.658). The Wrst part of the line sets out his hideous
credentials—he is huge and terrifying—but the loss of his eye,
described in the second half, strangely, but poignantly, recalls the
death of Catullus’ brother, the loss of a metaphorical light (Catull.
68.93 ei misero fratri iucundum lumen ademptum—‘alas for your
poor brother, the delightful light taken from him’).
Indeed, I think that Virgil’s presentation of Catullus as poet of real
and raw emotion is so strong that it can even override the tone of the
original work in a famously fraught incidence of intertextuality. As
Aeneas encounters Dido’s ghost in the Underworld, he is reminded
of the love he has lost and is Wlled with guilt at the thought that he
was the cause of her death. Claiming a reluctance which neither he
nor the poet directly expressed back in book 4, he says, inuitus,
regina, tuo de litore cessi (‘unwillingly, queen, did I leave your
shore’, 6.460). This is a virtual quotation of a Catullan line with a
very diVerent Xavour. In his translation of Callimachus’ Lock of
Berenice, Catullus has the lock of hair exclaim, inuita, o regina, tuo
de uertice cessi (‘unwillingly, O queen, did I leave your head’, 66.39).
Now, this need not contradict an analysis of the line which reveals it
as a complex game on many levels69 but I suggest that, at least on one
level, this is a quotation that is supposed to function as an expression
of raw emotion, because that is what Catullus does in the Aeneid.70
Virgil, if you like, tests the strength of his own portrait of Catullus,
even challenges us to see his source as any less serious than he is
himself. His representation of other authors in his epic can be
ambitiously reductive and one-sided as well as expansive.

69 Skulsky (1985) argues that the ‘sour note’, if it is there, is struck by Aeneas (who
does not know what he is saying) rather than the poet himself. Cf. Lyne (1994) 193,
‘the text leaves Aeneas unwittingly speaking rather smugly, as he cites an intertext
simultaneously radiating Dido’s disaster and his own stardom’. There is, I think, room
left in my interpretation for more detailed and subtle analyses like these. To say that
Catullus represents emotion is not to say that an allusion to Catullus cannot also have
a very complex and intellectual side to it as well.
70 Tatum (1984) makes the important observation that even the Xippancy of
Catullus 66 is tempered, not to say overshadowed, by Catullus 65, where the poet
reveals that he translated the Coma Berenices while in mourning for the death of his
brother. We come back once again to Catullus the poet of serious emotion.
 The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire 157

C ON C LU S I ON

Virgil’s project in the Aeneid is even grander than it need have been.
Not content with mapping the rise of Rome and the creation of a
Roman hero within the plot itself, Virgil extends the imperialist
mindset to his literary interactions as well. He absorbs and reshapes
earlier literature to Wt this new and daring creation, a growing literary
empire which both mirrors and contrasts with the political empire of
Augustus. One need not equate Virgilian appropriation with insensi-
tivity—far from it—but we should not underestimate or understate
the far-ranging ambition revealed by this very well-read Roman.
This great, deWnitive work is to be a treasury of literary history,
one which will ‘hold sway over all shores’ every bit as much as the
house of Aeneas.
This page intentionally left blank
 6
The Epic and the Monuments

Interactions between Virgil’s Aeneid and the

Augustan Building Programme

Stephen Harrison

This chapter looks at references in Virgil’s Aeneid to the buildings in

Rome constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus, which he
famously lists himself in the Res Gestae (19–21). It deals both with the
few brief direct mentions of these projects and the larger number of
arguable allusions to them, through parallel buildings and iconog-
raphy in the Wctional descriptions of the mythological epic plot. This
highlights one element of what Peter Wiseman has called ‘an aspect of
Virgilian allusiveness that we moderns often forget—the signiWcance
of the visible monuments and topography of the city of Rome’.1
Although such indirect allusions in the Aeneid to well-known
monuments of art and architecture are not restricted to Augustan

It is a great pleasure to oVer this chapter to my former tutor, whose teaching was
grandly inspiring, and whose writing on Virgil and other Latin poets has been a major
stimulus to my own work. The chapter was much improved by typically astute and
generous comments from my other former classical tutor, Oliver Lyne: his sudden
death in the middle of the editorial process is a grievous loss to all his students and to
Latin studies.
1 Wiseman (1984) 123; this article, on the presentation of Cybele in the Aeneid and
its connection with Augustus’ revival of the goddess’s cult at Rome and the building
of her temple on the Palatine (Res Gestae 19), provides a good model for this kind of
allusiveness in the poem (and enables me to dispense with the Augustan temple of
Cybele here).
160 Stephen Harrison
material,2 these form by far the majority, and should to some degree
be seen as complimentary allusions to Augustus’ contemporary
transformation of the Roman urban landscape, amply evident for
the poem’s original readers.3 Given the traditional political function
of urban embellishment at Rome as the self-promotion of the
builder, it is diYcult to avoid the conclusion that such extensive
engagement in the poem with the Augustan building programme
shows political support for the princeps in general terms. But the fact
that most such allusions are indirect and in the form of Wctional
analogies often allows for a more diverse and ambiguous treatment;
as we shall see, Virgil’s epic consistently broadens out merely com-
plimentary allusions to Augustan buildings into humane meditations
which, while maintaining an encomiastic element, do not ignore the
tragic elements of human life and achievement. Thus allusions to
buildings, so often compared to works of literature in antiquity, are
in eVect another aspect of the Aeneid’s rich intertextuality, and their
subtle and nuanced nature adds an identiWable and contemporary
layer to the poem’s dense literary and ideological texture.

DIUUS IULIUS

The anniversary funeral games celebrated by Aeneas for his dead

father Anchises in Aeneid 5 are generally thought to recall the Ludi
Victoriae Caesaris celebrated by the future Augustus not long after
the death of his adoptive father Julius Caesar in July 44 bc, at which
the comet thought to betoken Caesar’s divine status appeared,4 and
the general parallel between the apparent apotheosis of Anchises and
that of Caesar has been noted since Servius (on Aeneid 5.45: sic omnia
inducit quasi diuinae honores soluantur Anchisae, quos constat Iulio
Caesari tribuisse Augustum). But the events of 44, or of 42 when
Caesar became Divus Iulius, are not the only historical moments at

2 e.g. an allusion to the cult-statue of Athena Parthenos in Athens at Aeneid

2.225–7: cf. Harrison (1987).
3 Especially good here is Favro (1996).
4 Hardie (1998) 68.
 The Epic and the Monuments 161
issue in Virgil’s account. At Aeneid 5.45–60, Aeneas addresses his men
at the beginning of the funeral games:

‘Dardanidae magni, genus alto a sanguine diuum,

annuus exactis completur mensibus orbis,
ex quo reliquias diuinique ossa parentis
condidimus terra maestasque sacrauimus aras;
iamque dies, nisi fallor, adest, quem semper acerbum,
semper honoratum (sic di uoluistis) habebo.
hunc ego Gaetulis agerem si Syrtibus exsul,
Argolicoue mari deprensus et urbe Mycenae,
annua uota tamen sollemnisque ordine pompas
exsequerer strueremque suis altaria donis.
nunc ultro ad cineres ipsius et ossa parentis
haud equidem sine mente, reor, sine numine diuum
adsumus et portus delati intramus amicos.
ergo agite et laetum cuncti celebremus honorem:
poscamus uentos, atque haec me sacra quotannis
urbe uelit posita templis sibi ferre dicatis.’
‘Great descendants of Dardanus, race sprung from the high blood of the
gods, the annual cycle is now full with the passing of the months from the
time when we laid in the earth the remains and bones of my godlike father
and consecrated altars of mourning; and now, unless I am mistaken, the day
is here which I shall always keep as one of bitter loss, always as one of honour
(this was your will, gods). If I were to spend this day in exile in the African
Syrtes, or caught in the sea of Greece or the city of Mycenae, I should still
carry out the annual prayers and the ritual processions in due order, and pile
altars with their proper gifts. Now of our own accord (but not without the
intention or will of the gods, I think) we are here at the site of the ashes and
bones of my father himself, and are carried along to enter friendly harbours.
Therefore come now, let us all celebrate together the joyful ceremony of
honour: let us ask for winds, and may my father will that these rites be paid
to him every year once our city is established and temples dedicated.’
Modern treatments of these lines see them as establishing an aeti-
ology in Aeneas’ honours for Anchises of the Parentalia, the Roman
festival of ancestors celebrated in February,5 following Ovid’s

5 e.g. in the fullest commentary on book 5, R. D. Williams (1960) 53; the same
view is still held by M. F. Williams (2003) 19 (where Paternalia must be a misprint for
Parentalia).
162 Stephen Harrison
interpretation of Virgil’s episode in the Fasti,6 but the speciWc details
here point strongly to the cult of Divus Iulius and to the establish-
ment of its temple as part of the Augustan building programme.7 The
temple of Divus Iulius, vowed in 42 and built in the 30s, was
dedicated by the future Augustus on 18 August 29 bc, following the
triple triumph of 13–15 August.8 This dedication, and its prehistory
in the events after Caesar’s death, corresponds closely to the details of
the Virgilian text here, as follows:
47 diuini . . . parentis: both Aeneas and Augustus have a father who
becomes a god after his death. This is the Wrst hint of Anchises’
potential divinity (there is nothing in the obituary at 3.710–15),
followed by several more in book 5.9
48 maestasque sacrauerimus aras: an improvised altar was set up at
the site of Caesar’s pyre immediately after the cremation of his corpse
on 17 March 44, the Wrst stage on the road to full divine cult.10 The
future Augustus in 29 was thus analogous to Aeneas in book 5,
adding the Wnal conWrmation of full apotheosis in setting up an act
of commemoration (the dedication of a temple), as a later sequel to
an initial act of cultic consecration made at the time of his father’s
death.
49–50 iamque dies, nisi fallor, adest, quem semper acerbum, j sem-
per honoratum (sic di uoluistis) habebo. The reference to a particular
anniversary of the father’s death naturally refers to the Ides of March;
this is supported by the fact that the dramatic time at this point in the
Aeneid is spring, assuming that Aeneas had left Carthage at the
beginning of the sailing season.11 Though it was not a date men-
tioned in the extant fragments of Augustan calendars, the Ides of

6 Fasti 2.543–6 (on the Parentalia) hunc morem Aeneas, pietatis idoneus auctor, j
attulit in terras, iuste Latine, tuas. j ille patris Genio sollemnia dona ferebat: j hinc
populi ritus edidicere pios.
7 Cf. Res Gestae 19 aedem Divi Iuli . . . feci. The link between Virgil’s lines and this
building is laconically implied by Camps (1970) 100–1, but seems to have been
ignored by subsequent scholarship.
8 For the temple in general see Gros (1996).
9 For the divine status of Anchises in Aeneid 5 see Harrison (1985) 104–5.
10 See the evidence gathered at Weinstock (1971) 364–7.
11 R. D. Williams (1960) p. xxix places the games for Anchises in February to
match the Parentalia.
 The Epic and the Monuments 163
March was declared a dies nefastus in 42 (Dio 47.19.1), and Ovid’s
famous treatment at Fasti 3.697–710 makes clear that the date and its
association with Caesar’s death was a familiar feature of the Roman
year. Acerbum reXects this dark association; the positive honoratum
would conXate the day with happier anniversaries with necessary
links to the Ides of March such as the consecration of the god Divus
Iulius (probably 1 January 42) and the Wnal dedication of his temple
(18 August 29).
53–4 annua uota tamen sollemnisque ordine pompas j exsequerer
strueremque suis altaria donis. Here pompas could conceivably refer
to the private visits by families to the tombs of their dead, the main
ceremonial of the Parentalia (cf. Ovid, Fasti 2.533–42), but the word
refers more readily to a public processional celebration such as might
have taken place on the festival of the dedication of Divus Iulius (18
August 29). Georgics 3.22–3 iam nunc sollemnis ducere pompas j ad
delubra iuvat, referring to the inauguration of the poet’s metaphor-
ical temple, along with the Ara Pacis processional frieze, makes it
clear that such processions were a feature of the dedication of
Augustan religious buildings; this and altaria, given that the temple
of Divus Iulius seems unusually to have had an altar in a niche in the
centre of its front,12 suggest that the dedication festival of the temple
of Divus Iulius is the annual celebration alluded to here.
59–60 atque haec me sacra quotannis j urbe uelit posita templis sibi
ferre dicatis. The dedication of a temple13 to an individual Wts much
better the shrine of Divus Iulius than the scattered oVerings at
individual family tombs characteristic of the Parentalia, and
urbe . . . posita suggests not just Aeneas’ initial urban foundation in
Italy but the Augustan building programme in Rome.
Taken together, these details suggest that the passage focuses not
on the aetiology of the Parentalia, but rather on the parallel between
the Wctional funeral celebrations and apotheosis of Anchises and
their historical analogue in the posthumous treatment of Julius

12 Gros (1996) 118 and Wg. 81 (p. 428); there are clear signs that the anomalous
altar was removed at a point in Augustus’ reign after the Aeneid (14 or 9 bc).
13 The plural templis suggests a collection of temples such as those in Rome and
implies that Anchises will take his place in cult alongside the other gods, again more
suitable for Divus Iulius than the Parentalia.
164 Stephen Harrison
Caesar in the years 44–29. Especially prominent (as it would be in the
mind of the poem’s Wrst readers) is the dedication of the temple of
Divus Iulius on 18 August 29, a key building in the Augustan
programme, whose dedication was specially reserved for a prime
propaganda position just after the great triple triumph. The
emphasis on Wlial pietas in honouring Anchises of course Wts the
character of Aeneas, but it also Wts the self-projection of Augustus as
the avenger and commemorator of his adoptive father, much
emphasized in the Res Gestae.14

IUPPITER FERETRIUS

The temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, recorded amongst

Augustus’ building projects at Res Gestae 19 (aedes in Capitolio Iovis
Feretri . . . feci), was a small building with a larger political signiW-
cance.15 Restored not long before Actium, probably as part of the
young Caesar’s resuscitation of the traditional Roman mechanisms
of declaring war,16 this temple had been at the centre of a propaganda
struggle in 27 bc, when M. Licinius Crassus, grandson of the trium-
vir, after his victory against the Thracian Bastarnae, claimed the right
to dedicate spolia opima, ‘supreme spoils’, the armour of an enemy
chieftain, traditionally oVered in the shrine of Jupiter Feretrius by
Roman commanders who slew their counterpart enemy com-
manders in single combat. This ancient honour may have been
granted in theory to Julius Caesar, but in practice had not been
awarded since the third century bc, and this claim from the heir
of the triumvir Crassus was a clear challenge to the military prestige
of the future Augustus, who managed to defeat it on the technicality
that he and not Crassus was formally the supreme commander.17

14 Res Gestae 2 qui parentem meum trucidauerunt, eos in exilium expuli . . . et . . . uici
bis acie; I see Caesar as less problematic for Augustus than White (1988).
15 See the standard article, Coarelli (1996).
16 Some of the equipment of the fetiales, formally responsible for declaring war,
was to be found in the temple—see Harrison (1989) 409.
17 The contemporary sensitivity is clear from Livy 4.20. See in detail Harrison
(1989), Rich (1996).
 The Epic and the Monuments 165
At Aeneid 6.854–9, in the Show of Heroes in the Underworld,
Anchises introduces the last winner of the honour, M. Claudius
Marcellus (cos. 222 bc):

sic pater Anchises, atque haec mirantibus addit:

‘aspice, ut insignis spoliis Marcellus opimis
ingreditur uictorque uiros supereminet omnis.
hic rem Romanam magno turbante tumultu
sistet eques, sternet Poenos Gallumque rebellem,
tertiaque arma patri suspendet capta Quirino.’
Thus spoke father Anchises, and added this for his marvelling listeners: ‘See
how Marcellus strides, conspicuous with the supreme spoils, and victori-
ously towers over all the heroes. He will hold fast on horseback the state of
Rome when a mighty tumult rocks it, he will lay low the Carthaginians and
the rebellious Gaul, and will hang up the third set of captured arms for
father Quirinus.’

As I have argued elsewhere, the presentation of Marcellus here as

the last of the three dedicators of spolia opima supports Augustus’
position in 27: here as in other Augustan poets the canon of
three awards is presented as Wxed, closed, and a matter of historical
and antiquarian record rather than as a live political issue.18 The
mention of Romulus rather than Jupiter Feretrius as the dedicatee
seems to refer to the presence of a statue of Romulus (the
Wrst dedicator of spolia opima) in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius
(Livy 4.20.11).
The issue of the spolia opima, and by implication of the temple of
Jupiter Feretrius, also comes up in the Wctional plot of the Aeneid. At
Aeneid 10.449–51 the youth Pallas replies bravely to the challenge and
threats of Turnus:

‘aut spoliis ego iam raptis laudabor opimis

aut leto insigni: sorti pater aequus utrique est.
tolle minas.’
‘I shall gain praise either for taking the supreme spoils, or for a noble death;
my father is equal to either outcome. Cease your threats.’

18 Harrison (1989).
166 Stephen Harrison
The use of the technical term spolia opima is anachronistic and
strictly inaccurate (Pallas is not the commander of his army), but is
surely chosen for contemporary resonance. The propaganda crisis of
27 is clearly recalled, but the reader may also be meant to remember
the mention of the spolia opima in Aeneid 6. In the Show of Heroes
the great Marcellus of the Punic Wars is immediately succeeded by
his distant descendant Marcellus, the son-in-law and intended heir of
Augustus. The Pallas and Marcellus of the Aeneid are a similar
pair of characters, both young men of heroic potential who
perish before they can achieve real glory, and each (along with the
similar character Lausus at 10.825) is famously addressed posthu-
mously with the sympathetic apostrophe miserande puer (Marcellus
at 6.882, Pallas at 11.42).19 The suggestion may be that both
Pallas and Marcellus have the potential to achieve the highest
award of Roman military glory or the courage to aim for it, but
that in both cases death tragically prevents the fulWlment of that
potential; for Marcellus, this is implied by his juxtaposition with his
famous ancestor, the last winner of that very award, and by the
hyperbolic description of his military prowess, probably
shown only in one campaign as a junior oYcer in Spain in 25–24
bc20 (6.878–881):

‘heu pietas, heu prisca Wdes inuictaque bello

dextera! non illi se quisquam impune tulisset
obuius armato, seu cum pedes iret in hostem
seu spumantis equi foderet calcaribus armos.’
‘Alas for his piety, alas for his old-fashioned loyalty and and his right hand
unconquered in war. No warrior would have charged to meet him in battle
unscathed, whether he advanced on foot towards the enemy or dug into his
foaming horse’s Xanks with spurs.’
Thus these allusions to the spolia opima and its actual and potential
winners refer indirectly to Augustus’ building programme and the
temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and arguably support the Augustan
position that the award was a historical honour not to be achieved
by contemporaries.

19 For these parallels see e.g. Horsfall (2003) 75.

20 Cf. Dio 53.26.1, Crinag. x Gow–Page GP.
 The Epic and the Monuments 167

MAUSOLEUM AUGUSTI

In the just-mentioned lament for the young Marcellus in the mouth

of Anchises in the Show of Heroes, reference is made to his funeral
and burial in 23 bc, recent events for the Wrst readers of the Aeneid 21
(Aeneid 6.872–4):

‘quantos ille uirum magnam Mauortis ad urbem

campus aget gemitus! Vel quae, Tiberine, uidebis
funera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem.’

‘What loud groans that plain full of men will raise at the mighty city of Mars!
And what a funeral you will see, Tiber, as you glide past the fresh tomb-mound.’
Virgilian commentaries usually omit to note that tumulum . . . recen-
tem is a very clear reference to the great Mausoleum of Augustus,22
probably begun soon after Actium,23 in which Marcellus’ was the Wrst
interment (Dio 53.30.5). The address to the Tiber creates an
emotional tone, but also points to the exceptional position of the
Mausoleum in the bend of the river on the Campus Martius (see the
contemporary description at Strabo 5.3.8). Here we Wnd a restrained
and tragic view of the Mausoleum as the resting-place of a youth
prematurely deceased. This contrasts with the likely propaganda
function of the building as a victory monument and dynastic
claim: its design arguably demonstrated appropriation from the
defeated Antony of the trappings of Hellenistic kingship,24 while its
vast size showed it was not for Augustus alone.25
21 Though I am, like many scholars, sceptical about Servius’ romantic story here
(on 6.861) that these lines were read by the poet to Marcellus’ mother Octavia with
great emotional aVect; see further Horsfall (1995) 16.
22 Nothing in Norden (1927) or (more surprisingly) Austin (1977); the point is
Wrst noted by D. West (1993) 295. An honourable exception amongst modern
commentators is Maclennan (2003) 182. This section summarizes Harrison (2005).
23 Cf. Zanker (1988) 72. For the standard modern account of the Mausoleum see
now von Hesberg (1996).
24 Note that the name ‘Mausoleum’ with its clear connotations of Hellenistic
monarchy is found already in Strabo (5.3.8).
25 Cf. Zanker (1988) 76: ‘when the Mausoleum was completed, after the defeat of
Antony, it no doubt gave the impression of a triumphal monument, one erected by
the victor himself ’.
168 Stephen Harrison
This more celebratory aspect of the Mausoleum may perhaps be
detectable in the proem to Georgics 3 (12–16):

primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas,

et uiridi in campo templum de marmore ponam
propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi Xexibus errat
Mincius et tenera praetexit harundine ripas.
in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit.
I shall be the Wrst to bring back Syrian palms for you, Mantua, and I shall
establish a temple of marble in your green plain, next to the water, where the
mighty Mincius meanders with its slow bends and fringes its banks with soft
reeds. Caesar will be in the middle for me, and occupy his temple.
In this famous passage Virgil promises to build a metaphorical poetic
temple at Mantua and by the river Mincius to celebrate the greatness
of Augustus. It has been suggested that the metaphorical templum
recalls a real building in Rome, perhaps the aedes Herculis Musarum
or the temple of Palatine Apollo. But it is the location, materials, and
design of the Mausoleum Augusti which seem to be especially echoed
in Virgil’s description of the templum here; the Mausoleum as a
consecrated tomb could be described as a templum.26 Like Virgil’s
temple, the Mausoleum had a position on a plain in the bend of a
river, on the Campus Martius (cf. 13 uiridi in campo), was faced with
marble (cf. 13 de marmore), and had Caesar in the middle, being
topped by a bronze statue of the great man which stood in the centre
of the circular monument (cf. 16 in medio mihi Caesar erit and the
description at Strabo 5.3.8). Even the chariot-racing imagined by
Virgil, clearly evoking the great Greek athletic festivals with Pindaric
colour,27 Wts the Campus Martius, as Strabo notes in his description
(ibid.): ‘And the size of the plain [the Campus Martius] is extraor-
dinary, providing at the same time tracks for chariots and other
horsemanship, without obstruction . . . especially worth seeing is the
so-called ‘‘Mausoleum’’, a great mound on a high base of white

26 Tombs as templa: Nonius p. 743.12 Lindsay templum et sepulchrum dici potest

ueterum auctoritate (citing Sychaeus’ burial-shrine at Aeneid 4.457 de marmore
templum, where the language closely echoes Georgics 3.13); cf. too the templum of
Dido’s tomb at Silius, Punica 1.84.
27 Cf. Wilkinson (1970).
 The Epic and the Monuments 169
marble by the river, covered to its top with evergreen trees; on its
summit is a bronze statue of Augustus Caesar.’
This Wctional and symbolic temple clearly honours the victorious
Caesar on the (then imminent) occasion of his triumphal return to
Rome in 29 bc, and Virgil’s poetical tribute to the victorious Caesar
in 29, a metaphorical monument, thus appropriately echoes the form
of one of Caesar’s major tributes to himself. The heady atmosphere
of this likely allusion to the Mausoleum in the Georgics contrasts
strikingly with the monument’s appearance in the Aeneid: closely
associated with the premature death of Marcellus, its tragic role as
a receptacle of doomed youth is emphasized rather than its role
as a marker of victory. Here we can see poetic meditation on the
tragedy of wasted life taking precedence over easy triumphalism, a
pattern we will Wnd elsewhere in the Aeneid’s modiWcation of
Augustan victory monuments (see next section).

APOLLO PALATINUS

The temple complex of Palatine Apollo, dedicated on 9 October 28

bc,28 makes a notable appearance in the Aeneid in its own right, in
the climactic prophetic image on the Shield of Aeneas (Aeneid
8.720–3):

ipse sedens niueo candentis limine Phoebi

dona recognoscit populorum aptatque superbis
postibus; incedunt uictae longo ordine gentes,
quam uariae linguis, habitu tam uestis et armis.
He himself, seated on the snow-white threshold of Phoebus, acknowledges
the gifts of the peoples and Wts them to the proud doorposts; the defeated
tribes march in a long column, as varied in tongues as in their mode of dress
and arms.
Here niveo . . . limine points speciWcally to the facing of the temple in
white marble from Luna (cf. Servius here and Propertius 2.31.9–10).
As commentators point out, Virgil’s lines here conXate the dedica-

28 For the standard account with full references to other literature see Gros (1993).
170 Stephen Harrison
tion of the temple in October 28 with the triple triumph of Augustus
in August 29, an unsurprising element of poetic licence given that the
second and central triumph of the three celebrated the battle of
Actium with which the temple was closely associated.29 This brief if
glorious view of the chief Augustan propaganda monument is sup-
plemented by its appearance in two Wctional artefacts elsewhere in
the poem.
At the beginning of Aeneid 6 Aeneas lands on the Italian mainland
for the Wrst time and visits another important Italian shrine of
Apollo, that at Cumae (6.9–13):

at pius Aeneas arces quibus altus Apollo

praesidet horrendaeque procul secreta Sibyllae,
antrum immane, petit, magnam cui mentem animumque
Delius inspirat uates aperitque futura.
iam subeunt Triuiae lucos atque aurea tecta.
But pious Aeneas made for the heights on which lofty Apollo sits and the
secret places of the Sibyl close by, the monstrous cave; into her the prophet
of Delos breathes a mighty consciousness and spirit, and thus reveals what is
to come. Now they approach the groves of Diana and the golden buildings.
As Michael Putnam has brieXy noted,30 this temple of Apollo recalls
that of Apollo Palatinus in Rome in some decorative features; one
might go further and claim that it has been designed speciWcally to
evoke the contemporary building. Its lofty domination of its hill
(arces quibus altus31 Apollo j praesidet) matches the site of Palatine
Apollo at the crest of the Palatine, looking south-west over the Circus
Maximus, while the apparent joint cult with Diana (Triuiae lucos)
which ‘seems to be a Virgilian innovation’32 recalls the appearance of
Diana in the triad of cult-statues in the Palatine temple (Propertius
2.31.15).

29 Cf. e.g. Zanker (1988) 82–9. Along with many scholars, I Wnd the attempt of
Gurval (1995) to play down the connection of the Palatine temple with Actium
unconvincing, especially given Propertius 4.6.
30 Putnam (1998) 17.
31 As Austin (1977) 35 notes, altus is here ‘not conventional, but stressing the
rocky height of Apollo’s guardian shrine’, as true of the Palatine temple (not men-
tioned by Austin in this context) as of that at Cumae.
32 Austin (1977) 37.
 The Epic and the Monuments 171
The key plot-event at the Cumaean temple is of course Aeneas’
encounter with its priestess the Sibyl and her prophetic capacities.
Aeneas promises Apollo in a prayer that he will build a temple to
Apollo with an associated festival, provide a Wxed home for the
Sibyl’s prophecies (6.69–76), and set up a board of select supervisors
to look after them:

‘tum Phoebo et Triuiae solido de marmore templum

instituam festosque dies de nomine Phoebi.
te quoque magna manent regnis penetralia nostris:
hic ego namque tuas sortis arcanaque fata
dicta meae genti ponam, lectosque sacrabo,
alma, uiros. foliis tantum ne carmina manda,
ne turbata uolent rapidis ludibria uentis;
ipsa canas oro.’
‘Then I will set up a temple for Apollo and Diana from solid marble, and
festival days named after Apollo. For you too [Sibyl] great sanctuaries, are in
store in our kingdom: for here I will place your oracles and the secret
destinies revealed to my people, and consecrate chosen men to you, gentle
one. Only do not entrust your prophecies to leaves, lest they Xy around in
confusion as playthings for the rapacious winds; pronounce them yourself,
I pray.’
This collection of honours refers to institutions established over
several centuries. The festival for Apollo alluded to is normally
taken to be the seven-day Ludi Apollinares celebrated in July and set
up in 212 bc (Livy 25.12.9),33 and the lecti uiri to oversee the
prophecies are plainly the quindecimuiri sacris faciundis, the custo-
dians of the Sibylline Oracles, set up with smaller numbers in the
early Republic (Livy 5.13.6, 6.37.12) and increased to 15 by Sulla. But
commentators since Servius (on 6.69) have plausibly suggested allu-
sions to Palatine Apollo: that temple provided a home for the
Sibylline Oracles, moved there by Augustus before the death of Virgil

33 Austin (1977) 64 suggests also an anticipation of the Ludi Saeculares of 17 bc,

but these were perhaps not Wrmly predictable before Virgil’s death; another possible
allusion here is to the ludi quinquennales Wrst celebrated in 28 to mark Augustus’
Actian victory, in which Apollo and the Palatine temple must have played a major
part (Dio 51.19.2); for an attractive suggestion of this festival as the setting for
Propertius 4.6 see Cairns (1984) 149–54.
172 Stephen Harrison
(Suetonius, Aug. 31.1),34 and is an obvious candidate (for a Roman
readership) for a marble temple incorporating the cult of Apollo and
Diana (see above).
The doors of the Cumaean temple, supposedly designed by Dae-
dalus, show the story of Theseus and the royal house of Crete, with
the death of Androgeos, Pasiphae and the bull, the Minotaur and the
Labyrinth (6.20–33). These designs have been much discussed,35 but
it seems likely that they have proleptic force: in particular, Theseus
and the Labyrinth seem to anticipate Aeneas’ descent to the Under-
world (traditionally compared to a labyrinth: Pliny, HN. 36.91),
following in Theseus’ heroic footsteps (cf. 6.122). But here again
Palatine Apollo is highly relevant: Putnam has pointed to the possible
evocation of similarly mythological images on the doors of the
Palatine temple, describing acts of hubristic deWance of Apollo re-
pulsed by his divine power, Niobe’s boast of superiority over Leto in
child-bearing, and the Gallic Brennus’ attack on Delphi (Propertius
2.31.13–14), clearly relevant for Apollo’s supposed active interven-
tion at Actium (Aeneid 8.703–5, Propertius 4.6). However, Putnam
suggests with some plausibility that the Virgilian choice to vary these
scenes on the doors of his parallel temple36 makes general points
about the complexities, anxieties, and suVerings of heroic myth and
of the artist’s function in presenting it, a tension shared by Virgil with
Daedalus, rather than about the power of the Augustan god to
punish his enemies. Here we seem to have an instance of Augustan
propagandistic iconography being reXected in a poetic text through a
prism of thought on larger, more humane and less triumphalist lines,
and in a way which locks into the narrative mechanics of the poem.
The great contemporary Apolline temple is thus foreshadowed and
honoured through its analogue in the epic plot, just as Aeneas (at
times) foreshadows and honours Augustus,37 but its political mes-
sage is broadened into tragic and literary meditation.

34 This is clear from Tibullus 2.5; see Murgatroyd (1994) 163–4.

35 For a recent good discussion with references to previous literature see Putnam
(1998) 75–96.
36 Putnam (1998) 17 also makes the excellent point that Daedalus and Augustus
vow their designs after an episode of crisis (one might also add that both designs
mark an advent/return to Italy).
37 Cf. Binder (1971), with the important caveats of GriYn (1985) 183–97.
 The Epic and the Monuments 173
A similar approach is seen in the Aeneid’s treatment of the icon-
ography of the famous porticoes of the Palatine Apollo complex.38
Here stood statues of the Danaids (Propertius 2.31.3–4), nefarious
Egyptian/Greek slayers of their cousin-husbands; their political
symbolism has been much discussed, but they seem to be
likely analogues for Cleopatra, another Egyptian/Greek princess
who had supposedly disposed of her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV
in 44,39 and very likely celebrate the defeat of that similar wicked
female at Actium.40 At Aeneid 10.495–505 Turnus, having killed
Aeneas’ youthful ally Pallas, strips his victim’s corpse of a baldric or
sword-belt with an elaborate design, on which the narrative lingers in
some detail:

et laeuo pressit pede talia fatus

exanimem rapiens immania pondera baltei
impressumque nefas: una sub nocte iugali
caesa manus iuuenum foede thalamique cruenti,
quae Clonus Eurytides multo caelauerat auro:
quo nunc Turnus ouat spolio gaudetque petitus.
nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae
et seruare modum rebus sublata secundis!
Turno tempus erit magno cum optauerit emptum
intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista diemque
oderit.
And so saying he pressed the corpse with his left foot, stripping oV the
monstrous weight of Pallas’ baldric and the abomination stamped upon it:
the foul slaughter of a band of young men under the cover of one wedding-
night, and bloodstained marriage-chambers, which Clonus the son of Eur-
ytus had embossed with much gold. In this booty Turnus now triumphed,
and rejoiced to gain it. How ignorant of destiny and of their future lot are
the minds of men, and how unable to observe due measure when uplifted by
good fortune! There will be a time for Turnus when he will wish he had
bought Pallas’ safety at a great price, and when he will hate these spoils and
the day he got them.

38 Here I can be brief, referring to Harrison (1998), some elements from which are
reprised here.
39 Josephus, AJ 15.89, Ap. 2.58.
40 Here as in Harrison (1998) I follow the convincing political interpretation of
Kellum (1985).
174 Stephen Harrison
Virgilian commentators since Servius have agreed that the event
depicted on the sword-belt belongs to the myth of the Danaids, but
have long debated its symbolic function here within the poem.41
Pöschl suggests that the passage looks forward to the unachieved
marriage of the killer Turnus and his intended bride Lavinia, Conte
that it looks backward to the terminated marriage-prospects of the
young victim Pallas, Schlunk that Turnus with the despoiling of the
belt is taking on a crime similar to that of the Danaids in killing
Pallas. It seems diYcult to emerge with a simple triumphalist inter-
pretation such as is likely to operate for the Danaids in the contem-
porary iconography of the Palatine complex, which must have surely
conveyed a clear political message of victory over evil. As in the
description of the Cumaean temple, honoriWc allusion to an import-
ant Augustan monument is tempered with a broader and more
human approach. In the sword-belt of Pallas, the Aeneid focuses
with all its tragic force on the lamentable and irreversible catastrophe
of premature death, and this embodies the diVerence between the
demands of public politics at a time of propagandistic triumph, and a
more thoughtful and measured literary meditation.

I U P P I TE R C A P I TO L I NU S

The temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline was the

most important cult-site of ancient Rome, traditionally founded by
the Tarquin kings.42 The renovation of the whole Capitoline area is
prominently listed by Augustus at Res Gestae 20 as one of the projects
where he ‘modestly’ declined to inscribe his own name,43 but the
repair of this crucial site with the city’s supreme temple must have
been a key act of the Augustan building programme. Scholars are

41 To the discussions mentioned here, listed in Harrison (1998), now add Putnam
(1998) 185–207 and Fowler (2000) 212–14.
42 For the standard account of the Capitoline temple see De Angeli (1996).
43 Res Gestae 20.1 Capitolium et Pompeium theatrum utrumque opus impensa
grandi refeci sine ulla inscriptione nominis mei.
 The Epic and the Monuments 175
unsure when this renovation was carried out,44 but it may be alluded
to in the famous guided tour of the site of the future Rome given by
Evander to Aeneas in Aeneid 8 (347–8):

hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit

aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.
From here he led him to the Tarpeian abode and to the Capitol, now golden,
then unkempt with bushy tussocks.

The words aurea nunc might well refer to the recent Augustan
restoration, and the Capitol may have been one of the 82 temple
repair projects of 28 bc mentioned at Res Gestae 20.4. The wasteland
where the Capitol will stand provides a symbolic parallel to its later
need for repair under Augustus, and as in the whole tour of the future
site of Rome, a key idea is to celebrate not only the building of Rome
but also its rebuilding under Augustus, who famously boasted
(Suetonius, Aug. 28.3) that he found Rome made of mud-brick and
left it made of marble.
The Aeneid mentions the Capitol on several other occasions as part
of (future) Roman history: once as the traditional site for a triumph
(6.836), once as the location for the famous story of Manlius’ saving
of it in 390 bc (8.653), and once in the sympathetic apostrophe on
the deaths of the lovers Nisus and Euryalus (9.446–9):

Fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt,

nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo,
dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.
Fortunate pair! If my poetry has any power, no day will be able to remove
you from the memory of time, for as long as the house of Aeneas lives by the
unmoveable rock of the Capitol and the father-god of Rome holds his
dominion.

44 It may have been at the same time as his restoration of the Theatre of Pompey,
mentioned in the same sentence of the Res Gestae (see last note) and dated to 32 bc by
L. Richardson (1992) 384 and Gros (1999), or during the building of the temple of
Iuppiter Tonans on the Capitol in the period 26–22 bc (cf. Richardson (1992) 226).
De Angeli (1996) 150 suggests a date as late as 9 bc, but earlier seems much more
likely.
176 Stephen Harrison
Though the force of the passage relies on the traditional role of the
Capitol as the talismanic guarantee of Rome’s greatness as caput
rerum (Livy 1.55.6),45 the promise that Virgil’s Augustan poem will
last as long as the Romans inhabit the Capitol would take an extra
force from a recent Augustan renovation of that crucial area. Once
again, the contemporary building project is accommodated to the
broad and humane values of the Aeneid: the Capitol, though pro-
claimed here as the central ideological monument of the site of
Rome, is employed in a sympathetic obituary of a pair of lovers
whose actions, though in some sense heroic, have constituted a
military failure which is at best futile and at worst dangerous to the
Trojan war eVort.46 A key public monument and its recent restor-
ation is here appropriated for celebration of the private human
values of personal love and loyalty and the honouring of a pair of
tragic and unnecessary deaths, a tragic contrast with the relentless
forward progress of the Roman people.
These direct allusions to the Capitol are matched by an
indirect allusion. At Aeneid 7.170–8 the temple-palace of Evander
in Pallanteum (on the site of the future Rome) is described in some
detail:

Tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis

urbe fuit summa, Laurentis regia Pici,
horrendum siluis et religione parentum.
hic sceptra accipere et primos attollere fascis
regibus omen erat; hoc illis curia templum,
hae sacris sedes epulis; hic ariete caeso
perpetuis soliti patres considere mensis.
quin etiam ueterum eYgies ex ordine auorum
antiqua e cedro . . .
There was an august building, huge, rising on a hundred columns at the top
of the city, the palace of Laurentian Picus, made numinous by woods and the
devotion of our ancestors. Here the omen prescribed that the kings should
receive their sceptres and Wrst raise their fasces; this sanctuary was their
assembly-house, this was the seat for their sacred feasts; here when a ram was

45 For full references see Nisbet and Rudd (2004) 368.

46 For a good account of the various views of the Nisus and Euryalus episode see
Hardie (1994) 23–34.
 The Epic and the Monuments 177
slain our fathers were accustomed to sit at long tables. Furthermore, there
were statues in order of ancestors, from ancient cedar-wood . . .
Servius’ commentary, no doubt transmitting earlier annotation, sug-
gests that this great building echoes Augustus’ own house on the
Palatine (on 7.170: domum, quam in Palatio diximus ab Augusto
factam, per transitum laudat), and the fact that the building is a
great temple (7.192 templo diuum) which also has political sig-
niWcance might indeed echo the Palatine complex of Virgil’s own
time with the temple of Apollo next to the house of Augustus.47 But,
as Camps pointed out,48 a number of speciWc details here suggest that
the temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol and its
surrounding area is the primary contemporary building-complex
alluded to: its use for the taking up of ruling insignia (so for the
consuls at Ovid, Fasti 1.81–2), its use as a meeting-place for the
Senate (frequently, along with other major temples including Palat-
ine Apollo), its use for the sacriWces and sacred feasts of Jupiter
(Gellius 12.8.2), and especially the collection of celebrity statues
outside it, including the early kings (Appian, B Civ. 1.16), matching
the gallery of such images in Virgil’s temple described in detail after
this passage (7.178–91). To this one might add its vast size (ingens;
centum is clearly a poetic number,49 and the Capitoline temple was
hexastyle), which for the contemporary Roman reader suits an allu-
sion to the Capitoline temple, the largest in Augustan Rome (extant
platform 53.50 m  62.25 m), rather than to the smaller Palatine
shrine (extant platform 24 m  45 m).
The eVect of this allusion to the Capitoline temple reinforces its
traditional role as the guarantee of Roman world rule: Aeneid 8 sets
out a mythical, primitive pre-Rome in which key Roman institu-
tions are nevertheless already in embryonic existence (note
that the Arcadian Greek Evander has a senatus, 8.105), thus looking
forward to and reinforcing Roman national ideology in general
terms. But the depiction of a site which is to be improved beyond
all measure must evoke for Roman readers the speciWcally contem-
porary glories of the Augustan building programme, complimented

47 See the references collected at Horsfall (1999) 150.

48 Camps (1959) 54. 49 Horsfall (1999) 147.
178 Stephen Harrison
here through the allusion to the repair of one of the city’s foremost
monuments.

F ORUM AU G U S T U M?

Debate has long raged amongst scholars as to how or whether the so-
called ‘Show of Heroes’ in Aeneid 6 (756–892) relates to the most
important propaganda project of Augustus’ principate, the Forum
Augustum and its accompanying temple of Mars Ultor.50 Part of the
diYculty is chronological: the temple of Mars Ultor was vowed as
early as 42 bc but only dedicated in 2 bc, probably on 12 May, and
the accompanying colonnades must have been erected between those
two dates. Modern scholarship varies between positing the mid-20s
bc as the time when work on these commenced,51 and stating that the
Forum was not begun until after 19 bc,52 but the evidence is thor-
oughly unclear and in essence consists of a report that the Forum was
opened for business well before the dedication of the temple (Sueto-
nius, Aug. 29.1). I hold that at least the plan and possibly some
detailed contents of the Forum could have been available to Virgil
at the time of the Aeneid, and that if there is allusion, we are (as in the
other instances adduced in this chapter) dealing with allusion by
poet to building rather than vice versa.53
The plan of the Forum Augustum has been clearly established by
scholars:54 it ran on a north-east/south-west axis, and the temple of

50 On the Forum see Zanker (1968), Kockel (1995), Spannagel (1999), and Rich
(2002), with full references. In the scholarly dispute three positions have been held:
that there is no connection between the Show and the Forum, e.g. Degrassi (1945)
and Horsfall (1995) 145; that the Show imitates the Forum, e.g. Frank (1938), Rowell
(1940), and Galinsky (1996) 210–12; and that the Forum imitates the Show, e.g.
Rowell (1941).
51 L. Richardson (1992) 160.
52 Kockel (1995) 289.
53 See n. 50 above.
54 See n. 50 above, especially the key work of Zanker (for his plan see also Zanker
(1988) 194. The main evidence for reconstruction comes from the description at
Ovid, Fasti 5.551–70.
 The Epic and the Monuments 179
Mars Ultor stood at its north-east end, Xanked by two semicircular
exedrae, and by long colonnades of over 100 m running south-west
on each side. The exedrae contained statues of Aeneas and Romulus
and the kings of Alba Longa, while the colonnades contained niches
with busts of great Romans, accompanied by encomiastic inscrip-
tions (elogia). The particular personal interest of the princeps in this
project is well attested. Suetonius reports (Aug. 31) that Augustus
himself saw a clear purpose in these representations of great Roman
commanders:
After the immortal gods he honoured the memory of leaders who had found
the empire of the Roman people small and left it great. For this reason he
restored the public works each had undertaken, leaving the inscriptions in
place, and dedicated statues of all of them with their triumphal ornaments in
the twin colonnades of his Forum, also proclaiming too in an edict that he
had done this so that he himself, while he lived, and the rulers of later ages
would be required by the Roman people to take the lives of these men as
their model.55
The general idea of an exemplary collection of great leaders from
Roman history to inspire others has an obvious and frequently
observed parallel with the Show of Heroes as presented by Virgil’s
Anchises in the Aeneid. Anchises himself, seeking to inspire his son,
clearly takes the attitude ascribed to Augustus by Suetonius, using
the examples of (future) great men to spur Aeneas on to even
greater deeds, especially military deeds as he faces the war in Italy
(6.806–7):

‘et dubitamus adhuc uirtutem extendere factis,

aut metus Ausonia prohibet consistere terra?’
‘And do we still hesitate to enlarge our manly virtue through deeds, and does
fear prevent our settling in the land of Italy?’
But any link between the two collections must rest on detailed
parallels of content as well as overall ideological framework. Both
collections clearly focus on military and political leaders: Augustus’
dressing of the Roman heroes in triumphal garb clearly matches his
instruction that the temple of Mars Ultor should be used to deposit

55 Translation from Edwards (2000) 160.

180 Stephen Harrison
triumphal insignia (Suetonius, Aug. 29) in presenting the Forum
Augustum as a celebration of Roman success in war. The speciWc
links between the two can be seen most easily through summary
catalogues of Wgures treated, bearing in mind that for the Forum
Augustum we have only a few elogia from many:
Figures treated in the Show of Heroes:
1 Silvius and the kings of Alba (756–77)
2 Romulus (777–87)
3 Caesar et omnis Iuli j progenies (789–90)
4 Augustus (791–807)
5 Numa and other kings (807–17)
6 Brutus (818–23)
7 Republican military heroes (824–46), with Caesar and Pompey in
the middle (826–35)
8 The two Marcelli (854–87, 860–87 on the younger).
Figures commemorated in the elogia of the Forum Augustum:56
Aeneas and four kings of Alba Longa (cf. 1 above)
Iulii Caesares [cousin and father of Julius Caesar] (cf. 3 above)
Marcellus the younger (cf. 8 above)
Republican heroes (including Marius and Sulla; sharing Cossus,
Cato, Fabius Cunctator, and the two Scipiones Africani with Virgil’s
list, cf. 7 above).
These scant parallels allow no Wrm conclusions in themselves, though
clearly many more of the Virgilian Wgures must have been included
in the sequence of the Forum (it seems very improbable that the
latter did not include at least the Scipiones). But two such prominent
lists in Augustan art of the military history of Rome, both stretching
from Aeneas and Romulus through the Alban kings and the gens
Iulia, and both starring the all-conquering Wgure of Augustus,57 are
unlikely to be unconnected. Two particular points not so far stressed
in the debate suggest that the plan of the Forum Augustum underlies
that of the Show of Heroes.

56 Items numbered according to Alföldy and ChioY (2000); see also Degrassi
(1937) for the earlier position.
57 On Augustus’ central role in the Forum Augustum see Gruen (1996) at 192–3.
 The Epic and the Monuments 181
First, the fact (already noted above: see under ‘Iuppiter Feretrius’)
that the encomiastically hyperbolic praise of the military prowess
of the recently deceased young Marcellus (in fact barely experi-
enced in war) is so prominent in the Virgilian pageant at Aeneid
6.878–81:

‘heu pietas, heu prisca Wdes inuictaque bello

dextera! non illi se quisquam impune tulisset
obuius armato, seu cum pedes iret in hostem
seu spumantis equi foderet calcaribus armos.’
‘Alas for his piety, alas for his old-fashioned loyalty and and his right hand
unconquered in war. No warrior would have charged to meet him in battle
unscathed, whether he advanced on foot towards the enemy or dug into his
foaming horse’s Xanks with spurs.’
Given that the young Marcellus was included in the Wgures of the
Forum, his improbable characterization here as a great military man
may pick up his inclusion (perhaps soon after his death in 23 bc) in
the most prominent public representation of Roman war heroes.
Second, another likely allusion to the Forum Augustum in the
Aeneid has been rarely applied to the debate.58 In the climax to his
great prophecy of Aeneid 1 Jupiter predicts the end of war (primarily
civil war) in the time of Augustus (1.291–6):

‘aspera tum positis mitescent saecula bellis;

cana Fides, et Vesta, Remo cum fratre Quirinus,
iura dabunt; dirae ferro et compagibus artis
claudentur Belli portae; Furor impius intus,
saeua sedens super arma, et centum uinctus aenis
post tergum nodis, fremet horridus ore cruento.’
‘Then the ages of savagery will soften as wars are laid aside: white-haired
Loyalty and Vesta, and Quirinus with his brother Remus will assign laws; the
accursed gates of war will be closed with iron and with tight bars; inside,
impious Madness, sitting on a pile of cruel arms, bound behind his back
with a hundred brazen knots, will roar terribly with bloody mouth.’
D. Servius noted that previous commentators had suggested that the
famous image of Madness bound recalls a painting by Apelles which

58 Despite the full note at Austin (1971) 113–14.

182 Stephen Harrison
was placed by Augustus in the Forum (on 1.294): ‘in the Forum
of Augustus on the left as you enter was a picture of War and
Madness seated on arms and bound, of the appearance related
by the poet’. This seems to be identical with the picture of War
reported as part of Augustus’ decoration of the Forum by Pliny
the Elder (HN. 35.27 ‘the divine Augustus placed two pictures
in his Forum in its most frequented part, showing the painted
Wgure of War and that of Triumph’, 35.93–4 ‘the image of War with
his hands tied behind his back, with Alexander triumphing in
his chariot, both of which paintings were dedicated by Augustus
with restrained simplicity in the most frequented parts of
his Forum’). Here then we Wnd a likely allusion to a painting, perhaps
taken by Augustus from Alexandria, given its accompanying
Alexander in a chariot, and perhaps put in the Forum Augustum
in the 20s bc.59
If the Forum Augustum does as I have argued exercise inXuence on
the Show of Heroes, it remains to consider how this most propa-
gandistic of Augustan monuments is treated in Virgil’s epic poem.
On the one hand, the Show of Heroes shares with the Forum a clear
encomiastic purpose.60 Anchises’ intention to inspire Aeneas (and all
future Romans) to great military deeds, and its parallel with the
reported intentions of Augustus for his forum, has already been
noted, and the presentation of Augustus himself (791–807), sand-
wiched out of chronological sequence between Romulus and Numa
and thus presented as combining their characteristic virtues of
founding/conquest and religious leadership, is plainly complimen-
tary, famously echoing praise of Alexander the Great.61 On the other
hand, scholars have rightly noted62 that the selective account of
Roman military history in the Show of Heroes does not shy away
from diYcult moments such as Brutus’ execution of his sons, though
this might be seen (along with some acts of Aeneas) as a tragic event

59 It is of course possible that Pliny and Servius are describing a painting which
was added to the Forum in the post-Augustan period, but an Augustan origin seems
much more likely.
60 See D. West (1993).
61 See Norden (1899).
62 See e.g. Feeney (1986); O’Hara (1990) 163–72.
 The Epic and the Monuments 183
in which the collective good overcomes individual rights and feelings,
or the sadly premature death of Marcellus, though as we have seen
the encomium of Marcellus is sympathetically exaggerated, presum-
ably a gesture towards the princeps who had made him his son-in-law
and likely heir.63 Once again, the Wctional framework allows a
broader perspective on Roman history than the propagandistic
monument; here, as consistently elsewhere in the examples examined
in this paper, the Wltering of politically charged monuments through
indirect literary allusion, analogous to the Wltering and modiWcation
of other literary texts, allows (as in the Aeneid generally) more
complex, nuanced, and humane views on the tragic aspects of heroic
achievement to have a place alongside undoubted compliments to
the striking reconstruction of Rome under Augustus.

63 We may compare the presumably contemporary lament for Marcellus in Prop-

ertius 3.18.
This page intentionally left blank
 7
Augustan Responses to the Aeneid
Matthew Robinson

Let us begin with GriYn: ‘[Augustus’] mastery of propaganda was

one of his greatest sources of strength’.1 He was certainly a man
who knew the value of good publicity, and like others before
him—though on a grander scale—he promoted himself and his
message through a variety of media, such as coins, statues, architec-
ture, and even the calendar.2 Poetry could also have a role to play in
such a campaign,3 and in the right hands it might not only bring
glory to the present moment, but also oVer the hope of something
greater: immortality.4 For this reason, important Romans desired
(and frequently received) epics glorifying their great deeds,5 and

I am very grateful to the editors for the opportunity to express my gratitude to Jasper
for his teaching and wisdom over the years. I would also like to express my gratitude
to the late Oliver Lyne: this chapter, like so much that preceded it, beneWted
immensely from his comments and suggestions; his warmth, humour, and words
of sense are sorely missed.
1 GriYn (1986) 58.
2 For a general treatment, cf. Zanker (1988), and the brief but useful comments of
GriYn (1984) 201–3, and Barchiesi (1997) 69–73, who gives further bibliography.
3 For Augustus’ use of pre-existing poetry, cf. Suetonius’ picture of the emperor
hunting through previous literature (not just poetry) for instructive precepts and
exempla (Suet. Aug. 89.2); and of course, the very name ‘Augustus’ gains resonance
from its Ennian intertext (cf. Suet. Aug. 7.2; Enn. Ann. 155 Sk.). Opinion is divided
on the extent of Augustan inXuence on contemporary poetry: for the view that it was
not as signiWcant as commonly thought, cf. White (1993) 110–55.
4 Cf. e.g. Cicero’s Pro Archia, passim.
5 We know for instance of epics on events such as Marius’ Cimbrian war; the
Mithridatic war of Lucullus; the Gallic wars of Caesar. For references and further
examples, see the useful summary in Lyne (1995) 31.
186 Matthew Robinson
there is no reason to think that Augustus was an exception. He
wanted an epic about himself—but only, as Suetonius tells us, from
a poet of suYcient quality.6 Just as he was aware that a bad poem
might do more harm than good, he was no doubt sensitive enough to
realize that a direct imperial command for an encomium might
compromise its credibility.7 Better then to leave all such negotiations
and suggestions, as many others did, to a friend—such as Maecenas,
with his literary interests and contacts.8
It is against this background that we should judge the many
recusationes or ‘refusals to write epics’ that we see in Augustan
poetry.9 Now while there is a certain literariness to many of them,
I believe that on the whole they do reXect and attempt to deXect
expectations or suggestions that perhaps the poets might consider
an historical epic based around the achievements of the divine
Augustus.10
To begin with, it seems, no one, or rather, no poet of suYcient
quality, was particularly willing to oblige.11 However, when Octavian,
travelling back from Actium,12 heard the beginning of Georgics 3, with

6 Suet. Aug. 89.3: ‘he took oVence if any work was written about him, unless it was
serious, and written by the most eminent writers, and he used to instruct the praetors
not to allow his name to be cheapened in literary contests’.
7 For another example of sensitivity to his role as emperor, see his remarks to
Horace after the poet’s failure to address an epistle to him: ‘are you afraid that you
will have a bad reputation in the future, if you are seen to be friendly with me?’ (Suet.
Vita Hor.). For further thoughts on Augustus’ sensitivity in these areas, see GriYn
(1984) 201–3.
8 Cf. GriYn (1984) 195. The Wgure of a ‘middle-man’ who would make
approaches to writers on behalf of a friend is not unusual: cf. White (1993) 74. On
the mediating role of Maecenas, cf. Brink (1982) 523–72. Somewhat later we Wnd
Augustus asking for encomia of his stepsons directly (Suet. Vita. Hor.): it is thought
that this reXects the more direct approach of Augustus after about 20 bc. Cf. Brink
(1982) 523–72 and (1995) 276–8, responding to White (1991), who disagrees.
9 Cf. e.g. Verg. Ecl. 6.1–8; Prop. 2.1.17–45, 2.10.19–26, 3.3.1–52, 3.9.35–60. For
more examples and discussion, cf. Lyne (1995) 31–9.
10 Not all would agree. For some dissenting views, see G. Williams (1968) 102,
Hubbard (1974) 99, and the important discussion of White (1993) 134–55.
11 It is likely that lesser poets may have written encomiastic verse in the hope of
some reward: cf. A. Hardie (1983), ch. 3, and compare Macrobius’ tale about the poet
who repeatedly tried to present Augustus with a poem in his honour (Sat. 2.4.31).
Recent studies are sceptical about Varius’ supposed Panegyric to Augustus: cf. Cova
(1989) 82–5; Courtney (1993) 275.
12 If we are to believe Donatus’ Life of Virgil (Vita Donati 27 Hardie).
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 187
its Ennian and Pindaric motifs,13 its mention of the conquered cities
of Asia (line 30), its promise that his battles will be celebrated (45–6),
and its silent Cynthian Apollo (36),14 he may well have thought
that his longed-for epic was Wnally on its way. So too Virgil’s
contemporaries. The proem to Georgics 3 seems to promise the
kind of epic that Augustus would have wanted; and soon after the
Georgics are published, word spreads that Virgil has started work on
an epic poem. Now it is possible that the Georgics passage was
originally conceived as another recusatio;15 and it is certainly
true that the Wnished Aeneid will be very diVerent from the poem
outlined there; however, we can see how easy it would be for Virgil’s
contemporaries to interpret this incipient work not just as a poetic
undertaking, but also as a political one, of the kind which for the
most part they tried to avoid: that is, as a response to pressure from
above,16 a pressure which for the most part they tried to resist. As we
shall see, the Augustan poets respond to both the poetics and the
politics of the Aeneid.
Given the restrictions of space, I limit myself to discussing Horace,
Propertius, and Ovid, and then only a few of their poems.17 I do not
touch upon their response to Virgil in terms of language, metre, or
style.18 I do not attempt to assign precise dates to any particular
poem, and throughout what follows, I assume that Horace and
Propertius are familiar with at least some of the content of the Aeneid

13 For Ennius, cf. G. 3.8–9 and Ennius’ epitaph (Enn. Epigr. 18V); for Pindar, cf.
Wilkinson (1969) 165–72, (1970); Lundström (1976); Balot (1998). The latter argues
against Thomas (1983, 1985, 1988), who believes that the Pindaric motifs of this
passage are in fact Callimachean.
14 Virgil uses the epithet Cynthius of Apollo only here and at Ecl. 6.3, where of
course he prevents Virgil from writing epic.
15 Cf. e.g. Instone (1996) 24. If not a full recusatio, the phrase modo vita supersit
‘if only I live long enough’ (G. 3.10) could at least echo the delaying tactics of Ecl.
8.6–12. The irony is that in this case Virgil did write an epic, and he did not in fact live
long enough to Wnish it.
16 Even if the direct approach was made by Maecenas, the knowledge that Augus-
tus wanted an epic would itself be indirect pressure.
17 For Tibullus’ response to Virgil, cf. Murgatroyd (1994); Maltby (2002a, with
summaries of previous scholarship; 2002b).
18 For such links between Horace and Virgil, cf. e.g. Duckworth (1956). For Ovid
and Virgil, cf. Kenney (2002).
188 Matthew Robinson
while it is being written,19 and all of the poem before their Wnal books
are published.20

C O NS C I U S AU DAC I S FAC T I : H OR ACE A ND VI RGI L

Whatever the precise nature of Horace’s friendship with Virgil, the

extent of which some have questioned,21 it is surely quite something
to be mentioned in the third poem of Odes 1, directly after Maecenas
and Octavian. For such a great honour, however, the poem itself is
something of a mystery. The Wrst two stanzas are addressed to a ship
which is to take Virgil to Greece (1–8); Horace then muses on the
courage of the Wrst sailor in the face of the terrible dangers of the sea
(9–20), a courage which borders on impiety (21–4); this leads him
on to the audacia of mankind in general (25–40) and his Wnal
conclusion: ‘in our stupidity we seek the sky itself and by our sin
we do not allow Jove to put aside his angry thunderbolts’.22
Commentators have long been troubled by the poem, remarking
that ‘its progress is perplexing’,23 or that ‘the trite and unseasonable
moralizing seems out of place in a poem of friendship’.24
Various attempts have been made to make sense of the poem.
None is entirely successful, but I believe the most promising are those
which take Virgil’s voyage to be a metaphorical journey across the
seas of epic.25 On this reading, Odes 1.3 gives us our Wrst glimpse of
Horace’s response to the Aeneid.

19 Either from recitals or requests for feedback: cf. Ball (1975) 48–50; Starr (1987).
20 For recent thoughts on the dating of Propertius’ earlier works, see Lyne (1998a).
For the dating of Horace’s Odes, cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) pp. xxxv–xxxvii, but
cf. Hutchinson (2002).
21 Cf. Thomas (2001) 55–73; Pucci (1992).
22 Hor. Carm. 1.3.38–40 caelum ipsum petimus stultitia neque j per nostrum
patimur scelus j iracunda Iovem ponere fulmina.
23 Commager (1962) 118–20.
24 Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 45.
25 Cf. Anderson (1966) 91; Lockyer (1967); Kidd (1977); Basto (1982); Pucci
(1991, 1992); Sharrock (1994) 112–17; Lyne (1995) 79–81; Thomas (2001) 65. For
other interpretations see summaries in Elder (1952), Basto (1982), and Campbell
(1987). I hope to add a few more arguments in support of the metaphorical reading
in what follows.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 189
The starting-point for such a reading is the metaphor of the ‘ship of
poetry’, which has a long history: it goes back at least to Pindar,26 and
is found frequently in the Augustan poets.27 The idea of the open sea
as representing epic is most explicit in Propertius,28 though it
perhaps has its origins in Callimachus.29
Support for this metaphorical reading is provided by Virgil him-
self, who uses this very image in a number of passages in the Georgics.
At 2.40–6, Virgil initially asks Maecenas to ‘spread the sails to the
open sea’ (pelago . . . da vela), but then reins in his ambition: ‘I do not
want to embrace everything in my verses, no not if I had a hundred
tongues and a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron’, a clear allusion
to and ampliWcation of a famous passage of Homer: ‘[I could not
name the multitude of soldiers at Troy] not if I had ten tongues and
ten mouths, and an unfailing voice, and a heart of bronze inside
me’,30 giving a strong epic resonance to the passage. For the moment,
it seems, Virgil rejects the open sea, and the superhuman endeavours
that it signiWes, and is content merely to skirt the shore.
But Horace now imagines Virgil about to embark on the kind of
voyage across the open sea that he rejects in Georgics 2,31 and
alludes to the ‘epic’ attributes that Virgil linked to such a voyage,
but adds a nautical Xavour. According to Horace, the Wrst man to
attempt such a voyage and entrust his ship to the open sea (com-
misit pelago ratem) may not have had ten tongues or a hundred
mouths, but (more usefully) he has ‘oak and threefold bronze
around his breast’.32 The aes . . . circa pectus reminds us of Homer’s
ºŒ . . . qæ (‘bronze heart’), but the combination of wood

26 Cf. Pind. Ol. 6.103–4; Nem. 3.26–7, 5.2–3; Pyth. 2.62–3, 11.39–40.
27 Cf. e.g. Prop. 3.3.22–4 with Fedeli (1985) ad loc.; Ov. Fast. 1.4 with Bömer
(1957–8) ad loc., 2.3, 2.863–4, 3.790; Rem. am. 811–12. Cf. its signiWcant recurrence
in Horace’s Wnal Ode, 4.15.
28 Cf. Prop. 3.3.23–4, 3.9.3–4, 3.9.35–6.
29 Cf. the sea and the Euphrates at Callim. Hymn 2.105–12. Whatever Callimachus
himself intended to signify by large expanses of water, it seems that to the Romans
they suggested epic.
30 Cf. Hom. Il. 2.488–93.
31 Virgil is oV to Greece, perhaps to fetch the Muses as promised in the proem to
Georgics 3 (10–11) . . .
32 Carm. 1.3.9–10 illi robur et aes triplex j circa pectus erat.
190 Matthew Robinson
and bronze also reminds us of a ship, and perhaps also an epic
shield.33
Horace sees such courage as verging on impiety,34 and such
thoughts lead him on to his Wnal section—the boldness or audacia
of mankind. However, Horace’s twofold repetition of audax at 25–835
has a particular relevance to Virgil, as audacia is a quality which
Virgil explicitly associates with his poetic endeavours in the Georgics,
at the beginning and the end of the work.36 So when Horace muses
in the Wnal stanza ‘In our stupidity we seek the sky itself ’, he alludes
not only to the foolhardy boldness of the Giants in attacking heaven,
or of Daedalus in his attempts to transcend nature, but also to
the poetic audacia that encourages an artist to ‘seek the sky’, an
action frequently symbolic of poetic ambition.37 Horace lists himself
among the guilty, looking back perhaps to his use of the same image
at the close of Odes 1.1.38
However, there is one further thread to be drawn out here.
Commentators often draw attention to the commercial imagery of
the second stanza (cf. e.g. ‘O ship, you who owe (debes) Virgil
deposited (creditum) with you’).39 This reminds us of the moralizing
tradition that regards the only motive for sailing as a desire to

33 Cf. Basto (1982) 31; Putnam (1971).

34 Cf. Carm. 1.3.21–4. This is somewhat humorous if such courage concerns the
composition of a poem all about pius Aeneas.
35 audax omnia perpeti j gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas, j audax Iapeti genus j
ignem fraude mala gentibus intulit ‘bold to endure everything, the human race rushes
through forbidden sin; bold, the oVspring of Iapetus brought Wre to the peoples by
wicked deceit’.
36 Cf. G. 1.40 (the Wrst ‘ship of poetry’ image in the poem) da facilem cursum,
atque audacibus adnue coeptis ‘grant a smooth journey, and nod assent to the bold
work I have begun’ (of the Georgics); 4.565–6 carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque
iuuenta, j Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi ‘[I am he] who played with the
songs of shepherds, and in the boldness of youth sang of you, Tityrus, beneath the
spreading cover of a beech tree’ (of the Eclogues). Cf. also 2.175–6 sanctos ausus
recludere fontes j Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen ‘daring to open up the
sacred fountains, I sing an Ascraean song through Roman towns’ (again of the
Georgics). On audacia, see also Leigh, p. 224 and n. 25 below.
37 Cf. the same image at Carm. 1.1.36 sublimi feriam sidera vertice ‘I will strike the
stars with my exalted head’. Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) on 1.1.35–6 and Sharrock
(1994) 115–17.
38 See previous note.
39 Cf. Elder (1952) 147; Buttrey (1972) 47–8; Basto (1982) 30–1.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 191
make money.40 We should perhaps then recall that Horace frequently
associates the writing of epic or encomiastic poetry with Wnancial
reward: for example, when Trebatius advises Horace in Sat. 2.1 on
possible subject matter, he says ‘if you are carried away by so great a
passion for writing, dare to tell the deeds of unconquered Caesar—
you will receive a great reward for your labours’.41 There is a sly
suggestion, but to my mind a humorous one, that Virgil is in it for
the money.42
Though much more could be said on the links between Horace
and Virgil in many poems of Odes 1–3,43 let us turn now to one of the
few poems we know for certain to have been composed at the direct
request of Augustus, the Carmen Saeculare.44
The purpose of the Ludi Saeculares, at which the Carmen
was performed, was primarily to celebrate the beginning of a new
saeculum, and perhaps the very existence of this event can be seen as
Augustus’ response to the fourth Eclogue.45 With great pomp
and splendour Augustus enforces a reading of the text that (on an
emotional level at least)46 identiWes the mysterious puer as none
other than himself, co-opting the poem and its prophecies to the
service of his regime.
40 Cf. Hes. Op. 684–94; Eur. IT 407–21; Prop. 3.7, esp. 1–8; Nisbet and Hubbard
(1970) 43–4.
41 Sat. 2.1.10–12 aut si tantus amor scribendi te rapit, aude j Caesaris invicti res
dicere, multa laborum j praemia laturus. Cf. also Epist. 2.1.245–7 at neque dedecorant
tua de se iudicia atque j munera quae multa dantis cum laude tulerunt j dilecti tibi
Vergilius Variusque poetae ‘The poets Virgil and Varius, dear to you, discredit neither
your judgement of them, nor the gifts which they have received, to the great renown
of the giver.’
42 In this I would agree with those who think that Horace had a ‘private joke’
with Virgil about Virgil being very concerned with money, particularly with reference
to the studium lucri of 4.12.25: cf. Bowra (1928); Porter (1972); Minadeo (1975–6);
Belmont (1980), esp. pp. 13–14. For a recent opposing view, cf. GriYn (2002) 315 n. 15.
43 Cf. for example Duckworth (1956).
44 That is, if we can believe Suetonius’ vita: and there seems to be no reason not to.
This would be in keeping with the more direct approach some believe Augustus to
have adopted after about 20 bc: see n. 8.
45 Cf. esp. Ecl. 4.5 magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo—‘the great line of the
centuries begins anew’ (Loeb).
46 If one thinks too carefully about it, one remembers that Augustus was born 23
years earlier than the setting of the poem and so hardly qualiWes as a ‘boy’ (puer). But
the emotional link is strong: Eclogue 4 promises the arrival of a new saeculum tied to a
particular Wgure, and the Ludi Saeculares inaugurate just such a new saeculum, tied to
Augustus.
192 Matthew Robinson
Similar forces are at work in Horace.47 The Carmen Saeculare is in
a sense a carmen circulare, with strong emphasis on cycles of rebirth
and renewal.48 On a metapoetic level too, this is poetry of response
and renewal: the language of the Carmen is richly textured with
hymnic and prophetic notes drawn primarily from Catullus and
Virgil, which serve to underline how the glorious future predicted
in those earlier poems has now become a vivid present.49
Furthermore, just as Augustus played down the chthonic aspects
of the ceremony,50 so too has Horace taken great pains to free his text
from any negative content. For example, Apollo is invited to hear
the prayers of the chorus ‘in a gentle and benign fashion’ (33 mitis
placidusque) and with his arrows put aside (33 condito . . . telo), the
direct opposite of his image in the Wrst book of Iliad;51 and there are
no evils to be wished away from Rome, as there are in previous
Augustan hymns.52 The interesting point for our purposes is that
Horace extends this sanitization to aspects of Virgil’s text, which
provides interesting evidence for the way in which he and some of
his contemporaries may have read the poem.53
As the Wrst word of the central stanza, Roma, rings out, Horace
thinks back to its origins in Troy, and recalls Aeneas’ journey in the
following lines (41–4):

cui per ardentem sine fraude Troiam

castus Aeneas patriae superstes
liberum munivit iter, daturus
plura relictis . . .

47 On Horace’s allusions to Eclogue 4, and his realization of Virgil’s prophecies,

see Putnam (2000) 118–23.
48 Cf. Carm. saec. 10–11 (of Apollo as the sun) aliusque et idem j nasceris ‘you are
born as another but still the same’, 17–24, 50; and cf. Putnam (2000) 60 and 90–1. For
the ‘renewal’ of Pindar and Greek traditions, see Barchiesi (2002).
49 Cf. Putnam (2000) 113–29.
50 Cf. Putnam (2000) 52–3.
51 Cf. Hom. Il. 1.43–6 ‘So he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him.
Down he came from the peaks of Olympus, angry at heart, bearing on his shoulders
his bow and covered quiver. The arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god . . .’.
Cf. Putnam (2000) 70–1 and 100–3.
52 Cf. Putnam (2000) 98, 126–9.
53 The argument here follows Putnam (2000) for the most part, and also Thomas
(2001) 69–73, though it concentrates on the Carmen as evidence for an ‘Augustan’ use
for the Aeneid.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 193
[The Trojans . . . ] for whom chaste Aeneas, a survivor of his fatherland,
paved a path of freedom through burning Troy without harm/deceit,
destined to give more than was left behind . . .
Now castus is an odd adjective to use of Aeneas—he is of course
famously pius, but not famously castus. The adjective is doing a lot of
work here, linking Aeneas with pueri casti at the start of the poem,54
and also forming one part of a nexus of links and allusions that
associate Aeneas with Diana via Catullus’ hymn;55 but we can also see
in it a denial of any impropriety that Aeneid 4 may impute;56
ardentem sine fraude Troiam is similarly busy: it not only alludes to
Aeneas’ escape from Troy, and to the end of Laomedon’s perjury,57
but it also may refute suggestions of Aeneas’ treachery, which some
had spotted (at least by the time of Servius) on the doors of Juno’s
temple in Aen. 1.488.58
Horace follows this with a strong evocation of the Aeneid at lines
49–52:
quaeque uos bobus ueneratur albis
clarus Anchisae Venerisque sanguis,
impetret, bellante prior, iacentem
lenis in hostem.
And what things the famous blood of Anchises and Venus asks of you, with
the sacriWce of white cattle, let him obtain them, superior to the warmonger,
merciful to the defeated enemy.
The phrase ‘the famous blood of Anchises and Venus’ makes
explicit the Aeneid’s link between Aeneas and Augustus—but in
this poem of renewal and rebirth, it also looks to the future.59
Furthermore, whatever problems Aeneas may have had adhering to

54 Cf. Putnam (2000) 74–5, who also sees in castus a reference to Aeneas’ religious
purity, a virtue which preserved him and will preserve the Roman race.
55 The adjective castus immediately recalls this traditional aspect of Diana, and there
are strong echoes of Catullus 34: cf. e.g. sospite cursu (40) and liberum iter (43) picking
up cursu, iter, and sospites at Catull. 34.17–24. On Augustus’ links with Diana, see below.
56 Cf. Thomas (2001) 71.
57 Cf. Putnam (2000) 75–6.
58 Cf. Serv. Aen. 1.242 and 1.488 and Casali (1999); Putnam (2000) 163 n. 51;
Thomas (2001) 71–3.
59 The idea being that this bloodline will continue, to celebrate the next Ludi
Saeculares. This is perhaps one reason why Horace does not actually name Augustus
in the poem.
194 Matthew Robinson
Anchises’ injunction to debellare superbos and parcere subiectis at the
end of Virgil’s poem,60 this is a lesson learnt by Augustus (and his
line),61 who is bellante prior and iacentem j lenis in hostem, merciful
to his enemies just as Diana is ‘merciful’ (lenis) to women in labour.62
Aeneas and Augustus are both linked to Diana,63 and both have a
positive role to play in the continuation of the Roman gens, a striking
conceit that perhaps adds a touch of tenderness to these characters
that is missing in the Aeneid.
Both the Carmen Saeculare and the Aeneid are in a sense national
poems of rebirth and renewal, and Horace clearly feels there is a place
for some themes from the Aeneid in his oYcial national hymn.
However, it is also clear that Horace Wnds more than just a patriotic
voice in Virgil’s poem: the fact that he has to sanitize the Aeneid
before he can include it in his positive and untroubled hymn shows
that he is aware of and responding to troubling elements within the
poem that require such sanitization.64
Horace may well have been happy to hymn peace and celebrate the
dawning of a new age, but how did he feel when asked to sing in
praise of the military exploits of Tiberius and Drusus?65 Direct
imperial pressure was growing, and Horace was faced with the
problem of how to deal with it. He was also faced with a poetic
problem: how to respond to the publication of the Aeneid, and to
champion the value of his lyric poetry in the face of an epic that
seems to have been almost immediately celebrated as a classic. With
these questions in mind, let us turn to Odes 4.
In Odes 1–3, Horace claims to be the follower of Lesbian lyric
poetry,66 especially that of Alcaeus.67 However, in Odes 4, Horace

60 Cf. Verg. Aen. 6.851–3.

61 Cf. Putnam (2000) 80; Thomas (2001) 70–1.
62 Cf. Carm. saec. 13–14.
63 For a similar play with gender, cf. the description of Apollo as alme Sol
‘nourishing Sun’ (line 9), with Putnam (2000) 60.
64 More examples can be found: cf. Putnam (2000) 81–4. Cf. Barchiesi (2002) for a
slightly diVerent interpretation of some of these.
65 Cf. Suet. Vita Hor. with Lyne (1995) 194–5.
66 Cf. 1.1.34 Lesboum . . . barbiton; 1.26.11 Lesbio . . . plectro; 3.30.13 Aeolium car-
men; cf. 2.13.24–8.
67 Cf. 1.32.4–5 barbite . . . Lesbio primum modulate ciui (‘lyre Wrst tuned by the
Lesbian citizen’); and cf. Epist. 1.19.32–3, 2.2.99.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 195
repositions his allegiance in the lyric canon: in the words of GriYn,
‘Pindar, rather than Alcaeus, is in the ascendant’.68 Although Pindar’s
presence can be felt in the Wrst three books of the Odes,69 he is named
for the Wrst time in book 4, appearing with something of a fanfare
in Odes 4.2. Pindaric themes and ideas are very much to the
fore throughout the book,70 most obviously in 4.4 and 4.14, the
encomiastic odes to Tiberius, Drusus, and Augustus.
I believe that this is part of Horace’s response to the Aeneid. Eager
to present his lyric poetry as a valid alternative to epic as a vehicle for
encomia, he creates a new ‘Pindaric’ persona;71 and in order to
support this new status for his poetry, for the Wrst time in the Odes
he presents the idea that lyric poetry can confer immortality.72
Horace makes his case in the central three poems of book 4,
measuring the power of his lyric against that of epic in general, and
the Aeneid in particular.73
The Wrst poem of this triptych is 4.7, a poem full of shocks and
surprises. It begins like a ‘spring poem’, celebrating the end of winter.
But the joys of spring quickly fade; summer crushes the spring, only
to perish itself with the arrival of autumn, and before we know where
we are, bruma iners (‘lifeless winter’) has returned. This leads Horace
on to thoughts of human mortality, much as it does in Odes 1.4.
However, the manner in which he illustrates these thoughts is
surprising to say the least: nos ubi decidimus, j quo pius Aeneas, quo
Tullus diues et Ancus, j puluis et umbra sumus (‘we, when we are fallen
whither pious Aeneas, whither rich Tullus and Ancus are fallen, we

68 GriYn (2002) 317.

69 Cf. Highbarger (1935); Fraenkel (1957) 276–97; Miller (1998).
70 Cf. Highbarger (1935) 224–5; Harrison (1995). For a slightly diVerent view, cf.
David (1991) 133–44; Putnam (1986) 48–62.
71 Barchiesi (1996) has shown that the poetry of Simonides and the Hellenistic
reception of the lyric poets has an important and hitherto underrated part to play in
book 4, one which complicates the idea of the book as merely Pindaric. However, the
primary lyric voice, and the one to which Horace draws most attention, is that of
Pindar. To put it another way, Horace presents his new persona as ‘Pindaric’, even if it
in fact incorporates other lyric poetry too.
72 Cf. Fraenkel (1957) 423: ‘The idea that lyric poetry can immortalize men’s
achievements is completely absent from the Wrst three books of the Odes. This is a
remarkable fact . . .’.
73 For a detailed treatment of these three poems, and some similar conclusions, see
Barchiesi (1996) 11–44.
196 Matthew Robinson
are shadow and dust’, Carm. 4.7.14–16). Aeneas is an odd choice as
a Wgure to illustrate man’s mortality.74 Odder still to refer to him
as pius Aeneas, for this is a clear allusion to the Aeneid—but did we
not read there that although Aeneas descended to the Underworld,
he did indeed return to the light? And that he will not in fact
perish, but be taken to heaven?75 As if to underline his iconoclastic
approach to the Aeneid, Horace tells Torquatus explicitly that the
great Aeneiadic virtue of piety will not bring him back from the dead
(23–4 non te j restituet pietas); furthermore, in telling us that Diana
was not able to bring back Hippolytus from the dead (25–6), he
directly contradicts another (striking) Virgilian resurrection.76
So what is going on? Is there really to be no escape from death
for anybody? The answer is given in the following poem, Odes 4.8,
which gains importance not only from its position in the centre of
the work, but also from its metre, used only here and in Odes 1.1 and
3.30, the Wrst and last poems of his Wrst collection of Odes. This is in a
sense a keynote poem for Odes 477—or much of it, at least78—and
as beWts Horace’s new stance, it is awash with Pindaric echoes
and motifs.79
Horace, in the fashion of a Pindaric priamel, rejects the glory given
by athletic prizes, and by statues and paintings, in favour of poetry.80
‘You delight in songs’, he says to Censorinus, ‘and we can give
you those, and tell you the worth of the gift (pretium dicere muneri)’

74 Fraenkel (1957) 421, remarks only that this shows ‘how strong the inXuence of
Virgil’s poem was at that time’.
75 Cf. Verg. Aen. 1.259–60 sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli j magnanimum Aenean
(‘you will bear great-souled Aeneas on high, to the stars of heaven’); 12.794–5
indigetem Aenean scis ipsa et scire fateris j deberi caelo fatisque ad sidera tolli (‘You
yourself know, and admit that you know, that Aeneas as a native hero is owed to
heaven and lifted by the fates to the stars’).
76 Cf. Aen. 7.765–9. On this cf. Putnam (1986) 152 n. 10; Barchiesi (1996) 42–3.
77 Cf. Fraenkel (1957) 422–3.
78 Although concerns with death, poetry, closure, and immortality run through-
out the work, Horace’s ‘Pindaric’ guise does not appear in every poem. There are still
glimpses of other Horaces (cf. e.g. 4.10 and 4.11) and see below.
79 Cf. Highbarger (1935) 245–6; Harrison (1990) 34–6. For the important inXu-
ence of Simonides and Theocritus here, see Barchiesi (1996).
80 The priamel is Pindaric; so too the list of prizes; so too the rejection of sculpture
in favour of poetry. For further details see Harrison (1990) 35; Highbarger (1935)
245.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 197
(11–12).81 The rest of the poem proceeds to do exactly that, to tell the
worth of a gift of poetry, not just to Censorinus, but to anyone else
reading the poem.
The gift of poetry turns out to be extremely valuable: reading the
text as we have it in the manuscripts,82 Horace tells us (13–22) that
neither records of deeds, nor the deeds themselves, bring as much
glory as poetry. Now this is a very bold thing to say, and it is not
surprising that scholars have sought either to delete these trouble-
some lines or explain this striking thought away. However, that this is
precisely what Horace means is clear from 4.9, where he makes it
explicit (25–30): there were many brave men before Agamemnon,
but they are forgotten because they did not have a poet to celebrate
them—that is to say, their deeds alone did not make them famous.
Without publicity, virtue and cowardice are indistinguishable.83
Returning to 4.8, we Wnd that Horace continues on this striking
theme: he now claims that the Muse is not only responsible for
immortality through glory, but also for the very deiWcations that
Horace himself has in the past ascribed to virtue.84 We can now
read 4.7 in this light: Virgil’s poetry deiWed Aeneas, and brought
Hippolytus back from the dead, but in a gesture of ‘authorial
self-assertion’,85 Horace’s poetry puts them back in the Underworld.
However, to prove that his poetry can work the other way too, in 4.8
he snatches Aeacus from the Underworld (where traditionally he is
one of the judges of the dead), and places him on the Isles of the
Blessed,86 where he can be found in no other extant source.87
81 Though the sense ‘the cost of this gift’ should not be ignored: cf. Barchiesi
(1996) 23–4.
82 Some editors excise much of lines 15–19, owing to possible historical problems;
the unpoetic presence of eius in 18; the perceived diYculty of thought; and the fact
that this is the only Ode where the number of verses is not divisible by four. For
a recent discussion of the textual issues, see Harrison (1990).
83 Another Pindaric motif: cf. Nem. 7.12–13 ‘for great deeds of valour remain in
deep darkness when they lack hymns’; cf. also Isthm. 7.16–19 and Bowra (1964) 33–4.
Cf. also Theoc. Id. 16.40–6.
84 Cf. e.g. Odes 3.3, and Lyne (1995) 210–11.
85 The phrase is Putnam’s: cf. Putnam (1986) 152 n. 10; Barchiesi (1996) 42–3.
86 Compare similar ‘self-assertion’ in Pind. Ol. 2.78–80, where various heroes are
placed (somewhat unusually) in the Isles of the Blessed, including Achilles, who is of
course located by Homer in the Underworld: cf. Farnell (1932).
87 For details and discussion, see Putnam (1986) 152–4. Comparison with the list
of mortals who become gods (such as in Odes 3.3) shows that Aeacus is very much the
198 Matthew Robinson
Odes 4.8 then focuses on the power of poetry and the poet to
immortalize: in 4.9, the Wnal poem in this triptych, what was sug-
gested by the Pindaric content of 4.8 is made explicit, namely the
validity of lyric poetry as a vehicle for immortality, and in particular
Horace’s poetry.88 The epic poetry of Homer may have Wrst place (5–
6), but the poetry of the lyric poets still survives (6–12), proof that
Horace’s words will not perish either (1–4). He too can bestow
immortality (30–4), and in his whitewashed presentation of the
unfortunate Lollius, he oVers proof that this immortality depends
more on the poet’s glorious words than the subject’s inglorious
deeds.89
The Wnal poem of Odes 4 nicely illustrates the tensions in the
fourth book between Horace’s old lyric persona, his new lyric
persona, his respect for the Aeneid and also his desire to compete
with it. Although the poem is shot through with echoes of the
Aeneid, its premiss is that epic is no longer required. He closes his
Wnal Odes with wine and song, as we might expect from the poet of
Odes 1–3; but surprisingly, the song appears to be on the subject of
the Aeneid: ‘of Troy and Anchises and the oVspring of nurturing
Venus we will sing’ (4.15.31–2). The ‘oVspring of nurturing Venus’
is always taken to be either Aeneas or Augustus or the Roman
people, and commentators point to the pleasing inversion of the
mater saeua Cupidinum that opened the poem, and the change in
outlook that this represents. However, few note that the most
natural identity of progeniem Veneris is Cupid himself. Horace
discreetly suggests that amidst all the new patriotic poetry, the
lyric voice that sang of love will still resound.90

odd one out. For some diVerent interpretations of this, see Highbarger (1935) 245;
Harrison (1990) 41; Lyne (1995) 212; Barchiesi (1996) 40–4.
88 Cf. Fraenkel (1957) 424–5. We note that Horace dedicates three lines to the love
poetry of Sappho (4.9.10–12)—on this see below, n. 90.
89 Cf. Putnam (1986) 157–73. Lollius famously suVered defeat in Gaul in 16 bc:
while possibly not a signiWcant defeat, one is still surprised by the praise lavished
upon him. See Putnam (1986) 168 n. 19, and Barchiesi (1996) 30–3, who reaches
similar conclusions.
90 A hint already given at Odes 4.9.5–12, where in a discussion of the immortality
of poetry, Sappho receives more space than any other poet.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 199

LABOR IMPROBUS : PRO PERTIUS AND VIRGIL

With Cupid once again in our thoughts, let us turn our gaze to
Propertius.91
In his Wrst book Propertius warns the aptly named Ponticus that
his mythological epic poetry and its graue carmen (1.9.9) will do him
no good should he fall in love. Sure enough, he falls in love, and is
encouraged to write the appropriate style of verse. It appears that we
have here one more example of the opposition between epic and
elegy, and further support for that old elegiac proverb ‘weighty art
never won fair lady’.
At the beginning of the second book, however, this opposition
between epic and elegy gains a political dimension. The possible
subject matter for epic is extended to include not just Greek myths
(17–21), or great Wgures from the history books of Greece and Rome
(22–4), but also contemporary historical events involving Caesar
himself (25–36). Propertius, in familiar elegiac fashion, excuses him-
self from writing epic on the ground that he is not up to the task (17–
18, 39–46)—but when he describes the civil war battles that he claims
he would be writing about (if only he had the ability),92 he makes it
abundantly clear just how he feels about the recent achievements
of the divine Augustus, and the prospect of celebrating them
in poetry.93 When Propertius tells us he is not suited to such a
task, we may well wonder what kind of person, to Propertius’
mind, would be.

91 Given the severe problems of the Propertian text, and the short space available
for discussion, I try to avoid the most corrupt passages as much as possible in what
follows.
92 Cf. 2.1.27–9 ‘For as often as [I sang] of Mutina, or Philippi, grave of Romans
(ciuilia busta), or of the battles of the Xeet and the defeats around Sicily, and the
devastated hearths of Etruria’s ancient race (euersosque focos antiquae gentis Etruscae)
. . .’. Cf. Camps (1967) ad loc. for reasons why Propertius’ presentation of these
battles may have been troubling for Augustus (though Camps dismisses such ideas),
and also Stahl (1985) 164–5.
93 Maecenas may well have been relieved to hear at lines 39–46 that Propertius was
not up to the job. I assume in this discussion that Propertius is either responding to
a suggestion from Maecenas, or perhaps pre-emptively refusing a request he does not
want to receive.
200 Matthew Robinson
The exact phrasing of Propertius’ refusal is worth examining
closely: 2.1.41–2 nec mea conueniunt duro praecordia uersu j Caesaris
in Phrygios condere nomen auos, ‘nor are my talents suited in harsh
verse to establish the name of Caesar back to his Trojan ancestors’.
The fact that he characterizes the epic that he will not write in this
way is signiWcant: it suggests that either this is what Propertius
believes Augustus wants to see in his epic, or that Propertius is
thinking of the poem promised in the Georgics, with its statues of
‘Trojan ancestors’ in the guise of ‘the oVspring of Assaracus’ and
‘father Tros’.94
With this in mind, let us turn to poem 2.34, which (possibly by an
accident of transmission)95 ends the book that 2.1 begins, and which
contains the most famous early response to the Aeneid.
2.34 follows a similar theme to the Ponticus poems of book 1.96
A serious writer, Lynceus, is urged to write elegiac poetry in the
manner of Philetan and Callimachean poetry: after all, serious poetry
will not help him with women (25–32). He should forget epic or large-
scale compositions, since no right-minded girl is interested in Homer
or Antimachus (33–47). Natural philosophy is also a turn-oV (51–4).
Propertius invites Lynceus to gaze in awe upon him, as he sits like
a king amidst various puellae (55–8). He continues: mi libet hesternis
posito languere corollis j quem tetigit iactu certus ad ossa deus.97
It is therefore something of a surprise when the syntax continues
with a sentence that we are completely unprepared for (61–6):
Actia Vergilio custodis litora Phoebi
Caesaris et fortis dicere posse rates,
qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma
iactaque Lauinis moenia litoribus.
Cedite Romani scriptores cedite Grai!
nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.
[and it is the pleasure of] Virgil to be able to tell of the Actian shores of
guardian Apollo, and the brave ships of Caesar; who is now stirring to life

94 Cf. Verg. G. 3.34–6.

95 Cf. the theory of Lachmann that book 2 as we have it now was once two separate
books: for recent discussion, see Günther (1997) 6–14.
96 Prop. 1.7 and 1.9.
97 Prop. 2.34.59–60 ‘my pleasure is to loll amid the garlands of yesterday, for the
god of unerring aim has pierced me to the bone’ (Loeb).
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 201
the arms of Trojan Aeneas and the walls founded on Lavinian shores. Make
way, Roman writers, make way, Greeks! Something bigger than the Iliad is
being born.
Virgil bursts in rather unexpectedly on Propertius as he wallows in
the languor of the morning after. No such slothfulness for Virgil who
(even as Propertius speaks) is waking up the arms of Aeneas. The
passage has clear echoes of Aeneid 1,98 but also of Aeneid 7.99
While Virgil is certainly allocated a great deal of space in the
catalogue of poets that the poem has become, and while Propertius
seems fairly positive about the Eclogues (67–76) and the Georgics
(77–80), it is hard in the context of the poem, and in the context of
Propertius’ work as a whole, to see his description of the Aeneid as
positive. Given Propertius’ preference for the smaller things in life,100
the arrival of ‘something bigger than the Iliad’ is not necessarily a
commendation, and in this context, the cry of cedite . . . cedite may be
a cry of warning to ‘get out of the way!’101
The disquiet may be reXected in what follows: straight after all
these echoes of the Aeneid, we have another one: the phrase tu canis
(‘you sing . . .’), which introduces both Propertius’ description of the
Eclogues (67) and the Georgics (77), is a clear allusion to the present
indicative in the Aeneid’s Wrst words arma virumque cano (‘I sing
of arms and the man . . .’). In this context, tu canis has a special
force, suggesting either a hint of disbelief (‘Something bigger than
the Iliad? But you wrote the Eclogues and the Georgics . . .’), or
perhaps almost an imperative (‘sing of the Eclogues and Georgics,
not of arms and a man’).
In describing the Eclogues, Propertius suggests that while the work
presents a rather naı̈ve view of love,102 it still meets one of his criteria
for successful poetry, the approval of women (76 laudatur facilis inter

98 Cf. Aen. 1.1–7. Boucher (1965) 294–5 sounds a note of caution about this
allusion.
99 Compare Propertius’ nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade with Verg. Aen. 7.44–5
maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo j maius opus moueo (‘A greater sequence of events
comes into being for me. I begin a greater work’).
100 Cf. e.g. 2.1.40, 72, 2.13.31–4, 2.34.43, 3.3.5.
101 For similar thoughts, cf. Sullivan (1976) 24–5; Stahl (1985), 172–83. For a very
diVerent interpretation, see Newman (1997) 220–8; Vessey (1969–70) 63–70.
102 Cf. Stahl (1985) 181–2.
202 Matthew Robinson
Hamadryadas ‘it is praised among the easy nymphs’), even if these
women are ‘easy’.103 As for the Georgics, he comments thus (79–82):

tale facis carmen docta testudine quale

Cynthius impositis temperat articulis.
non tamen haec ulli uenient ingrata legenti,
siue in amore rudis siue peritus erit.
You compose such a song as Cynthian Apollo tunes on his learned lyre, when
he places on his Wngers. These poems, however, will not come unwelcome to
anyone reading them, whether they are skilled or novice in love.
This is the only time Propertius uses the epithet Cynthius of Apollo,
and it is a clear allusion to Ecl. 6.3–5,104 one of the few other
occurrences of the epithet in Latin. There, of course, Cynthian Apollo
restrains Virgil from singing epic. Here, Propertius, reminding us of
this passage,105 tells us that the Georgics is just the kind of song this
anti-epic, Callimachean Apollo would sing. What then would
Cynthian Apollo, with his love of the Wne-spun song, make of
‘something bigger than the Iliad ’? There is perhaps a mischievous
hint as to an answer in the following couplet:106 ‘these poems,
however, will not come unwelcome to anyone reading them . . .’.
For a moment we could be fooled into thinking that haec refers to
the Eclogues and the Georgics, leaving us to conclude that Virgil’s
other poem may not be so well received.107

103 Unlike a dura puella such as Cynthia: cf. e.g. Prop. 2.1.78.
104 cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem j uellit et admonuit ‘pastorem,
Tityre, pinguis j pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen’ (‘When I was singing of
kings and battles, Cynthius plucked my ear and told me ‘‘Tityrus, you should feed
your sheep fat, but sing a Wne-spun song’’ ’).
105 Propertius has the Eclogues very much in mind while discussing the Georgics,
and vice versa, helping to link the two poems together in opposition to the Aeneid.
106 It is the following couplet if one keeps the lines as they appear in the manu-
scripts. Goold, following Ribbeck, places 77–80 after 66, so that the couplet follows
on from 76.
107 Of course, as the poem continues, we see that haec refers to love poetry, initially
that of Propertius and then of the other poets that he mentions: cf. Vessey (1969–70)
67; Newman (1997) 225; Stahl (1985) 182 with n. 27; Camps (1967) 232. This
technique of suggesting one meaning and then giving the ‘real’ one is very much in
the Propertian manner: cf. e.g. 2.16.39–42, 4.6.65–8. The following couplet (on the
swan and goose) is too complex to deal with here: for discussion, cf. Stahl (1985)
183–4; Newman (1997) 226–7; Vessey (1969–70) 67.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 203
On this reading, in 2.34 we see Propertius responding both to
the incipient Aeneid, and possibly the fanfare that was already
surrounding it, with little enthusiasm. Restrictions of space forbid
us to examine book 3, but similar responses can be found there: cf.
e.g. 3.1.7 ah ualeat, Phoebum quicumque moratur in armis! (‘Begone
the man who detains Apollo in war!’)108 Let us turn instead to book
4, which like Horace’s Wnal book, is written after the death of Virgil,
and in a time of increased imperial pressure.109 How will Propertius
respond to the poetic challenge of the Wnished Aeneid and the
changed times in which he Wnds himself ?
We Wnd our answers with the Wrst lines of book 4 (1–4):

Hoc quodcumque uides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est

ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit.
atque ubi Nauali stant sacra Palatia Phoebo
Euandri profugae concubuere boues.
All this that you see here, stranger, where now stands most mighty Rome,
was hill and grass before Phrygian Aeneas. And where stands the Palatine,
sacred to Naval Apollo, the migrant cattle of Evander lay together . . .
Propertius immediately invites comparison with Aeneid 8. Tibullus
2.5 is also recalled, but mention of hospes and Evander put Virgil’s
text in the foreground.110 But mischief is already afoot. Phrygem is
not an uncomplicatedly positive epithet to use of Aeneas, bringing
with it suggestions of eVeminacy.111 We are not surprised to see cattle
on the site of ancient Rome: Virgil has them mooing in the Forum,112
and Tibullus perhaps a little archly has them grazing on the Palat-
ine.113 However, Propertius not only places them on the Palatine,
which (he reminds us) now hosts a temple in honour of Phoebus

108 Cf. esp. 3.1 and 3.4, with the discussion of Nethercut (1970), who covers several
poems in book 3, and Stahl (1985) 189–212. See also Frost (1991), on 3.3.
109 On this see Brink (1982) 546–72, though he believes that this has little eVect on
Propertius (p. 558).
110 For hospes cf. Aen. 8.122–3 and 188–9.
111 Cf. Pease (1935) on Aen. 4.103 (p. 168): ‘Heinze . . . observes that Phrygius is [in
the Aeneid] commonly used (though not solely . . . ) by the enemies of the Trojans as a
term of contempt’. He gives references and some discussion.
112 Verg. Aen. 8.360–1.
113 Cf. Tibullus 2.5.25, 55–6.
204 Matthew Robinson
Navalis,114 but rather than mooing they are now mounting each
other.115 Early Rome may provide Propertius with a veneer of re-
spectability, but underneath he seems much the same. He has read
his Aeneid 8, and he has noticed how Virgil attempts to unite the
rugged virtues of ancient Rome with its contemporary wealth and
splendour, to show that the simple and honest heart of the past still
beats in the breast of today’s Roman. Propertius initially seems to go
along with this strategy (5–36), echoing the hardy morality of Virgil
rather than the pastoral scenes of Tibullus 2.5, but this is how he
concludes the passage (37–8): nil patrium nisi nomen habet Romanus
alumnus j sanguinis altricem non putet esse lupam (‘the son of Rome
has nothing from his ancestors but his name. He would not think
that a she-wolf is the nurse of his blood’). It turns out that the
modern Roman has nothing in common with his ancestors, apart
from the name. In one line, the connection that Virgil has carefully
created between old and new is severed.116
The poem continues, with Virgil never far from Propertius’
gaze,117 and soon reaches its initial conclusion (57–70):
moenia namque pio coner disponere uersu: 57
ei mihi, quod nostro est paruus in ore sonus! 58
       
ut nostris tumefacta superbiat Umbria libris, 63
Umbria Romani patria Callimachi!
scandentis quisquis cernit de uallibus arces, 65
ingenio muros aestimet ille meo!
Roma, faue, tibi surgit opus; date candida, ciues,
omina; et inceptis dextera cantet auis!
sacra deosque canam et cognomina prisca locorum:
has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus.

114 It also hosts, of course, the residence of Augustus.

115 Cf. OLD s.v. and Fedeli (1965) ad loc. Given this rather shocking meaning, he
along with other editors would rather read procubuere.
116 Propertius allows himself (and editors uncomfortable with what the text
appears to be saying) the defence that he is actually talking positively about
present-day Rome (‘they have inherited no material wealth from their ancestors,
i.e. built themselves up from nothing’); and some such as Camps (1965) and Fedeli
(1965) ad loc. would see in Romanus alumnus an allusion to Romulus, and read pudet
in the following line. But the primary meaning of the text is clear.
117 Cf. Fedeli (1965) ad loc. for the echoes of Aeneid 6 and 8.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 205
For now let me attempt to set out walls in pious verse. Alas, that the sound
from my mouth is (only) small . . . in order that Umbria may be swollen with
pride in my books, Umbria the fatherland of Roman Callimachus. Whoever
sees citadels rising from the valleys, let him rate the walls by my genius.
Rome, give your favour, the work rises for you. Grant fair omens, citizens;
and let a bird sing auspiciously for my undertaking. I will sing of rites and
gods and the ancient names of places. It is the duty of my horse to sweat
towards this goal/turning post.
Once again, this is all very much aimed at Virgil. Propertius tells us
that he is attempting to ‘set out walls in pious verse’ (moenia namque
pio coner disponere uersu): his building project is more ambitious
than a mere temple by the Mincius,118 for these are the walls of Rome
themselves, the altae moenia Romae (Aen. 1.7) that form the climax
to the introductory section of the Aeneid. Propertius’ poetry is,
of course, appropriately pius. Mantua beneWted from Virgil’s victory
in the Georgics proem,119 but now it is Umbria that will swell
with pride.
Once he has built the walls, no doubt his city will grow (65–7):
scandentis quisquis cernit de uallibus arces, j ingenio muros aestimet ille
meo! j Roma, faue, tibi surgit opus. These arces are a little vague.
Commentaries invite us to recall the hilltop towns of Umbria,120 and
this is how Horos will interpret the phrase later in the poem (125–
6),121 but at this point surely the most natural reading is to take the
arces to be the famous seven citadels of Rome,122 and the muros of the
following line to be the same as the moenia mentioned only a few
lines previously.123 Indeed, we are encouraged to do so by the echo of

118 Virgil’s building project in the proem to Georgics 3: cf. 3.13 et uiridi in campo
templum de marmore ponam (‘and in the green plain I will set up a temple of marble’).
119 G. 3.12.
120 Cf. Camps (1965) and Richardson (1977) ad loc.
121 Following the suggestion of Newman (1997) 269 n. 64, we might think that
this is a joke: Horos misinterprets Propertius’ bold claim as something much less
impressive—not Rome, but a small town in Umbria. This would be in keeping with
the tone of Horos’ message.
122 Cf. e.g. Aen. 6.783: septemque una sibi muro circumdabit arces (‘[Rome] will
surround its seven citadels with one wall’).
123 MacLeod (1976) 143 and Newman (1997) 269 also see this couplet as contain-
ing a reference to Rome.
206 Matthew Robinson
scandentis . . . arces in the phrase Roma . . . tibi surgit opus.124 So when
Propertius tells us to ‘esteem the walls by my genius’, the emphasis
perhaps falls on meo—we must esteem the altae moenia Romae, and
the poetic construction of Rome, by the genius of Propertius, not
Virgil.
Finally, in lines 69–70 of the text given above, Propertius’ challenge
to Virgil becomes even more direct:125 no arma uirumque cano for
Propertius, but sacra deosque canam. This is a point-for-point rebut-
tal, which gains an added piquancy, and almost a divine sanction,
from the fact that this phrase has been taken from the mouth of Virgil’s
Jupiter.126 This will be his response to Virgil. He will sing Roman
themes indeed, but his will be an elegiac Rome. He will sing the Aetia
that Virgil feints towards in Aen. 1.8 Musa, mihi causas memora
(‘Muse, sing me the causes . . .’). He will truly be Roman Callimachus.
Of course, things are never quite that simple in this Wnal book.
Even while he makes them, there are reasons to believe Propertius’
Callimachean claims are not quite what they seem.127 But the real
surprise is yet to come. Propertius’ poetic horses, which have sweated
their way (oportet perhaps suggests under some compulsion) to
the turning post (the primary meaning of metas), are now of course
coming back in the other direction. The mysterious Wgure of Horos
appears, warning him that Apollo does not approve of his new poetic
venture.128 He is advised to stick to love elegy (135–8). The poem
ends without resolution. We may well wonder in what direction this
book of poetry is heading.129
And so begins Propertius’ boldest experiment with the possibilities
of elegy. Reading the fourth book for the Wrst time, each poem comes
as something of a surprise, the style and subject matter constantly

124 MacLeod (1976) 144 also notes parallels between what Propertius says of Rome
in lines 41 and 44, and what he says of his own poetry in 57 and 67–8.
125 Following Sullivan (1976) 138 n. 27, Goold (1990), and S. J. Heyworth (via
email) I read sacra deosque rather than the better attested sacra diesque. The latter
creates a link back to Hesiod, but in the context of the many competitive allusions to
Virgil, I Wnd the former more persuasive.
126 Cf. Verg. Aen. 12.192 sacra deosque dabo (‘I will give them rites and gods’).
127 On this, see MacLeod (1976).
128 For a good discussion of this part of the poem, see MacLeod (1976).
129 For a useful survey of literature up to 1985 that tries to answer this question,
see Stahl (1985) 265–9. See also Wyke (1987); Newman (1997) 265–77.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 207
changing like Vertumnus in 4.2. Who would have expected Actium
(4.6) after Acanthis (4.5)? Or Cynthia (4.7) after Actium, and a dead
Cynthia at that, who after all Propertius’ fretting about her behaviour
at his funeral,130 has actually pre-deceased him? It is another shock
after 4.7 to Wnd Cynthia very much alive in 4.8, a shock too great for
more literal-minded scholars to bear.131 The one constant amidst all
this change is Propertius’ desire to explore the boundaries of elegy, by
elegizing, feminizing,132 and subverting the themes of other genres.
Noble didactic becomes a sordid lecture on amatory extortion by
the disreputable Acanthis; Patroclus’ ghost becomes the ghost of
Cynthia, who takes on the likeness also of Anchises, Hector,
and Dido;133 Propertius becomes an immodest Penelope taking
advantage of Cynthia’s absence in a smutty parody of the Odyssey;134
the Scipionic epitaph is reworked as a memorial to a Scipio whose
glory is to have been a virtuous Roman matrona; the Roman story of
Tarpeia becomes a rather Hellenistic tale of love; and Hercules, after
dealing with Cacus in record time, Wnds himself in the elegiac
position of an exclusus amator,135 and where Propertius’ tale overlaps
with Virgil’s account, we see him take particular delight in retelling
the most bombastic narrative of the Aeneid in exquisitely Alexan-
drian fashion, and in general robbing this Wgure of all the dignity and
allegorical importance he was given by Virgil.136
130 Cf. e.g. 1.17.19–24, 2.13.17–42, 3.16.21–30.
131 Cf. especially the delightful comments of Postgate (1901) p. lv: the idea that 4.7
should precede 4.8 is ‘a ghastly imagination . . . only possible to ages which have learnt
to Wnger the secret springs of the horrible and produced the paintings of a Wiertz and
the Wction of a Poe’.
132 Cf. e.g. Wyke (1987) and Janan (2001).
133 For allusions to Dido and to the Aeneid in general, see Allison (1980). The
appearance of Cynthia’s ghost to the sleeping Propertius looking as she did in death
recalls not only Patroclus appearing to Achilles, but also the similar appearance of
Hector to Aeneas at Aen. 2.270–97; her account of the Underworld and her place in it
recalls Anchises’ ghost at Aen. 5.731–42 and more generally the descriptions of the
Underworld given by the Sibyl and Anchises in book 6.
134 Cf. Evans (1971); Hubbard (1974) 155. For allusions to the Aeneid in 4.8, cf.
Allison (1980).
135 Cf. Anderson (1964).
136 Cf. Warden (1982), still one of the best discussions of this poem, and one
particularly relevant as regards Propertius’ response to Virgil. For example, on p. 229:
‘As elsewhere in the fourth book Propertius has taken a Virgilian theme and played
variations on it. His aim is not to imitate but to challenge; to show what his
sophisticated elegiac mode can do with the material of epic . . .’.
208 Matthew Robinson
To conclude: from the moment of its inception, Propertius seems
to have viewed the Aeneid as a poem written to satisfy imperial
desires for laudatory epic, a task which to Propertius was at best
distasteful, at worst, oVensive. His presentation of the poem strongly
highlights its Augustan aspects, and it is the most Augustan parts of
the poem that receive much of his attention.137 He does not seem to
have noticed the kind of ambiguities that Horace responds to, and as
such, his response seems to be based on a reading of the Aeneid as
a very Augustan poem. So much for politics. On a poetic level, in an
attempt to assert his own poetic identity in the face of a poem that no
doubt most were loudly praising, Propertius produced his most
experimental and audacious work, presented as a direct response to
the Aeneid, Roman elegy against Roman epic, a Roman Callimachus
eager to escape from the shadow of, if not the Roman Homer, then
at least the Roman Apollonius. It was a work that would have a
profound inXuence on Ovid, to whom we now turn.

MAIUS OPUS MOVEO : OV I D A N D V I RG I L

When Ovid tells us in the Tristia that he only saw Virgil (Vergilium
uidi tantum),138 he does so in the context of a discussion of poets he
associated with in his youth—but the phrase usefully encapsulates
a crucial diVerence between Ovid and the other Augustan poets.
Propertius and Horace were closer in time to Virgil, experiencing
similar imperial pressures, witnessing the birth and growth of the
Aeneid, responding to it both while it was being composed and when
it was published. Ovid is, however, to a large extent responding to
a Wnished corpus of works:139 Virgil is for Ovid a text—he has
only read him.
Furthermore, the responses of Propertius and Horace to the
Wnished Aeneid were their Wnal works. Ovid’s response is prolonged
over his entire poetic career, and his most direct engagement with

137 For example, when alluding to the Aeneid in his fourth book, it is Aeneid 8 that
Propertius has in his sights much of the time.
138 Ov. Tr. 4.10.51.
139 Cf. Tarrant (2002) 23.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 209
Virgil will not appear for more than twenty years after the Aeneid’s
oYcial publication. During this time, of course, many others are
responding to the Aeneid: not just poets, but commentators, admirers,
detractors, and of course, emperors.140 This means that when Ovid
comes to write the Metamorphoses, his response to the Aeneid is based
not just on the text, or his own reading of the text, but also on the
wealth of other readings that have grown up around the poem.
It must also be remembered that Ovid’s response to Virgil has to be
seen in the context of his response to other authors too. While Ovid
is perhaps nimium amator ingenii sui,141 he is certainly an ardent
admirer of the ingenium of others.142 There is no anxiety of inXuence
in Ovid’s works, rather a wallowing in it—be it poetry, prose, sculp-
ture, architecture, or painting.143 He has a great sensitivity to how
literature works, and to what makes a particular artist tick, and what
would make them wince. When in the Fasti Ovid’s Ariadne looks
back at her lament in poem 64 of Rome’s most aggressive sophisticate
and asks herself quid Xebam rustica? we are treated to three of the
most deliciously cruel words in Latin.144
The question of Ovid’s response to Virgil has been the subject of
a number of recent treatments,145 and bibliography on the subject is
considerable,146 so I will be brief.147

140 Augustus’ reading of the Aeneid, according to Ovid, was one which appropri-
ated it to the service of the regime, to the extent that he describes it as ‘Augustus’
Aeneid’ by the time he writes the Tristia (Tr. 2.533): on this passage, see Thomas
(2001) 74–8 and Barchiesi (1997) 27–8. For more on the appropriation of the Aeneid
by Augustus, cf. Thomas (2001) 34–40 and 73–4.
141 Quint. Inst. 10.1.88 (‘Too much in love with his own talent’).
142 Cf. Tarrant (2002), esp. pp. 17–20 for the breadth of Ovid’s literary interests.
143 For Ovid’s response to art, cf. Solodow (1988) 224–6, who cites Buccino
(1913), Bartolomé (1935), and Laslo (1935).
144 Ov. Fast. 3.463 (‘Why did I weep like a bumpkin?’), looking back to Catullus
64.
145 Cf. recent discussions in Solodow (1988), ch. 4, esp. 136–56; Hardie (1993);
Barnes (1995) 257–67; Casali (1995); Tarrant (1997a) 60–3; Tissol (1997) 177–91 ¼
(approx.) Tissol (1993); Hinds (1998) 99–122; Thomas (2001) 74–83; Tarrant (2002)
23–7; Huskey (2002); Nappa (2002), although discussing the Georgics, makes some
interesting points that could also be applied to the Aeneid.
146 See the useful summary in Myers (1999), esp. pp. 195–6. For bibliography since
then, see the more recent discussions in n. 145.
147 In order to reduce the size of the footnotes, I will refer in what follows only to
the most recent discussions, which all contain good bibliographies of previous works.
210 Matthew Robinson
There are many reasons why Virgil should appear so often in the
pages of Ovid. First, as Ovid tells us, the Aeneid quickly became one
of the Latin world’s most famous poems,148 and thus was a
natural target for Ovid’s allusive play. Furthermore, Ovid took a
mischievous delight in undercutting anything that took itself ser-
iously, be it poetry or imperial ideology. As such, any serious poem
(especially one in Latin) was at risk: for example, poor Catullus’
Xights of tortured fancy inspired by the candida diua that steps on
to Allius’ threshold in 68b are cheerfully debased in Ovid’s very
matter-of-fact Amores 1.5;149 and the angst of the odi et amo of
poem 85 Wnds a rather facile resolution in Amores 3.11.33–4. Virgil’s
much longer poems provide much more material for this kind of
allusion, perhaps the most famous example being Ovid’s theft of the
line hoc opus, hic labor est:150 what once described in vatic tones
the awful task of returning alive from the Underworld now refers
to the tricky problem of getting a woman into bed without paying for
the privilege.151
For a poet as interested in generic games as Ovid, the Aeneid also
serves as a handy marker for epic: the Wrst words of Ovid’s Amores are
arma graui numero, an epic phrase by itself but also a strong echo of
the Wrst words of the Aeneid, arma uirumque cano.152 When Ovid
wishes to add epic colouring to a passage, it is the language and
similes of the Aeneid that come to mind:153 as, for example, when he
describes the epic rush of the Fabii in the Fasti, or the daring
midnight manoeuvres of Faunus as he attempts an assault on
Omphale.154

148 Cf. Ars am. 3.337–8.

149 Cf. Lyne (1980) 262–4; Hinds (1987) 7–11.
150 Tarrant (2002) 24 sees this as a speciWc response ‘to Virgil’s canonical status’,
and pleasingly describes such ‘shameless appropriation’ as ‘self-assertive manoeuvres’,
which illustrate Ovid’s control of his models.
151 Compare Aen. 6.128–9 sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras, j hoc
opus, hic labor est (‘but to retrace your steps and emerge into the upper air, this is the
task, this the labour’) with Ars am. 1.453 hoc opus, hic labor est, primo sine munere iungi
(‘this is the task, this the labour, to get it together without giving her anything Wrst’).
152 On this see McKeown (1989) ad loc.
153 At least, it is easy for us to recognize similes from Virgil (and Homer), as we
still have these texts. Many echoes of authors such as Ennius may be lost to us.
154 Fast. 2.195–242 and 331–52; on these passages, cf. my forthcoming commen-
tary on Fasti 2.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 211
Ovid’s use of Virgil stretches right through his career, from the Wrst
word of the Amores to the Tristia.155 However, Ovid’s response to
Virgil is perhaps most clear when Ovid is writing his own epic, and
particularly when his material overlaps that of the Aeneid. So let us
turn now to the Metamorphoses.
Ovid’s narrative encounter with the events of the Aeneid begins
at Met. 13.623.156 As with his version of the Iliad (beginning at
12.64),157 we Wnd that the great and signiWcant stories are com-
pressed (e.g. Dido receives just four lines at 14.78–81), while trivial
details are expanded with stories of transformation (e.g. dinner with
Anius on Delos leads to a lengthy account of the metamorphoses of
his children (13.638–674)).158 Ovid also enjoys ‘correcting’ Virgil,
certainly anticipating the kind of criticism that we will Wnd in
Servius, perhaps echoing contemporary scholarly responses to the
work: for example, Ovid’s Aeneas leaves the Sibyl and sails to
the ‘shores which do not yet have his nurse’s name’ (14.157). Virgil’s
Aeneas, however, leaves the Sibyl and ‘takes himself to the port
of Caieta’ (Aen. 6.900), although it is only at the beginning of the
following book, at Aen. 7.1–4, that the shore receives its name, on
the death of Aeneas’ nurse. This is just the kind of thing Servius feels
he needs to explain: ‘ ‘‘to the port of Caieta’’—this is prolepsis by the
poet: for it was not yet called Caieta’.159
Ovid’s account of Aeneas’ journey to the Underworld highlights
many of the above features. Ovid contracts Virgil’s lengthy narrative
of the descent, and expands and perhaps ‘corrects’ Virgil’s brief
account of the journey back. In the Aeneid the return journey receives
barely six words of narrative (6.898–9), and it seems remarkably easy
given the words of the Sibyl at 6.128–9: ‘But to retrace your steps and

155 On Virgil in the Tristia, cf. Bews (1984); Huskey (2002).

156 For recent discussions, see n. 145.
157 This reminds us that many aspects of Ovid’s response to Virgil are to be seen in
the context of his response to other authors.
158 On a number of occasions, Ovid expands on metamorphoses that he Wnds in
the text of the Aeneid itself: cf. e.g. Aen. 11.271–4 (Diomedes’ companions turned
into birds) with Met. 14.464–511; Aen. 9.77–122 (the Trojan ships turn into sea-
nymphs) with Met. 14.530–65.
159 Serv. ad Aen. 6.900. On this, see Hinds (1998) 108–11. For some other
corrections, cf. Solodow (1988) 154.
212 Matthew Robinson
emerge into the upper air, this is the task, this the labour’.160 So when
we read in the Metamorphoses how Aeneas ‘making his weary way on
the return journey, eased the labour by chatting with his Cumaean
guide’ (Met. 14.120–1 inde ferens lassos auerso tramite passus j
cum duce Cumaea mollit sermone laborem), we see that Ovid has
acknowledged the famous labor of the task: but even so, it serves only
to introduce another conversation between Aeneas and the Sibyl,
whose tone is in marked contrast to their previous exchanges in the
Aeneid (cf. Aen. 6.45–97).
Of course, the main feature of this passage is the way in which
Ovid compresses one of the most signiWcant episodes of the Aeneid.
‘He saw the wealth of fearsome Orcus’ (Met. 14.116–17) is all that
remains of intense narrative of the descent into the Underworld, with
its emotional encounters with Palinurus, Dido, and Deiphobus. But
worse is to come: ‘and he saw his ancestors and the aged spirit
of great-hearted Anchises’ (14.117–18). Crucially, Ovid omits any
mention of Aeneas’ descendants, and this brings us on to Ovid’s
treatment of the Aeneid on a more general level. He has stripped the
Aeneid of its most important feature—its teleology. The painful
revelation of fate, that sense of destiny, the glorious prophecies that
link the heroic age to the age of Augustus, all this has gone.161 The
great trip to the Underworld provides only a display of ancestors and
a few details about the forthcoming wars. Helenus’ prophecy is
passed over in a couple of lines (13.722–3), and when it Wnally does
appear, and when we at last receive a prophecy concerning the
greatness of Rome (15.431–49), it will be in the disreputable context
of Pythagoras’ speech, the main purpose of which is to advocate
a vegetarian diet; and predictions of Rome’s eternal greatness sit
uneasily amidst a catalogue of cities which were powerful once, but
no more.162
With the heart of the Aeneid torn out, we are left with little more
than a series of events and characters that Ovid can employ to serve

160 For text see n. 151.

161 On this aspect cf. esp. Tissol (1997) 179, who argues that Ovid replaces Virgil’s
themes with his own: ‘Ovid oVers an answer to the Aeneid, subsuming its plot and
characters to illustrate the universal prevalence of Xux’.
162 Cf. Barchiesi (1989) 73–96. The article appears in translation in Barchiesi
(2001b), ch. 3: where see pp. 62–78.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 213
the purpose of his own narrative. The Aeneid becomes a frame for
stories about metamorphoses, subsumed within Ovid’s own epic: all
that was ‘Virgilian’ has been removed, and what remains becomes
decidedly ‘Ovidian’. It turns out that the Aeneid was only ever about
metamorphoses, if only it had been told properly.163
In all of this, Ovid’s close and sensitive reading of Virgil’s text is
very clear. Indeed, one could argue that his poems form a kind
of commentary on the Aeneid, whether it be on points of detail
such as allusions or etymology,164 on larger issues such as character
or plot, or on possible tensions or ‘oppositional’ readings within the
Aeneid.165 But it is perhaps the existence of the Metamorphoses as a
whole that is Ovid’s most direct and unique response to the
Aeneid.166 As Rebecca Armstrong has demonstrated in a previous
chapter, the Aeneid aimed to subsume within itself many of the great
genres of literature, an all-inclusive epic containing both the Iliad
and the Odyssey among others, positioning itself as the one and only
epic.167 It is in this regard that the Metamorphoses responds most
competitively to the Aeneid, and this is clear from the very start of the
poem. These exceptionally dense lines have been well discussed, so
I will mention only a few salient points.168
Where Virgil begins his epic with references back to the Iliad and
the Odyssey, Ovid allows us to read the Wrst words of his epic in nova
fert animus (‘my mind is carried into new things’) as a suggestion
that, in contrast, his epic will be treading new ground.169 In what
follows Ovid presents us with highly condensed allusions to the
Eclogues, the Georgics, Lucretius, Ennius and the historical tradition,

163 Cf. Hinds (1998) 104–7.

164 Cf. O’Hara (1996b).
165 Cf. Casali (1995); Knox (1995) 21–2 (on Heroides 7); Thomas (2001) pp. xi–xx
and 78–83.
166 Though the process whereby Ovid is inspired by the work of another poet is
not in itself unique: cf. e.g. the Heroides inspired by Prop. 4.3; on this see most
recently Knox (2002) 126.
167 Cf. also Hardie (1993) 1–3. The idea of the ‘epic which contains all genres’ is,
however, an idea commonly associated with Homer (cf. Quint. Inst. 10.1.46), prob-
ably dating to at least the Hellenistic period: cf. F. Williams (1978) 85–9.
168 On this astonishingly dense proem, cf. Kenney (1976), Heyworth (1994), and
the very detailed Wheeler (1999) 8–33.
169 We will of course have to reconstrue the meaning (cf. Wheeler (1999) 8–13).
On the theme of ‘novelty’, cf. Wheeler (1999) 13–14.
214 Matthew Robinson
all to be subsumed in his master epic: so it is no wonder that not just
Apollo or the Muse but the entire pantheon is summoned to the
cause.170 The gods are invoked to ‘bring down a continual song’
(perpetuum deducite . . . carmen); once they have ‘brought it down’,
what may have seemed like an un-Callimachean carmen perpetuum
will of course become an everlasting carmen deductum.171 Here
Ovid trumps Virgil and Callimachus:172 the result will be not
only the new ‘ultimate epic’ but also a monumental Aetia, encom-
passing everything from the creation of the world up to Ovid’s
time and lasting not just ‘for many a year’,173 but for ever. With a
Wnal Xourish, deducite ad mea tempora not only indicates that the
epic will reach right to the present day, but also (again surpassing
the Aeneid) advertises a sequel, tempora being the Wrst word of the
Metamorphoses’ sister piece—if you like my Metamorphoses, you’ll
love my Fasti.174
By the time we have Wnished the Wrst book, we have seen Ovid
feinting in the direction of just about every genre there can be, from
the learned heights of scientiWc and mythic cosmology to elegy175—
and possibly even mime.176 By the time we reach the end of the
poem, we will see Ovid attempt to out-gun Virgil on every level—
more genres, more books, more history, and a poem which includes
not only the Iliad and the Odyssey but also the Aeneid as well. So when
Ovid refers in the Tristia to his epic as maius opus (‘his bigger work’),
we can read this as a comparison not just with Ovid’s previous œuvre,
but Virgil’s too (Tr. 2.1.63). What is more, Ovid will go one step

170 Cf. Wheeler (1999) 13–30.

171 Cf. Wheeler (1999) 25–30.
172 Ovid has noticed Virgil’s glance towards the aitia at Aen. 1.8 Musa, mihi causas
memora (‘Muse, recount to me the causes’). On the aetiology of the Metamorphoses,
cf. Myers (1994).
173 As Callimachus prays for his Aetia at Aet. fr. 9.13–14 Massimilla ‘Come now
and wipe your anointed hands upon my elegies that they may live for many a year’.
174 For this play on tempora, cf. Barchiesi (1991) 6; Hardie (1993) 13; Wheeler
(1999) 24–5.
175 On this see Solodow (1988) 17–25; Harrison (2002) 87–9; Keith (2002).
176 The scene in which the suspicious Juno interrogates the adulterous Jupiter
about the cow in which he has ‘hidden’ Io (Met. 1.601–21) may evoke motifs from
adultery mime, or perhaps Hellenistic comedy. In either case, the inclusion of comic
material is something that Ovid has in common with Homer, that Virgil does not.
Once again, his is the more complete epic.
 Augustan Responses to the Aeneid 215
further than Virgil and actually burn his masterpiece—though, as he
adds with typical pragmatism, a few copies had already been made
(Tr. 1.7.23–4).177

QUAE IAM FINIS ERIT?

So we have seen some of the ways in which Horace, Propertius, and

Ovid respond to the Aeneid as both a poetic and a political text.
However, it is important to remember that their response to the
Aeneid does not take place in a vacuum, but rather in the context of
their responses to other pressures, both internal and external. While
I believe that the Aeneid was an important motivation for all these
poets to assert their poetic identities more strongly, this motivation
may well have been ‘working with’ other factors pushing in the same
direction.178 For example, even without the presence of the Aeneid,
Horace and Propertius may have been looking for new things to do
with lyric and elegy; they may also have been looking for ways to deal
with the more direct pressure being exerted by Augustus.179
Which brings us to the man who gave his name to this period, and
to all these poets, the emperor himself. What was Augustus’ response
to the Aeneid? Was this the poem he wanted? Was it the poem he
expected? Was its national and mythic scope a pleasant surprise, or a
slight disappointment?180 Did he notice any troubling aspects in the
text (like Horace and Ovid), or was it for him the celebratory work it
seems to have been for Propertius?
We hear of a number of Augustus’ responses to the poem,181 but
the one from which we might hope to learn most is his authorization
of the Aeneid’s posthumous publication, possibly against Virgil’s

177 For Virgil’s desire to burn the incomplete Aeneid, cf. Vit. Donat. 39; Gell.
17.10.7; Plin. HN. 7.114. For Ovid actually burning his incomplete Metamorphoses,
cf. Tr. 1.7.15–26.
178 To borrow a phrase from the late Oliver Lyne.
179 Cf. n. 8.
180 The implication of GriYn (2002) 317, who comments that Augustus never did
receive the historical epic he desired.
181 Cf. e.g. Vit. Donat. 31 Hardie; Serv. ad Aen. 6.861; Suet. Aug. 40.5.
216 Matthew Robinson
will.182 But even this simple act is open to a number of interpret-
ations. We could say that it was motivated simply by a love of
literature; we might argue that it suggests that Augustus saw in the
Aeneid a Wtting tribute to his glory; or we could perhaps see this as
the Wrst step in the appropriation of the Aeneid by the regime,183 part
of an Ovidian manoeuvre by Augustus (or was it an Augustan
manoeuvre by Ovid?) that will see Aeneas feature in the Augustan
narrative of monuments such as the Ara Pacis—a ‘retelling’ of the
Aeneid according to the imperial agenda, that suggests that the
Aeneid in fact reXects the imperial agenda.
But whatever we decide about Augustus’ motives, we must all be
grateful for this particular Augustan response.

182 If we believe the tradition at Vit. Donat. 39–41 Hardie; cf. Plin. HN. 7.114.
183 Cf. n. 140.
 8
Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus
Matthew Leigh

. . . this Capaneus of a poet ingag’d his two Immortal

Predecessours, and his success was answerable to his Enterprise.
John Dryden, Dedication to the Aeneid.
This chapter considers the implications of a poet’s identiWcation
with his hero. The poet is Statius and the hero Capaneus, whose
aristeia and death take up much of the tenth book of the Thebaid. At
the heart of this analysis is the striking overlap between the terms
with which Statius narrates this episode and the language of
contemporary literary criticism, as exempliWed among others by the
poet himself, by Martial, by Pliny, and, in particular, by Longinus.1 In
opening up this issue, I wish to challenge certain conventional views
of the poet’s response to the established hierarchies of literary merit
and to question what exactly modern criticism might have at stake in
constantly reminding us that Virgil is indeed best.

This chapter is oVered to Jasper with thanks for his teaching and his example.
1 Reference to Longinus rather than ‘Longinus’ or Anonymous should not be
mistaken for conviction that On the Sublime is the work of the 3rd-cent. ad scholar
Cassius Longinus. Both Roberts (1912) 1–23 and Russell (1964) pp. xxii–xxx argue
convincingly that the manuscript headings ‘Dionysius Longinus’ and ‘Dionysius or
Longinus’ represent a Byzantine scholar’s best guess at the likely authorship of a work
of the 1st cent. ad, whose author was at that point already unknown. Contrast
Mazzucchi (1992) pp. xxvii–xxxiv, who attempts to demonstrate that Dionysius
Longinus is the name of an otherwise unknown critic of the Augustan period;
Heath (1999), who argues that Cassius Longinus is indeed the author. My analysis
of the Thebaid in terms of the sublime overlaps signiWcantly with the excellent Delarue
(2000), esp. 18–35, 83–5, 195–7.
218 Matthew Leigh

L I T E R ARY HIE R ARC HIE S AN D TH E

D I V I N E AU T H O R

Roman writers characteristically contemplate the relationship of

their compositions to those of their predecessors in metaphors
of competition: if the process of imitatio can be described in terms
of reverential devotion to a model, that of aemulatio is associated
with a considerably more agonistic approach.2 This much is familiar;
so too is the modern critical practice which assumes a conscious
process of imitation and emulation in a given Latin text and sets out
to describe the relationship of the text to its model in just these
terms. In Statian studies, this practice is perhaps best exempliWed by
Kytzler’s Wne article on imitatio and aemulatio in the Thebaid;3 it is
also central to the somewhat comical attempts of David Vessey and
Gordon Williams to demonstrate that Statius graciously declines
the temptation in any way to rival the serene majesty of the Aeneid.4
The approach which I wish to adopt in this chapter is rather diVerent.
I propose to trace not the process of imitation and emulation in the
Thebaid but its rhetoric. The Wrst task therefore is to open up certain
fault-lines in Statius’ language of deference; the second to relate these

2 For aemulari in the sense of rivalry with one’s model, see Quint. Inst. 1.2.21–6,
10.5.5; Plin. Ep. 7.30.5, cf. Lucr. 3.3–6. For a less competitive sense to aemulari, see
Hor. Carm. 4.2.1; Plin. Ep. 1.5.12–13, 4.8.4; Quint. Inst. 10.2.17; Gell. NA 2.18.7 and
13.27[26].2. For the capacity of aemulari to express ØEŁÆØ, ºF, and ŁE,
see Fraenkel (1957) 436 n. 2. Kroll (1924) 139–78 is fundamental for the topic as a
whole. See also Guillemin (1924); Russell (1979).
3 Kytzler (1969).
4 Vessey (1973) 1 is especially revealing: ‘As soon as it appeared, the Aeneid stood
supreme, its pre-eminence apparently beyond challenge or dispute . . . The Wrst
century of the Christian era produced four substantial epic poems: Lucan’s Bellum
Civile, Valerius’ Argonautica, Statius’ Thebaid and Silius’ Punica. Lucan attempted,
rashly and unsuccessfully, to break free from the Virgilian tradition and to create
a new style of epic. His aim, at least implicitly, was to contest the primacy of the
Aeneid. . . . The other three poets, writing some twenty years later, recognised the
futility of Lucan’s aim; all accepted Virgil as their master and the Aeneid as the perfect
exemplar of their genre, to be imitated and worshipped, but never equalled. Their
realism, which was proved in the event, should not, however, blind us to the merits of
those who willingly accepted a position in the second rank.’ Cf. Vessey (1982) 558–9,
572–3 and (1996) 24; G. Williams (1978) 150 and (1986); A. Hardie (1983) 62. For a
catalogue of pejorative judgements on Statius, see Ahl (1986) 2804–10.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 219
to episodes in which the characters of the Thebaid actively perform
those things which Statius does—or claims not to do—in metaphor.
If the psyche which the poet presents to us in the Thebaid is exam-
ined in these terms, it may be possible to see quite why Dryden saw
in him not a contented member of poetry’s little regiments
but rather a Capaneus laying siege to the poetic heaven of his
divine master.5
The advertisement for an epic with which Virgil opens the third
Georgic depicts the coming Aeneid as a games, an agon held in
honour of Augustus, and the poet himself as victor;6 the advance
judgement oVered by Propertius proclaims the poem something
positively greater than the Iliad.7 If the judgement on the Aeneid of
Quintilian stops just short of putting it on a par with Homer, it makes
clear that all other writers will feel bound to obey the command with
which Propertius opens.8 The judgement of Quintilian also attests to
two further phenomena typical of the Wrst-century ad reception
of Virgil: Wrst, Ennius is now conclusively displaced as Rome’s second
Homer;9 second, Virgil enjoys in Roman culture the same sacral
trappings as Brink traces for Homer in his study of the Hellenistic
worship of the poet.10 Where Homer received cult at Homerea in

5 For other sceptical or nuanced responses to Statian deference, see Henderson

(1991) esp. 38–9; P. Hardie (1993) 110–11; Malamud (1995) esp. 23–5; Hinds (1998)
83–98.
6 Verg. G. 3. 17–22 with Mynors ad loc.
7 Prop. 2.34.65–6 cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite, Grai! j nescio quid maius
nascitur Iliade.
8 Quint. Inst. 10.1.85–6 idem nobis per Romanos quoque auctores ordo ducendus
est. itaque ut apud illos Homerus, sic apud nos Vergilius auspicatissimum dederit
exordium, omnium eius generis poetarum Graecorum nostrorumque haud dubie prox-
imus. utar enim uerbis isdem quae ex Afro Domitio iuuenis excepi, qui mihi interroganti
quem Homero crederet maxime accedere ‘secundus’ inquit ‘est Vergilius, propior tamen
primo quam tertio.’ et hercule ut illi naturae caelesti atque immortali cesserimus, ita
curae et diligentiae uel ideo in hoc plus est, quod ei fuit magis laborandum, et quantum
eminentibus uincimur, fortasse aequalitate pensamus. ceteri omnes longe sequentur. For
cedere as deference to a literary exemplar, see also Cic. Tusc. 1.5 nam Galbam
Africanum Laelium doctos fuisse traditum est, studiosum autem eum, qui is aetate
anteibat, Catonem, post uero Lepidum Carbonem Gracchos, inde ita magnos nostram ad
aetatem, ut non multum aut nihil omnino Graecis cederetur; Columella, Rust. 1 praef.
30, nam neque [ille] ipse Cicero territus cesserat tonantibus Demostheni Platonique . . .
9 Lucil. fr. 1189 Marx and Hor. Epist. 2.1.50 dub Ennius alter Homerus; Jer. Ep.
121.10.5 proclaims Virgil alter Homerus apud nos.
10 Brink (1972).
220 Matthew Leigh
Argos, Chios, Ios, Alexandria, and Smyrna, Silius bought the tomb
of Virgil near Puteoli and worshipped there annually, and
Statius himself describes a visit to the temple of Maro (Maronei . . .
templi).11 Where Quintilian pays tribute to ‘that celestial and
immortal nature’ (illi naturae caelesti atque immortali),12 Seneca
assumes that the proper ambition of Lucilius’ topothesia of Mt Etna
will not risk the irreverence of challenging Virgil,13 and Columella
attributes his audacity (audendum) in composing a Wfth Georgic to
the inspirational divine force (numen) of one deserving the utmost
reverence (uatis maxime uenerandi).14
Rome of the Wrst century therefore constructed the Aeneid as
something on a par with the Iliad and its poet as one worthy of the
religious reverence which the Greeks felt for the divine Homer.15 The
same rhetoric is also present in two passages of the Thebaid. First,
10.445–8:
uos quoque sacrati, quamuis mea carmina surgant
inferiore lyra, memores superabitis annos.
forsitan et comites non aspernabitur umbras
Euryalus Phrygiique admittet gloria Nisi.
You too are consecrated, though my songs rise for a less lofty lyre, and will
go down the unforgetful years. Perhaps too Euryalus will not spurn his
comrade shades, and the glory of Phrygian Nisus will not refuse you.
Second, 12.816–17:
uiue, precor; nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta,
sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora.
Live, I pray, and do not rival the divine Aeneid, but follow from far oV and
ever adore its footsteps.
The address to Hopleus and Dymas as uos quoque sacrati in the Wrst
passage grants them a sacral status which makes sense only in terms

11 Mart. 11.48 and 11.49, cf. Stat. Silv. 4.4.53–5.

12 Quint. Inst. 10.1.86, cf. 10.1.81 on Plato’s eloquendi facultate diuina quadam et
Homerica and 10.2.18 on Cicero as caelestis huius in dicendo uiri.
13 Sen. Ep. 79.7.
14 Columella, Rust. 10 praef. 3–4, cf. 1 praef. 30. See also 10.433–6 on Virgil as
siderei uatis.
15 Quint. Inst. 10.1.46 looks to the Greek tradition: igitur, ut Aratus ab Ioue
incipiendum putat, ita nos rite coepturi ab Homero uidemur.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 221
of their status as epigoni of Virgil’s Nisus and Euryalus; the second
passage dubs the Aeneid divine.
The constant reference to the divinity of Virgil by those who wrote
in his form is the most vivid evidence of the burden borne by
the epicists of the Wrst century ad. If Virgil saved Rome from the
inferiority complex of never having an epic poet to put alongside
Homer, he bequeathed to his successors the terrible psychological
aZiction of never being able to come up to his mark. This is the
picture which emerges from a Wrst survey of the evidence. Yet on
closer examination it is possible to detect the stirrings of dissent even
amidst the expressions of complaisant acquiescence.
The most obvious example of resistance to the cult of Virgil is
Lucan. Statius himself records the boast of Lucan that he had
composed the Pharsalia ‘before the age at which Virgil wrote his
Culex’.16 There is an unruly self-conWdence here even if it reveals itself
only through reversal of a discourse framed to give expression to the
dominance of the poet he seeks to depose. For Vessey it is easy to
acknowledge the rebellion of Lucan because, in the same breath, he
can assure us that it was undertaken ‘rashly and unsuccessfully’. The
poet who is the great embodiment of the western tradition sits aloft
in his ‘serene pre-eminence’, untroubled by the murmurs down
below. The modern critic who buys so enthusiastically into
the rhetoric of Virgil as a Jupiter amongst poets is disarmingly
unconcerned to disguise the political underpinnings of his aesthetic
judgement: could he ever Wnd so much to admire in Virgil had he not
Wrst identiWed him as the poet of monarchical order, the West, and
even the Christian era? Contrast Lucan’s own most explicit challenge
to the Aeneid at Pharsalia 9.980–6:

o sacer et magnus uatum labor! omnia fato

eripis et populis donas mortalibus aeuum.
inuidia sacrae, Caesar, ne tangere famae;
nam, siquid Latiis fas est promittere Musis,
quantum Zmyrnaei durabunt uatis honores,
uenturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra
uiuet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aeuo.

16 Stat. Silv. 2.7.73–4.

222 Matthew Leigh
O great and holy work of the poets! You snatch everything from death and
give immortality to mortal peoples. Do not be touched, Caesar, by envy of
holy fame! For, if it is right for the Latin Muses to promise anything, as
long as the honours of the poet of Smyrna shall endure, coming men will
read me and you; our Pharsalia will live and we will be condemned to
darkness by no age.
Caesar picks his way through the ruins of Troy, prays to the gods of
his ancestors and of his Aeneas (di cinerum . . . j Aeneaeque mei),
oVers pious incense (pia tura) and proclaims himself the most
glorious descendant of the race of Iulus (gentis Iuleae . . . clarissi-
mus . . . j . . . nepos).17 At this point where we are most starkly con-
fronted with Virgil’s complicity in the Augustan appropriation of
the Trojan myth, Lucan announces the signiWcance of his own
achievement.18 His references to the priestly uates, to holy fame,
and to the Latin Muses engage directly with the rhetoric of the cult
of the Aeneid; the reference to the bard of Smyrna perhaps alludes
to Virgil’s achievement of the same holy rites the Hellenistic period
oVered to Homer;19 the claim to the status of the Roman counter-
part of the Greek Homer silently deposes Virgil from the throne
which he has hitherto occupied.20 Lucan’s self-promotion is still
unable to express itself save through the negation of the language
developed for the deiWcation of his rival, but this is a scene of
consummate daring. Its eVectiveness is hugely enhanced by the
awareness it displays of the political impulse behind judgements of
aesthetic worth.
Statius, Silvae 2.7.79–80 concedes to Lucan the victory he claimed:
‘the Aeneid itself will worship you as you sing to the Latins’ (ipsa te
Latinis j Aeneis uenerabitur canentem). Silvae 2.7 is a tribute designed
to please Lucan’s widow Polla Argentaria and the claim it makes for

17 Luc. 9.990–6.
18 My remarks here owe much to Zwierlein (1986) esp. 470–2, and particularly to
Quint (1993) 3–8.
19 For the cult of Homer at Smyrna, see Brink (1972) 549 citing Cic. Arch. 19 and
Strab. Geog. 646 C. For Homer ‘the bard of Smyrna’ paired with Virgil ‘the bard of
Mantua’, cf. Sil. Pun. 8.592–4 and Stat. Silv. 4.2.8–10.
20 See also Anth. Lat. 225 S-B Mantua, da ueniam, fama sacrata perenni: j sit fas
Thessaliam post Simoenta legi. The manuscript title for this epigram Caesaris de libris
Lucani is fascinating but the same verses are also quoted in the Paris. 8209 manuscript
of Probus’ commentary on Virgil and are there attributed to ‘Alcimii’.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 223
the Pharsalia is one which it may be all too easy to dismiss as the
empty expression of the encomiast.21 This, I suggest, would be too
facile a response. If Statius in the Thebaid studiously avoids making
the same claim for himself, it is through the very studiousness of his
evasion that we can perceive quite how much his ongoing preoccu-
pation with the sacred supremacy attributed to the Aeneid
rankles with him. Consider, for instance, the manner of Statius’
whole envoi to the epic at 12.810–19, of which verses 816–17 were
quoted above:

durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes,

o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos
Thebai? iam certe praesens tibi Fama benignum
strauit iter coepitque nouam monstrare futuris.
iam te magnanimus dignatur noscere Caesar,
Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuuentus.
uiue, precor; nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta,
sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora.
mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila liuor,
occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores.
Will you endure through time to come, O my Thebaid, for twelve years
object of my wakeful toil, and will you survive your master and be read? Of
a truth already present Fame has paved a friendly road for you, and begun to
hold you up, young as you are, to future ages. Already great-hearted
Caesar deigns to know you, and the youth of Italy eagerly learns and recounts
your verse. O live, I pray! and do not rival the divine Aeneid, but follow
afar and ever venerate its footsteps. Soon, if any envy as yet overclouds
you, it will pass away, and, after I am gone, your well-won honours will be
duly paid.
As Horace in the sphragis to the Epistles addresses his poetic book as a
young slave eager to escape the constraints of his master’s house and
expose himself to the corrupting inXuence of the city, so here Statius is
dominus to the Thebaid as he sends it forth into the world.22 This

21 Note how Mart. 7.23 refers to the eVorts of Lucan’s widow to promote his
memory but still insists on relegating the poet to second place: Phoebe, ueni, sed
quantus eras cum bella tonanti j ipse dares Latiae plectra secunda lyrae. j quid tanta pro
luce precer? tu, Polla, maritum j saepe colas et se sentiat ille coli. Friedlaender’s
interpretation of plectra secunda as ‘als dem nächsten nach Virgil’ must be correct.
22 Hor. Epist. 1.20.
224 Matthew Leigh
artiWcial distinction between author and text is intriguing here be-
cause it becomes incumbent on Statius to instruct the poem he
himself has composed not to rival the divine Aeneid.23 Moreover, by
telling his text to worship the footsteps of Virgil’s poem and to follow
them from afar (longe sequere), he appeals to it to act in such a manner
as to leave unchallenged the hierarchy of literary merit laid down by
Quintilian at 10.1.86 (ceteri omnes longe sequentur).24 Implicit in all
this therefore is the confession that some part of the Thebaid, that is of
Statius himself, is tempted to do just that which it is urged not to do.
Compare Silvae 4.7.25–8 where the tribute to Vibius Maximus again
attributes to Statius’ text just that ambition against which it must be
warned in the envoi:
quippe te Wdo monitore nostra
Thebais multa cruciata lima
temptat audaci Wde Mantuanae
gaudia famae.
Since with you for trusty counsellor, my Thebaid, tortured by endless
polishing, attempts with audacious strings the joys of Mantuan renown.
Is the servile punishment of cruciWxion imposed on the Thebaid in
order to ready it to try for the joys of Mantuan renown? Or does it try
for those joys in spite of such punishment? Either way the charac-
teristic of the Thebaid which emerges from this passage is the literary
critical category developed by Latin as an equivalent to the Greek
º, the audaci Wde of the poem corresponding to the audacia of its
composer.25 From these two passages therefore, we see a text uneasily

23 Cf. Stat. Silv. 2.7.35 which reverses the hierarchy: Baetim, Mantua, prouocare
noli. For a poet praised for deciding not to rival one he could easily outdo, see the
praises of Cerrinius at Mart. 8. 18, esp. 5–8: sic Maro nec Calabri temptavit carmina
Flacci, j Pindaricos nosset cum superare modos, j et Vario cessit Romani laude cothurni, j
cum posset tragico fortius ore loqui. SchöVel (2002) ad loc. identiWes tempto/tento as
the intensive form of tendo and argues that it therefore Wts naturally Wrst with any
reference to stringed instruments, then to carmen in general. He cites Buc. Eins. 1.23;
Hor. Ars P. 405, Epist. 2.1.257–8; Luc. 6.578; Ov. Pont. 2.5.25; Porph. at Hor. Sat.
1.10.46; Prop. 2.3.19; Tac. Ann. 14.15.4. These passages are clearly important but
none parallels the further sense introduced by Martial. Note that Lactantius at Stat.
Theb. 12.816 glosses tempta as prouoces.
24 See also Plin. Ep. 7.30.4–5 for the writer happy to imitate and follow his model.
25 For º, see [Longinus], Subl. 2.2 and 38.5 and [Aelius Aristides] Rhetorica 1. 142 (ed.
Schmid); for audacia, see Brink at Hor. Ars P. 10 and TLL i. 2. 1243. 8–19 and i. 2. 1248. 3–21.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 225
and inadequately distinguished from the mentality of its composer,
a text marked out by its audacity, a text which has to be restrained
from making challenge to the divinity of the Aeneid. Is it really
so strange that Dryden should have seen in Statius a ‘Capaneus of
a poet’?

S U B L I M E P O E T, S U B L I M E H E RO

Capaneus is a giant, a Titan.26 As early as book 3, he is likened to a

Centaur or a Cyclops,27 and expresses contempt for augury, claim-
ing that it was fear which Wrst created the gods;28 the book 4
description of his armour stresses the giant protruding from the
top of his helmet;29 when he kills the sacred snake in book 5, it is
with the positive hope that he may have slain a darling of the
gods;30 in the boxing match of book 6, he is as big as the giant
Tityos as he attempts to kill the divinely trained Alcidamas.31 Yet it
is in book 10 that his titanic ambition is most clearly perceived and
this is essential to the problems to be addressed in this argument.
For Capaneus regards his assault as a challenge to the truth of
stories about the gods and, at 10.847, he resolves to test the value of
the sacriWce of Menoeceus and the truthfulness of Apollo’s utter-
ances;32 at 10.874–5 he rejects the mythical story of Amphion’s

26 Statius develops a theme familiar from the Greek tradition: Aesch. Sept. 424–5
has the messenger dub Capaneus a giant; Eur. Phoen. 1130–3 describes the giant on
the shield of Capaneus. For Capaneus as giant, see also Franchet d’Espèrey (1999)
197–203, 333–4.
27 Stat. Theb. 3.604–5; Klinnert (1970) 15–17.
28 Stat. Theb. 3.661 primus in orbe deos fecit timor; Klinnert (1970) 19. Snijder ad
loc. compares Lucr. 5.1161–3 and suggests an Epicurean tone to the hero’s claim. For
Epicurus as giant, see below, nn. 64–5.
29 Stat. Theb. 4.175–6; Klinnert (1970) 27; Harrison (1992).
30 Stat. Theb. 5.567–8; Klinnert (1970) 31.
31 Stat. Theb. 6.753–5; Klinnert (1970) 33.
32 Stat. Theb. 10.847 ‘experiar, quid sacra iuuent, an falsus Apollo’. For this reso-
lution cf. Lycaon at Ov. Met. 1.222–3 ‘experiar, deus hic, discrimine aperto, j an sit
mortalis; nec erit dubitabile uerum’.
226 Matthew Leigh
building of Thebes;33 and Wnally at 10.899–906 he challenges Bac-
chus, Hercules, and Jupiter to defend their city. He is also consist-
ently described through similes and metaphors which relate him to
the myth of gigantomachy, for instance at 10.849–52 and 915–17,
where he is likened Wrst to Otus and Ephialtes storming heaven,34
then to Iapetus the Titan.35 His assault on Thebes is not just an
expression of his heroic etiquette, it is also a vehicle for his militant
rationalism.
The crucial precursor for the titanic hero in Roman epic
is the Virgilian Mezentius.36 Where Capaneus is the contemptor
superum, Mezentius is the contemptor divum;37 where Capaneus
sees his boxing match against Alcidamas as the opportunity for
a perverted blood-sacriWce, Mezentius contemplates dressing his
son in the armour of Aeneas and making him a ghastly distortion
of the tropaeum;38 where Capaneus uses Thebes as the springboard
for a notional assault on heaven, the distraught Mezentius enters

33 Stat. Theb. 10.874–5 ‘hi faciles carmenque inbelle secuti, j hi, mentita diu The-
barum fabula, muri?’
34 For Otus and Ephialtes as Wgures of ‘impious presumption’, see [Longinus],
Subl. 8.2 with Russell ad loc. See also Lactantius at Stat. Theb. 10.850 who character-
izes them by their audacia.
35 See also Stat. Theb. 11.7–8 gratantur superi, Phlegrae ceu fessus anhelet j proelia et
Encelado fumantem impresserit Aetnen.
36 For Capaneus and Mezentius, see Eissfeldt (1904) 414; Klinnert (1970) 18, 43–5;
Thome (1979) 97, 350–1. For Mezentius as Titan, see Thome (1979) 83–100, 155–6;
La Penna (1980) esp. 13–15 on links to Polyphemus and the Orion simile at Aen.
10.763–8; GotoV (1984) esp. 199–200; P. Hardie (1986) 97, 155–6. For what distin-
guishes the two characters, see Klinnert (1970) 18, 43–4, 77; Franchet d’Espèrey
(1999) 370–1; Delarue (2000) 83–4.
37 Verg. Aen. 7.648 contemptor diuum, 8.7 contemptorque deum, cf. Stat. Theb.
3.602, 9.550 superum contemptor. Note also Aesch. Sept. 441 on Capaneus as
Łf I ø—if the Statian Capaneus is like Mezentius, this is in part because
Mezentius himself owes much to the Capaneus of the Greek tradition. See also ten
Kate (1955) 112.
38 For Mezentius and the tropaeum, see Verg. Aen. 10.774–6, cf. 11.1–16, where
Aeneas performs the rite in the proper manner. For blood sacriWce in the boxing
match, see Stat. Theb. 6.734–6 ‘date tot iuuenum de milibus unum j . . . j . . . quem fas
demittere leto’ where the language is reminiscent of Neptune’s demand ‘unum
pro multis dabitur caput’ at Verg. Aen. 5.815. For a similar concept, see Valerius
Flaccus 4.148–53. Both passages respond to Verg. Aen. 5.461–84 and the substitu-
tion sacriWce which averts bloodshed at the close of the contest between Dares and
Entellus.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 227
his Wnal battle with the promise not to spare any of the gods;39
where Capaneus proclaims the ‘provident omens of his right
hand and the terrifying rages when his blade is drawn’ (prouida
dextrae j omina et horrendi stricto mucrone furores),40 Mezentius
calls on the gods which are his right hand and the spear which he
brandishes (dextra mihi deus et telum, quod missile libro, j nunc
adsint).41
No one will suggest that Mezentius and Capaneus are Wgures of
pious and dutiful virtue. Yet neither exists simply to furnish his poem
with anything as crude as a villain, and, even amidst each character’s
most impious excesses, there are traces of a deeper nobility of spirit.
Consider, for instance, the strict heroic etiquette to which Mezentius
adheres in the thick of the Wght, deigning neither to attack an enemy
in Xight nor to win by trickery (atque idem fugientem haud est
dignatus Oroden j sternere nec iacta caecum dare cuspide uulnus; j
obuius aduersoque occurrit seque uiro uir j contulit, haud furto melior
sed fortibus armis).42 Capaneus likewise refuses to participate in the
night attack with which book 10 opens and deigns neither to Wght by
trickery nor to take advantage of divine aid (haud dignatus in hostem
j ire dolo superosque sequi).43 When, by contrast, Capaneus leads the
daylight assault on Thebes, he does so glad that the light will provide
his valour (uirtus) with a witness.44 Here too, therefore, Capaneus is
the spiritual heir of Mezentius but now in a potentially more positive
sense. This will bear deeper analysis.

39 Verg. Aen. 10.880 ‘nec diuum parcimus ulli’. Harrison (1991) ad loc. and Thome
(1979) 155–6 and n. 42 render parcimus as ‘show regard for’ and point with La Cerda
and Conington-Nettleship to Polyphemus at Hom. Od. 9.277–8 P
 i Kªg ˜Øe
Ł Iºı Ø
  j h F hŁ æø. The parallel is signiWcant but
primarily for the exacerbation which the sentiment undergoes in the Virgilian
version. Where Polyphemus is in a position of power and must only think of the
dangers of divine retribution, Mezentius is wholly doomed and, in his rage both
against the hero who killed his son and the gods who allowed it, threatens all alike.
40 Stat. Theb. 10.485–6. See also 9.548–50 ‘ades o mihi, dextera, tantum j tu praesens
bellis et ineuitabile numen, j te uoco, te solam superum contemptor adoro’.
41 Verg. Aen. 10.773–4. For this mode of blasphemy, Harrison (1991) ad loc. cites
Parthenopaeus at Aesch. Sept. 529–30 and Idas at Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.466–8.
42 Verg. Aen. 10.732–5.
43 Stat. Theb. 10.258–9.
44 Stat. Theb. 10.482–6. This passage is well discussed in Franchet d’Espèrey
(1999) 373.
228 Matthew Leigh
The refusal of trickery in warfare is a standard aspect of the Achil-
lean ethos and, in turn, of Roman self-fashioning, and is of no
particular interest here.45 Likewise hostility to night attack.46 When,
however, Capaneus refuses to proWt from the help of the gods, the
mentality which he demonstrates is one more particular to his type.
A signiWcant parallel has already been seen in the tendency, which
both he and Mezentius exhibit, to acknowledge no god other than
their own right hand. Without doubt, there is something here of the
Aeschylean Capaneus, who proudly proclaims that he will sack Thebes
whether the gods like it or not (ŁF  ªaæ Łº KŒæØ ºØ j
ŒÆd c Łº Ø, Sept. 427–8).47 Yet an even closer model might
be the Sophoclean Ajax, who dooms himself by his determination to
win glory without the aid of the gods,48 and indeed Sullivan identiWes
precisely this aspect of the tragic Ajax as the model for Mezentius’
refusal of the divine.49 The same scholar, however, argues that the
noble resistance of Mezentius in book 10 of the Aeneid owes much to
the rather diVerent Homeric Ajax, and observes in particular that the
similes likening the Etruscan king to a cliV battered by the sea, a boar
at bay, and a lion assailing a goat or a deer correspond to the Iliad 17
comparisons of Ajax to lion, boar, and wooded headland.50 And it is
the same book which draws from Ajax a famously noble complaint
which has much in common with Capaneus’ refusal to join a night
attack and demand for daylight as the proper place in which to display
his valour: struggling to rescue the corpse of Patroclus and enveloped
in an impenetrable mist, Ajax breaks down and calls on Zeus to send
light even if he is to slay him in it.51

45 See the material collected in Leigh (2004) 24–56.

46 Polyb. 36.9.9–11; Livy 42.47.4–9; Plut. Alex. 31.11–12, cf. Curt. 4.13.8–9 and
Arr. Anab. 3.10.1–2.
47 For the same notion, see Hyg. Fab. 68.2 ibi Capaneus quod contra Iouis uolun-
tatem Thebas se capturum diceret, cum murum ascenderet fulmine est percussus.
48 Soph. Aj. 762–77.
49 Sullivan (1969) esp. 221–2.
50 Sullivan (1969) 220–1 cites Verg. Aen. 10.693–6, 707–16, 723–9, cf. Hom. Il.
17.132–7, 281–5, 746–53.
51 Hom. Il. 17.645–7, cf. [Longinus], Subl. 9.10 Ø ‰ IºŁH e Ł `YÆ ,
P ªaæ B hÆØ (q ªaæ e ÆYÆ F læø ÆØæ), Iºº KØ
c K IæŒfiø
ί c I
æ Æ N P
b ªÆE r
ØÆŁŁÆØ,
Øa ÆF IªÆÆŒH ‹Ø æe c
 IæªE, H ‹Ø ØÆ ÆNEÆØ, ‰ ø B IæB æ
ø KØ ¼%Ø,
Œi ÆPfiH ˘f IØÆØ.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 229
To the A scholion, the hero’s protest against the mist demonstrates
his greatness of mind (ªÆºæø ). Longinus in turn states that
sublimity is the echo of greatness of mind (oł ªÆºæ
I
Æ), and cites as examples of this mode Wrst the noble silence
of Ajax when confronted with Odysseus in the world below, then
the same hero’s protest against the mist and his consequent inability
to turn his valour to any noble end.52 It is therefore signiWcant in this
context to note that the Statian Capaneus is Wrst introduced inter alia
with the observation that he has surpassed by his deeds the
great nobility of his ancestors,53 and that he will later be described
precisely as great-minded (magnanimus).54 In other words, he does
not just reproduce given words and deeds of the Homeric and
Sophoclean Ajax; he is also explicitly described by reference to the
same quality which the later critical tradition takes those words and
deeds to embody. In one signiWcant sense, therefore, Capaneus may
be said to be a sublime hero.
When Longinus states that sublimity is the product of a great
mind, then illustrates this by reference to the words and deeds of
the Homeric Ajax, the Wrst great mind must be that of Homer, for it
is he who is able to imagine and relate the scene. Yet the Wnal proof
of Homer’s greatness of mind is his ability to create heroes who
themselves utter great words and perform great deeds, while it is
the ignoble, indeed comic, character of much of the Odyssey which

52 [Longinus], Subl. 9.2, cf. 9.10.

53 Stat. Theb. 3.600–2.
54 Stat. Theb. 9.547, 11.1. For magnitudo animi and the sublime, see also Delarue
(2000) 19–20 and his discussion of Sen. Tranq. 1.14 rursus ubi se animus cogitationum
magnitudine leuauit, ambitiosus in uerba est altiusque ut spirare ita eloqui gestit et ad
dignitatem rerum exit oratio; oblitus tum legis pressiorisque iudicii sublimius feror et ore
iam non meo. For an alternative interpretation, see Dewar at 9.547 who translates
magnanimus as Homeric ªŁı , compares Catull. 66.26 and Verg. Aen. 1.260
with Austin ad loc., and notes the attribution of the same epithet to a number of
characters and not just Capaneus. See e.g. Stat. Theb. 6.827, cf. Achil. 1.733 for
Tydeus; Theb. 5.653 for Lycurgus, 8.357 and 10.662 for Menoeceus, 10.399 for
Aepytus, 12.795 for Theseus, 12.814 for Domitian. Williams at Stat. Theb. 10.399–
400 observes that magnanimus can mean either ªŁı or ªÆºæø in Latin
but sees the former sense predominating in the Thebaid. Dominik (1994) 30–1 does
not take the issue forward. More sympathetic, though following a diVerent line of
reasoning from my own, is Klinnert (1970) 45–6, cf. Franchet d’Espèrey (1999) 200–1
and n. 80, 372 and n. 147.
230 Matthew Leigh
proves that it is the product of the poet’s decline.55 In this sense,
therefore, given situations may be said to be pregnant with the
potential for sublimity should they Wnd a poet or orator able
to bring them to realization. And since both the Greek oł and
the Latin sublimitas have at root conceptions of loftiness or elevation,
it is perhaps no accident that one type of situation most obviously
pregnant with sublimity is that in which a character either is lofty or
aspires to raise himself aloft by one means or another.56 Two obvious
examples of this from Longinus are the attribution of sublimity to
the Homeric description of the giants’ assault on heaven,57 and the
illustration of Platonic sublimity by reference to Republic 586a, where
the philosopher equates those devoid of wisdom or virtue with the
beasts of the Welds constantly gazing downwards, and implicitly
associates moral greatness with the readiness to turn one’s eyes
upwards to heaven.58
The Platonic contrast between man and beast becomes famous in
antiquity.59 One particularly signiWcant version is to be found at
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.82–6. Here the poet describes how the divine
creator made the beasts to stare at the ground (pronaque cum spectent
animalia cetera terram), but gave man a face made to look aloft and
bade him turn his eyes to heaven and lift his gaze to the stars
(os homini sublime dedit caelumque uidere j iussit et erectos ad sidera
tollere uultus).60 The implication is that the os sublime, the face made
to look aloft, is designed by the gods in order to facilitate in man the
sublime deed which distinguishes him from the beasts. Elsewhere,

55 [Longinus], Subl. 9.11–15 discusses the Odyssey as the product of Homer’s

decline. But note 9.14 for what grandeur remains in the form of storms and giants:
ºªø
b ÆF PŒ KغºÆØ H K fiB  ˇ
ı fi Æ Øø ŒÆd H æd e
˚ŒºøÆ ŒÆ Øø ¼ººø, Iººa ªBæÆ
تFÆØ, ªBæÆ
 ‹ø  ˇ
æı.
56 Roberts (1912) 209–10 and Mazzucchi (1992) pp. xviii–xix are helpful in this
context. Roberts points to [Longinus], Subl. 1.3 on the pointlessness of demonstrat-
ing ‰ IŒæ ŒÆd K%
Ø ºªø Kd a oł while Mazzucchi refers to the language
and imagery of elevation at e.g. [Longinus], Subl. 35.2–4 and 36. For the enduring
connection between the Latin adjective sublimis and ideas of height, see Brink at Hor.
Ars P. 165.
57 [Longinus], Subl. 8.2.
58 [Longinus], Subl. 13.1, cf. 35.2.
59 Pl. Tim. 90a, 91e; Xen. Mem. 1.4.11; Epict. 1.6.19; Cic. Leg. 1.26, Nat. D. 2.140;
Sall. Cat. 1.1; Vitr. De Arch. 2.1.2; Sen. Dial. 8.5.4, Ep. 92.30, 94.56.
60 Cf. Sen. Dial. 8.5.4 sublime caput.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 231
however, the eyes raised to heaven as an expression of sublime
ambition are not so much a part of the divine plan as a direct
challenge to the power of the gods. This is clearly the case at Lucretius
1.62–79, the famous account of the triumph of Epicurus. Here
religion lowers over mankind from above (humana ante oculos
foede cum uita iaceret j in terris oppressa graui sub religione j quae
caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat j horribili super aspectu mortalibus
instans) and it is the heroic achievement of Epicurus to have dared to
look up and challenge the authority of the divine (primum Graius
homo mortalis tollere contra j est oculos ausus primusque obsistere
contra). Undeterred by threats from above, he bursts through
the portals and then wanders in his mind beyond the Xaming walls
of the universe (Xammantia moenia mundi), bringing back as booty a
true account of all physical relations. Religion which started aloft
Wnishes cast down at our feet.61
The reading tollere . . . j . . . oculos is that found in the manuscript
tradition; Nonius quotes the alternative tendere and this has been
favoured by some; inasmuch, however, as Epicurus cannot direct his
eyes against religion save by lifting them aloft, both tollere and tendere
eVectively express the same idea.62 Conte, who makes this passage the
key to his famous account of the sublime reader in Lucretius, adopts
the former reading in an early version of his study, but opts for the
second in its republished form.63 Epicurus casts his eyes aloft; his
only weapon is his mind; but he swiftly becomes a triumphant
general, sacking the enemy and bringing home the truth. This
is the dominant metaphor of the passage. Yet Lucretius himself
retrospectively introduces a further Wguration and one which has
special signiWcance for one whose only foe is religion. For in book 5
he acknowledges the potential anxiety, that Epicurus may seem like

61 For the mind wandering beyond the walls of the universe and the sublime, see
[Longinus], Subl. 35.2–3, esp. 35.3
Øæ fi B Łøæ Æ ŒÆd
ØÆ Æ B IŁæø 
KغfiB P
 › Æ Œ IæŒE, Iººa ŒÆd f F æØ ººŒØ ‹æı
KŒÆ ıØ ƃ K ØÆØ. Russell ad loc. notes the parallel with Lucretius and also cites
Arist. [Mund.] 1 and Sen. Dial. 8.5.6. See also Conte (1991) 29–30.
62 tollere MSS, tendere Non. p. 662 L. The manuscript text is retained by Munro,
Bailey, Ernout-Robin; the Nonian reading is preferred by Lachmann (1882) 21–2;
Kenney (1974) 22 n. 4 (on p. 137).
63 Conte (1966) 356; (1991) 9–11.
232 Matthew Leigh
a giant, and that those who use their reason to disturb the walls of
the universe may suVer punishment for their monstrous crime
(proptereaque putes ritu par esse Gigantum j pendere eos poenas
immani pro scelere omnis j qui ratione sua disturbent moenia
mundi).64 The philosopher-hero is therefore the leader of a new
race of giants; but this time it is the giants who win.65
Attention has already been drawn to the many occasions in the
Thebaid on which Capaneus is Wgured as a giant or a Titan, and it is
in his reproduction of their great aspirations that a further aspect of
his sublimity may be seen.66 For Capaneus starts loftier than all his
peers and he will end his career, much like the giant on his helmet,
pursuing ever greater and more impossible heights.67 As he launches
his great assault on Thebes, he tosses a spear aloft (iaculum excusso
rotat in sublime lacerto);68 earthly matters lose all interest for him
(iam sordent terrena uiro);69 he hymns his own lofty valour (ardua
uirtus);70 and rises in triumph onto the captive walls (alterno captiua
in moenia gressu j surgit ouans),71 until Wnally he can look down on
the city from above (utque petita diu celsus fastigia supra j eminuit
trepidamque adsurgens desuper urbem j uidit) and stand amidst the
stars (mediis . . . in astris) and in the middle height of heaven
(in media uertigine mundi).72 Statius Wgures his hero as a giant, and
the gods themselves fear him as a giant.73 Jupiter alone stands Wrm
and unconcerned,74 and can even aVord himself some amusement at

64 Lucr. 5.117–19. On this point, see Salemme (1980) 9–21, esp. 18.
65 Cf. [Arist.] Mund. 1.1: since it is impossible physically to enter heaven as the
foolish giants once planned, ŒÆŁæ ƒ I  Kı `ºfiø
ÆØ, the soul,
through philosophy and taking the intellect as its guide, has done so instead.
66 My analysis here has much in common with Delarue (2000) 31, 83–5.
67 For the height of Capaneus, see Stat. Theb. 4.165 pedes et toto despectans uertice
bellum, cf. 6.731 immanis cerni immanisque timeri, 10.872 ingenti . . . umbra,
11.14–15 immensaque membra iacentis j spectant. For hugeness as a property of
epic verse, see Petron. Sat. 115.2 Eumolpum sedentem membranaeque ingenti uersus
ingerentem, 118.6 belli ciuilis ingens opus quisquis attigerit, 124.2 cum haec Eumolpos
ingenti uolubilitate uerborum eVudisset.
68 Stat. Theb. 10.745.
69 Stat. Theb. 10.837.
70 Stat. Theb. 10.845.
71 Stat. Theb. 10.848–9.
72 Stat. Theb. 10.870–2, 898, 918–19.
73 Stat. Theb. 10.849–52, 915–20
74 Stat. Theb. 10.897 non tamen haec turbant pacem Iouis.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 233
his challenger’s ravings;75 the thunderbolt soon sees oV any further
resistance.76
So much for the hero. What of his poet? Here, the crucial lines are
the extraordinary invocation to the Muses with which Statius intro-
duces the Wnal stages of the aristeia at Thebaid 10.827–36:

hactenus arma, tubae, ferrumque et uulnera: sed nunc

comminus astrigeros Capaneus tollendus in axis.
non mihi iam solito uatum de more canendum;
maior ab Aoniis poscenda amentia lucis:
mecum omnes audete deae! siue ille profunda
missus nocte furor, Capaneaque signa secutae
arma Iouem contra Stygiae rapuere sorores.
seu uirtus egressa modum, seu gloria praeceps,
seu magnae data fata neci, seu laeta malorum
principia et blandae superum mortalibus irae.
So far of arms and trumpets, of swords and wounds I tell; but now Capaneus
must be raised high to do battle with the star-bearing vault. No more may
I sing in the accustomed way of poets; a mightier madness must be
summoned from the Aonian groves. Dare with me, goddesses all: whether
that madness of his was sent from the deepest night and the Stygian sisters
dogged the banner of Capaneus and forced him to the assault against Jove,
or whether it was valour that brooked no bounds, or headlong love of glory,
or utter destruction’s appointed doom, or success that goes before disaster
and heaven luring mortals to ruin in its wrath.
A particularly striking aspect of the work of Longinus is his emphasis
on those episodes in which the poet participates in, identiWes himself
with, the deeds of his heroes: Homer enters into forms of heroic
greatness along with his characters (N a æøØŒa ªŁ
ıÆ Ø KŁ Ø), blows on the struggles like Zeus of the winds
(hæØ ıE E IªHØ), and rages as his hero rages
(Æ ÆØ);77 Euripides takes great pains to render madness and

75 Stat. Theb. 10.907–10, esp. ipse furentem risit.

76 Stat. Theb. 10.927–30. For the sublime orator’s words identiWed with
the thunderbolt, see [Longinus], Subl. 1.4, 12.4, cf. Cic. Orat. 234, Att. 15.1a.2;
Columella, Rust. 1 praef. 30; Plut. Per. 8.
77 [Longinus], Subl. 9.10–11. For what is unusual about this conception, see
Bühler (1964) 42–4.
234 Matthew Leigh
desire (
 Æıd Ł, Æ Æ  ŒÆd æøÆ , KŒæƪfiø
BÆØ),
and the soul of the writer rides the chariot of the
sun along with Phaethon and takes wing along with his steed (
łıc F ªæ ıØÆ Ø F –æÆ ŒÆd ıªŒØ
ııÆ
E ¥Ø ıæøÆØ).78 Sublimity, therefore, is the product
of the poet’s oneness with the grand, the extraordinary deeds
of his character. And Statius, whose account of the aristeia of
Capaneus is poised to propel the hero into the sublime, would
seem in this passage to be alluding to a very similar critical principle.
As the poet contemplates the deeds of Capaneus, he havers as
to which category best describes the actions of his hero: furor, gloria,
or uirtus? The instability of these categories is indeed typical of the
Thebaid, but here it acquires a new signiWcance.79 For if madness is
the abiding condition of the characters of the Thebaid, Capaneus
remains the Wgure of furor, insania, and amentia par excellence.80
And if madness is the necessary condition of the inspired poet, the
poet seeking to sing of this hero must ask of the Muses a greater
madness still (maior ab Aoniis poscenda amentia lucis).81 Nor will
he just sing. Rather, just as the spirit of Menoeceus has lately made
its way to heaven and demanded a place for itself in the topmost
stars,82 so now Statius will positively assist Capaneus in his irreverent
siege and will lift him up to Wght hand-to-hand in the starry

78 [Longinus], Subl. 15.3–4.

79 For the instability of categories, see e.g. Stat. Theb. 8.406–7 at postquam rabies et
uitae prodiga uirtus j emisere animos, cf. 11.1 furias uirtutis iniquae. The death of
Menoeceus is a complicated cocktail of qualities: for gloria, see Creon at Stat. Theb.
10.711–12 and the gloria tantum j uentosumque decus which he foresees in his son’s
sacriWcial death; for the role of personiWed Virtus, see Stat. Theb. 10.632–782; for the
role of furor in the episode and other indications of madness, see Stat. Theb. 10.607,
609, 657–9, cf. 10.677 (letique inuasit amorem) and 10.804 (unde hic mortis amor?
quae sacra insania menti?) where the mental state of Menoeceus conforms to that of
the not spectacularly rational centurion, Scaeva, at Luc. 6.246.
80 See Stat. Theb. 3.668–9, 10.32, 486, 751–5, 907, 919, 11.1–2 with Venini ad loc.;
Eur. Phoen. 1172; Soph. Ant. 135.
81 Cf. Stat. Theb. 12.808 on the need for new furor if he is to continue his story. For
passionate possession as essential for sublime literature, see Pl. Ion 534B; [Longinus],
Subl. 8. 4, 9. 11, 13. 2 with Russell ad loc., 15. 3; Cic. Arch. 18; Petron. Sat. 118. 6
furentis animi vaticinatio, cf. 115. 5 phrenetico; Hershkowitz (1998) 61–7.
82 Stat. Theb. 10.781–2 nam spiritus olim j ante Iouem et summis apicem sibi poscit
in astris.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 235
sphere (sed nunc j comminus astrigeros Capaneus tollendus in axis).
That the language employed here is more commonly that reserved
for ecstatic praise renders the assertion the more arch, the more
troubling.83
To tell of Capaneus, a new, a greater madness will be required.
The phrasing implies that the poet of the Thebaid was mad
throughout but that his symptoms must necessarily grow the
more acute in order to respond to this particular Wgure.84 Under-
stood this way, Statius bids merely to outdo himself. Yet the striking
opening hactenus arma seems to suggest that what has come before
is eVectively on the level with the arma uirumque of Virgil; and the
bid no longer to sing in the conventional manner of the poets (non
mihi iam solito uatum de more canendum) will therefore lead Statius
into realms which even the Aeneid could not reach.85 And what is
the quality which Statius will employ in order to achieve his end if
not the very audacia which he assigns to his text at Silvae 4.7.27? If
Statius is to achieve his aim and lift Capaneus up to heaven, then he
will require from the Muses not just a greater degree of madness but
with it their co-operation in his audacious venture (maior ab Aoniis
poscenda amentia lucis: j mecum omnes audete deae!). The quality
which Statius asks the Muses to share with him is that which Jupiter
himself will later attribute to the endeavour of Capaneus (11.122–4
‘uidimus armiferos, quo fas erat usque, furores, j caelicolae, licitasque
acies, etsi impia bella j unus init aususque mea procumbere dextra’).86
Poet and hero are complicit in the same venture: the hero challenges
the gods, the poet the divine predecessor and the master of his
form. But can the poet succeed where his hero is doomed to fail?

83 For lifting up to the heavens, cf. Sall. Cat. 48.1; Cic. Att. 2.25.1; Verg. Ecl. 5.51,
9.27–9; Hor. Sat. 2.7.28–9; Sil. Pun. 2.337. Note that Lactantius ad loc. glosses
tollendus as carminibus altius eVerendus.
84 For the poet mad from the start but now necessarily madder still, see Stat. Theb.
1.3 Pierius menti calor incidit and the analysis of Schetter (1960) 19.
85 For arma as shorthand for the Aeneid, see Mckeown at Ov. Am. 1.1.1, 1.15.25.
See also Delarue (2000) 84: ‘comment ne pas penser à Virgile?’.
86 Note also Theb. 12.800 for Euadne, widow of Capaneus, dubbed audax as she
leaps on his pyre.
236 Matthew Leigh

MAD VENTURES AND SUBLIME AMBITION

The critical terminology favoured by the contemporaries of Statius

oVers a number of ways of thinking about the invocation to the
Muses at Thebaid 10.827–36 and the ensuing narrative of mad
venture and catastrophic fall. One approach might be that suggested
by Martial 3.38, an exchange between the poet and the ambitious
Sextus set on a career at Rome. Poor Sextus imagines that he can
plead cases with more eloquence than Cicero (causas . . . agam Cicer-
one disertior ipso) or compose poems which the hearer will swear to
be the work of Virgil (si nihil hinc ueniet, pangentur carmina nobis: j
audieris, dices esse Maronis opus). You are mad (insanis), comes the
disheartening reply: all those fellows over there in cold cloaks once
were Ovids and Virgils. One small tale of mad ambition and
necessary disappointment, but it is not alone. Consider Pliny,
Epistle 7.30.4–5. The writer follows on from a complaint addressed
to his father regarding all the urban and rural aVairs which keep him
from literary study. There is, however, some small time for such work
and a recent speech did indeed owe much to Demosthenes’ oration
Against Meidias. Yet Pliny consulted his model not out of any wish to
rival it, for that would be wicked and almost mad, but rather with a
view to following his model and imitating it as far as the gulf between
their respective talents and the diVering characters of the cases might
allow (quam sane, cum componerem illos, habui in manibus, non ut
aemularer (improbum enim ac paene furiosum), sed tamen imitarer et
sequerer, quantum aut diuersitas ingeniorum maximi et minimi, aut
causae dissimilitudo pateretur).87
This then is one form of literary madness and its emphasis on
the insanity of challenging the established master is indeed suggest-
ive: as Statius stands in relation to Capaneus, so Jupiter stands in
relation to Virgil. Another approach might be founded on Pliny,
Epistle 9.26.5. Here Pliny writes to Lupercus and describes a
contemporary orator of what sounds very much like the
Atticist school: he is upright (recto) and sane (sano) but lacking in

87 Cf. Plin. Ep. 9.26.7 non ita insanio disavowing any ability to equal the sublime
verse of Homer.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 237
grandeur and ornament (sed parum grandi et ornato).88 An orator,
Pliny opines, should be ready to aim for precipitous heights even
if he risks a terrible drop (nam plerumque altis et excelsis adiacent
abrupta); those content to crawl will never win praise even if
they never fall, but those who run and fall may still win some;
the tightrope walker is applauded at the very moment when a fall
seems imminent (cum iam iamque casuri uidentur); the helmsman
who only sails on a mill-pond enters port without praise or glory
(inlaudatus inglorius), for his art is only truly tested when a mighty
storm blows.89 The strong preference expressed here for grand and
daring authors who occasionally err over the perfect but restrained
overlaps signiWcantly with On the Sublime 33 and this has been
noted by scholarship.90 Yet, as Pliny goes on to show, not all would
agree: what I call sublime, you call tumid; what I call daring, you
call wicked; what I call full-bodied, you call excessive (cur haec? quia
uisus es mihi in scriptis meis adnotasse quaedam ut tumida quae
ego sublimia, ut improba quae ego audentia, ut nimia quae ego
plena arbitrabar).91 And just as Pliny has oVered that certain orator
the backhanded compliment of dubbing him sane and upright,
so an Atticist would surely dismiss the grand eVects which he
admires as positively insane.92
The language of sanity and insanity, sublimity and tumidity in
Flavian literary criticism oVers some contexts for thinking about
what is at issue in the Capaneus episode. For it is evident that a
narrative of this sort falls clearly into the category which Pliny praises
and Lupercus deprecates: if it comes oV, it will indeed be daring and

88 Plin. Ep. 9.26.1.

89 Plin. Ep. 9.26.2–4.
90 Quadlbauer (1958) 108–9, cf. Russell (1964) p. xli. For similar remarks, see also
[Longinus], Subl. 36.
91 Plin. Ep. 9.26.5. Note also 9.26.8–9 for the celebration of audacia in Demos-
thenes and Cicero. For a similar exchange, see Plin. Ep. 7.12.4 reporting on certain
alterations to a speech which Pliny has introduced in order to meet the sober criteria
of Minucius: nam, cum suspicarer futurum, ut tibi tumidius uideretur, quoniam est
sonantius et elatius, non alienum existimaui, ne te torqueres, addere statim pressius
quiddam et exilius vel potius humilius et peius, uestro tamen iudicio rectius. For the
failing of tumidity, see also [Longinus], Subl. 3.3; Gell. NA 6.14.4–5.
92 For the fastidious sanity of the Atticist, see Cic. Brut. 51, 202, 276, 278, 279, 284;
Opt. Gen. 8, Orat. 90; Quint. Inst. 10.1.44, 12.10.15; Tac. Dial. 23.
238 Matthew Leigh
sublime; if it fails, it will simply be tumid and bombastic.93 Capaneus
has a deWnite proclivity to tumidity throughout the poem, though
this primarily reXects his status as the man of anger.94 Yet when
Jupiter, undisturbed by his threat, asks what hopes men can have
after the battles of tumid Phlegra (quaenam spes hominum tumidae
post proelia Phlegrae?, 10.909), it is as if he is another put-upon
listener, his ears battered by the rantings of the reciting epicist.95
The narrative of Statius eVectively appropriates the very terms in
which the success or failure of his venture will be assessed. A very
contemporary conclusion, perhaps, and one founded on that dreari-
est of contemporary approaches to verse, the metapoetic reading.
True indeed but only partly so. For there is an intriguing prehistory
to the practice adopted in this chapter and one which has a signi-
Wcant contribution to make to the establishment of the very text
which prompts it. I refer to Casper Barth’s 1664 edition of the works
of Statius, a leitmotiv of which is precisely the accusation that the
poet is as mad as his character.96 Barth is particularly infuriated by
the capacity of the ladder of Capaneus to take him out into the upper
reaches of the sky and condemns this in turn as madness (uecordia),
raving (delirat), and insanity (insanire).97 When the gods feel shame
to fear Capaneus, Barth opines that it is rather Statius who should
feel ashamed for purveying such irrational nonsense (tam omni
ratione carentes),98 and when the poet describes the mad (insanas)

93 An obvious example of the poet who aspires to the sublime but achieves only
tumidity is the Petronian Eumolpus. Note esp. Petron. Sat. 123 v. 209 dum Caesar
tumidas iratus deprimit arces. Hor. Epist. 2.1.252–3 has listed arces j montibus impo-
sitas among the features of high epic verse which his humble composition cannot
attain, and it is easy to see how the gaze upwards to such lofty citadels might be
thought sublime. Petron. Sat. 116.1 indeed refers to the impositum arce sublimi
oppidum of Croton and Sil. Pun. 15.227–8 sed gelidas a fronte sedet sublimis ad Arctos
j urbs imposta iugo, cf. 15.405–6 sublimi uallatam uertice montis j et scopulis urbem will
abandon all geographical veracity in order to equip New Carthage with the necessary
topographical characteristics. Eumolpus’ substitution of ‘tumid’ for ‘sublime’ at v.
209 is a pointer to his qualities as a poet. Baldwin ad loc. observes that ‘tumidas
. . . applied to fortiWcations, would be inXated language indeed’.
94 Stat. Theb. 3.600, 6.749, 823. For tumidity and anger, see Leigh (1997) 273 n. 102.
95 The indigant auditor at Juv. 1.1–18 comes to mind.
96 Barth (1664).
97 Barth (1664) at Stat. Theb. 10.837–8, 909, 915 (line numbers cited according to
modern editions).
98 Barth (1664) at Stat. Theb. 10.917–18.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 239
battles of the hero, the critic suggested that the entire concept is mad
(sane uero insana hic omnia).99 Finally, when Barth comes to the Wnal
line of the book and argues for the reading fulmen sperare secundum
over the printed fulmen meruisse secundum,100 he observes that
nothing could better Wt the wasted ambition of the hero and the
aVected acumen of the poet, and asks to which copyist’s brain a
phrase of this sort might be credited (illius perditae ambitioni, huius
aVectato acumini nil accommodatius inveneris. et quis librariorum
cerebro tale quid deberi crediderit ?).101 The poet then is mad and his
text shall be reconstructed according to the intriguing principle of
lectio dementior melior. This Capaneus of a poet? Perhaps Dryden had
been reading his Barth.

C ON C LU S I ON

If Capaneus does incarnate the yearning of Statius to cast Virgil

down from his poetic Olympus, must we then treat the coda to his
narrative as a confession of the impossibility of this mad hope? Surely
yes. For there is something about Virgil the acknowledged classic
which inhibits the writers of this age, which helps them frame their
sense of inferiority even when that inferiority is to another writer
altogether.102 Explain it as we will, this is an inescapable reality of
the Flavian literary scene.103 And yet for the poet whose every
composition is a secret challenge to the established order, there is
some consolation to be found even amidst the certainty that he will

99 Barth (1664) at Stat. Theb. 10.919.

100 meruisse ø, sperare PDN.
101 Barth (1664) at Stat. Theb. 10.938.
102 See Plin. Ep. 1.2.2 quoting Verg. Aen. 6.129–30 pauci quos aequus . . . as he
expresses his inability to match Demosthenes or Calvus; 7.20.4, where Verg. Aen.
5.320 and the opening of the foot-race expresses Pliny’s youthful certainty of always
coming second to Tacitus and wish to te sequi, tibi ‘longo sed proximus intervallo’ et
esse et haberi.
103 Even if it is true, it will help us little to repeat that Virgil simply is the best. In
one sense the reason why Statius can never outdo his rival is because the contest has
been called oV: the conservative character of a canon leaves it with far more need of
an authority-Wgure than of a challenger.
240 Matthew Leigh
fail or will at least be told that he has failed. For where Longinus
deprecates tumidity and has little time for the doctrine of heroic
failure proclaimed by those who wish to celebrate their own short-
comings,104 he also recognizes a further category of writers who
break a spear in strife with an acknowledged master and avoid
discredit even in defeat, Longinus On the Sublime 13.4:
ήd P
 i KÆŒÆØ Ø
ŒE ºØŒÆF ØÆ E B غ Æ
ªÆØ
ŒÆd N ØØŒa oºÆ ººÆF ıBÆØ ŒÆd æØ , N c æd
æø ø c ˜ Æ Æd ŁıfiH æe  …æ, ‰ IƪøØc  æe X

ŁÆıÆ, Yø b غØŒæ ŒÆd ƒd
ØÆ
æÆØ , PŒ
IøºH
 ‹ø
ØæØ ‘‘IªÆŁc’’ ªaæ ŒÆa e ˙ 
 ‘‘æØ l

æEØ:’’ ŒÆd fiH ZØ ŒÆºe y ŒÆd I%ØØŒÆ PŒº Æ Iª  ŒÆd
Æ , K fiz ŒÆd e AŁÆØ H æªæø PŒ ¼
%.
And it seems to me that there would not have been so Wne a bloom of
perfection on Plato’s philosophical doctrines, and that he would not in many
cases have found his way to poetical subject matter and modes of expression,
unless he had with all his heart and mind struggled with Homer for the
primacy, entering the lists like a young champion matched against the man
whom all admire, and showing perhaps too much desire for victory and
breaking a lance with him as it were, but deriving some proWt from the
contest none the less. For, as Hesiod says, ‘This strife is good for mortals.’
And in truth that struggle for the crown of glory is noble and best deserves
the victory in which even to be worsted by one’s predecessors brings no
discredit.
Capaneus surely falls into this category: the challenge to the
supreme god is doomed from the start but the magniWcence of his
deeds is able to attract the admiration even of Jupiter himself
(11.10–11 toruus adhuc uisu memorandaque facta relinquens j genti-
bus atque ipsi non inlaudata Tonanti).105 A powerful metaphor surely
for Statius’ consciousness of his relationship to Virgil: at various
points in the poem, the poet makes obvious and craven obeisance

104 [Longinus], Subl. 3.3.

105 Cf. Plin. Ep. 6.21.1 stating that admiration for the writers of the past does not
imply scorn for the present and that neque . . . quasi lassa et eVeta natura nihil iam
laudabile parit. See also 9.26.4 contrasting the audacious but potentially excessive
poet with his Xawless but unambitious counterpart and likening the latter to a
helmsman who sails successfully over calm seas and enters port admirante nullo
inlaudatus inglorius.
 Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus 241
to his master, to the god; at others he launches futile but not ignoble
assaults on his title.106 Statius may have spent his life competing for
poetic crowns in Naples and in Rome, but the hurt remained that
there was one contest he could never win and against an opponent
too lofty to be concerned. Not even this, though, would stop him
from trying.
When modern critics clutch at those passages in Statius which
defer to the cult of Virgil, they think they have found the true nature
of his verse. For Vessey, there is nothing remotely subversive in the
Thebaid, only a reassuring retreat from the political and aesthetic
aberrations of the Pharsalia. The little regiments are at peace. I don’t
believe this. The upholders of order and decency continue to appro-
priate Virgil. They latch on to reassuring models for the relationship
of poets to one another, models in which someone occupies the
heights of heaven and is called God and sets the rules for the
behaviour of all those who are quite content to cower below and
meekly worship their betters. They like Statius because they can point
to evidence that he is possessed of all the required qualities of
meekness and respect. I like Statius because I think he was really of
the Devil’s Party.

106 Cf. Columella, Rust. 1 praef. 29–30, esp. 29 summum enim columen adfectantes
satis honeste uel in secundo fastigio conspiciemur.
This page intentionally left blank
 9
Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn

Continuity and Analogy from

Homer to the Medieval North

Michael Clarke

Up to now this book has been concerned with authors who stand in an
ordered succession, each conscious of his predecessors and respond-
ing to them with allusion, innovation, or subversion. Epic is marked
out among the genres of Western literature by this intense sense of
connection, and hence we can be conWdent that a book like this is
focused on an objective unity. But behind epic walks a less happy word,
heroic : and if we use this word to deWne a literary category we Xounder,
because it signals an intractable paradox. The traditions commonly
referred to as heroic poetry or primary epic comprise works composed
over a vast range of times and cultural settings, from ancient Greece to
Muslim Afghanistan to the land of the Maori; and, being rooted in oral
traditions of unguessable antiquity, they seem on the face of it to be
quite unconnected with each other in origin and essence. If the
category of heroic poetry carries any meaning in terms of theme and
subject matter, this must be grounded in universals of human nature,
which somehow produce parallel behaviour and parallel literary re-
sponses across gulfs of space and time; but on its own this seems a
Ximsy basis on which to build such a construct.1 In what follows I will
1 Outstanding contributions to the discourse on this problem include Lang
(1893); H. M. Chadwick (1912); Bowra (1952), esp. 1–47; Hatto (1980–9); Hains-
worth (1993). For a recent survey see Foley (2002).
244 Michael Clarke
try to tease apart the paradox by exploring a three-cornered set of
parallels and correspondences between Homer and two medieval
literatures, both customarily placed at the heart of the canon of
primary heroic narrative, which irresistibly recall aspects of the Iliad
in particular despite the virtual certainty that their creators had no
acquaintance with the Greek narratives. I hope the discussion will
serve as a case study among some of the possible types of interaction
that run between the Homeric poems and their non-Greek analogues.

THE DISCOVERY OR INVENTION OF THE HEROIC

As a concept in literary history, heroic poetry is the child of cultural

revivalism. Since the eighteenth century if not earlier, one resurgent
nation after another sought to establish prestige for cultures that had
lain beyond the pale of Graeco-Roman classicism: and in each such
project it was felt necessary to recruit an arch-poet who could be set
on a pedestal opposite Homer’s and assigned the equivalent author-
ity. The process is vividly illustrated by the packaging in which
Macpherson’s pseudo-translations of the Ossianic ‘lays’ of Gaelic-
speaking Scotland were presented to their London-oriented readers
from 1760 onward. Not only were editions variegated from the start
with little notes directing the reader to parallel passages in classical
epic,2 but within a few years of publication they were accompanied
by a highbrow essay explicitly developing the equation between
Homer and the Fenian poet. Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on
the Poems of Ossian3 makes sad but revealing reading, slipping from
bold assertion of the equation to apologies for the shortcomings of
the Celt:
As Homer is the greatest of all poets, the one whose manner, and whose
times come the nearest to Ossian’s, we are naturally led to run a parallel in

2 See e.g. Macpherson (1996 (1760–73)) 422. Under the guise of translating, Mac-
pherson took what in Gaelic would have been short allusive ballads and inXated them to
an epic scale, unrecognizably distorting them in the process: Thompson (1987).
3 Macpherson (1996 (1760–73)) 343–408; cf. Wood (1996 (1767) ), with Simon-
suuri (1979) 108–42.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 245
some instances between the Greek and the Celtic bard. . . . But if Ossian’s
ideas and objects be less diversiWed than those of Homer, they are all,
however, of the kind Wttest for poetry . . . In a rude age and country, though
the events that happen be few, the undissipated mind broods over them
more; they strike the imagination, and Wre the passions in a higher degree;
and of consequence become happier materials to a poetic genius, than the
same events when scattered through the wide circle of more varied action,
and cultivated life.4
The same drive for aspiration and assimilation motivated the early
exponents of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, presented by its Wrst success-
ful translator as ‘a little common Homer for England and the North’,5
and of the saga cycles of early medieval Ireland, whose foremost
warrior Cú Chulainn was proudly dubbed ‘the Irish Achilles’.6 High
Victorian scholarship then rationalized and stabilized the construct,
so that eventually the Chadwicks, in their monumental The Heroic
Age and The Growth of Literature, provided respectable foundations
through their developmental paradigm. The Homeric depiction of
the race of heroes was assigned to a speciWc point of adolescence in
society’s movement from childhood to maturity, and the world of
Germanic saga was mapped onto the same place in the scheme, in
terms both of the ethical and social worlds depicted in the narratives
and of the historical realities from which their authors emerged.7
When classical scholarship began to embrace the idea that Archaic
Greece could be understood in terms of the anthropologists’ then
fashionable analyses of exotic cultures—what E. R. Dodds called
‘Borneo and the primitive past’8—the wheel eVectively turned full
circle: Homer himself became merely the most famous member of
the international club whose members, all of them blind and illiterate
and singing men’s famous deeds to the music of a stringed instrument,

4 Macpherson (1996 (1760–73)) 357. Blair does not refer openly to Thomas
Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), but the inXuence is
unmistakable: cf. Jenkyns, pp. 303–4 below.
5 N. F. S. Gruntvig in 1820, cited by Osborn (1996) 345.
6 See e.g. Dillon (1948) 1, still in print. The phrase goes back at least as far as the
title of Alfred Nutt’s popular retelling (1900).
7 H. M. Chadwick (1912) 1–240; further developed in H. M. and N. K. Chadwick
(1932–40), part. i passim.
8 Dodds (1951) 13.
246 Michael Clarke
are assigned the label of ‘bard’.9 It is here that the shadow of circular
reasoning looms darkest. To consider ‘the Iliad as heroic poetry’, as
Bryan Hainsworth does in a recent essay,10 is arguably no more than
to assert that it belongs in a class of poems that was originally
formulated on the basis that they reminded people of the Iliad itself:
the circle of resemblance is closed and meaningless.
Integral to the construct is the assumed link between heroic theme
and oral composition.11 It was against this background that Milman
Parry was encouraged to make his bold equation between the com-
positional techniques of Homer and the oral poets whom he encoun-
tered in what was then Yugoslavia: ‘When one hears the Southern
Slavs sing their songs, he has the unmistakable impression that he is
hearing Homer’.12 Although seventy years of subsequent research
have substantially conWrmed the theory of formulaic diction, the
underlying typological association remains fraught with diYculties,
above all when the scholar allows it to guide his view of the meaning
of the poetry rather than merely the nuts and bolts of its compos-
itional techniques. Parry (typically for his generation) seems to
have traded on the belief that the essence of heroic poetry is
the unproblematic praise and exaltation of its cast of characters:
and the word heroic itself becomes an empty space in the centre
of his analysis of the communicative force of the repetition of
ornamental epithets:
The Wxed epithet . . . adds to the combination of substantive and epithet an
element of grandeur, but no more than that . . . Its sole eVect is to form, with
its substantive, a heroic expression of the idea of that substantive. As he grows
aware of this the reader acquires an insensibility to any possible particular-
ized meaning of the epithet, and this insensibility becomes an integral part
of his understanding of the Homeric style.13

9 For the newest and most sophisticated results of this tradition see Foley (2002).
10 Hainsworth (1993). Despite the subtlety of this essay, the word ‘heroic’ leads to
tautology: ‘Heroic poetry occupies that part of the spectrum of narrative poetry in
which heroic qualities predominate’ (p. 45).
11 I do not understand why this link should be thought to be a causal one, and I
know of no published critique of the assumption. Cf. Foley (1990), esp. 17–19; Fenik
(1986), passim.
12 M. Parry (1971) 378.
13 M. Parry (1971) 127; italics mine.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 247
The implication here is that the ‘heroic’ quality is simply equivalent
to ‘grandeur’: and even the most subtle and nuanced of the analyses
of formular semantics that have been produced since Parry’s time
have failed to Wll in the gap at the heart of his analysis.14
If the concept of heroic poetry poses such deep heuristic problems,
would it be better to abandon it altogether? We might propose
instead that in terms of theme, at least, these traditions are united
only by the fact that they explore types of personality and behaviour
that are unfamiliar in the cultures in which I and most of this book’s
readers grew up—just as it is now seen that there is an endless variety
of diVerent kinds of oral poetry, united in our eyes only by the fact
that they all diVer from the bookish discourse that happens to be
most familiar to us.15 This negative conclusion may seem attractive:
yet it Xies in the face of the extraordinary fact that there really are
intensely vivid parallels between heroic literatures, parallels that
cannot easily be explained as direct borrowing (still less as inherited
Indo-European archetypes)16 but which seem too intimate to be
merely the reXection of similar developments in the social and
ideological worlds that produced them. It is uncanny, for example,
to turn to Beowulf, with the virtual certainty that its creators were
innocent of any acquaintance with classical epic,17 and to hear what

14 In practice, even the most successful attempts to frame a more positive model
for understanding the semantics of formulaic language have hinged on connotative
and deictic eVects rather than the straightforward communication of meaning: see
for example Bakker (1997) passim.
15 Finnegan (1977) is authoritative on this point.
16 The question of the Indo-European inheritance is beyond the scope of the
present chapter. It suYces here to say that recent attempts to place Indo-European
archetypes at the centre of the analysis of Greek and other heroic literatures (e.g.
Watkins (1995), cf. Schmitt (1967)) have failed signally to validate the widespread
assumption that the common ancestor of the poetic formulae shared between
Homeric Greek and Vedic Sanskrit must have been a tradition of heroic narrative
poetry rather than sacred song in praise of gods. See also below, n. 37.
17 For a survey of the literature on this question see Andersson (1996) 138–42. On
the general question of classical learning in Anglo-Saxon England, the most illumin-
ating studies are those that reconstruct the collections held in ecclesiastical libraries:
there is evidence for (very limited) acquaintance with Virgil, Lucan, and Persius in
the period before the Norman Conquest, but the Hellenic presence in Anglo-Saxon
learning was overwhelmingly ecclesiastical and theological in character, and mediated
almost entirely through Latin Wlters. See Gneuss (1981), Lapidge (1985), Bately
(1986), with Lendinara (1991). On the unique and untypical case of Canterbury in
248 Michael Clarke
sound like close echoes of images from the Iliad. A classic example is
the song of lamentation for Beowulf when he has died as a glorious
dragon-slayer, which becomes the opportunity for a woman to sing
of the griefs of her own life:

Swylce giomorgyd Geatisc meowle

æfter Biowulfe bundenheorde
song sorgcearig, sæde geneahhe
þæt hio hyre heofungdagas hearde ondrede
wælfylla worn werudes egesan
hynðo ond hæftnyd.
So a Geatish woman, bound-haired, sang a song of lamentation for Beowulf,
sorrowful; she said repeatedly that she sorely dreaded her days of misery,
multitude of violent deaths, terror of the war-band, humiliation and cap-
tivity (Beowulf 3150–5).
There is an exact parallel with the lamentation of women over the
dead warriors of the Iliad—most precisely with Briseis’ song over
Patroclus, where the women again use the hero’s death as the frame
for recounting their own sorrows: —挺 æÆØ, H

ÆPH Œ

 Π(Il. 19.302).18 We might speculate that both
passages represent survivals of an international tradition in women’s
lamentation, and that the parallel strikes us only because surviving
evidence for that tradition is so sparse in our male-dominated
inheritance. Nonetheless, it remains disquieting that Briseis’ lament
Wnds a closer echo here in Beowulf than it does anywhere within the
surviving literature of ancient Greece. The same point can be made
on a larger scale about the system of honour, status, and prestige that
structures the social relations of Iliadic warriors and their behaviour
on the battleWeld:19 the modes of male behaviour on the plain of Troy
bear only an imperfect relation to what we know of the patterning of
real-life Greek society, but they match snugly with those seen in other
‘heroic’ traditions. It is in this area above all that we Wnd precise local
correspondences with the world of Beowulf : as when one warrior

the seventh century, where the presence of Byzantine monks brought a real presence
of Patristic learning in Greek, see Lapidge (1988).
18 Cf. Il. 22.477–514, 24.718–81.
19 The best modern studies are van Wees (1992), Wilson (2002).
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 249
exhorts another to courage by reminding him of the boasts he
uttered at the feast before battle:

Ic ðæt mæl geman, þær we medu þegun,

þonne we geheton ussum hlaforde
in bior-sele, ðe us ðas beagas geaf,
þæt we him ða guð-getawa gyldan woldon,
gif him þyslicu þearf gelumpe,
helmas ond heard sweord . . .
      
Nu is se dæg cumen
þæt ure man-dryhten mægenes behofað,
godra guð-rinca; wutun gongan to,
helpan hild-fruman . . .

I recall the time, when we were drinking mead, how we promised to our
lord, in the beer-hall, when he gave us treasure, that we were ready to repay
him for that war-gear, if the need for such things came to him, helms and
hard swords . . . Now is that day come, when our lord of men has need of
strength, of good battle-warriors; let us go forward and help the fray-leader
(Beowulf 2633–8, 2646–9).20
Compare an Homeric passage where a god mimics the common
language of the battleWeld:

`N Æ
 NŁf ºÆ tæ `ººø

I Æ —º'ø , KBŒ
 ƒ  M+:
ıƒœ
b —æØØ ¸ıŒØ YÆ ø
:
fiH Ø KØ æ ˜Øe ıƒe `ººø_
`N Æ, æø ıºæ, F Ø IغÆd
L æø ÆغFØ   Nø
—º'
ø `غB KÆ Ø º %Ø;

At once Apollo, the people’s saviour, launched Aeneas against Peleus’ son,
and placed good strength in him; he disguised his voice as Lycaon’s, the son
of Priam. In this guise spoke Zeus’ son Apollo: ‘Aeneas, counsel-bearer of the
Trojans, where are those threats of yours, which you swore before the leaders
of the Trojans when you were tipsy with wine, that you would stand and
Wght against Achilles son of Peleus?’ (Il. 20.79–85; cf. e.g. 8.229–34).

20 Cf. e.g. Maldon 212–24.

250 Michael Clarke
In Homer the social frame is slightly diVerent, lacking the Germanic
emphasis on an intense relationship between lord and follower:21 but
the logic behind the exhortation is the same, based as it is on the
principle that a boast before one’s peers can be ‘called in’ at a
moment of challenge in the heat of battle. The parallel seems to
represent an exact match on several levels: the sense that the warrior’s
status is dependent on his reputation, the principle that the fear of
dishonour is the surest incentive to excellence, and the acting out of
these ideas in the rhetoric of the feast and of the battleWeld.

EXCELLENCE AND EXCESS IN HOMER AND IN

A NG LO - S A XON P OE TRY

Parallels like these could be multiplied indeWnitely. But what do they

mean? As long as we restrict them to social institutions, as in the two
examples that I have cited, it can still be concluded that the parallel is
merely sociological: military men who Wght with their hands engage
universally in certain types of status-based behaviour, and since poets
do not compose in a vacuum they are liable to recall or recreate those
realities in the half-imagined, half-real worlds of narrative song.
Pursuing that line, it would be possible to conclude that the points
of contact between the world of the Iliad and its analogues relate not
to the poetry itself but to the world that provided its setting and
springboard. If this carries conviction, we might conclude that the
correspondences between the two traditions are accidents rather than
substance: their basis becomes the mere fact that close-knit groups of
violent men behave in similar ways the world over, from Troy to
Heorot to the New York of The Godfather, and images based on those
repeated realities crop up when such men become the subject matter
of stories and songs. Sensible though this conclusion may seem,
I believe that it is unnecessarily reductive, and that the heroic tradi-
tions of Greece and the medieval North are linked by more complex
and indeed intractable threads of connection—threads that will turn

21 On this see O’Brien O’KeeVe (1991), with Cherniss (1972) 30–59; Woolf (1976).
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 251
out to diVer signiWcantly from what was proposed in the old hand-
books of heroic poetry. As we have seen, our forebears read each of
the heroic literatures as if their view of warrior manhood was framed
by praise and exaltation of the hero and his quest for glory through
courage and self-sacriWce. It is uncontroversial that Homeric schol-
arship now oVers routes for replacing such views with a more poised
and problematizing analysis of the Iliad: what is more surprising is
that precisely the same revision can be successfully applied to the
small corpus of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry centred on Beowulf. In
what follows I will Wrst sketch a (relatively uncontroversial) example
of such a reading of the Iliad, before moving on to apply it in strictly
parallel fashion to the Anglo-Saxon materials.
The paths traced by each of the foremost warriors in the Iliad can
be seen as a sequence of variations on a single theme: the tendency in
the warrior’s personality for excellence to move into excess, for
bravery to become self-destructive recklessness and for the quest
for glory, Wnally, to become a wilful turning towards death.22 Dio-
medes, divinely Wlled with his father’s strength and courage, goes too
far and Wghts even the gods; Hector, deluded by his rush of success
against the Greeks, ignores Polydamas’ advice and tries to Wre the
Greek ships; Patroclus forgets Achilles’ warning and tries to storm
Troy alone; and, Wnally, the intensity of Achilles’ emotional energy
turns his Wnal quest to avenge Patroclus into a surge of beast-like
violence that appals the gods and hastens his own death. It is
impossible to decide whether, on balance, each of these warriors is
meant as a model or as a warning; it is a truer reading of Homer to
leave that question open and to see the warrior as caught at a point of
tension or ambiguity in the ideology of warlike energy—the ambi-
guity itself is what the poem seeks to explore. The theme is writ large
in each of the narratives we have mentioned, especially that of
Achilles; and on the more local scale of simile imagery it is expressed
in the equation between warrior and savage beast, where the quality
that makes the lion or boar a symbol of strength and bravery is also
what makes him reckless and self-destructive.23 The beast’s heroic

22 I have examined this theme at length elsewhere: see esp. Clarke (2002) and
(2004), with references there.
23 Clarke (1995); Wilson (2003).
252 Michael Clarke
nature brings his death, Iªæ 
 Ø ŒÆ (12.46), 
 Ø
þº IºŒ
(16.753), just as Andromache prophetically warns Hec-
tor that his passionate strength will be his death:
ÆØØ, Ł Ø
 e e  (6.407). This slippage between excellence and self-
destructiveness is again represented in miniature iconic form in the
ambiguous semantics of the key words in this semantic Weld.  is
closely cognate with the verb Æ ÆØ, and the active semantic
association is realized, for example, when Helenus warns the Trojans
that Diomedes’ rage is unstoppable:

Iºº ‹
 º 
Æ ÆØ, P
  ƒ
ÆÆØ  NÆæ Ø.

He is raging too much, and no one can draw equal to him in force (Il. 6.100–1).
The connection between warrior prowess and excess is still clearer in
the words Iª
øæ and Iªæ : the second element of the com-
pound is transparently ‘manliness’, and the nuanced meaning of the
combination shifts from great manliness to excessive manliness, from
the warrior’s abundance of life to the tendency for that abundance to
reach destructive extremes.24 Diomedes encapsulates the problem in
a few close words when he responds to the news that the Embassy’s
pleadings have worsened Achilles’ resentment:
n
 Iª
øæ Kd ŒÆd ¼ººø .
F Æs Ø ºf Aºº Iªæ fiØ KBŒÆ .
(Il. 9.699–700).

The best of the Achaeans was always agenor, always full of the
abundance of manhood that made him admirable: and his extreme
of vicious resentment is an exaggeration, not a denial of that quality.
The ultimate working-out of this theme in Achilles’ story is of course
more complex, and involves the workings of divinity as well as of
human psychology;25 but its human basis is exactly paralleled by the
working of the same forces on the life and death of Hector. Androm-
ache’s prediction, that his own menos would destroy him, is worked
out when his pursuit of glory beyond prudent limits sets him in a

24 For the semantics see Haubold and Graziosi (2003), and references there.
25 See esp. Schein (1984); Zanker (1994).
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 253
hopeless combat against Achilles, from which he refuses to withdraw
because of his terror at the prospect of the loss of his reputation in
the eyes of his people (22.105–8): and so when Andromache hears the
voices of sudden lamentation she immediately guesses that his
excessive manliness has brought about his ruin:26


ø c

Ø ŁæÆf  ‚ŒæÆ
E `غºf
F I
%Æ ºØ 

b
ÆØ,
ήd

Ø ŒÆÆÆfi Iªæ  IºªØB
l Ø Œ , Kd h  Kd ºŁıE  I
æH,
Iººa ºf æŁŒ, e n  P
d Yο.
I fear that bright Achilles has cut oV rash Hector in isolation, that he has
pursued him into the plain, that he has halted him in his terrible excess of
manhood, which was holding him when he would not remain with the
throng of the soldiers, but he surged out in front of them, yielding to no one
in his own strength (Il. 22.455–9).
Here is the crux of the heroic condition: excellence stands on a knife-
edge between cowardice on one side and self-destructive folly on the
other, and it is in the nature of the Homeric warrior that the excellence
which ensures he will never shirk a challenge is by the same token
what pushes him towards the wilful seeking of his own death.27
If we accept this sketch as a description of a central strand in the
Iliad’s evocation of the ethics and problematics of the warrior’s life,
let us see what emerges if we bring the same perspective to bear on
the heroic poetry of Anglo-Saxon England. I take as a case study the
substantial fragment known as The Battle of Maldon, which stands
alongside Beowulf as one of the very few documents of non-ecclesi-
astical narrative poetry surviving from before the Norman Conquest.
The centre of this poem is the confrontation on the East Anglian
coast between an English force led by Byrhtnoth, nobleman of
Essex, and a band of Vikings who are occupying a small island
separated from the mainland by the tidal waters of an estuary.28

26 Haubold and Graziosi (2003) 70–1.

27 On the ambiguities of this theme in post-Homeric attitudes to heroism see
Loraux (1995) 63–74; Clarke (2002).
28 For the reconstructed details of the topography see E. V. Gordon (1937) 1–15;
Scragg (1991), introduction, passim.
254 Michael Clarke
As the tide goes out, a causeway appears on which a few English
warriors take their stand in combat: it is to be assumed that by
keeping the Vikings hemmed on the island Byrhtnoth will eventually
be able to wear them down to defeat or withdrawal. Then something
strange happens. The Vikings persuade Byrhtnoth to let them cross
over to the mainland and Wght a pitched battle:

Ongunnon lytegian þa laþe gystas,

bædon þæt hi upgang agan moston,
ofer þone ford faran, feþan lædan.
Then the hated strangers proceeded to use guile, asked that they might have
passage, fare over the ford, lead the troop (Maldon 86–8).
The poem does not explain why Byrhtnoth agrees to their request; but
the answer is clear if we supply its logic from a corresponding decision
made by Beowulf before he faces Grendel. Planning to lie in wait in the
hall of Heorot to seek combat with the monster who attacks it every
night, the hero anounces that he is unwilling to carry a sword, because
he has heard that his adversary Wghts with his bare hands:

No ic me on here-wæsmun hnagran talige,

guþ-geweorca þonne Grendel hine;
forþan ic hine sweorde swebban nelle,
aldre beneotan, þeah ic eal mæge . . .
. . . . . . .
ond siþðan witig God
on swa hwæþere hond, halig Dryhten,
mærðo deme, swa him gemet þince.

I count myself no less in war-stature of battle-works than Grendel [counts]

himself; therefore I am loth to use my sword to put him to sleep, deprive him
of life, although I am able . . . and then let wise God, holy Lord, grant glory
on one hand or the other, as seems meet to him (Beowulf 677–80, 685–7).
Beowulf refuses the artiWcial advantage that his weapon would give,
and commits the outcome of the combat to divine will: Byrhtnoth
likewise declares that in the evenly matched battle on open ground the
victory will be decided by God (Maldon 93–5).29 The parallel shows

29 See BloomWeld (1969); cf. F. Robinson (1993) 105–21.

 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 255
that Byrhtnoth makes his decision in order to ensure a fair Wght
without artiWcial advantage; but Beowulf shows later in his own
story that this principle is not an inXexible or absolute one, that it
must be tempered with prudence. Facing a dragon in his old age,
Beowulf recalls how he faced Grendel unprotected, but explains that
he cannot do the same now because the Wre-breathing monster is too
dangerous (Beowulf 2518–37). There is, then, a sense of calculus in this
ethic; but there is a vital diVerence between Beowulf ’s Wght with
Grendel and Byrhtnoth’s with the Vikings. Beowulf triumphs, but
Byrhtnoth proves weaker than the ‘slaughter-wolves’, loses his battle
and is cut down along with his loyal followers. The crux lies in
the way the poet names the force that drives Byrhtnoth to accept the
Vikings’ oVer:

Ða se eorl ongan for his ofermode

alyfan landes to fela laþere ðeode.
Then the earl proceeded in his over-mod to grant too much land to the hated
host (Maldon 89–90).
The word mod (whose sense is trivialized in the modern descendant
mood, and better paralleled by its German cousin Mut) stands for
strength, force, manly courage: much the same constellation of ideas
as is represented by Greek menos. Ofermod, then, is an extreme or
excess of that quality; but is the term necessarily pejorative? Much
ink has been spilt over this question.30 It has been argued that the
word’s other attestations (which are scanty) may justify taking it as
equivalent to the sin of pride;31 but that cannot be the whole truth,

30 The most useful articles known to me are Gneuss (1976), Cavill (1995). Modern
German Übermut appears to be a false parallel, formed independently from the same
elements.
31 Apart from Maldon there are three signiWcant attestations. In the tenth-century
poem Genesis B Lucifer is described as ‘the angel of ofermod ’ (l. 272); in the prose
Instructions for Christians a man subject to the sin of pride is hateful to God because
of his ofermod (l.130); and in an isolated glossary example the word translates Latin
coturnus, literally the buskin of tragedy, which would have referred to an overblown
or vaunting style in a panegyric or similar. Gneuss (1976) argues that the sense must
be pejorative, as in Genesis B; Cavill (1995) shows (convincingly, in my view) that the
active meaning of the word in the Maldon context would not have been determined
by the equivalence to superbia suggested by the two theological passages. The glossary
example seems to me instructive, since it seems to refer to an exuberant excess of
256 Michael Clarke
most obviously because other compounds in ofer- refer to an abun-
dance rather than necessarily an excess of the quality named by the
second element. The overall frame of the poem, and the declarations
of love and loyalty by Byrhtnoth’s followers after his death, suggest
overwhelmingly that his death is to be regarded as glorious. The
essence of the poem, just as with the Iliadic link between valour and
self-destruction, is in the poised ambiguity of the warrior’s excellence:
he lives out his ideals, but tied up in those ideals is the tendency of
mod or menos to lead to futile death.32 And, just as the problem was
expressed in miniature in Homeric semantics, so the paradox of
destructively increased mod recurs later in the discourse of Maldon.
After Byrhtnoth’s death, some of his loyal followers declare that they
will stand and Wght to the death, acting out the principle that a
follower must not leave the battleWeld hlafordleas (251), ‘lordless’.
The call to stand Wrm is expressed as a turning towards the quality
that led to Byrhtnoth’s own death:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,

mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlaþ.
Courage must be the harder, hearts the keener, mod must be the larger, as
our strength grows less (Maldon 312–13).
For the followers as for the lord, the expansion of mod is progres-
sively more and more self-destructive.
This semantic conWguration is closely paralleled within Beowulf,
suggesting that the theme we have sketched was one of the central

energy rather than to anything deWned in moral terms. Similarly, I suggest that the
application of the term to Satan in Genesis B emerges from the consistent portrayal of
the rebel angel as if he were the disloyal warrior thane of a Germanic overlord: the
force behind his rebellion is described as if he were a reckless young warrior driven to
rebellion precisely by ‘excess of valour’.
32 It is interesting to note the latest summary account of the problem of ofermod:
‘The vaunting courage and belligerence which [Byrhtnoth] has already displayed, and
of which this present behaviour is an extension, cannot be faulted either within the
conventions of heroic story or in the context of a dire period of English history, when
cowardice in the face of the enemy was the norm’ (Marsden (2004) 258; italics mine).
How can we take these conventions for granted, given that only Maldon and Beowulf
oVer us substantial sources for plotting what they are in the Wrst place? Is the word
‘heroic’ again being overworked to meaninglessness here?
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 257
concerns of Old English thought on warrior ethics. When king
Hrothgar congratulates Beowulf in his hour of triumph over Gren-
del, his speech develops into a warning to the young warrior about
the future perils that face the heroic personality. Beowulf is to learn
from the example of one of Hrothgar’s relatives, who became a
tyrannical king:

Ne geweox he him to willan ac to wæl-fealle

ond to deað-cwalum Deniga leodum.
Breat bolgen-mod beod-geneatas . . .
He [Heremod] did not develop according to their desire for the nation of the
Danes, but to slaughter and to death-killing; with swollen-mod he smashed
his table-companions . . . (Beowulf 1711–13).

The expansion of mod is the psychological source of his overweening

behaviour. Hrothgar explains the psychology further:

Oð þæt him on innan oferhygda dæl

weaxeð ond wridað, þonne se weard swefeð,
sawele hyrde . . .
Until inside him a portion of over-hygd grows and Xourishes; then the
guardian sleeps, the soul’s keeper . . . (Beowulf 1740–2; cf. 1760).

Hygd is a virtual synonym of mod: passion, force, the violent valour

of the warrior. When Beowulf is warned against swollen mod and
excessive hygd (see also 1760), he is reminded that it is precisely in the
context of martial excellence, at the moment when the warrior is
living out his ideal to the full, that he risks moving towards an
extreme of this quality that will be destructive to his followers and
ultimately to himself. Like Maldon, Beowulf is framed by a passage
expressing unequivocal admiration for the poem’s hero; but it is
remarkable that there is a hint, if no more, that his death in his
Wnal combat with the dragon involves an excessiveness akin to what
we saw in Byrhtnoth. Although he agrees to take his sword, as we
have seen above, Beowulf insists on facing the dragon without help
from his companions; and the verb used here seems to echo the
vocabulary of Hrothgar’s warning:
258 Michael Clarke
Oferhogode ða hringa fengel,
þæt he þone widXogan weorode gesohte
sidan herge . . .
Then the lord of rings despised that he should go after the far-Xier with his
war-band, with a great army . . . (Beowulf 2345–7).
Oferhogode, for which my translation ‘despised’ here is tentative, is
the past tense of oferhycgan, the verb corresponding to the noun
oferhygd: is there a suggestion here that if Beowulf had been more
prudent or less proud he would have let his companions share the
Wght, and might even have survived instead of losing his life in the
killing of the dragon? To try to give a deWnite answer to that question
would be like trying to decide whether ‘on balance’ Homer approves
or condemns Achilles. The centre of the poetry is not a neat value
judgement but the evocation and exploration of the ambiguity be-
tween virtue and self-destructive excess that lies at the centre of the
ethics of the warrior.
Even when due allowance is made for the very real diVerences
between them, the Homeric and Anglo-Saxon poems seem astonish-
ingly similar in their preoccupation with the psychological and
ethical anatomy of the warrior. It is uncanny that Homer’s evocation
of Achilles’ state of mind as he moves deeper into vindictiveness and
death depends, just like Hrothgar’s word bolgen-mod, on the
conception that the mental substance in his breast is expanding
and swelling with the inXux of menos and cholos.33 It is not an
exaggeration to say that the two bodies of poetry seem to have
more in common with each other than either of them has with the
other literary documents surviving from the culture which produced
it; yet I repeat that there is no evidence whatever to suggest that
the Anglo-Saxon poets knew classical epic.34 If the comparison
sketched above holds good, then the only sober conclusion must
be that the similarity between the two traditions results from the
parallel evolution of poetic traditions in completely diVerent and
unconnected worlds.

33 See Il. 9.646, 678–9, with Gill (1996) 190–204; Clarke (1999) 90–100.
34 See above, n. 16.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 259
But the range of available possibilities may be wider than this stark
conclusion would suggest. Although little is known or directly know-
able about the development or compositional methods of the poets
of Beowulf and Maldon, we do know that poets in their tradition were
quite capable of working with materials imported from alien cultural
worlds and transmitted by written means. Alongside the ‘pure’ heroic
narratives, and very close to them in style and diction, stand the
poems whose story-lines were taken from foreign sources, including
the Old Testament as well as international narratives like saints’ lives.
Particularly instructive here are the great Old Testament poems—
Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Judith. In them the union between
imported story and native poetic tradition is smooth and seamless:
Moses and Judith take on the character and vocabulary of Old
English kingship and heroics without any sign of tension or contra-
diction, Satan is portrayed as the disloyal retainer of a Germanic
overlord, and battle-scenes in the world of the Patriarchs take on the
full colouring of the world that we know from Beowulf and Maldon.35
If we did not happen to have the biblical source-texts in front of us
for comparison, it would not be obvious that the poetry had been
systematically built on texts imported from the other side of the
world only a few generations before the time of composition.36 This
should sound a note of caution: if poems like Beowulf and Maldon
were inXuenced by external models, including even classical epics,
then it would have been characteristic of the poets to hide that
inXuence subtly and eVectively under the forms and conventions of
their own school of composition. For this reason, the theory of
parallel development must be balanced against the possibility (for
it is no more) that some of the apparent echoes of Homeric epic that
we hear in the heroic poems may result, in some deep or distant way,
from the absorption of themes and ideas into the North from the
culturally prestigious heartlands of the Graeco-Roman world. This is

35 See above, n. 31.

36 See Remley (1996) on the poetic qualities of the Old Testament poems. Beyond
the scope of this chapter are the special problems posed by Genesis, where the most
deeply nuanced assimilations of Germanic ideology and language to the biblical
material are in the originally separate poem Genesis B, which was adapted by its
English author-redactor from a Continental Saxon original of probably Carolingian
date: see Doane (1978) and (1991).
260 Michael Clarke
necessarily speculation: but it is worth listening to the warning that
interaction between disparate cultural horizons may take forms that
are invisible or counter-intuitive to us modern readers, conditioned
as we are to assign ancient and medieval literatures to sealed and
separate categories.

INNOVATION AND I MITATION IN THE

U L S TE R C YC L E

When we face the strictly hypothetical possibility of some kind of

indirect rapprochement between Anglo-Saxon and Homeric tradi-
tions, there is food for thought in the parallel case of the narrative
literature that was developing on the other side of the Irish Sea
during the centuries when Beowulf and Maldon were composed.
I refer here to the prose tales of the so-called Ulster Cycle, which
reach their full form around the eleventh century but whose earlier
history and origins are still Wercely disputed.37 The composers of the
texts evidently worked in or in contact with the life of the monaster-
ies; they show evidence of Latin book-learning; but otherwise any
view on their relationship with earlier or alien source-materials
must come from guessing the literary aYnities of the narratives
themselves.38 The longest and most ambitious of the narratives,
Táin Bó Cúailnge, presents the problem in a particularly stark
form: many of the themes and events in the narrative are strongly
reminiscent of classical mythology and epic, but it is tantalizingly

37 In the absence of full exegetical materials on the Ulster Cycle texts, the best
starting-point is Gantz (1981). For the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the authoritative editions
and translations are those by C. O’Rahilly (1967) and (1976); useful introductory
essays in Mallory (1992). I should point out here that recent scholarship has done
much to debunk the belief (preserved in countless handbooks) that the myth and
ideology of early Irish saga preserve pristine Indo-European archetypes. For a Xavour
of the debate in its full-blown form, see for example McCone (1990), chs. 1–2 and
passim.
38 The literature on this question is complex and highly controversial. For
an introductory discussion with reference to Táin Bó Cúailnge in particular see
Ó hUiginn (1992); further references in next note.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 261
diYcult to say whether this is due to direct inXuence or parallel
development.39 In what follows I will concentrate on one famous
and striking example from this text (hereafter referred to as TBC1).
Thematically the parallel with Homer is similar to what we saw in the
Anglo-Saxon material, revolving as it does around the extreme and
more-than-human levels of behaviour reached by warriors in battle,
but it is on the detailed level of descriptive imagery that the resem-
blance is clearest. The foremost of the Ulster warriors, Cú Chulainn,
undergoes an extraordinary transformation before engaging in single
combat:40
Then he put on his head his crested war-helmet of battle and strife and
conXict. From it was uttered the shout of a hundred warriors with a long-
drawn-out cry from every corner and angle of it. From it there used to cry
alike goblins and sprites, spirits of the glen and demons of the air before him
and above him and around him whenever he went, prophesying the shed-
ding of the blood of warriors and champions. He cast around him his
protective cloak made of raiment from Tı́r Tairngire, brought to him from
his teacher of wizardry. Then there came upon Cú Chulainn a great distor-
tion (riastartha) so that he became horrible, many-shaped, strange and
unrecognisable. All the Xesh of his body quivered like a tree in a current

39 The now largely outmoded view of Táin Bó Cúailnge as ‘a window on the Iron
Age’ depends on the theory of the parallel development of ‘heroic age’ society and
literature in diVerent cultures, implicitly or explicitly following the Chadwick model
(see esp. Jackson (1964); Murphy (1961) 25–9; discussion, Koch (1994); and for a
recent essay in the same tradition see Enright (2002)). The opposing argument, that
the text is an imitation of classical epic, has taken varying and often problematic
forms. Handbooks continue to cite the examples cited by Thurneysen ((1921), esp.
96–7) in support of his theory that the work emulates the Aeneid: this despite the fact
that Thurneysen’s overall approach would nowadays command little conWdence,
modelled as it is on the harsher versions of Analyst criticism of Homer. Of Thurney-
sen’s examples some, such as the parenthesis equating the war-goddess Morrı́gan with
the Fury Allecto (TBC1 955), are peripheral and reXect atomistic ecclesiastical
learning; others, such as the claim that the inset narrative of the boyhood deeds of
Cú Chulainn is intended to match Aeneas’ narrative in Aeneid 2–4 (cf. also Carney
(1955), 305–21), seem to ignore the fact that the dynamics of focalization through
long speeches is well developed throughout the Ulster Cycle along patterns quite
diVerent from those of classical epic. For revised analyses of the question of classical
inXuence, emphasizing the intertextual importance of Dares Phrygius and other Late
Antique texts, see Ó hUiginn (1992) esp. 40–1, and (1993); Tristram (1995); and cf.
Dilts Swartz (1986).
40 Jasper GriYn is, so far as I know, the only Hellenist to have brought this passage
to the attention of audiences reared on a diet of Greek epic: GriYn (1980) 38–9.
262 Michael Clarke
or like a bulrush in a stream, every limb and every joint, every end and every
member of him from head to foot. He performed a wild feat of contortion
with his body inside his skin. His feet and his shins and his knees came to the
back; his heels and his calves and his hams came to the front. The sinews of
his calves came onto the front of his shins, and each huge round knot of
them was as big as a warrior’s Wst. The sinews of his head were stretched to
the nape of his neck and every huge, immeasurable, vast, incalculable round
ball of them was as big as the head of a month-old child. Then his face
became a red hollow (?). He sucked one of his eyes into his head so deep that
a wild crane could hardly have reached it to pluck it out from the back of his
skull onto his cheek. The other eye sprang out onto his cheek. His mouth
was twisted back fearsomely. He drew back his cheek from his jawbone until
his inward parts were visible. His lungs and his liver Xuttered in his mouth
and his throat. His upper palate clashed against the lower in a mighty
pincer-like movement (?) and every stream of Wery Xakes which came into
his mouth from his throat was as wide as a ram’s skin. The loud beating of
his heart against his ribs was heard like the baying of a bloodhound . . . or like
a lion attacking bears. The torches of the war-goddess, virulent rain-clouds
and sparks of blazing Wre, were seen in the air over his head with the seething
of Werce rage that rose in him. His hair curled about his head like branches of
red hawthorn used to re-fence a gap in a hedge. If a noble apple-tree weighed
down with fruit had been shaken about his hair, scarcely one apple would
have reached the ground through it, but an apple would have stayed impaled
on each separate hair because of the Werce bristling of the hair above his
head. The warrior’s moon (lúan láith) rose from his forehead, as long and as
thick as a hero’s Wst and it was as long as his nose, and he was Wlled with rage
as he wielded the shields and urged on the charioteer and cast slingstones at
the host. As high, as thick, as strong, as powerful and as long as the mast of a
great ship was the straight stream of dark blood which rose up from the very
top of his head and dissolved into a dark magical mist like the smoke of a
royal hostel when a king comes to be waited on in the evening of a winter’s
day (TBC1 2237–78, trans. C. O’Rahilly (slightly adapted)).41
Instantly this recalls the transformation of Achilles when he reveals
himself to the Trojans in Iliad 18. In each case a hero who is poised

41 This passage belongs to the latest strata of Recension I of TBC; it corresponds

closely to a very similar transformation found in the tale Brislech Mór Maige
Muirthemne, also known as Aided Con Culainn (The Great Defeat of the Plain of
Muirthemne/The Death of Cú Chulainn). The tale is relatively inaccessible: for text see
van Hamel (1933) 102–4 with partial translation; Stokes (1877).
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 263
between divine and human status, displaying himself to his enemies
before his solitary onslaught, is brieXy and suddenly transformed in a
way that goes above and beyond the limitations of human nature. Cú
Chulainn is transformed after being healed and helped by the divine
Lug Mac Ethlenn, who is a god responsible for fathering the hero in
one of three mythical births;42 Achilles, similarly poised by his
uniquely close association to Zeus, is transformed with the personal
help and presence of Athena. So stated, the comparison is broad and
thematic; but the echoes extend to the most detailed level and run
between an extended sequence of motifs. I quote the Iliad passage in
full for comparison:

ÆPaæ غºf tæ ˜ØU  º : I
 Ł


þØ NŁ ØØ º ÆNª
Æ ŁıÆÆ,
Id
 ƒ ŒƺfiB  
EÆ Łø
æ, KŒ
 ÆPF
ÆE ºªÆ ÆÆøÆ.
‰
 ‹ ŒÆe Ng K% ¼ ÆNŁæ ¥ŒÆØ
ºŁ KŒ 
ı, c

œØ IØøÆØ,
¥  ÆæØØ ıªæfiH Œæ ÆØ @æœ
¼ KŒ æı: –Æ
 Mº fiø ŒÆÆ
Ø
ıæ  ºªŁıØ K
æØØ, ł
 ÆPªc
ª ªÆØ I'ıÆ æØŒØØ N
ŁÆØ,
ÆY Œ ø f ıd ¼æø IºŒBæ ¥ŒøÆØ:
S I غºB ŒƺB ºÆ ÆNŁæ ¥ŒÆ:
B
 Kd æ Ng Ie   , P
 K ÆØf
 ª: æe ªaæ ıŒØc T  K
.
ŁÆ a Xß , IæŁ
b —ƺºa Ł

Łª%Æ : IIæ æØ K ¼ tæ Œı
Ø.

But Achilles rose up, dear to Zeus; and Athena cast the tasselled aegis around
his sinewy shoulders, and around his head the bright goddess set a golden
cloud, and from it she burnt a Xame shining all around. As when smoke
reaches the high air, rising from a city, far away on an island, round which
enemies are Wghting, who are making division in bitter war from their own
city; and at the hour of sunset pyres burn in succession, and the gleam
appears, shooting high above, so that those who dwell round about can see

42 See TBC1 2088 V., with the tale Compert Con Chulainn, ‘The Conception of Cú
Chulainn’ (trans. in Gantz (1981) 130–3).
264 Michael Clarke
it, so that perhaps they will come with their ships to help in the war: so from
Achilles’ head the gleam reached the high air. Going from the wall he stood
on the mound, nor did he mingle with the Achaeans; for he was mindful of
his mother’s close command. Standing there he cried out, and Pallas Athena
spoke from behind him; and amongst the Trojans he roused terrible panic
(Il. 18.203–18).
In each case the isolated and threatening warrior utters a magically
terrifying cry; a magical garment symbolizing hostility is wrapped or
shaken around him; a gleam of divine light shines out from his
forehead; and, most striking of all, the stuV rising from his forehead
becomes the vehicle for an extended simile which describes Xames
and smoke rising from a Wre in a vividly contrasted visual context.
Sure enough, there are obvious diVerences as well, most notably the
presence in the Irish material of a level of baroque fantasy that is
approached by no surviving specimen of Homeric imagery: but the
sequence of apparently exact correspondences in the choice of im-
agery demands an explanation. At Wrst blush, there are two alterna-
tives: either the resemblances are a coincidence of parallel
development,43 or the author of this passage had been reading the
Iliad.44 If the Wrst of these seems against the odds, the second is
hopelessly unlikely: there is no possibility that any Irishmen were
acquainted with Homer at the time that this work was composed.
There may have been some knowledge of Virgil and some late Roman
epic, notably Lucan and Statius; but it seems that this was largely or
entirely a matter of atomized grammatical and scholiastic facts rather
than literary engagement;45 and in any case there is no description of
a warrior in any of those poets which is suYciently close to our Iliad
passage to be claimed as a credible intertext.

43 Thus GriYn (1980) 38–9.

44 For a detailed discussion of this possibility, suggesting moderations similar to
those proposed below, see Sayers (1996), cf. more generally Carney (1955) 276–323.
45 See above, n.39. Controversy continues as to whether the Irish literati were in a
position to read Virgil in the period before the inXux of continental narrative
literature associated with the arrival of the continental monastic orders and the
Anglo-Normans. In a much-cited article HoVmann (1988) argues on the basis of
the Old Irish glosses to Priscian that the Irish grammarians knew Virgil directly as
early as the eighth century; but it is a long way from there to any suggestion that the
Aeneid might have served as a literary model for the authors of the narratives
discussed in this article. See further below, n. 51.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 265
However, one narrative document of classical heroic lore was
indeed known and prized in the culture that created the image of
Cú Chulainn printed above: a late Latin text of negligible literary
quality which very seldom comes into the ken of today’s Hellenic
scholars. This is the De Excidio Troiae of Dares Phrygius, a narrative
pseudo-history of the Trojan War, presented as the reminiscences of
an eyewitness and consequently written in a plain, unadorned sum-
mary style like an incompetent pastiche of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
Dares’ text was enormously inXuential in England and the Continent
from the late twelfth century onward, when it formed the basic
channel for the transmission of the Troy legend; but it had made its
way at least two centuries earlier to Ireland, where it was put into
Irish in a succession of versions under the name of Togail Troı́.46 To
speak of ‘translation’ would be potentially misleading here, because
the Irish text’s derivation from the Latin is hidden under layers of
embellishment, deepening, and literary richness very close in theme
and style to TBC1. In eVect the authors of Togail Troı́ have spun out a
rich heroic narrative by applying the literary artistry of their Irish
heroic tradition to the bare and spartan skeleton of Dares’ Latin
original.47 The earliest surviving recension in the series is judged
on linguistic grounds to have developed roughly in tandem with the
Wrst surviving full version of TBC1, and on internal grounds it is
agreed that TBC1 is also the result of the expansion and embellish-
ment48 of earlier and simpler exemplars, whether written or oral,
which are now long lost. In this way both texts bear witness to a single

46 The detailed linguistic analysis by Mac Eoin (1960) is authoritative. It remains

mysterious that the Irish version of Dares Phrygius pre-dates its popularity in
England and the Continent: the appeal of Dares elsewhere seems to have been
bound up with the fact that it tells the story from a Trojan point of view, and most
of the peoples of the medieval North claimed Trojan descent (see Graus (1989)),
whereas the Irish claimed descent rather from Scythia via Greece and Spain. Evidence
is emerging that the Irish recensions of Dares share a common origin with those
in Welsh (Poppe (2003)), so the original exemplar may have reached Irish culture
from Celtic-speaking British communities, where the claim to Trojan stock was a
commonplace.
47 See Mac Gearailt (1996) and (2000/1). In the present discussion I deal only with
the Wrst recension of Togail Troı́; for discussion of the second (Book of Leinster)
recension see Mac Gearailt (1996) 460 V.
48 Perhaps also distortion and redirection: see e.g. Kelly (1992) and Tristram
(1994) for possible reconstructions, and cf. Edel (2001) 216–26 and (2002).
266 Michael Clarke
programme of developing an authoritative narrative cycle out of the
outlines of the mythical or quasi-historical past of Ireland and of
Europe as a whole. The abundant matches in phrasing, structure, and
style between the two texts leave no doubt that they are products of
the same creative milieu. It would be futile as well as wrong-headed
to try to propose one as the original and the other as an imitation;
rather, comparison suggests that the creators of both narratives
were using the same repertoire of imagery and even phrasing to
expand their originals and create an authoritative narrative of the
heroic past.49
The elements of this ‘expansionist aesthetic’ can be picked out in
some detail by comparing the two texts and, in the case of Togail Troı́,
by setting the Irish version line by line alongside the Latin original of
Dares. A recurring technique is vivid and startling juxtaposition,
especially in similes and comparisons: take a typical example from
a description of a stranger in the words of a charioteer in TBC1:
A single, royal, wide-eyed warrior is driven in the chariot. He has a thick,
forked beard reaching down past the soft lower part of his navel. It would
protect Wfty warriors on a day of storm and rain if they were under the deep
shelter of the hero’s beard. He carries a curved variegated shield with white
shoulder piece and three beautiful concentric circles. A litter-bed for four
bands of ten men would Wt upon the hide which stretches across the broad
circumference of the warrior’s shield (TBC1 2711–17).
In the bizarre contrasts there is a clear and striking parallel with the
aesthetic of the Homeric simile, which tends to vividly juxtapose the

49 I diVer here from the analysis of Tristram (see esp. (1995) 70–2; and cf.
Ó hUiginn (1992) 40–1), who maintains that classical narratives like Dares served
as literary models for the creation of the extended narrative discourses of Táin Bó
Cúailnge. There are no substantive linguistic or textual grounds for assigning priority
to one of these two Irish texts over the other; and a comparison between Togail Troı́ I
and its Latin original shows that the narrative skills of the former are overwhelmingly
due to the original contributions made by the authors of the Irish version. It seems
incredible that any people with a storytelling tradition of their own would have found
anything to imitate in the literary qualities of such a mediocre work as Dares
Phrygius: the Latin text provides the skeleton of names and events and nothing
more. With Tristram contrast Mac Gearailt (1996), and more broadly (2000/1), who
takes it that the author of Togail Troı́ I is ‘moulding the lifeless narrative of Dares into
a story of the kind he knew in contemporary Irish’ ((1996) 455, and more generally
489–93; cf. further Myrick (1993) 145–9).
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 267
distant world of peace-time life with the battleWeld on which the
narrative takes place. Because both Irish and Greek narratives (like
the worlds that created them) are intimately concerned with single
combat on the battleWeld, this aesthetic is particularly liable to
produce seemingly Homeric images in this context. Consider two
similes added to Dares’ narrative by the Irish translator:
Hector rested not from then in that way till [the Weld] was full of bodies and
of heads from one end to another of the battle. So it is that not more
numerous are sheaves of oats in autumn after a great reaping-party, or
icicles under the feet of king’s herds in a ford between two territories, than
are the hands and feet and bodies and waists cleft by the edge of his sword or
point of his spear and cut by the little swords and spears that were Wtted out
of his own hauberk and the hauberks of his horses (Togail Troı́ 1 1159–66).
The comparison of dead men with reaped corn instantly suggests the
Iliad;50 only the climatic details reassure us that the image is a
Northern creation. It is quite possible that the simile technique
developed independently in the two traditions. On balance, however,
it is more likely that the Irish similes have indeed been inXuenced by
classical sources, but that the inXuence has come by an indirect and
roundabout route. The Irish writers may well have been inXuenced
by collections in Xorilegia or commonplace books of handy images,
originally culled from disparate classical sources, which could be
imitated or emulated at will.51
The pattern, then, is of a combination of two complementary
processes: typological analogy in the application of similar aesthetic
techniques to similar subject matter, and indirect inXuence through
the fragmentary transmission of individual snippets of classical
lore into the Irish repertoire. Counter-intuitive though this twofold
analysis may seem, it is often the most eYcient explanation for the

50 See e.g. Il. 19.221–4.

51 Scholarship has underestimated the importance of Xorilegia as a conduit for the
transmission of classical images and tags into early medieval literary traditions. A
related question is the possible inXuence of late Latin rhetorical handbooks on the
development of the Wgured style of the Ulster Cycle: see Dilts Swartz (1986). Brent
Miles (Univ. of Toronto) kindly informs me that his forthcoming study of classical
inXuences on Togail Troı́ will propose Macrobius and Lactantius’ scholia to Statius
among the conduits by which excerpted passages from Greek as well as Latin epic may
have come to the knowledge of the Irish author-compilers.
268 Michael Clarke
contributions made by the author of Togail Troı́ I to convert Dares
into a narrative of real artistry. To take a typical example,52 Dares’
sentence
Teuthras cum exercitu superuenit, quem Achilles fugato exercitu uulnerauit
(ch.16)
Teuthras came up with his army, and Achilles set the army to Xight and
wounded him
becomes the following in the Irish text:
The hosts and multitudes of the land awaited them round Teuthras, round
their king. Teuthras challenged them to single combat. When Achilles heard
this, he threw his travelling-clothes from him and put on his battle-dress of
battle and combat. He put on, indeed, his hauberk of twice-forged iron and
crested, shapen helmet on his head. Then he came through the host of
Mysians like a Wercely wounding lion worried on account of its cubs, or
like a furious bull to which an evil blow is given. He gave a cast of a great
broad-blue lance at Teuthras, in such a way that its head went through him
from one side to the other (Togail Troı́ I 724–31; revised from Stokes’s
translation).
It is possible that a classical source lies somewhere in the distance
behind the beast similes here: I am irresistibly struck, for example, by
the strange echo between the lion simile here and the famous image
of a lioness tracking her cubs in Homer’s description of Achilles’ grief
for Patroclus (Il. 18.316–30).53 If so, however, the source is undoubt-
edly removed by several stages from the Greek original, and the
original context of grief and distress has been replaced by the con-
ventional one of battle: it may even be a coincidence that the simile
has re-attached itself to the hero to whom it was originally applied by
Homer. Likewise it is possible that the bizarre comparison of Cú
Chulainn’s heartbeat to ‘a lion attacking bears’ (TBC1 2264–5,
quoted above) is ultimately derived from the conventional beast
similes of classical epic; but the context here is utterly diVerent, and
the logic of the image is unparalleled by any possible exemplar that
I can Wnd in Latin sources.

52 See further Mac Gearailt (1996) 459.

53 Noted by Myrick (1993) 92.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 269
The picture that begins to emerge is of the development of a
home-grown narrative canon whose overall structures are strength-
ened or given authority by rapprochement with late classical myth-
ography, while its aesthetic and cultural concerns naturally and
coincidentally parallel those of the now lost and forgotten Homeric
originals. Much of what drives the battle-descriptions in Togail Troı́,
as well as the accounts of challenge and combat with Cú Chulainn in
TBC1, is a concern with the extreme states of mind and body into
which the hero is cast in the heat of battle—a concern closely akin in
spirit, if not in detail, to the theme of heroic excess that we identiWed
in the Iliad as well as in the Old English material of the same period.
From this background emerge exuberant descriptions of the changes
undergone by the foremost heroes in the heat of battle, where the
extremity of spirit becomes a physical transformation.54 Alongside
Cú Chulainn’s transformation, printed above, stands a briefer but
parallel account of Troilus in Togail Troı́:55
Fury and anger entered [Troilus]; and out of his forehead there rose the
warrior’s moon until it was as long as his nose; and his two eyes came out of
his head till they were longer than a hand’s measure to the outside of his
head. His hair was like the branches of a hawthorn. He attacked the hosts in
that wise, like a lion active, full of rending fury, who runs to attack a herd of
boars (Togail Troı́ I 1471–88, adapted from Stokes’s translation).
As we noted above, there are no grounds to assign primacy either to
this transformation or to that of Cú Chulainn: all we can say is that
both bear witness to the same formal template for describing the
miraculous transWguration of the hero in battle, and one is extended
into more elaborate form than the other, evidently for literary
reasons related to its place at a crucial point of the story-line of the

54 It is impossible to tell whether the transformation of Cú Chulainn is speciWc to

that hero or represents a Xoating motif which could be freely applied to diVerent
warriors in diVerent narratives. For the latter possibility see e.g. Bruford (1994) 27–8.
It remains possible, however, that the transformation of Troilus in Togail Troı́ I is
deliberately intended to recall the transformation traditionally associated with Cú
Chulainn: note that in the thirteenth-century Irish poem Clann ollaman uaisle Emna
Cú Chulainn is speciWcally paralleled with Troilus (13–14) among a series of equations
between characters in the two cycles. Cf. Byrne (1963) 81 n. 4; Ó hUiginn (1992) 37–8.
55 See further Myrick (1993) 151–3.
270 Michael Clarke
Táin.56 By setting the two alongside each other we can pick out the
shared patterns of the template: the warrior’s fury, the miraculous
luan láith or ‘hero’s moon’ that gleams over his head, the weird
transformation of his eyes, the comparison of his wild hair to a
tree, and the deployment of simile imagery in which beasts Wght
each other. When we focus on the template in this way, it begins to
seem more and more remote from the Iliadic image of Achilles. The
apparent correspondences with Homer are fortuitous, due to the
combination of heterogeneous but mutually strengthening routes
of convergence. First is the independent interest of the two traditions
in the extreme behaviour of semi-divine warriors in battle; second is
the shared aesthetic of the simile, with contrastive juxtaposition in
the choice of imagery; and third is the overall project of developing a
narrative cycle which would stand as an integrated whole, the ‘Matter
of Ireland’ in the context of universal pseudo-history. It is part and
parcel of this distinctive literary project that its elements are culled
indiscriminately from native and foreign sources, contributing to a
unique synthesis with its own logic. If it is true that some of the
imagery of Cú Chulainn has found its way into the Irish discourse
from Mediterranean sources, it is equally true that the warriors of
Troy have taken on the characteristics, potentially superhuman, of
the heroes of an inherited tradition whose antiquity and ultimate
origins will have been already unknown when the texts were com-
posed.
If this analysis carries conviction, it may give us some insight into
the paradoxical resemblances between disparate literatures that are
dubbed ‘heroic’. It is undoubtedly a fact of human nature that men
behave in uncanny and even self-destructive ways on the battleWeld,
and that they are especially liable to do so when their world associates
social prestige and lasting glory with success in single combat; and at
diVerent times and places literary art has responded to these phe-
nomena in extended narratives of the kind now called ‘heroic’. But
the detailed shaping of that response is subject to external inXuence
as much as any other art-form: the complicating factor is that the

56 Note that even within TBC1 the long description of Cú Chulainn’s transform-
ation is echoed in a passage by the so-called H-interpolator by a briefer version of the
image, on a similar scale to the account of Troilus’ transformation printed here.
 Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cú Chulainn 271
carriers of such inXuence seldom correspond to the texts that later
hindsight sees as the great classics of mainstream literature. We have
seen that a combination of independent cultural development and
the inXuence of late Latin bric-a-brac created a medieval Irish litera-
ture which uncannily resembles Homer, even though no one respon-
sible for it can have known clearly what the name of Homer stood for.
Given the paucity of available evidence, it is impossible to tell whether
the background of the Old English heroic poems is in any signiWcant
way similar to that; but the Irish material, and the key role therein of
Dares’ wretched little book, will at least stand as an example of the
kind of muddled and counter-intuitive connections that characterize
much of the history of literary interaction. If the most prized and
most ‘classical’ works of the epic succession stand over us now like the
heights of a single great tradition, we should remember that more
signiWcant continuities have often been transmitted over the centuries
by the dog-eared handbooks of sub-literary lore.
This page intentionally left blank
 10
Quantum Mutatus ab Illo

Moments of Change and Recognition

in Tasso and Milton

Emily Wilson

By the end of the sixteenth century, any European or British writer

embarking on a long heroic poem would have been aware of the
classical epic tradition, and especially of the Aeneid. Even those who
knew no Greek or Latin could now, for the Wrst time, read a range of
vernacular translations, which were given a wide circulation by the
printing press. In Britain, a spate of English translations of the Aeneid
appeared in the late sixteenth century,1 and around the turn of
the century, Chapman published his versions of the Iliad and the
Odyssey.2 Knowledge of the classical epic tradition was no longer
conWned to specialists; even moderately educated readers—even,
perhaps, literate women—could be expected to pick up obvious
classical allusions.
New consciousness of classical literature created a new set of ques-
tions about how writers should relate to their ancient predecessors.

1 Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a Middle Scots version of the whole poem, was
published in 1553 (though Wnished in 1513); Surrey’s blank verse translations of
books 2 and 4, in 1554; Richard Stanihurst’s quantitative version of books 1–4, in
1582; Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne’s plodding but heavily circulated version in
fourteeners was Wnished in 1584. See Gransden (1996); Burrow (1997a).
2 His Seaven Bookes of the Iliades appeared in 1598; he Wnished the whole poem,
after many revisions, in 1611.
274 Emily Wilson
Should all heroic narrative poetry imitate the Aeneid and the Homeric
poems? What allowances should be made for the tastes and expect-
ations of a contemporary readership? Could the presence in classical
epic of pagan gods and pagan magic be adapted in a Christian poem?
How far could a writer diverge from either the form or the ethos of
Homer and Virgil, and still remain within the classical tradition?
Should modern writers of narrative poetry even try to imitate the
ancients?
Some writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would
have given a resounding ‘No’ to this last question. The availability
of the classical tradition also made it possible to reject classicism
altogether. New long narrative vernacular poems like Orlando Inna-
morato and Orlando Furioso were seen by many as belonging to a new
and unclassical, even anti-classical genre, ‘romance’, which owed little
or nothing to ancient literature and which catered to the needs of
contemporary Europe.3 For these writers and commentators, clas-
sical epic was a restrictive genre which required adherence to a
narrow set of formal unities, whereas vernacular romance allowed
for the inWnite expansion of episodes, and was therefore more suited
to a newly expanded and pluralist society.
Others—including Tasso in Italy and, a little later, Milton in
Britain—deliberately positioned their work within the tradition of
Homeric and Virgilian epic. Both poets ostensibly rejected romance
outright: in the Discorsi, Tasso insists on his diVerences from Boiardo
and Ariosto, while Milton’s narrator at the beginning of Paradise Lost
book 9 takes a side-swipe at Spenser, sneering at those who tell the
unheroic tales of ‘jousting knights’ (9.33–8).
But it would be misleading to present these poets as simply
returning to a purely classical tradition. Like all great poets,
Milton and Tasso do not conWne themselves rigidly to generic
demarcations. They reject the narrow conception of the classical
epic tradition itself which is implied by a strict distinction between

3 Classical epic was found too monotonous by many of those whose tastes had
been nourished by Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso. Tasso himself acknow-
ledges in the Discorsi that most of his contemporaries prefer reading Ariosto to
Homer: ‘I grant what experience demonstrates, that Orlando Furioso delights our
contemporaries more than [Trissino’s] Italia liberata or even the Iliad and the
Odyssey’ (Cavalchini and Samuel (1973) 76).
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 275
epic and romance;4 they rediscover in epic the Odyssean strand
which had been largely co-opted by romance. Supposedly ‘romance’
elements persist in both poets’ work,5 and indeed, Tasso denies that
romance is really a separate genre from classical epic.6 Both were
willing to incorporate into epic themes, tropes, and styles more
often associated with other genres, including tragedy, comedy,
mock-heroic, pastoral, and history writing, as well as romance.7
Moreover, both poets draw on biblical as well as classical traditions,
mingling pagan and Christian literature.
Because of its multiple debts—to biblical, classical, and more
recent literature—Renaissance epic raises in a particularly acute
form the question of how literary memory operates. How do poets
signal their awareness of past literature? Should we imagine the
relationship of a poet to his or her predecessors as a kind of heroic
struggle for dominance, as Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of inXuence’
model suggested? Or should we set the psychodynamics of
authorship aside, and view multiple allusions as competing ‘voices’
within the text?8 Do echoes of previous literature necessarily carry

4 Some of the less successful Renaissance epics suVer from their authors’ equation
of ‘epic’ with ‘Iliadic’—and of ‘Iliadic’ with ‘militaristic’. Ronsard’s Franciade (1572)
is the most obvious example. On this, see Silver (1961), who discusses Ronsard’s
attitudes towards Homeric epic and their limitations; see especially 141–2.
5 Many recent critics have discussed how Tasso and Milton combine ‘epic’ with
‘romance’: see especially Parker (1979); Quint (1993); Burrow (1993).
6 In the Discorsi: Cavalchini and Samuel (1973) 71. For him, Ariosto is as much an
epic writer as Homer was. Tasso suggests that Orlando Furioso diVers from classical
epic not in genre, but in its greater emphasis on ‘love, chivalry, adventure, enchant-
ment’ (Discorsi: Cavalchini and Samuel (1973) 76–7)—none of which is, in itself, an
improper subject for epic. With touching trustfulness, he claims that there is not, has
not been, and will never be a poetic genre unknown to Aristotle’s ‘subtle genius’. On
Tasso’s adherence to Aristotelian principles, see Rhu (1993). The desire to return to a
more truly classical and truly epic tradition involved, for Milton and especially Tasso,
an interest in the theoretical precepts of Aristotle in the Poetics. On Milton and
Aristotle’s Poetics, see Steadman (1976).
7 On Milton’s mixture of genres in Paradise Lost, see especially Rollin (1973) and
Lewalski (1985). See also Lyne (1994) on the introduction of other genres into epic in
the Aeneid.
8 See e.g. Bloom (1973); Lyne (1987). Even the terminology one uses to ask
the question necessarily implies a particular theoretical outlook. ‘Allusion’ and
‘inXuence’ suggest deliberate and conscious recollection of one poet by another.
‘Relationship’ and ‘response’ suggest an emphasis on the interpersonal dynamic
between authors. ‘Intertextuality’, on the other hand, and sometimes ‘echoes’ or
276 Emily Wilson
with them a memory of their earlier contexts?9 What happens when a
single passage draws on more than one earlier source? Renaissance
epic raises problems of generic and literary-historical identity.
What makes one poem the same genre as another? How can one
recognize continuity within the poetic transformation of particular
themes or tropes?
In this chapter I will suggest that the interactions between
characters in two Renaissance epics may hint at how we should
read the interactions between Renaissance epic and the various
traditions on which it draws. I will point to the complex ways in
which echoes of Virgil, in particular, may be joined with recollections
of later literature. But I would also like to warn against reading these
poems exclusively in terms of allusion or intertext. Milton and Tasso
succeed in making their readers forget or misremember past litera-
ture, by transforming classical tropes beyond recognition.
I will focus on the transformation in Renaissance epic of two
moments in Virgil where Aeneas encounters a radically altered
Wgure from his past, who tells him to run away and to pursue his
imperial quest elsewhere. In book 2 Aeneas has a dream of Hector,
who tells him to leave Troy; in book 3 he encounters a bleeding,
speaking tree, who turns out to be the Trojan Polydorus, and who
tells him to leave Thrace and found his city in another country. The
scenes are verbally linked in the Aeneid; the words heu, fuge
are repeated (Aen. 2.289 and 3.44). Tasso alludes to the Polydorus
episode in Gerusalemme liberata, when Tancredi misidentiWes an
enchanted, bleeding, speaking tree as his dead beloved, Clorinda.
In Paradise Lost Milton reworks Aeneas’ dream vision of Hector,
when Satan fails either to recognize or be recognized by his family
and friends.
In the Aeneid these passages suggest that the past may inform
the future. Strange encounters with lost and altered companions
guide Aeneas away from dead-end places to resume his true journey

‘voices’, are terms adopted by those who do not want to make any assumptions about
authorial intentionality, and who may want to shift attention from authors to texts.
This theoretical question has lately been much discussed by Latinists; see Hinds
(1998); Edmunds (2001).
9 Martindale (1986) oVers helpful reservations against the idea that readers are
expected to keep the original context in mind in every instance of apparent allusion.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 277
towards Italy. The episodes draw attention to change, but not recog-
nition or identity; Aeneas has no diYculty in knowing that the
blood-stained character he sees in his dream is Hector, though a
Hector he has never seen before, nor in knowing that the voice from
the tree really is Polydorus.
Only in the Underworld, in Aeneid 6, does Aeneas encounter a
companion so changed that he barely knows him. Deiphobus, the
second Trojan lover of Helen, has had both face and hands mutilated
by the Greek pillagers, Menelaus and Ulysses, incited by Helen
herself. Aeneas struggles to recognize his shade:

Atque hic Priamiden laniatum corpore toto

Deiphobum vidit, lacerum crudeliter ora,
ora manusque ambas, populataque tempora raptis
auribus et truncas inhonesto vulnere naris.
vix adeo adgnovit pavitantem ac dira tegentem
supplicia.
And here he saw Deiphobus the son of Priam with his whole body ravaged,
his face cruelly mutilated—his face and both his hands, and his ears torn
from the ravished sides of his head, and his nostrils maimed by a shameful
wound. Indeed he barely recognized him, as he was trembling in fear and
covering up his terrible marks of torture (Aen. 6. 494–9).
In this passage, physical torment combines with shame to destroy
Deiphobus’ original appearance. The body of the military Deiphobus
(Deiphobe armipotens as Aeneas calls him at 6.500, ‘Deiphobus strong
in arms’) has been totally destroyed by his relationship with Helen
and its aftermath. The encounter with Deiphobus conWrms that
something of old Troy has been lost forever.
In the Renaissance epics, the story-patterns associated with
Polydorus and Hector in the Aeneid become scenes of mistaken
recognition (Tasso) or non-recognition (Milton), where—as in the
Deiphobus episode—it is diYcult, painful, or impossible for
one character to know another. Recognition after change had, of
course, been a theme in the epic tradition since the Odyssey.10 But
Renaissance epic adds new levels of complexity to scenes of

10 For discussions of recognition in the Odyssey, see Murnaghan (1981) and

Richardson (1984).
278 Emily Wilson
problematic, painful, and failed recognition. These poems make their
readers ask what it means to recognize another person, and what the
criteria are by which we Wnd sameness or identity despite time and
change. What exactly is it that goes wrong, when Tancredi in Ger-
usalemme liberata misidentiWes the tree as Clorinda, or when Satan in
Paradise Lost repeatedly fails to recognize or be recognized by his
friends? In Aeneid 6, recognition is momentarily diYcult only for
Aeneas: the reader is told clearly, twice, that this Wgure is Deiphobus
(Aen. 6.495, 500). In Milton and Tasso, the reader of epic is led to
share the characters’ bewildered failure to know one another.
I suggest that the representation in these poems of recognition as
something painful, perhaps impossible, perhaps even undesirable,
reXects Milton and Tasso’s relationship with the classical epic trad-
ition.11 These poets both recognize and deny the kinship between
their own work and that of their ancient predecessors. These scenes
suggest that the epic tradition itself may be both deeply familiar, and
transformed beyond recognition.

DEFINITIONS OF RECOGNITION

Recognition12 is the perception of an identity which has been in

doubt. It is the sudden re-learning of something once known, or of
something which ought always to have been known, after a period of

11 The possibility that there might be a connection between epic recognition and
the epic tradition is raised in a parenthesis in a footnote by Cesare (1992) 91 n. 9. He
notes that the passage evokes ‘Aeneas’ dream-vision of Hector at Troy (and perhaps a
kind of recognition among epics? but that is beyond my scope here)’. Cf. also Hinds
(1998) 8–9 and passim.
12 The analysis I oVer here of ‘recognition’ is less lexical than conceptual. I am not
primarily interested in charting a history of the conceptual variations between, say,
anagnosco and recognosco. I take the usage of ‘recognition’ in English, IƪتŒø or
Iƪøæ ø in Greek, recognosco in Latin, and the words descended from recognosco
in Romance languages (including conoscere, riconoscere, riconoscimento, and riconos-
cenza in Italian) as part of my evidence. But I do not intend to limit what counts as a
scene concerned with ‘recognition’ to passages where one of these words is used. I am
here interested in philology only insofar as it contributes to a conceptual analysis. On
the principle of starting from the lexicon but moving beyond it, see Rosen and Sluiter
(2003) 4.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 279
forgetfulness or failure to know. For this reason, recognition is always
preceded by non-recognition, and moments of non-recognition
remind us that recognition itself always happens with diYculty.
In Gerusalemme liberata and Paradise Lost, failed attempts at rec-
ognition draw attention to problems of personal identity. If we know
other people by means of external signs or appearance, what happens
when the outer appearance changes? Can the person remain the same?
What if the inner person also changes, morally or spiritually—as
Clorinda does by conversion to Christianity, and Satan by his Fall?
I will suggest that in both these poems, recognition is impeded by
the characters’ resistance to change. Tancredi cannot fully accept that
Clorinda is enjoying eternal bliss after death. He can recognize her only
as the one he has known in the Xesh, the one he has wounded. Satan
cannot accept that he himself has changed, by falling from Heaven.
Stanley Cavell has argued convincingly that psychological states
which may seem purely cognitive—such as knowledge and doubt—
often, perhaps always, have an emotional dimension.13 This is,
I would argue, especially true of recognition. Aristotle presents
recognition, anagnorisis, simply as an intellectual change, ‘from
knowledge to ignorance’ (Poet. 1452a29–31). But unlike knowledge,
recognition does not depend on good reasons for true belief. Literary
recognitions always rely on inconclusive and circumstantial pieces of
evidence, such as scars, footprints, and locks of hair (as Terence Cave
emphasizes).14 Cavell suggests that recognition may be closely asso-
ciated with its emotional and performative counterpart: acknow-

13 Cavell (1969), (1987).

14 Terence Cave’s (1988) central insight is that recognition scenes, which one
might expect would be moments of epistemological certainty and full revelation,
are in fact both shocking (‘a scandal’ is the term he uses), and deeply ambiguous.
Cave includes at the start of his study the real-life story of Martin Guerre, the soldier
whose wife supposedly recognized him after a long absence in war, but who was then
accused of being an impostor. The story shows, for Cave, how recognition is always
debatable, reversible, and potentially ‘scandalous’. Cave’s point applies well to the
passages I discuss, although he makes no mention of Milton, and discusses Tasso only
as a literary theorist, not as a poet (in his section on Renaissance commentaries on
Aristotle’s Poetics, 78–83). He mentions the non-recognition scene between Tancredi
and the false voice of Clorinda in Gerusalemme liberata, but only in a footnote on
Freud (172 n. 86).
280 Emily Wilson
ledgement.15 I will suggest that both Tasso and Milton treat recogni-
tion as a synecdochal image for acknowledgement, speciWcally ac-
knowledgement of responsibility.16
Freud vividly dramatizes17 the potential for slippage between
recognition and acknowledgement in an anecdote about himself
which he includes as a footnote to his essay on the uncanny, Das
Unheimliche.18 He tells us that once, alone in a sleeping compartment
on a train, he was startled as the lavatory door of his room swung
open and he saw ‘an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and
travelling cap’, who had suddenly entered his chamber. He found
the intruder’s appearance ‘thoroughly unpleasant’. It took him
a moment to realize, ‘to [his] astonishment’, that the ‘elderly gentle-
man’ was—of course—himself, visible in the bathroom mirror.
Freud implies that his failure to recognize himself was motivated by
a reluctance to acknowledge his own death.19

15 On the relationship of knowledge to acknowledgement, see Cavell (1969) and

(1987). Cavell’s reading of King Lear in particular ((1987) 39–124) raises the possi-
bility that Lear’s failure to recognize Cordelia in the last act of the play echoes his
failure to acknowledge her in the Wrst.
16 Mario di Cesare (1992) associates recognition in epic with ‘re-connection’, and
implies that epic recognition may actually be identical with acknowledgement. He
writes as if Penelope’s recognition of Odysseus, and her acknowledgement of him as
her husband, were the same thing. The slippage between recognition and acknow-
ledgement in epic texts can be discussed more precisely if the distinction between the
two concepts is retained.
17 I use the word ‘dramatize’ because I am interested in Freud here less as an
analyst than as a storyteller or dramatist.
18 See Freud (2003 (1919)) 162; iii. n. 1. Terence Cave relates literary recognition
to Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, noting that ‘Freud’s dazzling analysis of the
etymology and semantics of the words heimlich and unheimlich is curiously suggest-
ive of the ambivalences of anagnorisis’ ((1988) 172). Cave’s discussion of Freud also
touches on The Interpretation of Dreams, the commentary on Walter Jensen’s Gradiva
(Der Wahn und die Träume), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
19 Freud suggests that his response to his own reXection might have been ‘a vestige
of the archaic reaction to the ‘‘double’’ as something uncanny’. At Wrst, he treats the
idea of the double as a fantasy of immortality, an insurance against the possibility of
death. But after childhood, or after the development of civilization beyond the
‘primitive’, ‘the meaning of the ‘‘double’’ changes: having once been an assurance of
immortality, it becomes an uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud (2003 (1919)) 142).
In context, the story also functions as an image of Freud’s whole analysis of the sense
of the uncanny, which he claims is caused by the familiar. The sense of the uncanny
involves the insistent pressure of ‘home-truths’—or, more often, ‘home falsehoods’,
such as the childish belief that the dead come back to life—which have been
imperfectly repressed.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 281
I will be particularly concerned with literary examples of false
recognition and non-recognition.20 I suggest that both these errors
of recognition are caused by a slippage between recognition and
acknowledgement. Tancredi’s false recognition, his misidentiWcation
of the voice he hears as that of Clorinda, is prompted by a desire to
acknowledge his responsibility for her death. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s
failure to recognize his children, Sin and Death, or his old
friend Beelzebub, is prompted by a reluctance to acknowledge his
responsibility for his own Fall.

G E RUS AL E M ME L I B E R ATA

In Gerusalemme liberata, Tancredi repeatedly fails to recognize Clor-

inda, the warrior princess on the enemy side with whom he has
fallen in love. He is the Christian knight who represents the concu-
piscent part of the soul according to the ‘Allegory of the Poem’.
Paradoxically, however, he is misled not by desire but by false opin-
ion: he is seduced by the cognitive distortions of the wizard Ismene.
Tancredi suVers and errs from false belief—from repeated failures of
recognition.
From the very beginning of the Tancredi and Clorinda story, the
reader is led to intuit that Tancredi may have diYculty in recognizing
his beloved. Their Wrst interaction within the narrative of the poem is
in book 3, when she comes out riding with the pagans and attacks
him. As they tilt their lances together, her helm falls oV, and her long
hair is revealed. The narrator’s voice intervenes at this point to
address Tancredi:

20 Aristotle does not include the possibility of non-recognition as a possible type

of recognition scene. But Tasso’s Italian contemporary, the Aristotle commentator
Castelvetro, Wlls in the gap, discussing the possibility that a familiar person may be
so altered—by a change in form, or miraculous transformation, or great suVering—
as to be unrecognizable: see Castelvetro (1576) 250–3, discussed by Steadman
(1976) 72, who remarks that the encounters in Paradise Lost between Satan and
Sin in book 2, and between Satan and and the angelic guard in book 4, Wt
Castelvetro’s model.
282 Emily Wilson
Lampeggiàr gli occhi, e folgoràr gli sguardi,
dolci ne l’ira; or che sarian nel riso?
Tancredi, a che pur pensi? a che pur guardi?
non riconosci tu l’altero viso?
Quest’è pur quel bel volto onde tutt’ardi;
tuo core il dica, ov’è il suo essempio inciso.
Questa è colei che rinfrescar la fronte
vedesti già nel solitario fonte.
Her eyes blazed and her glance sparkled like lightning, sweet in her anger;
now what would they be in laughter? Tancred, of what are you thinking?
what are you heeding? do you not recognize the beloved face? This is in truth
that beautiful countenance for which you are all on Wre: your heart can tell
you, on which its image is graven. This is she whom you saw that day
refreshing her brow in the solitary pool (GL 3.22).21
Tancredi ought already to know Clorinda: he has already met and
fallen in love with her, before the narrative of the poem began. In fact,
Tancredi has not, at this stage, forgotten his beloved, and he does not
fail to recognize her, as the next stanza reassures us: ‘Ei ch’al cimiero
ed al dipinto scudo j non badò prima, or lei veggendo impètra’ (‘He
who never before paid heed to crest or painted shield now, seeing her,
is turned to stone’, 3.23.1–2). But the narrator’s series of questions is
striking, and vaguely troubling. The anxiety expressed is not the more
obvious possibility that Tancredi might no longer love Clorinda, but
that he might fail to recognize her. The narrator’s questions intro-
duce the reader to the fact that Tancredi is somehow not very good at
recognizing the woman he loves.
Tancredi’s diYculties are associated here with his role as a Pet-
rarchan lover. Part of the reason he cannot recognize Clorinda’s ‘altero
viso’ (literally, ‘proud face’) is that his love is essentially distanced,
dependent on his own abjection and his beloved’s pride. In fact,
Tancredi does not seem to remember or recognize Clorinda’s face at
all; it is only when her hair is revealed that he knows her. Tasso subtly
mocks a chivalric tradition in which love is based on a fetishistic
obsession with the individual features of a distanced and cold beloved.
But Tancredi is not simply a Wgure of fun; he is also a Wgure of the
poet.22 Tasso uses Tancredi’s inability to know Clorinda to explore

21 Trans. Nash (1987).

22 On Tancredi as poet, see especially Ferguson (1983).
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 283
the danger that every poet, not only Petrarchan love poets, may
become divorced from reality.
Tancredi’s diYculties in recognizing Clorinda are also the result of
her own complexity as a character. She is a woman who dresses and
behaves like a man, and she discovers in book 12 that her mother,
although she brought her up as a Muslim, was in fact an Ethiopian
Christian; although she is white, her parents were black.23 It is not
surprising that Tancredi fails to recognize Clorinda when she does
not know herself. The story of her birth and upbringing creates
doubts about which of her many contradictory roles constitutes the
‘real’ Clorinda. On one level, there seems to be a suggestion that true
identity is formed by birth: Clorinda is born to be a Christian because
her mother was Christian. An obvious reason for the presence of the
story in the poem is to allow for the religious and literary redemption
of the sympathetic Clorinda, without violating the poem’s rigid
categorization of the non-Christians as the villains of the story.
But Clorinda was also suckled by a tigress while escaping from
Ethiopia. This complicates the picture, since the milk Clorinda has
drunk as a baby—the primary image for nurture—is associated
metaphorically less with the pagans than with the Christians.24
Perhaps, then, Clorinda’s two religions are parallel: Islam is not
merely false nurture superimposed on native Christian truth. More-
over, if nurture may provide a good intimation of a person’s
proper self and proper religious identity, Clorinda might even seem
right to insist that she will remain in the faith in which she has been
raised. Tasso thus invites us to consider what it means to recognize
someone’s true identity. Is it constituted by physical appearance, or
by past history, or by religion, or by moral quality? The diYculty
for Tancredi is to disentangle the real Clorinda from her multiple
diVerent roles. But the recognition of any aspect of Clorinda involves
the failure to recognize its converse. He can recognize her as a warrior
only by not seeing that she is a woman. He can recognize her as his
victim only by not seeing that she dies redeemed.

23 The story is closely modelled on Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story—an example of

Tasso’s willingness to draw on non-epic sources and incorporate them into his poem.
24 As Lawrence Rhu has pointed out (1993), both Rinaldo and GoVredo are
compared to tigers.
284 Emily Wilson
When Tancredi meets Clorinda on the battleWeld, she is not
wearing her characteristic tigress helm. He fails to recognize her,
they Wght, and he gives her a death wound. As she lies dying, she
appeals to him to fetch water and baptize her as a Christian. It is only
when he moves her helm away that he sees her face. The narrator
explicitly signals the moment as a recognition scene, or at least, as a
cognition scene, exclaiming, ‘Ahi vista! ahi conoscenza!’, ‘Alas the
sight! Alas the knowledge!’ (GL 12.67.8).25
It may be signiWcant that the word used is conoscenza, not rico-
noscenza. This moment is only one in what is to be a series of
recognitions and false recognitions of Clorinda by Tancredi. He
hovers between recognizing what is, in the terms of the poem, the
truth about Clorinda—that she dies a Christian and is redeemed—
and experiencing again the recognition of the fact that he has mur-
dered her.
Tancredi retains enough self-control to baptize Clorinda, before he
passes out. The narrator assures us that she dies joyfully: ‘e in atto di
morir lieto e vivace, j dir parea: ‘‘S’apre il cielo; io vado in pace’’ ’
(‘and through the act of her joyful and living death, she seemed to
say: ‘‘Heaven is opening; I depart in peace’’ ’, GL 12.68). Tancredi later
receives a vision of Clorinda in her heavenly splendour; she conWrms
that, thanks to his baptism, she has risen to eternal bliss (GL 12.91–3).
But neither the baptism itself, nor the later vision, entirely succeed in
comforting Tancredi. On one level, he has recognized the truth, that
he has killed his beloved. But on another level, he repeatedly refuses
to recognize the further truth, that he has saved her.
Peter the Hermit reproaches him for his love of the ‘rebel’ Clorinda,
which is distracting him from his own salvation. The hermit pre-
sents Tancredi’s continuing grief as a failure to recognize reality:
‘O Tancredi, Tancredi, o da te stesso j troppo diverso e da i princı̀pi
tuoi, j chi sı̀ t’assorda? e qual nuvol sı̀ spesso j di cecità fa che vedere
non puoi?’ (‘O Tancred, Tancred, O too far wide of yourself and your
beginnings, who is making you so deaf ? and what cloud of blindness
so thick is causing it that you cannot see?’, 12.86.1–4). Tancredi
persists in his material recognition, at the expense of the spiritual one.

25 See Rhu (1993) on the use of the Aristotelian terminology of recognition in this
passage.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 285
He seems partly to trust in his dream vision of the exalted Clor-
inda. We are told that he ‘wakes consoled’, and now submits to the
doctors who will enable him to go on living (12.94). But his Wrst care
is to arrange Clorinda’s burial. Throughout the episode, Tancredi
shows an obsessive interest in her dead body. In his immediate
response to her death, he launches into a macabre fantasy that she
may have been eaten by a wild animal, and if so, he hopes to be
devoured by the same beast so that his own body may be joined with
hers (12.78–9). Tancredi’s devotion to the physical being of Clorinda
blinds him to what Peter the Hermit regards as the true reading of her
death. It is a sign from heaven, which Tancredi will ignore at his peril;
he risks damnation if he continues in his suicidal despair (12.86–8).
Tancredi responds to the hermit’s warnings, but he does so with
conXicting emotions: he is torn between desire for death, and fear
of hell (12.89). He is willing to acknowledge his own guilt, but not
willing to recognize that his guilt might be forgivable.
In book 13, Tancredi encounters what seems like the voice of
Clorinda in a tree. The wizard Ismene has animated the forest with
spirits from hell, who terrify the Christians as they come to try to
gather wood. The forest is essential for the success of the Christian
enterprise. It is the only available source of wood, and without wood
GoVredo cannot rebuild his siege engines and take the city. After
others have failed, Tancredi succeeds in passing the terrors of the
outskirts of the forest. But when he reaches a clearing containing only
one tall cypress tree, he discovers an inscription on its trunk, which
hints that the tree holds the dead: ‘Perdona a l’alme omai di luce
prive: j non dée guerra co’ morti aver chi vive’ (‘Have pity on souls
that are deprived of light; the living ought not to wage war with the
dead’, 13.39).26 Despite the warning, Tancredi tries at Wrst to con-
tinue with his mission of cutting down the forest; he takes his sword
and strikes the trunk of the tree. But blood comes from the bark, and
he hears a voice like that of Clorinda, which reproaches him: ‘Alas,
too much have you wronged me, Tancred; now let this much suYce’
(13.42).27 Tancredi is overcome, even though he half knows that this
is a delusion (13.44); he loses his sword to the winds, and returns
back to the camp.

26 Trans. Nash (1987). 27 Trans. Nash (1987).

286 Emily Wilson
Tasso here draws on the Polydorus episode in Aeneid 3, as well as
on two more recent Italian imitations of that scene, by Dante and
Ariosto.28 At the start of Aeneid 3, after the fall of Troy, Aeneas tries to
found a city in Thrace. But as he tears up a tree to deck the altar for
sacriWce, blood drips out, and on the third try, the voice of Polydorus
speaks to him in warning:

‘quid miserum, Aeneas, laceras? iam parce sepulto,

parce pias scelerare manus. non me tibi Troia
externum tulit, aut cruor hic de stipite manat.
heu, fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum.
nam Polydorus ego. hic conWxum ferrea texit
telorum seges et iaculis increvit acutis.’
‘Why, Aeneas, are you hurting a poor unhappy creature? Now that I am
buried, spare me, and spare to pollute your own dutiful hands. Troy bore
me, I am no stranger to you; this blood does not drip from a tree-trunk.
Alas! Escape this cruel country, escape this greedy shore. For I am Polydorus.
Here an iron crop of weapons covered over my pierced body, and grew with
sharp javelins’ (Aen. 3. 41–6).
The wounded, speaking tree is imitated by Dante in the Inferno
(canto 13), where Dante the character encounters a mysterious
wood full of voices. His guide, Virgil, tells him to break oV a
branch from one of the trees. It drips blood, and protests against
such cruel treatment. Virgil explains that this would not have been
necessary, had Dante been able to believe what he had seen in Virgil’s
own poetry (‘la mia rima’, 13.48). But Dante makes some signiWcant
alterations to Virgil’s version of the wounded, speaking tree. The tree
man here is a victim of the treachery of others, like Polydorus: he is
Pier della Vigna, counsellor to the Emperor Frederick II, who was
unjustly ousted from favour with him. But he is also the victim of
his own self-betrayal and violence against himself: this is the wood
of the suicides. While the Polydorus episode reminds Aeneas of
the external dangers of the world away from home, the
wood of the suicides reminds Dante of psychological and moral
danger to the self.

28 Tasso’s use of Ariosto in this scene is discussed in detail by Ferguson (1983). On

the relationship of Tasso’s wood to Dante’s, see Murrin (1980).
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 287
Moreover, whereas Aeneas breaks the branch of the tree in order to
use its wood to bless his new city, Dante breaks the tree only because
Virgil tells him to do so. The wood itself is of no signiWcance; what
matters is what Dante can learn from the encounter. Ariosto’s version
of the wounded tree takes this a step further: his tree breaks entirely
by accident. In Orlando Furioso canto 6, the knight Ruggiero is
spending the night on a magical island. He ties his hippogriV to a
myrtle tree, but the animal bucks about, and the tree complains with
a human voice. An episode which in Virgil had suggested the dangers
inherent in an imperial quest, and in Dante had been a reminder
both of moral danger and of the hidden truths in the pagan poetry of
Virgil, becomes in Ariosto just one of those things: another weird and
amusing incident.
There are two central diVerences between Tancredi’s encounter
with the bleeding tree and its epic predecessors. One is that, as
Margaret Ferguson points out, ‘his encounter with a voice from the
past impedes rather than furthers his mission and his understanding
of it’.29 ‘Tasso alone makes the ontological mystery into an epistemo-
logical and moral danger, calling the voice a ‘‘simulacrum’’ which lies
to the hero about its—and his—identity.’30 Tasso’s scene makes
central the problem of knowing who is talking from the tree.31
Tasso presents Tancredi as an image of the poet, one who hears
spectral voices from the past which have no basis in physical reality.
But in Tasso, the wood itself, as material, becomes far more
important than it has been in any previous version. In Dante, the

29 Ferguson (1983) 127.

30 Ferguson (1983) 128.
31 This point is neglected by Freud, who mentions the episode in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle as an example of the passive repetitive experience of trauma (1955
(1920) 24). Freud misses, too, the fact that Tancredi is not really the primary ‘hero’ of
the poem. He is subordinate to GoVredo, and he is in the forest not to satisfy his own
curiosity (as Freud’s ‘he makes his way’ implies, (1955 (1920) 24), but in obedience to
GoVredo’s instructions. Freud had not read the whole poem; he borrows his account
of the story from Goethe’s Wilhem Meister 1.7 (Goethe (1989 (1795) ) 11–13). Cathy
Caruth, one of the most prominent trauma theorists, reiterates the idea that what
happens in this scene is pure repetition: ‘the unwitting reenactment of an event that
one cannot simply leave behind’ (1996) 2. She adds her own central idea: that trauma
involves ‘a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound’ (ibid., italics
original).
288 Emily Wilson
poet breaks oV the branch only because Virgil tells him to do so;
he has no need of the wood. Ariosto’s Ruggiero does not even know
that his animal’s antics have broken the tree. Aeneas had tried to
gather wood to serve his larger imperial and religious purposes—but
to bless a city which is not, after all, destined to be the new homeland
for the Trojans. Tasso is the only poet in the series who suggests that
the wood itself is necessary for the hero’s quest, and who presents
the failure to gather wood from the bleeding tree as a failure in the
mission.
Gerusalemme liberata associates the problem of how to cut down
the enchanted forest with the problem of how to use literary trad-
ition. ‘Wood’ or ‘timber’ is also a traditional metaphor for the raw
materials out of which poetry is created.32 Tasso uses the image in his
Discorsi, remarking that ‘the material of poetry is like a dark forest,
murky and without a ray of light’.33 But Tasso’s magic wood in
Gerusalemme liberata is not purely neutral material. It cannot be
transformed into siege engines immediately, because it carries too
much with it already. The wood is full of dreams, and feeds on the
dreams of those who enter it (like the planet Solaris).34 GoVredo and
his men must purge the wood of its magic, destroy its dreams (and,
hence, their own), in order to use it for their new military purpose.
Tasso was aware that his task in writing the poem, like GoVredo’s
in taking the city, must begin by creating usable material out of a
tangle of dreams.35 Tancredi’s guilt about killing the pagan Clorinda,
his desire to do so again, and his horror in the face of that desire, hint
at the complex relationship of Tasso’s poetic enterprise to those of
his predecessors. One could see here a version of the ‘anxiety
of inXuence’:36 perhaps Tasso feels an urge to destroy the Aeneid,

32 On the metapoetical sense of wood, see Hinds (1998) 12–14.

33 Cavalchini and Samuel (1973) 21.
34 In the story by Lem (1970), and Wlm adaptations by Andrej Tarkowski (1972)
and Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney (2003). Like Solaris, the enchanted forest in
Gerusalemme liberata is a place where dreams—including nightmares—seem to come
true.
35 Ferguson (1983) 135–6 makes a similar but diVerent point: she compares
Tasso’s revisions of the Liberata into the Conquistata to GoVredo’s destruction of
the forest.
36 The term is from Bloom (1973).
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 289
the Inferno, and Orlando Furioso, just as Tancredi kills Clorinda. But
Tasso Wnds that Virgil’s poem resurfaces even when he has tried to
repress it; he hears Virgil’s voice in the middle of a Christian mission.
A simile compares Tancredi’s encounter with the supposed voice
of Clorinda with a sick man’s hallucinations (GL 13.44. 1–6):

Qual l’infermo talor ch’in sogno scorge

drago o cinta di Wamme alta Chimera,
se ben sospetta o in parte anco s’accorge
che ’l simulacro sia non forma vera,
pur desia di fuggir, tanto gli porge
spavento la sembianza orrida e fera.
As sometimes the sick man who encounters in a dream dragon or tall
chimaera girt with Xame, although he suspects or partly knows that the
simulacrum is no true shape, yet wants to Xee, such terror the horrid and
dreadful appearance implants in him . . . 37
The Wrst words of the simile punningly draw attention to Tasso’s
dependence on Dante: Tancredi is like a sick man, ‘l’infermo’, but the
whole episode also resembles Dante’s poem, l’Inferno. Tasso’s wood,
like that of Inferno 13, is a place of moral danger and temptation,
where pity for the dead may be a distraction from the true path.
But although the simile suggests that Tancredi only partly believes
in the voice, as one may be half aware that dreams are dreams,
he declares positively to GoVredo that the tree really was inhabited
by a human spirit (13.49). Tancredi’s fears and confusions hint at
Tasso’s own anxieties, encountering the ‘wood’ or material of
past poetic tradition. Are the dead real, or only voices in our own
heads?
Rinaldo, GoVredo’s second in command, succeeds in cutting down
the forest without any trouble once he returns from the clutches of
the witch Armida. He succeeds where Tancredi fails because he has
no imagination; Rinaldo is not a poet. Tancredi listens to the voices of
his own memory, and is vulnerable to guilt, aggression, and desire,
whereas Rinaldo adheres to his purpose, and cuts down the trees
even when they speak with the voice of his once beloved Armida
(18.25–38).

37 Trans. Nash (1987).

290 Emily Wilson
Perhaps, a Bloomian reading might suggest, Tasso draws attention
to the problem of recognition in the relationship between Tancredi
and Clorinda in order to deXect attention from the real issue: his own
refusal to acknowledge his poetic relationships. But things are really
the other way round here: there is, if anything, too much recognition,
and also too much acknowledgement. The fear articulated by the
Tancredi episode is not that Tasso may be dependent on the voices of
the past, but rather, that there may be no other voices: as a poet, he
may have to stand alone, responding only to the images and sounds
in his head. As always in Tasso, there is an agonizing fear of lapsing
into solipsistic madness.
It is tempting to associate the supposed voice of Clorinda with the
voice of the past.38 But the episode hints at the diYculty or even
impossibility of recapturing poetic tradition. If Clorinda is Tancredi’s
past, then the voice from the tree is a false version of that past,
distorted both by the magic of Ismene the wizard, and by Tancredi’s
own desires. Tasso hints at the strangeness and inaccessibility of the
past, even when it seems at its most familiar. Colin Burrow suggests
an alternative to the Bloomian way of reading poetic tradition,
arguing that each poet struggles not to repress or destroy his prede-
cessors, but to rehabilitate their strangeness, to understand the alien
world-views of the past.39 Tancredi’s failure to understand that the
tree’s voice is not Clorinda is an image of the false belief that
the voices of the dead can ever be fully heard again.

PA R A D I S E LOS T

In book 2 of the Aeneid, Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream, not in

his living splendour, wearing Achilles’ Wrst set of armour which he
had stripped in triumph from Patroclus, but bloody and dusty from
Achilles’ chariot wheels. Hector has changed, and he warns Aeneas
that he too must change. He must be a diVerent kind of hero, one
adapted not to defend his city in the middle of a war, but to survive

38 Ferguson (1983) oVers a sophisticated reading along these lines.

39 See Burrow (1993).
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 291
now that the war is over. Aeneas, Hector says, must do what may
seem like the unheroic thing: he must run away. ‘heu, fuge nate dea,
teque his’ ait ‘eripe Xammis’ (‘Son of a goddess, run away,’ he said,
‘and tear yourself from these Xames’, 2.289). The warning from
Hector, greatest of the Trojan warriors, justiWes Aeneas in adopting
what might seem like the cowardly way out, although he is slow to
follow the advice.
Aeneas is shocked at Hector’s altered appearance, and exclaims:

‘quantum mutatus ab illo

Hectore, qui redit exuvias indutus Achilli
vel Danaum Phrygios iaculatus puppibus ignis!
squalentem barbam et concretos sanguine crinis
volneraque illa gerens, quae circum plurima muros
accepit patrios.’
‘How changed from that Hector, who returned after putting on the armour
of Achilles, or after hurling Phrygian Wres at the ships of the Greeks! With a
ragged beard and hair matted with blood, and bearing all those many
wounds which he got around his own city walls’ (Aen. 2.274–9).

Hector has changed so radically that it is as if there were two of him:

the Hector who was dragged round Troy by Achilles and whose
beauty and dignity are gone, and also ‘that Hector’ who thought he
had won. The passage suggests that there may be multiple versions of
a mythic character. DiVerent tellings of the story will concentrate on
diVerent Hectors.
Hector’s change marks the new mood in this new poem: the
Virgilian Hector is not as he was in the Iliad. The Aeneid plots
Aeneas’ attempts to deWne a new, Roman form of heroism, while
the poem itself tries to reinvent Homeric epic. How diVerent can
Hector be, and still be Hector? How diVerent can a hero be, and still
be a hero? How much can Virgil swerve from Homer, and still follow
the tradition of Homeric epic? The encounter between Aeneas and
Hector uses the motif of an altered character—Hector—to mark the
alteration which epic and epic heroism itself must undergo, as Virgil
draws on but alters his Homeric models.
Aeneas laments the changes which have befallen his friend, but
does not doubt even for a moment that this vision was truly a vision
292 Emily Wilson
of Hector. Neither Aeneas nor Hector change beyond recognition.
In Paradise Lost, as in the Aeneid, encounters with altered characters
within the narrative draw attention to the changes which the
tradition itself has undergone. But Milton’s poem suggests an even
greater sense that change can be disturbing, painful, and disruptive of
all continuity. In Milton, the encounter becomes centrally concerned
with the problem of recognition after an enormous change—a change
which is both physical and moral.
Satan’s Wrst words in the poem are an address in Hell to his
companion in sin, Beelzebub:
If thou beest he; but O how fall’n, how changed
From him, who in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright.
(PL 1. 84–7).

Charles Martindale suggests that this passage may be seen not as an

instance of speciWc allusion, ‘but rather a rhetorical formula of which
the most famous example happens to occur in the Aeneid’.40 A similar
exclamation occurs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.273–4). Moreover,
there is a verse in Isaiah which may be as important as a background
to the Miltonic passage: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,
son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which
didst weaken the nations!’ (Isaiah 14: 12). Martindale argues that the
Miltonic passage has a ‘classical epic timbre’, but disputes the claim of
Blessington that Milton is closely alluding to the context of the
Virgilian original, and thereby showing how pagan and un-Christian
the devils’ behaviour is, ‘when compared to Aeneas’ and Hector’s,
heroes who served as models for Christian behaviour during the
Renaissance’.41 Martindale points to the paradox in Blessington’s
reading, which treats the pagan Aeneas as the model for the Christian
hero and ignores biblical inXuences.
Martindale is certainly right to note that the biblical passage is also
an important model for Satan’s exclamation. Milton contaminates or
marries the classical with the biblical traditions. I would argue,
however, that he is wrong to suggest that this is ‘rhetorical formula’,

40 Martindale (1986) 15. 41 Blessington (1979) 3.

 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 293
not allusion. Milton’s enjambement echoes Virgil’s, suggesting that
the reader is being guided to think speciWcally of the passage from the
Aeneid, as well as other sources. The presence of a similar exclam-
ation in Ovid as well as in Virgil does not necessarily suggest that we
should see this trope as formulaic, since speciWc recollection of the
Ovidian passage is also relevant to Satan’s position. In Metamorph-
oses 6, Niobe watches all her seven sons die, and the narrator exclaims
at how diVerent she is in her grief from the proud woman who
boasted and rejected the gods. Niobe’s impiety is like that of Satan
and Beelzebub, although the fallen angels are not yet willing to accept
that they have, like Niobe, lost everything that mattered.
Milton adapts a trope which is already, in his models, concerned
with change, and alters it so as to suggest the possibility of an even
more radical loss of an original self. Virgil and Ovid suggest that
there may be two Hectors or two Niobes, one happy and one
wretched. Satan’s exclamation suggests that the changed Beelzebub
may not even be Beelzebub at all. Milton adds a striking detail not
present in either Virgil, Ovid, or Isaiah. Satan begins with an initial
conditional sentence, ‘If thou beest he . . .’. Rather than completing
the syntax, he breaks oV into an exclamation: he is amazed at ‘how
fallen, how changed’ Beelzebub is from his former glory. But the
conditional raises an important set of questions which remain un-
answered. Is Beelzebub still really himself? Is it possible to fall, and
retain one’s identity? The encounter between Satan and Beelzebub
suggests the possibility of a far more radical change of identity than
that implied either in the Virgilian meeting of Hector and Aeneas, or
even in Isaiah’s exclamation about Lucifer. To what extent can the
fallen angels, and later, the fallen Adam and Eve, be continuous with
their earlier, innocent selves? Is it possible to change one’s spiritual
self, to move from Heaven to Hell and to fall from grace, and still
remain the same?
Satan hopes to deny that he has really changed at all. He uses the
word ‘change’ three times in the course of a dozen lines (PL 1.84, 96,
97), but he insists that although Beelzebub may have changed and
fallen, he himself remains essentially unchanged. After acknowledg-
ing that God the Father’s ‘dire arms’ have, at least for the time being,
proved superior, Satan immediately denies that he has changed in
any important, inner way.
294 Emily Wilson
Yet not for those [God’s arms],
Nor what the potent victor in his rage
Can else inXict, do I repent or change,
Though changed in outward lustre, that Wxed mind
And high disdain, from sense of injured merit,
That with the mightiest raised me to contend.
(PL 1.94–9).
Satan paradoxically combines denial and admission—he does not
‘change j Though changed’. But even the sound patterns of the lines
undermine his position. Half-rhymes and sonic echoes (‘rage/change’,
‘mind/contend’, even ‘mind/merit/mightiest’) remind us that even
apparently small alterations can make all the diVerence in the world.
The narrator has already anticipated Satan’s exclamation, remark-
ing of Hell, ‘O how unlike the place from whence they fell!’ The fallen
angels struggle to deny that they themselves have been aVected in any
essential way, even if their location is diVerent. The attempt to deny
the fact of change continues as Satan and Beelzebub Wnd their way
out from the ‘Wery waves’ (1.184) to the dry land of Hell. Surveying
his new home, Satan asks, ‘Is this the region, this the soil, the
clime . . . j That we must change for heaven?’ (1.242, 244), echoing
the beginning of his greeting to Beelzebub, ‘If thou beest he . . .’. But
almost at once he denies that the external, geographical change
makes any diVerence, since he brings with him ‘a mind not be
changed by place or time’ (1.253); he asks, ‘What matter where, if I
be still the same . . . ?’ (1.256).
Satan implies that identity is constituted by mental and spiritual
continuity; it is unaVected by changes in geography. The principle
may be right, but Satan is, of course, wrong (in the poem’s terms) to
deny that his own mind has remained unchanged. Again, his condi-
tional clause begs the central question: if he were indeed still the
same, it might indeed not matter where he was. But he is not.
Moreover, it is not so clear in Paradise Lost that moral or spiritual
identity can be separated so easily from geography. Satan refuses to
admit that Hell is a state of mind as well as a place. He refuses to
recognize that he has changed, because he refuses to acknowledge
that he has fallen.
At the beginning of book 9, Milton’s narrator takes an opposite
line on the relationship of external factors (place and time) to
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 295
spiritual identity and mental power. He declares the superiority of his
own central story, the Fall of Man, to those of previous epics. But he
ends with a qualiWcation. His ‘higher argument’ is ‘suYcient of itself ’
to qualify the poem as ‘heroic’, ‘unless an age too late, or cold j Climate,
or years damp my intended wing’ (PL 9.44–5). The place of Paradise
Lost in the heroic tradition is, the passage suggests paradoxically,
assured by its subject matter or ‘argument’, which is more truly heroic
than pagan heroism. But that place may be jeopardized by Milton’s
own position, as a poet writing in cold, damp England, in his late
middle age, and in a time of political disillusionment, after the failure
of the English republic. Milton acknowledges, as Satan does not, that
his mind, and hence his poem, may be changed by place and time.
Like Milton’s poetic narrator, Satan struggles with his own rela-
tionship to tradition and his position in changed and degrading
circumstances. The parallel and contrast between Milton’s poetic
narrator and Satan suggest that Satan may be a bad poet, because
he is unable to acknowledge change as well as continuity. Satan,
unlike the narrator, refuses to accept that change may aVect his
own life and work.
The association of Satan with classical heroism has often been
noted by critics, and has been interpreted in a number of diVerent
ways. Some, like Blessington, conXate classical and Christian ethics,
suggesting that Satan has betrayed both.42 More often, the echoes of
classical literature in Satan’s speeches are taken as a sign that the
classical tradition itself is corrupt.43 Neither of these positions is
entirely right. Satan draws on the Bible as well as on Virgil.44 The
issue is less Satan’s classicism than his relationship to tradition—
which includes both classical and biblical literature.
For Milton, the proper relationship of a poet to his sources is part
of a broader ethical question: how to relate to the past, and to
change.45 In literary terms, Satan’s problems with self-recognition

42 Blessington (1979).
43 See for instance Kates (1974).
44 As Martindale (1986) notes.
45 This issue is brilliantly discussed by Quint (1986, epilogue), in greater detail
than I can oVer here. Quint focuses on Satan’s attitude towards his origins, especially
his desire to deny that he was created by God, and connects this to the poet’s
relationship to his sources.
296 Emily Wilson
and change suggest that a poet must Wrst recognize the discontinuity
and diVerence between his own position as a writer, and his sources.
Milton can position himself in the same tradition as Virgil, and
be recognized as an epic writer in the classical tradition, only if he
also recognizes the radical diVerences which divide him from the
ancients.
Milton uses the motif of a character’s astonishing change to hint at
how Renaissance epic itself is a mutation from an earlier classical
model. On one level, the fallen Satan’s exclamation might seem to
suggest that Milton’s work is a ‘falling-oV’ from the original greatness
of classical epic. On another, the passage suggests a new way of
valuing the classical canon: the ‘realms of light’ in the Christian
heaven are set over the inferno of pagan heroism. Satan has fallen
back into classical epic, and the echo of Virgil is a mark of the fact
that these fallen angels have not changed nearly enough.
Change is the subject of Paradise Lost. The whole poem is con-
cerned with a single momentous change, the Fall, and with all the
other changes which preceded, accompanied, and followed it. Milton
is particularly interested in change as a moral dilemma: sin can be
caused by too great a desire for change, or else by too great a desire to
maintain the status quo and deny the fact of change once it has
occurred. Eve falls because she wants to change too fast, to become
instantly wiser and more powerful. Adam falls because he refuses to
change his relationship with Eve, even after she has fallen. The most
important diVerence between the Fall of the angels and the Fall of
Man is that Adam and Eve, unlike Satan and his followers, manage to
accept change, to recognize that they have done wrong and that their
world is diVerent as a result. It is because they can recognize simul-
taneous continuity and change that Adam and Eve’s story ends on a
note of muted hope, whereas Satan’s refusal to recognize any alter-
ation in himself or his friends precludes further change. Satan does
not realize that he can remain continuous with his past, unfallen self
only if he can accept the change which has come upon him—or
rather, which he has brought upon himself. He is obsessed with
change, but wants to deny that it could happen to him. It is because
he refuses to recognize the truth about his own behaviour, and
especially, the diVerence between what he was and what he is, that
he becomes unrecognizable to others.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 297
The most self-conscious, even parodic recognition scene in Para-
dise Lost comes at the end of book 2, as Satan is making his way up to
Earth to try to corrupt God’s new creation, Man.46 At the gates of
Hell, guarding the exit, Satan meets two horrible creatures: a woman
with the tail of a serpent, and an indescribable shape wearing a
crown. Satan fails to recognize them and begins to attack, but the
woman shape appeals to him: ‘O father, what intends thy hand, she
cried, j Against thy only son?’ (2.727–8). It turns out that this is
Satan’s own family: the woman is Sin, born from his head when he
Wrst conspired against God in Heaven; the crowned shape is Death,
child of Sin by Satan. The scene is a comic or mock-tragic version of a
tragic recognition scene. Satan here becomes an unsympathetic and
perverted version of Oedipus, whose failure to recognize his own
incestuous family relations is the corollary of his failure to recognize
the truth about himself.
When Satan Wrst invades the Garden, he manages to evade recog-
nition by the guardian angel, Uriel. He pretends that his trip is
motivated only by the desire to see and wonder at the Father’s last
and greatest creation, Man. Uriel, in his innocence, is deceived,

For neither man nor angel can discern

Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will through heaven and earth.
(PL 3.682–5)

In this instance, the ability to evade recognition is an essential part of

Satan’s plan. It is a mark of Satan’s fallenness, and also enables him to
do further harm.
But after he has made his initial illicit foray into the Garden and
has glimpsed the ‘blest pair’ (4.774) in their innocent marital bliss, he
is apprehended by an angelic squadron sent by Gabriel. Ithuriel and
Zephon Wnd him sitting, ‘squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve’
(4.800), and have no diYculty in seeing that he must be a fallen
angel, although they do not know his name. They ask him, ‘Which of
those rebel spirits adjudged to hell j Com’st thou, escaped thy prison,

46 On this episode as a recognition scene, see Steadman (1976) and Cesare (1992).
298 Emily Wilson
and transformed?’ (4.823–4). Satan is outraged that they should fail
to recognize him:
Know ye not then said Satan, Wlled with scorn,
Know ye not me? Ye knew me once no mate
For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar;
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown,
The lowest of your throng; or if ye know,
Why ask ye, and superXuous begin
Your message, like to end as much in vain?
(PL 4.827–33)

As often happens, Satan’s language seems to run away with him. His
insistent repeated use of the word ‘know’ is a mark of Satan’s misun-
derstanding of the nature of knowledge, and hence, of recognition. He
repeats the word ‘know’, but so often that it threatens to lose its
intended meaning and become a mere exclamation of denial: ‘No,
no, no!’ ‘Know’ is surrounded and echoed by the reiterated negatives
‘not’ and ‘no’. Zephon reminds Satan that self-knowledge must in-
clude an awareness of how the self changes over time (trading on the
phonic similarity of ‘know’ and ‘now’): Satan cannot be ‘known’
because he is ‘now’ (4.839) dark as his own sin.
The passage suggests that Satan misunderstands what constitutes
either knowledge or identity. Even his mode of apprehending truth,
by ‘knowledge’, may be too limited. In answer to Satan’s ‘know’,
Zephon tells him what to ‘think’ (4.835), perhaps suggesting a less
deWnite mode of cognition. Satan is aVected by the encounter in a
way which is as much emotional as cognitive:
abashed the devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely, saw, and pined
His loss.
(PL 4.846–9)
Satan’s desire to be known, and scorn for those who do not ‘know’, is
answered by a recognition based on feeling and seeing. He is Wrst
subdued by Zephon’s superiority, ‘abashed’, and then feels and sees
the truth. Emotion and vision precede his new realization that he
really has lost something of irreplaceable value.
 Quantum Mutatus ab Illo 299

C ON C LU S I ON

Satan and Tancredi’s failures of recognition are both the result of

their fears about themselves. In both cases, misplaced or failed
recognition is a mark of misplaced or failed acknowledgement.
Both Milton and Tasso suggest that characters may identify one
another, or may fail to do so, because of empathy and desire rather
than evidence or proof. Tancredi feels that the voice he hears must be
that of Clorinda, because her reproaches are what he dreads and
expects. Satan has diYculty in recognizing Beelzebub, and fails
initially to recognize Sin and Death, because he resists acknowledging
his own responsibility for his fall. For Tancredi, an excessive desire to
acknowledge his own past guilt and his own aggression leads to the
supposed ‘recognition’ of a tree as his beloved. For Satan, a refusal to
admit to his own sinfulness leads to repeated failures to recognize or
be recognized by friends and family.
As has often been suggested, Tancredi and Satan are both Wgures of
the poet.47 The problems of recognition associated with these char-
acters represent their creators’ anxieties about the relationship of
individual creativity to the poetic tradition. The anxieties expressed
are diVerent in the two poems. Tancredi’s misidentiWcation of the
magical tree voice as the voice of Clorinda hints at Tasso’s fear of
solipsism. Perhaps the hope that a Renaissance poet could interact
with the poets of antiquity is pure fantasy; perhaps the voices which
seem to speak from a past tradition are only voices in our heads. In
Milton, the fear implied by Satan’s resistance to change is less of
solipsism than of egotism and excessive intellectualism. A Satanic
poetics would deny any diVerence between classical and Renaissance
epic. Paradise Lost and Gerusalemme liberata both use failures of
recognition between characters to articulate concerns about how
Renaissance Christian epic can connect itself to the classical trad-
ition, and yet remain distinct from it.

47 On Tasso, see Ferguson (1983); on Milton, Quint (1986).

This page intentionally left blank
 11
The Idea of Epic in the Nineteenth Century
Richard Jenkyns

This chapter is concerned with a paradox. It has been said that the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a barren period for epic
poetry; and indeed it was often said at the time. Yet the age was
closely engaged with the epic idea. Several signiWcant poets of
nineteenth-century England discuss the epic genre in their verse,
not allusively or intertextually but directly and explicitly: we shall
see Byron, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning doing this.
Arnold discussed epic in his prose, and his Sohrab and Rustum is so
saturated in Homer that the essays On the Modern Element in Lit-
erature and On Translating Homer almost seem to be continuing by
other means a debate which the poem initiates. Keats in his own
person, Clough in the person of Dipsychus, and Pater’s Wctional poet
Flavian all declare a contrast between themselves and Homer. If the
nineteenth century is not an age of great epic, it is at least a great age
for observing epic’s interactions.
The idea that the nineteenth century shunned the epic tone is an
assumption, and we might begin by asking how well it is grounded.
What of Joseph Cottle’s Alfred, James Bland Burges’s Richard the First,
Margaret Holford’s Wallace, Bulwer-Lytton’s King Arthur, Alexander
Smith’s Edwin of Deira, and Samuel Ferguson’s Congal?1 This roll-
call—which could be grimly extended—may remind us that the
typical poetry and the good poetry of a particular period are not

1 Tucker (2002) 29–31.

302 Richard Jenkyns
necessarily the same, and may not even be much alike.2 Slightly less
obscure is Bailey’s Festus, which is at least remembered for being
forgotten; in its time it achieved the unlikely double of being both
Wve times the length of the Aeneid and widely popular. We might
recall Morris and Arnold—Sir Lewis, that is, and Sir Edwin—for The
Epic of Hades and The Light of Asia each had its hour of public favour.
Turning to a more durable Arnold and Morris, we Wnd Sohrab and
Rustum, Balder Dead, Sigurd the Volsung, and The Life and Death of
Jason. And as we shall see, there are other major poets of the period
engaged in verse which seems epic or at least epic-like; if such works
are not to be placed within the genre of epic, it may indeed be worth
our while to ask why.
In fact, Byron’s ironic complaint, in English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers, was not that there was an absence of epic in modern
England but that there was too much. In antiquity, epic was pro-
duced at the rate of a millennium per piece:3

The time has been, when yet the muse was young,
When Homer swept the lyre, and Maro sung,
An epic scarce ten centuries could claim,
While awe-struck nations hail’d the magic name:
The work of each immortal bard appears
The single wonder of a thousand years.

(A slightly shifty footnote explains that the Odyssey is so closely

connected with the story of the Iliad that ‘they may almost be classed
as one grand historical poem’.) In the Renaissance productivity
increases, with Tasso, Camoens, and Milton each composing one
epic in a lifetime (another footnote tries to justify the discounting
of Paradise Regained). And now Robert Southey is turning them out
in quantity: already he has written Joan of Arc, Thalaba the Destroyer,
and Madoc.4 Southey himself, to Byron’s amusement, had declared

2 One might compare the often repeated German claim that England was ‘das
Land ohne Musik’. It was a land without great composers; but that is a diVerent
matter.
3 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, lines 189–94.
4 Thalaba is not easily categorized, but if a classical label is required, it might more
naturally be called Pindaric than epic. Byron’s footnote applies to it Porson’s phrase:
‘It will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.’
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 303
that Madoc ‘assumes not the degraded title of epic’.5 The reality, then,
is not that the age is uninterested in epic or heroic themes; but there
is a feeling that they have become problematic, as they were not in
earlier times. The question for us is why people thought this, and
whether they were right to do so.
Part of the answer may be simply empirical. The eighteenth
century wanted great epic; it failed to get great epic; and it was
natural to conclude that, for whatever reason, the thing could no
longer be done. Less pessimistically, it could be argued that good epic
would always be rare: that idea is implicit in English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. Samuel Johnson began his assessment of Paradise Lost by
observing, ‘By the general consent of critics the Wrst praise of genius
is due to the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assemblage of all
the powers which are singly suYcient for other compositions.’6 The
epic poet, he goes on to explain, must have complete mastery of
language, diction, and sound eVect; he must have the narrative and
dramatic skills of the historian, the imagination both to conceive
Wction and represent reality, a deep understanding of morality, an
insight into the complexities of vice and virtue in human character, a
wide experience of life; and more besides.
On this account it is diYcult to write an epic poem as it is diYcult
to design a cathedral or compose a symphony—diYcult because it is
a complex and ambitious project requiring knowledge, imagination,
powers of design, and experience. But there is nothing in Johnson’s
account to suggest that epic poetry was uniquely problematic—still
less that poetry as a whole was an obsolescent art. But Thomas
Blackwell’s An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735)
had already taken a somewhat bleaker view. This essay argued that
primitive peoples lived naturally; their passions were strong
and simple, and their conversation was not the prattle of modern,
polished speech. Because their manners were natural and simple, the
description of their ordinary and domestic activities was of
itself enchanting and poetic. Moreover, primitive people have the
advantage of living in a world that seems marvellous to themselves:
the ‘marvellous and wonderful is the nerve of the epic strain: but

5 Madoc, ‘Preface’. 6 Lives of the Poets, ‘Milton’.

304 Richard Jenkyns
what marvellous things happen in a well-ordered state?’ Accordingly,
it is impossible to write about modern life in the hyperbolic manner
essential to epic except in parody and the mock-heroic. Therefore, we
moderns, if we aspire ‘to poetize in the higher strains’ must go back
to the past, ‘unlearn our daily way of life’, and ‘adopt a set of more
natural manners, which however are foreign to us, and must be like
plants raised up in hot-beds and green-houses’.7 The simile is well
chosen, and brings out how the imagined process is almost but not
quite self-contradictory: for in one sense the hothouse plant is
natural, in another not. There is a kinship with Schiller’s later
division of poetry into the naı̈ve and the sentimental, though Schiller
was to resist the primitivist bias that gives the early poets the palm.
The idea expounded by Blackwell was to become commonplace in
the later eighteenth century: thus the argument of the last chapter of
William DuV ’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767) is summarized in
its comprehensive title: ‘That original Poetic Genius will in general be
displayed in its utmost vigour in the early and uncultivated periods
of Society, which are peculiarly favourable to it; and that it will
seldom appear in a very high degree in cultivated life.’8 There were,
in fact, a more pessimistic and a more hopeful version of the theory.
On the more pessimistic account, a cultivated society was inimical to
poetry generally; on the more hopeful, a cultivated society favoured
some kinds of poetry over others, and especially disfavoured epic.
Some of these notions had old roots. The idea that poetry must
respond to the conditions of its age goes back at least to Horace: in
the Wfth century one could write with the ruggedness of Pindar; in the
age of Augustus one must be more delicate, careful, and consciously
literary. Lucilius wrote rapidly and roughly; had he lived in Horace’s
time, he would have changed his methods of his own accord.9 Or we
might compare T. S. Eliot’s argument that as a culture develops its
poetic expression turns naturally from epic to the more concentrated
form of lyric utterance.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the most interesting
exploration of such ideas is Walter Pater’s, in Marius the Epicurean.

7 Blackwell (1972 (1735)) 24–8; cf. Bate (1971) 49–50.

8 DuV (1964 (1767)); cf. Bate (1971) 50.
9 Hor. Carm. 4.2.1–12, 27–32, Sat. 1.4.9–10, 1.10.67–71.
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 305
This novel is set in the second century ad, and one of the characters
in it, the aspirant poet Flavian, considers that Homer had it easy:
‘One might think . . . that there was but the almost mechanical tran-
script of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which one
could hardly have spoken at all without ideal eVect, or the sailors
pulled down their boat without making a picture in ‘‘the great style,’’
against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of an
age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer’s
poetry?’ If the poetry of his own Antonine age, Flavian reXects,
should try to revive the spirit of archaic verse, the most it could
hope to achieve would be ‘novitas, artiWcial artlessness, naı̈veté ’ and
‘it must count, in comparison with that genuine early Greek newness
at the beginning, not as the freshness of the open Welds, but only of a
bunch of Weld-Xowers in a heated room’.10 Pater is here providing a
variant on Blackwell’s metaphor, but it is an inferior variant, for the
plant in a hothouse is at least a living plant, whereas the Weld Xowers
in the drawing room must quickly shrivel. And Flavian’s view is not
quite so despairing. The sophisticated aVectation of simplicity has its
own charm, he believes, and modern literature has at least ‘improved,
by a shade or two of more scrupulous Wnish, on the old pattern’.11
Pater has at least half an eye, of course, on his own epoch: as Flavian
ponders the Odyssey and the ‘great style’, it is hard to resist the feeling
that he has been reading Matthew Arnold on translating Homer, and
maybe we are not meant to resist it. If you could not write an Iliad in
the Victorian age, perhaps you could write Sohrab and Rustum.
The Romantics and their successors looked, as the Wctional Flavian
did not, upon classical civilization as completed, over and done with;
and they debated their own relationship to that distant epoch. One
idea was that the ancient world was fundamentally unlike the mod-
ern world in aesthetic character: classical art was plastic whereas
modern art was picturesque, or classical art was sculptural whereas
modern was musical, or classical art was white whereas the modern
world was coloured. Another idea was that the ancient and modern
worlds were parallel, each going through a comparable process of
development, often compared to a natural life cycle. On this account,

10 Marius the Epicurean, ch. 6. 11 Marius the Epicurean, ch. 4.

306 Richard Jenkyns
Wfth-century Greece represented the childhood, youth, or prime
manhood of classical civilization; and it was always assumed that
the present age represented civilization in a late stage. From the Wrst
of these ideas one might reasonably have deduced that modern
conditions were suited as least as well to the production of epic as
ancient conditions, and perhaps better; but that was not the conclu-
sion drawn. People saw that the ancient world had been supremely
successful in epic. From the Wrst idea they could infer that epic was
suited to the classical world’s distinctive aesthetic character; from the
second, that it was suited to an early stage in a civilization’s devel-
opment. In either case the conclusion was that epic was unsuited to
the present day. This judgement was more easily reached if one
focused on Homer and ignored the Aeneid, but that awkwardness
could be smoothed over by downgrading Virgil—‘that harmonious
plagiary’, Byron called him12—or, more interestingly, by representing
his poem as a sport or freak of nature, a success against the odds.
This was the view that Macaulay took in his essay on Milton. He
declares the paradox that ‘no poet has ever had to struggle with more
unfavourable circumstances than Milton’. This is because ‘as civiliza-
tion advances, poetry almost necessarily declines’ and therefore ‘the
most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem pro-
duced in a civilized age’. Poetry requires a certain childlikeness of
mind, and ‘In a rude state of society men are children with a greater
variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state of society that we may
expect to Wnd the poetical temperament in its highest perfection.’
The essay on Milton made the young Macaulay’s reputation, but at
this point his argument was not quite as new and provocative
as he implied it to be. For example, a few years earlier, Peacock in a
half-serious, half-humorous essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, had
argued from the evidence of ancient Greece that as a culture
advances, poetry declines from an age of gold—in antiquity, the
period from Homer to the Wfth century—to an age of silver and
then to one of brass, which tries to recover the age of gold but
produces only poor verbosity. Nonetheless, Macaulay does add a
twist or two or his own. His detractors have depicted him, in his
lifetime and since, as a strong but prosaic mind, deWcient in subtlety

12 Letter to Moore, 11 Apr. 1817.

 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 307
and depth; but he appears here as a spirit of some complexity. On the
one hand, there is the Whig historian, watching how a childish and
fanciful manner of apprehending the world is thrust aside by the
onward march of desirable progress. On the other, there is the
romantic who declares that to compose and even to enjoy poetry
requires ‘a certain unsoundness of mind’, who recalls that Shake-
speare—whom he does not name but cites simply as ‘the greatest of
poets’—ascribed to the poet a Wne frenzy, and who asserts that ‘Truth,
indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness’. This is not
a belittlement of poetry but a recognition of what a later period
would call the Dionysian element in mental life. Macaulay also recalls
that Milton himself had wondered if he were not born in an age too
late, and that Johnson had mocked him for it; and Macaulay censures
that mockery. It is Tory Johnson who expects progress in the arts, and
the Whig historian who denies it. So potent is the sense that the
present age is unfavourable to poetry that it overbears Macaulay’s
otherwise ameliorative picture of historical process.
Another explanation for the modern world’s diYculty with epic
identiWed the problem as one of style. Matthew Arnold declared that
England had the glory of having produced ‘one of the only two
poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modern
languages’; these are The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.13
‘England and Italy here stand alone,’ he continued; ‘Spain, France,
and Germany have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor
Corneille, nor Schiller, nor even Goethe, has produced a body of
poetry in the true grand style, in the sense in which the style of the
body of Homer’s poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand.’ Even
Shakespeare, although ‘undoubtedly the supreme poetical power in
our literature’, does not achieve the grand style.
There is some diYculty in understanding what Arnold meant by
this; we may even wonder if Arnold knew himself what he meant.
Many scholars would deny that Dante wrote in a grand style (and
deny, for that matter, that his poem should be called an epic).14
When Arnold went on to say that Paradise Lost is in the grand style

13 On Translating Homer (see Super (1960) 144).

14 Curtius (1953) 361–2: ‘If it [The Divine Comedy] is commonly classed as ‘‘epic’’,
that can be ascribed only to the inanity which thinks that the Iliad and the Forsyte
Saga are to be spoken of in the same breath.’
308 Richard Jenkyns
‘in some respects to a higher degree’ even than the Iliad and The
Divine Comedy, one suspects that he associates the grand style, as the
man in the street is likely to do, with a certain amplitude and
orotundity. But in that sense Homer indeed, as well as Dante, may
not seem grand at all. Arnold himself, after all, brilliantly illustrates
the plainness and rapidity of Homeric style. Later, he tried to reWne
his position, distinguishing between ‘the grand style simple’, exem-
pliWed supremely in Homer, and the ‘grand style severe’, exempliWed
in Milton.15 But it remains unclear what the relation is between
grand style and good style. The diYculty is that Arnold wants
‘grand style’ to be partly a descriptive and partly an evaluative
term. He concedes that the grand style may have faults—‘it may be
harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or over-laboured’—but on the other
hand it is never aVected, and that is why Shakespeare does not
achieve it, because all his tragedies contain passages in ‘the worst
of styles, the aVected style’. ‘Never aVected’—already that seems to
claim too much: it is hard to imagine that a style is incapable of being
aVected which is capable of being ‘over-laboured’. Partly Arnold
seems to want the grand style to be a type of style, subject to the
kinds of fault likely to arise from a rich, elaborated manner, and
partly he wants it to be a virtuous style, which ceases to be grand once
it fails in quality.
It is probably impossible entirely to extricate Arnold from his
tangle, but it may be worth inquiring how he got into the tangle in
the Wrst place. He wants us to appreciate that he is not concerned
solely with epic: the styles of Pindar and Sophocles are grand, and
those of Corneille, Schiller, and Goethe are not. (Or rather, what
these later poets miss is the true grand style; the smuggling in of that
extra adjective, obscure in its import, suggests some unease in the
argument.) In a way he is broadening his Weld, by comparing epic
style with drama and lyric, but in another way it narrows the possible
scope of epic to associate it with especially lofty, tragic, or sumptuous
forms of literary expression. Not all epic need be like that; and even if
the best epics share the quality of stylistic hupsos, it is not clear that
the right word for this is grandeur: we might do better to say that the
Iliad and the Odyssey have found a style that matches their content.

15 On Translating Homer, ‘Last Words’ (Super (1960) 188–91).

 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 309
Arnold’s own feeling does indeed seem to be that recent centuries
have found it very hard to hit upon a style that is answerable to the
demands of the highest poetry. (Arnold himself favoured the word
‘adequate’, but I substitute ‘answerable’ as less dispiriting.) The
problem seems to lie in culture and society: there is something in
modern conditions which resists the greatest themes and the greatest
quality. So what appeared to be a question of technique comes back
to the state of civilization after all.
In fact, Arnold did imply on another occasion that a kind of heroic
poetry was possible in his own time—but tragic drama rather than
epic.16 For him, that is, tragedy and epic are importantly distinct and
diVerent. His argument is that Homer achieved an unmatched
success in representing a period contemporary to his own, or nearly
so (an argument harder to make today, when we do not believe that
the Homeric epics represent a period close to themselves). Virgil
achieved considerable success in recreating a period distant from
himself. But for the representation of a distant age, tragedy is better
than epic, because epic has to represent the forms of outward life,
manners, fashions, what is local and transient, whereas tragedy can
restrict itself to representing what is permanent and universal. So,
Arnold says, it is no accident that the three great tragic poets of the
Wfth century have survived, whereas the epic poets—Panyassis,
Choerilus, and Antimachus—have perished. And it is no accident
that the dramatic part of the Aeneid, the tragedy of Dido in the fourth
book, is the most popular part of that poem.
Though Arnold makes an eloquent case, one can imagine a diVer-
ent argument being made. We might borrow Macaulay’s observation
that the dramatist needs to eVace himself, and add that the romantic
age, by contrast, was the epoch of the egotistical sublime. And sure
enough, the most characteristic and innovative of Victorian verse
forms was the monologue. With hindsight, indeed, what may strike
us about the idea that epic was less suited to modern circumstances
than tragedy is how ill it sits with the actual course of Victorian
literary history. The Greeks’ deWnition of epos was in terms of metre.
If we take iambic blank verse as the English equivalent of the dactylic
hexameter, plenty of nineteenth-century poets, including some of the

16 ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ (Super (1960) 34–6).

310 Richard Jenkyns
best, were engaged with the epic genre, and even if we deWne
epic more restrictively, some major poems of the time are at least
epic-like. Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Morris might all be
counted epicists. By contrast, nowhere does Victorian poetry seem
more visibly to have tried and failed than in heroic verse drama. Idylls
of the King may not be Tennyson’s most admired work, but no one
reads Queen Mary, Harold, or Becket. Today we would be surprised to
hear him described as ‘poet and dramatist’, but Irving produced The
Cup, with himself and Ellen Terry in the leading roles, and Tennyson’s
last play, The Foresters, had its premiere in New York. We do not
think of Browning as a playwright either, but StraVord was the Wrst of
eight plays that he wrote within a decade; after 1846 he abandoned
the genre. Several of Wilde’s prose plays continue to hold the stage,
but no one, surely, will ever put on The Duchess of Padua. The ‘Greek
revival’ in poetic drama was the most conspicuous failure of all, and
indeed a puzzling phenomenon, for whereas people might feel that
plays in Shakespearean blank verse were a genuinely indigenous art
form, Hellenic tragedy seems obviously academic and artiWcial. It is
hard to say much in favour of Arnold’s Merope. Swinburne’s
Erechtheus is a frigid bore; Atalanta in Calydon is remembered only
for its choruses—that is, for the places where it eVectively ceases to be
classical (or dramatic) at all. Robert Bridges’ Ulysses and Prometheus
the Firegiver remain unread by millions.17
Hopkins thought that the problem lay with the use of classical
models: ‘Believe me,’ he told Bridges, ‘the Greek gods are a totally
unworkable material; the merest frigidity, which must chill and kill
every living work of art they are brought into.’18 But Keats
had managed to bring them into Endymion and Hyperion, and
Shelley into Prometheus Unbound.19 And Greek mythology, broadly

17 Why was the classicism of these poet-dramatists so costive? The dark thought
occurs that their shared disadvantage was a good classical education at a famous
public school, followed by Greats at Oxford: Arnold was at Rugby and Balliol,
Swinburne at Eton and Balliol, Bridges at Eton and Corpus Christi College. But
Clough (Rugby and Balliol) and Hopkins (Highgate and Balliol) used their classical
experience in a freer spirit.
18 Letter of 17 May 1885.
19 Prometheus Unbound, we might note, is only notionally a Hellenic verse drama:
it uses the Greek Prometheus Bound merely as the launching point for a conception
that takes oV into cloudlike lyric and the egotistical sublime.
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 311
conceived, led Tennyson to The Lotos-Eaters, Oenone, Tithonus, and
Tiresias. Of course, it might be answered that these things are Greek
only in a superWcial or tangential way; but that is as we should expect.
A loose and free relationship to the past is likely to be more successful
than revivalism. The nineteenth century ought not to have found the
thought surprising that it would be impossible to produce a modern
imitation of the Iliad or the Aeneid. The doubt was wider and deeper:
that it was impossible to produce a successful epic at all.
But what was epic? A deWnition might be made in terms of metre
or style or scale or content, or some combination of these things. In
Don Juan Byron oVered his own answer, and it is in terms of tradition
and convention (canto 1, stanza 200):
My poem’s epic, and is meant to be
Divided in twelve books: each book containing,
With love and war, a heavy gale at sea,
A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning,
New characters; the episodes are three:
A panoramic view of hell’s in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of epic’s no misnomer.

Is Don Juan epic? One response would be to remember that the poem
is comic and satiric, and to conclude that the very statement that the
poem is epic indicates that it is not. ‘Hail Muse, et cetera,’ Byron
writes at one point, and that is purely farcical (canto 3, stanza 1). But
in some other places his engagement with classical epic is more
sharply pointed: several times Byron contrasts the heroic warfare of
Homer with the unpoetic ugliness and the mass slaughter of modern
warfare, mixing with the comedy a more bitter tone (e.g. canto 7,
stanzas 78–80; canto 8, stanza 90). He himself calls his poem an ‘epic
satire’; in our own time that would mean hardly more than ‘massive
satire’, but Byron’s idiom is more exact.
Let us turn to antiquity for a moment and borrow the terms
primary and secondary epic. If Homer is primary and Virgil secon-
dary, Lucan might be said to be tertiary: he turns epic towards the
satiric and anti-heroic. He also turns epic towards monologue, for
the predominant focalizer in his poem is not Caesar or Pompey but
the poet himself. Mutatis mutandis one might see a similar process in
312 Richard Jenkyns
English literature: Byron turns epic tertiary—satiric, anti-heroic,
with the sense of an ego and a personal tone running through all.
But Byron’s example did nothing to make conventional epic seem
more manageable—if anything, the reverse. In one way or another,
the poets continued to express discouragement. In Endymion Keats
had wished that ‘Old Homer’s Helicon’ might sprinkle its waters over
his sorry pages, so that the verse might soar; but as it is, ‘the count j
Of mighty poets is made up’ and ‘the sun of poetry is set’ (book 2,
lines 717 V.). As the century progressed, the urban and industrial
conditions of modern life were added to the enemies of heroic verse.
Clough’s Dipsychus grumbles (Dipsychus, part 2, scene 4),

To live now
I must sluice out myself into canals,
And lose all force in ducts. The modern Hotspur
Shrills not his trumpet of ‘To Horse, To Horse!’
But consults columns in a Railway Guide;
A demigod of Wgures; an Achilles
Of computation . . .

The commonness of such ideas is shown by the earnestness of the

protest against them which Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives to the
heroine of her Aurora Leigh, another aspirant poet (book 5, lines
139–42, 146–58):
The critics say that epics have died out,
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—
I’ll not believe it. I could never dream,
As Payne Knight did . . .
       
That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned grey
Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;
And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plume
As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.
All men are possible heroes: every age,
Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
Looks backward and before, expects a morn,
And claims an epos.
Ay, but every age
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 313
Appears to souls who live in it (ask Carlyle)
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!
The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound
Who scorn to touch it with a Wnger-tip: . . .

Aurora Leigh’s argument is vehement, but not wholly clear. Homer is

unrealistic, she seems to say, because he represents the people in his
story as stronger and more beautiful than us, whereas in truth they
would not have been. But alluding to a famous scene in the sixth
book of the Iliad, she also seems to suggest that Homer is realistic,
because he represents Hector’s baby bursting into tears with fright,
just like yours. Moreover, the apparent claim—doubtful in itself—
that everyone and every age is heroic, at least potentially, is one that
she will later modify.
Miss Leigh goes on to explain that it is impossible to have a full
understanding of one’s own times: one lacks the necessary distance
(Aurora Leigh, book 5, lines 165–7):

Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. . . .

This idea is then developed by analogy. The narrator asks us to

imagine that Xerxes had succeeded in his megalomaniac plan of
carving Mount Athos into the likeness of a man. ‘The peasants,
gathering brushwood in his ear’ could hardly guess that they were
standing on part of a human form: they would have to travel ten
miles oV in order to see the Wgure distinctly. Likewise (Aurora Leigh,
book 5, lines 180–2):
’Tis even thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.

The terms of the argument have begun to shift a little. Aurora Leigh
had said before that all ages claim an epos; now she begins to hint at
what she will soon make explicit: that the present age is especially
heroic. We might also feel that she has inadvertently produced an
argument for writing about the past in preference to the present, for
314 Richard Jenkyns
if the analogy with Athos is pressed, it is blankly impossible for
anyone to get a clear vision of his own times. Her answer is that
the poet can somehow Wnd a way to escape the prison of his days
(Aurora Leigh, book 5, lines 182–97):

But poets should

Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep,
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his time,
And trundles back his soul Wve hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads
Alive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones.

In the picture of toads and lizards ‘alive i’ the ditch’ we seem for a
moment to catch the accents of the poet’s husband, Robert Brown-
ing. He surely had found a way of recreating the past with the vivid
sense of detail that Aurora Leigh admits is excusable. And indeed she
asks the poet to see distant things intimately as well as near things
comprehensively. So perhaps the past still could and should live in
modern verse? But Aurora Leigh next proceeds to shut out that
possibility: the poet should represent the present age only, which is
now declared to be actually superior to earlier times (Aurora Leigh,
book 5, lines 199–221):
Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 315
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To Xinch from modern varnish, coat, or Xounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as Xat
As Regent Street to poets.
Never Xinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say,
‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!
That bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating. This is living art,
Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’

‘Unscrupulously epic’ is a nicely pointed phrase—and again, one that

might happily be applied to Robert Browning—but the tone in
general is not easy to catch. If it had been Byron writing about the
modern age spending more heroic heat in the drawing-room than
the knights at Roncesvalles, we should know how to take the words.
But here, though there is some humour in her expression, Aurora
Leigh must be essentially serious. And her response suggests how
strong and pervasive was the sense that the modern world was
unpoetic, for it is oddly defensive. Instead of denying that her own
age is Xat and vulgar, she in eVect agrees: the mitigation is that all
ages seem equally dreary at the time. This is a weak response, because
it is so manifestly untrue.20 Besides, in saying that all ages are heroic,
she risks others drawing the conclusion that none is: if Camelot
seemed as Xat to minstrels as Regent Street to poets, then perhaps
Regent Street is as romantic as anything anywhere. And that is not an
inspiriting conclusion.

20 In the opposite camp we might place Ruskin’s spectacular chapter on ‘The Two
Boyhoods’ in volume 5 of Modern Painters (part 9, ch. 9), contrasting the Venice of
Titian and Giorgione (‘A city of marble, did I say? nay, rather a golden city, paved with
emerald’) with Turner’s youth in cramped, dirty Covent Garden—brilliant, exagger-
ated, but essentially just.
316 Richard Jenkyns
Nonetheless, Aurora Leigh insists on the possibility of an epic of
modern life, set in ‘this live, throbbing age’ and depicting the passion
that seethes in drawing rooms beneath double-breasted clothing. So
we might wonder why Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem itself
should not be classed as an epic. After all, it is a very long poem in
blank verse, and though it contains a good deal of introspection, it is
at root a narrative work telling a dramatic story—at moments, a
melodramatic story. Its author herself called it a ‘novel-poem’, and
this in turn raises the question whether the novel might not have
been the most natural outlet for epic aspiration in the nineteenth
century. War and Peace seems easily enough described as an epic
in prose; and in another way Anna Karenina and The Brothers
Karamazov, two works which could be said to handle a single action
with depth and grandeur, might be thought to earn the epic label. On
a lower level of achievement and from yet another angle Ivanhoe, a
tale of love and war, of heroism triumphing over villainy, set in a
distant and romantic epoch and with a national or patriotic theme to
boot, might lay claim to be an epic for an age of prose.
Replying to an admirer who had pressed her to write a historical
novel about the House of Saxe-Coburg, Jane Austen declared that she
could no more write a historical romance than an epic poem. On the
face of it, that represents even the historical novel as very distant from
epic: it is like saying, ‘I could no more climb the Matterhorn than
I could walk on the moon.’ But to an earlier importunity from the
same admirer, who was urging her to take a virtuous and heroic
clergyman for her subject, she had replied that she would be unable
to do justice to the morals and mind of such a paragon. His conver-
sation must be at times on science and philosophy (Jane Austen
explained); it would be abundant in quotations and allusions from
English and classical literature; any author would need to have had a
large education to do justice to a protagonist so conceived.21 This
bears some resemblance to Johnson’s prescription for the epic poet,
and even to Goethe’s description of Homer’s leading men as the
bravest and the wisest, and suggests that the historical romance
could have been hailed as the modern form of epos. If it was not,
we may wonder about the reason.

21 Letters to James Stanier Clarke of 1 Apr. 1816 and 11 Dec. 1815.

 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 317
One particular reason might be that George Eliot, the most self-
conscious of Victorian novelists, usually chose to set herself against
tragedy rather than epic. There are indeed some allusions to
epic in her novels. Thus in Middlemarch she famously sets her
heroine, Dorothea Brooke, against St Teresa of Avila. ‘Theresa’s
passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life,’ she writes in her
Prologue. ‘. . . She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.’
In a sense even Teresa is a ‘modern’ person, living in an un-epic age.
As a child, the novelist tells us, she walked out with her little brother
to seek martyrdom among the Moors, but that was a grand and
glamorous adventure that she could never know; it was inspired by
‘many-volumed romances of chivalry’ which, it is implied, showed
her a distant world remote from what was possible for herself. But
from another point of view, she did Wnd her epos—a new kind of
epos Wtted to the circumstances of her time.
George Eliot continues, ‘Many Theresas have been born who
found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant
unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes,
the oVspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the
meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no
sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.’ Already George Eliot is
shifting her terms from epic to tragedy; in the course of the novel
Dorothea will be described by an admirer as ‘a sort of Christian
Antigone’;22 and it is Sophocles who will return at the very end:
‘A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming the
conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic
piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in
which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone.’ As we have
seen, Arnold preferred to contrast epic and tragedy, but even if we see
them as two modes of one heroic aspiration, there remains in relating
them to the modern novel at least a potential ambiguity—one which
can be felt in Middlemarch and elsewhere in George Eliot’s work.
Does the novelist infuse into his ordinary people an epic or tragic

22 The speaker is Ladislaw, who will end the book as Dorothea’s second husband.
His thought is an example of the unreality which so many readers have found in the
love between Dorothea and Ladislaw: for though everyone should admire Antigone,
who ever wished to be married to her? The Antigone theme is George Eliot’s, and she
compels her character to act as its vehicle.
318 Richard Jenkyns
grandeur? Or is the novel rejecting the epic and high tragic notes? Do
the common folk now ‘claim an epos’, or is it their lot to be ineligible
for that claim? A novelist might present his relationship to epic as
one of inheritance or succession: as Ennius received his staV from
Homer, so the modern novelist might be carrying on the epic spirit in
a new form. Alternatively, the relationship to classical epic might be
one of strong disjunction.
It is a recurrent theme of George Eliot’s that the everyday joys and
sorrows of ordinary people are fully as important as those of kings
and princesses. Nature is a ‘great tragic dramatist’,23 and the emotions
of plain, commonplace people are as large as those of the heroes who
strut upon the tragic stage. The idea was not new: a form of it is, after
all, the central theme of Gray’s Elegy. And in Gray too the idea
Xuctuates somewhat. Presumably the ‘Cromwell guiltless of his
country’s blood’ is indeed guiltless: he has done no great and bad
action. The ‘mute inglorious Milton’ is indeed mute: he has written
no poem. But the ‘village-Hampden that with dauntless breast j The
little tyrant of his Welds withstood’ did act heroically: he is unknown
only because of his humble station and obscure life and because, like
the brave men who lived before Agamemnon, he has had no poet to
praise him. But in principle he could claim an epos as much as John
Hampden himself.
Joyce’s Ulysses can be seen as playing with this ambiguity. On the
one hand, Bloom is an anti-hero, Molly a faithless Penelope, Stephen
Dedalus an ersatz Telemachus (since he is not Bloom’s son). On the
other hand, the book has a classical regard for the unities of time and
place—ironically, a much greater regard than the Odyssey itself. And
it does give a kind of epic megethos to the shabby and commonplace
lives that it depicts. Besides, it has what one might call the mythic
dimension: though Bloom’s Dublin is very precisely located in time as
well as space, it becomes also a landscape of the imagination—what
Snell called a geistige Landschaft. But most of the more highbrow or
self-conscious Victorian novelists were not mythmakers of this kind.
Dickens unquestionably had the mythic gift, as did Emily Brontë;
otherwise, one should perhaps turn to less pretending genres: to
Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes’s London is almost as vivid an

23 Adam Bede, ch. 3.

 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 319
imaginative cityscape as Dickens’s) and to Robert Louis Stevenson,
who in Treasure Island and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde produced
perhaps the two most powerful of all modern myths.
The greatest epics have all been at some distance from naturalism,
and strong naturalism was the aim, not of all the nineteenth-
century’s Wction, but usually of its largest and most grandly
ambitious eVorts.24 The commitment to high realism may have
discouraged novelists from seeing themselves as epicists in prose.
But we must also take into account what one might call the Dutch
picture idea. Hardy called Under the Greenwood Tree ‘a rural painting
of the Dutch school’. In Adam Bede George Eliot devotes most of
a chapter to explaining what she is doing—a pretty smug and
sentimental chapter, to be frank.25 She delights in Dutch paintings,
she says. She Wnds a source of delicious sympathy ‘in these faithful
pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate
of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or
absolute indigence, of tragic suVering or of world-stirring actions.
I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets,
sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her
Xower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner . . . or I turn to that village
wedding. . . . ‘‘Foh!’’ says my idealistic friend, ‘‘what vulgar
details! . . . What a low phase of life! What clumsy, ugly people!’’ ’
Her novel, she indicates, is a Dutch painting in prose. It is, in other
terms, a set of genre scenes. On this account, Adam Bede at least is
not epic, tragic, or heroic.
Hippolyte Taine observed in the 1860s that heroic painting was
rare and poor in England: classical painting and ‘learned paganism’
had never taken root in Britain, and English painters were merely a
branch of the Flemish school.26 The genre scenes of the Dutch
school, that is to say, are the antithesis of heroic or classical painting.
As it happened, a new school of British classical painting was coming
to birth even as Taine was writing, but it is telling that these
painters—Alma-Tadema (literally a Dutch painter), Poynter, and

24 The non-naturalist works by the great naturalist novelists tend to be shorter

pieces: A Christmas Carol, for example, or The Turn of the Screw.
25 Adam Bede, ch. 17.
26 Hyams (1957) 258.
320 Richard Jenkyns
their like—were drawn for the most part not to grand historical or
mythological subjects but to genre scenes set in the ancient world—
in eVect, Dutch pictures in classical dress. SigniWcantly, the one
painter who did try to represent classical epic chose a diVerent
route. The Wgures in Leighton’s Captive Andromache, based on
Hector’s fearful vision of his wife’s likely future in the sixth book of
the Iliad, are raised on a stone stage or platform. The genre Wgures of
ordinary people—the Dutch part of the image, as it were—are below.
Leighton enforces the same moral: to make a Dutch picture, whether
in paint or prose, is to turn away from epic.
For Leighton, as for so many of his contemporaries, Homer was
essentially grand. But there was another school of thought: if the
Homeric poems had been assembled out of shorter and originally
independent lays, then maybe they were nearer to ballads than to
modern epic. Such was the idea behind Maginn’s Homeric Ballads
and a version of it inspired the translation of the Iliad made by F. W.
Newman, together with its preface. Newman would be forgotten
today if Arnold had not so devastatingly attacked him, and it may
be doubted whether the idea of Homer as ballad-maker ever took
much root. Newman described Homer’s style as ‘quaint’ and ‘garrul-
ous’, and Arnold was able to retort that it manifestly is not. In some
sense, however, it might still perhaps be possible to see Homer as
folk-like. Longfellow’s Hiawatha stands somewhere between the epic
and the folk ideas. Its theme met one of the expectations imposed on
epic by Virgil’s example—that its subject should be national as well as
mythic. Longfellow’s model, for the metre as well as the general
conception, was the Kalevala, formed in the nineteenth century
from a number of traditional but separate poems. But however the
eight-syllable trochaic line sounds in Finnish, in English it does not
feel epic; and the poem’s episodic and descriptive character, with
rather little narrative, also seems at some distance from epic content.
In any case, though Hiawatha was enormously popular—Longfellow
was the one poet who could match Tennyson’s readership in
Victorian Britain—it was not a work that could serve as a model
for others. The metre, much parodied, was not a trick that could be
carried oV twice.
One strand of nineteenth-century thought placed the possibility of
epic outside imaginative literature altogether. Some Victorians felt, as
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 321
Edward FitzGerald put it, that ‘it is not the poetical imagination, but
bare Science, that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic
than the Iliad ’.27 Carlyle too surmised that the true history was now
the true epic poem, and that a heroic poem in modern times would
need to be written with the ‘ink of science’. In his French Revolution
he compares ‘Homer’s Epos’ to ‘the epos of Universal History itself ’.
But such voices do not seem enough in themselves to explain the
pessimism about epic possibility. A stronger cause is to be found in
Homer and Virgil, and perhaps especially in Virgil, paradoxical
though this may seem in an age when Homer was so worshipped,
and Virgil often placed some distance behind him.
Some people felt that epic was now unmanageable not in
principle—that is, because it was the expression of a primitive or
early society—but for a contingent reason: because Homer, or
Homer and Virgil between them, had been so admirable that they
had exhausted the seam. That was Goethe’s line, more or less. At one
period he felt himself liberated by Wolf ’s theory that the Homeric
poems were of multiple authorship: if Homer had been not one but
many, there was no single gigantic genius under whose shadow
all other epic must wither. Accordingly he began an Achilleis,
but abandoning it after a few hundred lines, he recanted the WolWan
creed and sang his palinode in a poem entitled Homer again Homer.
Late in life he remarked that modern writers could create only
heroines, not heroes: ‘Nothing can be done with the men.
Homer has got all beforehand in Achilles and Odysseus, the bravest
and the most prudent.’28 The idea that epic was impossible
not because of the state of civilization but because of one or two
individuals of genius is not so easily found among British writers, or
at least not in a direct and explicit form; but it may have been felt in
an indirect and subterranean way. Byron’s equation of the epic genre
with the practice of Homer and Virgil suggests their imperious
command of the Weld.
We might notice too that the Aeneid is the one classical poem that
more or less fully Wts Byron’s description of epic; the Iliad and the
Odyssey each Wt only about half of it. In other words, he is describing
not so much Greek epic as Virgil’s reinterpretation of it. And that

27 FitzGerald (1889) i. 181. 28 Eckermann (1971), 5 July 1827.

322 Richard Jenkyns
means, ironically, that his deWnition best suits an epic which did
emerge from a highly developed society. Furthermore, his deWnition
also matches Paradise Lost better than it does either the Iliad or the
Odyssey singly. The facts that Virgil chose to be so Homeric and
Milton to be so Virgilian imposed boundaries on the idea of epic that
would have surprised the Greek poets.
Let us consider Johnson’s deWnition: ‘Epic poetry undertakes to
teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and
therefore relates some great event in the most aVecting manner . . .
The subject of an epic poem is naturally an event of great import-
ance. That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, the conduct of a
colony, or the foundation of an empire. His subject is the fate of
worlds, the revolutions of heaven and of earth; rebellion against the
Supreme King, . . .’29 This idea of epic may seem timeless and uni-
versal; it may even seem uncontroversial. In fact, it is not. We might
indeed question how well Johnson’s descriptions Wt even classical
epic, other than the Aeneid.
One might suppose that any deWnition or description of epic
which excluded the Odyssey fell at the second fence, but a good
many descriptions—stressing vastness of theme, depth of moral
seriousness, grandeur of manner, or tragic vision—have eVectively
done so. Is the subject of the Odyssey an event of great importance?
Of course it is important to Odysseus and Penelope, but by that
criterion almost any narrative tells an event of great importance, and
the deWnition is saved at the cost of being reduced to triviality. It is
true, too, that the action of the Odyssey aVects the whole society that
is Ithaca, but Ithaca is small, and it would be disingenuous to
claim that the social consequences of Odysseus’ experience are
more than secondary in the poem’s economy. We might add
that the subject of the Iliad, for that matter, is not the destruction
of a city. True, Hector’s death will lead to Troy’s destruction,
and that is signiWcant; but it signiWes primarily as it inXuences and
illuminates the thoughts and actions of Hector and Achilles, and the
emotions of such subsidiary Wgures as Priam, Hecuba, and Andro-
mache. Nonetheless, we can Wnd even professors of Greek, even in
the twentieth century, trying to Virgilianize Homer: Gilbert Murray

29 Lives of the Poets, ‘Milton’.

 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 323
asked of the Iliad, ‘What after all is its essential story? Is it not the
story of the battle of All-Greeks against the barbarian of Asia?’30 It is
always good to be asked a question that one can answer. The answer
is no.
We are likely to accept readily enough that the subject of the
Aeneid is ‘the foundation of an empire’. After all, does not Virgil
himself tell us that it is? Well, not exactly: he says that Aeneas’ task
was ‘to found the Roman race’, which is not quite the same thing.
And in reality, Aeneas does not found an empire, except in a very
indirect sense. His son will found Alba; and more than three centur-
ies on, someone else will found Rome. The Aeneid describes how a
man escaped from his defeated city, survived some adventures at sea,
extricated himself from a love aVair, and won a small, short war in
central Italy, before marrying the daughter of a local king and settling
down with his followers.
Virgil’s peculiar achievement is to take some epic adventures of
traditional type—modelled as much upon the Odyssey as the Iliad,
and with the story-pattern for Dido’s tragedy drawn from Apollonius
of Rhodes—and load them with world-historical import. And of
course he thus has a permanent eVect upon the epic idea. However,
it is Milton, inspired by Virgil but going far beyond him, who
narrates events that are directly and intrinsically of the highest
import and grandeur: war between God himself and the rebel angels;
the perfected experience of unfallen sexual love; the decisions of Eve
and Adam which determine the future experience of all humanity
and lead to the Redemption—and to the possibility of epic poetry,
for that matter.
It is thus Virgil’s example, fortiWed by Milton, which imposes on
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the idea that epic must be
colossal in its ambitions and immense in its success. Now it was not
likely that a Victorian poet would produce something to stand beside
the Iliad or the Aeneid, for the simple reason that it is never likely that
any particular age or person will give birth to one of the supreme
poems of the world. If the condition for attempting his enterprise
were the highest imaginable success, no composer would attempt

30 Murray (1934) 189.

324 Richard Jenkyns
a mass or a symphony, and perhaps no novelist pick up his pen.31 The
sense of epic’s impossibility seems to be a combination of an idea
of immense eVort that does authentically appear to be part of Virgil’s
eVect with later interpretation of Virgil and his place in the tradition.
For the curious thing—curious to us, at least—is that antiquity did
not think that epic was so immensely diYcult.32 Greek poets went on
composing epics after Homer, and Latin ones after Virgil without the
sense that they were taking oV on a kamikaze Xight.
We might have expected the educated of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to notice this more readily. They might have
reXected upon Apollonius, even if they did not much read him. On
the Latin side, they may not have counted Ovid’s Metamorphoses as
epic, and in any case it seems that Ovid’s place in the education of a
gentleman declined in the nineteenth century.33 There are one or two
murmurs of self-deprecation in Statius, but apart from the fact that
he had few readers in the nineteenth century, what he makes at the
end of the Thebaid is the accurate observation that it is far inferior
to the Aeneid;34 this is some distance from saying that epic is
unmanageable of its very nature. He also says that the Thebaid took
him a dozen years, whereas he could turn out his occasional poems at
the rate of 200 lines a day.35 Again, this suggests that a twelve-book
narrative poem on a heroic theme is a large and serious undertaking
—which no one would deny.
31 The one Victorian writer who does seem troubled by being unable to be among
the greatest is Matthew Arnold: he wanted to be like Sophocles, ‘to see life steadily
and see it whole’; he wanted to be like Goethe, who ‘struck his Wnger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!’; he suppressed his own Empedocles on Etna
because its protagonist was merely a passive suVerer; and he found Tennyson’s pre-
eminence in his own time agitating. But this was a matter of personal outlook; and it
was not directed distinctively to the problem of epic.
32 Otis (1963) devotes a whole chapter to ‘the obsolescence of epic’, a notion that
would have surprised most Roman poets.
33 Oxford’s reformed classical syllabus of 1852 excluded Ovid (and the other
elegiac poets): this cut undergraduates oV from the classical tradition of earlier
centuries. An Oxford classical tutor retiring in 2004 has lived through a striking
change of educational taste. At the end of the 1960s a single book of the Metamor-
phoses formed one twentieth part of the General Books paper, and this was the poem’s
only presence in the syllabus. Thirty years on, the syllabus gave Ovid more promin-
ence than any other Latin author, except perhaps Virgil.
34 Theb. 12.816–17. But see Leigh, Ch. 8, above, for a diVerent appraisal of the
Thebaid and of these lines.
35 Theb. 12.811–12; Silv. 1. praef.
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 325
Lucan’s poem does radically transform the tradition, but it is so
idiosyncratic and so evidently sets itself against the Aeneid that it
probably did little to discourage the idea that Virgil was secondary
epic’s one model. The Flavian epics will have gone mostly unnoticed,
but in any case they make little attempt to break the Virgilian mould.
The Achilleid is perhaps the one exception, and it is disappointing to
think that if Statius had completed it, it would probably look rather
more conventional than it does in its fragmentary state. Flavian epic
might have shown later Europe that Virgil had not scared oV his
successors, and that Roman poets did not consider epic—even the
conventional kinds of mythological or historical epic—obsolete or
impossible. But it might also have encouraged them to draw the
moral that Virgilian epic was epic’s necessary form, and that the best
that could be achieved after Virgil was pastiche.
Some nineteenth-century ideas about epic, therefore, sit uncom-
fortably with the reality of classical literary history. Nonetheless,
there was reason for regarding Homer and Virgil as the only models.
One might put the matter like this. Although it is not the purpose of
all poetry to convey intellection and a moral idea, the greatest epic
poetry thinks. The Iliad and the Odyssey, in their diVerent ways,
have deep things to say about the human condition. Virgil thinks
profoundly about man and society, in the Georgics as well as the
Aeneid;36 indeed, his use of epic verse as the vehicle of thought is one
of the ways in which he recovers the scope of the Homeric poems and
transforms it for modern purposes. In this respect, Homer and Virgil
do stand alone. The Argonautica does little thinking. Ovid was, in
more than one sense, thoughtless. Lucan tries to think, but his
thoughts are puerile. The Flavian epics do not think.

36 Among the liberating qualities of GriYn’s Homer on Life and Death (1980) was
the connection that it made between the Iliad’s poetry and its sense of the human
condition; some of the ideas in that book were Wrst oVered to Oxford audiences in
lectures provocatively entitled ‘Homer: his mind and art’. In general, Hellenists have
been better than Latinists at relating poetry to intellection. ‘Virgil was more a feeler
than a thinker. He could organise his feelings into a coherent poem, but he hardly
attempted to organise his thoughts into a coherent system.’ This is L. P. Wilkinson
((1969) 132), who actually has some telling things to say about Virgil’s thought. We
also need to take account of the lingering on of the idea most memorably expressed in
Housman’s declaration that the peculiar function of poetry is not to transmit thought
but to transfuse emotion.
326 Richard Jenkyns
It is easy to slip from the idea that the greatest epic thinks to the
idea that it is necessarily weighty, grave, sombre. The Odyssey ought
to be the refutation of that. But looking at the nineteenth-century
scene, one observes two phenomena. First, there was a tendency to
equate epic with high seriousness and earnestness, and perhaps
with a tragic theme. Second, the poets of the age do seem to have
found diYculty in combining epic with thought. Arnold did a good
deal of thinking, in some of his verse as well as his prose, but not in
Sohrab and Rustum. As a piece of Homeric narrative, it works
rather well, but it does not aim at more than storytelling: it seeks
to delight and to move, but not to teach. There are moments of
thinking in the Idylls of the King—for example, when the poet
explores the tension between the mystical quest for the Grail and
the demands of practical governance that lead Arthur to turn away
from the quest—but they do not amount to very much. Robert
Browning thinks energetically, but his contemporaries do not seem
to have seen him as an epicist, though later critics have done so.
Blake’s epics contain thought of a kind—mad thought, maybe. And
curiously, Don Juan does more thinking than Arnold when he is in
epic mode—another reminder that thinking and high seriousness
are not the same.
If we choose a broad deWnition of the term, our moral might be
that the Victorians were more successful in epic verse than they
supposed. We have heard Aurora Leigh urging the modern poet to
be ‘unscrupulously epic’, and though many people’s understanding of
epic was all too tightly scrupulous, there were others who answered
her call. Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, which combined
length and diYcult ambition with the distinctively Victorian mode of
dramatic monologue, might indeed be taken as an epic for the
modern age. For that matter, Aurora Leigh itself, a poem about the
length of the Aeneid told entirely in the Wrst person, could be
described as a dramatic monologue expanded to a fully epic scale.
We might think too of The Prelude—a Victorian poem by date of
publication, though most of it was written much earlier—and
Wordsworth’s assertion that its investigation of his own heart and
mind was ‘in truth, heroic argument, j And genuine prowess’—
words which in turn echo Milton’s claim that Paradise Lost presents
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 327
‘argument j Not less but more heroic’ than those of the Iliad, Odyssey,
and Aeneid.37
However, it is also worth taking the more scrupulous understanding
of epic in its own terms. Often it may seem that nineteenth-century
epic was most likely to succeed when it managed to shake itself free
from classical precedent, but we can also Wnd successful examples of
Victorian intertextuality—of the classical tradition turned to some-
thing new and of its time. For example, there is Clough’s The Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich, which is likely to be the only epic poem written
about a Balliol classical reading party. Playful Homeric allusions are
scattered through it, and it is even written in accentual hexameters.
One might compare Goethe’s Odyssey for modern times, his bourgeois
epic Hermann und Dorothea. Clough too has escaped from the tyranny
of the Iliad and remembered the Odyssey—and his is a bourgeois (or
perhaps one should say gentry) epic for Victorian Britain.
Proust said that the greatest works of the nineteenth century
had the quality of being always incomplete and drew from this self-
contemplating incompleteness a novel beauty.38 Sure enough, one of
the ways in which Victorian poets related themselves to classical epic
was through a sense of fragmentariness. Feeling the burden of the
past, the young Tennyson frames his Morte d’Arthur in a curious
poem called simply The Epic, in which he presents it as the eleventh
book of a work by the Wctional poet Everard Hall, who has destroyed
the rest because epic is an obsolete mode (lines 25–38):

‘You know,’ said Frank, ‘he burned

His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books’—
And then to me demanding why? ‘Oh, sir,
He thought that nothing new was said, or else
Something so said ’twas nothing—that a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day:
God knows: he has a mint of reasons: ask.
It pleased me well enough.’ ‘Nay, nay,’ said Hall,
‘Why take the style of those heroic times?

37 The Prelude, iii, lines 182–3, 1805 version (184–5, with ‘This’ for ‘And’, 1850
version); Paradise Lost, ix, lines 13–19.
38 La Prisonnière.
328 Richard Jenkyns
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,
Mere chaV and draV, much better burnt.’

However, many years later Tennyson put together his Idylls of the
King, subtitled ‘in twelve books’, and the Morte d’Arthur, slightly
extended, was incorporated into them—not as the eleventh book,
but the twelfth. But even though the poem is more than 10,000 lines
long, it is still presented as a series of idylls—that is, sketches.
Tennyson’s brother-in-law used to refer to the work as Epylls of the
King, on the grounds that it was a gathering of ‘little epics (not idylls)
woven into an epical unity’, but the poet himself, not surprisingly,
disliked the sound of the word.39
Sohrab and Rustum too is fragmentary; it is subtitled ‘an episode’.
The very Wrst word of the poem is ‘and’:
And the Wrst grey of morning Wlled the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream . . .

But this opening also introduces us to a contemporary preoccupa-

tion—the sense of nature and its immensity. The poem begins with
the great river Oxus and will end with its eternal Xow, contrasted
with the mortality of Rustum and his son, towards the distant
vastness of the Aral Sea. We might compare the ending of Morte
d’Arthur, with the King borne in his barge across the waters to
what may be death or immortality.40 We might compare Tennyson’s
Ulysses, pushing oV to sail beyond the western stars, perhaps to the
life after death, perhaps to oblivion.41 We might think of the last
stanzas of Swinburne’s The Garden of Proserpine, where human life
is both contrasted with the eternal sun and stars and night and
compared to a river (lines 81–8):
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving

39 H. Tennyson (1897) ii. 130, referring to Edmund Lushington.

40 Morte d’Arthur, lines 256–64.
41 Ulysses, lines 58–64.
 The Idea of Epic in the 19th Century 329
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.42

Arnold himself, writing to his friend Clough about Morte d’Arthur

and Sohrab and Rustum, said, ‘I think the likeness, where there is
likeness . . . proceeds from our both having imitated Homer.’43 That
seems implausible, for whereas Sohrab and Rustum is tightly bound
to the Iliad—and ironically, is thus curiously Virgilian in Xavour—
Tennyson’s poem is related to classical precedent only in the loosest
sense. With more than a century and a half of hindsight to help us,
we might prefer to say that what the two poets shared was the ability
to reinterpret epic themes in the light of an authentically modern
sensibility.44

42 Cf. also lines 89–96.

43 Letter of 25 Nov. 1853.
44 This chapter has beneWted from comments on its oral version by James Bur-
bidge, Jasper GriYn, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Anthony Kenny, Matthew Leigh,
and Oswyn Murray.
This page intentionally left blank
 12
Epilogue
Bruno Currie

The range of epic poetry treated in this book is vast and the
constructions placed on ‘interaction’ almost equally broad. The job
of this Epilogue will be to explore points of convergence and diver-
gence between the chapters and to attempt an overall narrative.
At the same time further perspectives, and further problems, will
emerge.
The subject of my own chapter was the interaction between poems
in the early Greek tradition. To speak of the interaction of the
Homeric poems with other early Greek epic poems is already to go
beyond what some would accept: allusion to a common ‘mytho-
logical tradition’ or the resonance immanent in certain formulas and
type-scenes (‘traditional referentiality’).1 Instead, I looked for a sense
of interaction which approximates to intertextuality. The question
then becomes whether intertextuality is possible in an oral(-derived)
poetic tradition which (arguably) had no Wxed texts, was (certainly)
performed before audiences, and depended (to an uncertain degree)
on a traditional, formulaic style. While it is true that this
unique combination of features in the classical epic tradition greatly
complicates allusive relationships between poems, it need not,

This Epilogue was originally to have been written by Oliver Lyne, who died suddenly
on 17 March 2005. In writing this substitute I pay a heartfelt tribute to his friendship,
teaching, and scholarship.
1 ‘Mythological tradition’: cf. Burgess (2001) 134. ‘Traditional referentiality’: see
Foley (1991), (1997) 166–72, and (1999); Graziosi and Haubold (2005).
332 Bruno Currie
I argued, rule them out. To return to the point about formularity: it
can be argued both that there is enough scope in the early Greek epics
for non-formulaic expression to ground allusion and that formulas
themselves may (in certain contexts) function as a vehicle of allusion.
In fact, the latter problem is not conWned to oral(-derived) epic, for it
resurfaces in an altered form in subsequent chapters of this book:
the question whether ‘clichés’ and ‘rhetorical formulas’ can support
allusion is considered by Pelling apropos of Herodotean allusions
to Homer, and by Wilson in connection with Miltonic allusions to
Virgil.2
Methodologically, my approach was indebted to neoanalysis, and
I ended up defending some traditional neoanalytical conclusions
against recent criticisms.3 The brunt of my argument was borne by
three test cases arguing an allusive interaction between early Greek
epic poems: Wrst, between the Odyssey and the Iliad; second, be-
tween the Odyssey and an earlier poem on Odysseus’ homecoming;
and third, between the Iliad and an earlier poem on Memnon. The
case of the Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad poses, for those who
accept it,4 interesting questions. Does it point us, for example, to a
widespread, even traditional, phenomenon within the early epic
tradition? Or rather to the unique standing that the Iliad and
Odyssey enjoyed within that tradition?5 The abiding diYculty is
to render it plausible that we should assume allusion to a speciWc
poem rather than to epic tradition or, more generally still, to
mythological tradition (not the preserve of epic poetry or neces-
sarily of poetry at all).6 In my test cases I argued for pointed
departures from scenes that are so distinctive and are recalled at
such a level of detail that it is reasonable to think of evocations
not simply of traditional poetic or mythical material, but of the

2 See Pelling, p. 80; Wilson, p. 292.

3 Another recent critique of neoanalysis is Kelly (2006). Despite his arguments I
still Wnd it likely that the scene of ‘Nestor in danger’ at Il. 8.80–129 alludes to a
comparable scene in the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) in which Antilochus lost his life and
from which Pind. Pyth. 6.28–42 and Verg. Aen. 10.789–820 depend.
4 R. B. Rutherford (2001) makes to my mind a persuasive case.
5 For the latter view, cf. e.g. Taplin (1990) 111 and 112; M. L. West (2003b) 14.
6 Cf. Burgess (2001) 4, emphasizing the role of informal oral narratives and artistic
representations in transmitting myth.
 Epilogue 333
idiosyncratic shape that this material had received in particular
earlier poetic treatments. In addition, I tried to identify various
narrative features which pointed to such a self-conscious inter-
action. Some of these are arguably peculiar to oral(-derived) epic;
others may be paralleled in later stages of the epic tradition. In the
former category are narrative inconsistencies, which I suggested
may be a way of keeping a traditional version of a poem that is
being alluded to present to the audience’s mind.7 This view of
narrative inconsistencies diVers from the one that sees them as a
consequence of imperfect assimilation of alternative versions,
an involuntary by-product of the process of composition in per-
formance, a diVerence we will come back to.
Of the features of the interaction between early Greek epic poems
which are paralleled at later stages of the epic tradition, the most
notable is the tendency I claimed for the Homeric poems to trope
their interaction with earlier poems. This bears comparison with the
way, for example, Virgil tropes his relationship to his predecessors,
Statius his relationship to Virgil, Tasso and Milton their relationship
to Virgil (and the classical tradition generally). Homeric troping of
the poet’s interaction with his predecessors may be seen in the
metapoetic use of fate or the gods (Zeus in the Iliad and Athena in
the Odyssey) to signal the poet’s obedience to, or his departure from,
earlier versions.8 Homer also seems to anticipate later epic poets
in the ‘signalling’ of the intertext, the metapoetic use of nekyiai,
multiple correspondence between source-text and target-text, and
opposition in imitation.9
Homeric anticipations of later developments raise the question
of the utility of later stages in the tradition to cast perspectives on
Homer; in particular, I aired the possibility of using Virgil as an
ancient ‘commentary’ on Homer.10 This is itself a recurring theme
of this book: Ovid may also be seen as oVering a commentary on

7 Similar suggestions have been made by R. B. Rutherford (1992) and Danek

(1998).
8 Cf. Leigh, p. 238 on Stat. Theb. 10.909: ‘it is as if [Jupiter] is another put-upon
listener, his ears battered by the rantings of the reciting epicist’.
9 ‘Signalling’: pp. 6, 19, 26–7. Nekyiai: pp. 21–2. Multiple correspondence of
source-text and target-text: pp. 14–15, 38–9. ‘Opposition in imitation’: pp. 13, 22, 38
10 See p. 37.
334 Bruno Currie
Virgil.11 Virgil is, of course, a problematic guide to the contemporary
reception of Homer. However, an underlying contention of my
chapter was that recognition of the important diVerences between
oral(-derived) epic and literary epic ought to be reconciled with
recognition of their important similarities.
The earliest stages of the classical epic tradition are also the subject
of Simon Pulleyn’s chapter. In exploring how and why the religious
picture of the Homeric poems evolved from older conceptions,
Pulleyn is fundamentally interested in interplays between old and
new and between Greek and non-Greek in the early epic tradition:
interaction here is not so much a question of intertextuality as
of innovation and borrowing. Methodologically Pulleyn’s study is
distinctive within this volume for focusing on individual words as
the site of the interaction: he traces in particular the historical
development of the words ˘ , Iæ , and ŒÆæ, and of
the religious conceptions they entail. Pulleyn uses the methods
of philology to distinguish old elements from new and Greek
(or Indo-European) elements from non-Greek ones, but the philo-
logical methods serve literary ends: the developments in the uses of
the words and their underlying conceptions reveal an evolving poetic
vision of the gods as a collective and of their relationship with
humans.
The most crucial interplay traced by Pulleyn is between
Indo-European and Near Eastern (especially Semitic) elements in
the Homeric poems. It is tempting to take these categories to
correspond broadly to the categories of native and imported material
respectively, and in some cases the correspondence would seem to
hold. An original Indo-European conception of Zeus as a god of
the ‘bright skies’ who lives in heaven seems to have been overlaid
in the Iliad with Semitic notions of a storm-god who inhabits a
mountain in the north (in Greek contexts, Mount Olympus); here,
it proves possible to discover an older Indo-European stratum and a
newer Semitic one. But the antithesis ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Semitic’

11 Cf. Robinson, p. 213. For a diVerent view of intertextuality as two-directional,

see D. P. Fowler (2000) 130: the contributors of this volume do not, as he urges,
abandon ‘a framework where source-texts precede target-texts’; cf. the ‘weak’ and
‘strong’ theses of Martindale (1993) 7.
 Epilogue 335
cannot consistently be equated with older and younger elements
respectively.12 Partly this is because we cannot be sure how early
Near Eastern elements entered the Greek epic tradition.13 Partly too
it is because old, and Indo-European, notions may be reactivated by
the poet to naturalize borrowings or innovations. An example is the
couple Zeus–Dione (etymologically ‘Mr and Mrs Zeus’). This couple
is apparently introduced into Il. 5.370–430 (and only here in the
Iliad) to correspond to the Semitic (Akkadian) couple Anu–Antu
(etymologically ‘Mr and Mrs Anu’), who play a closely comparable
role to the Iliadic Zeus and Dione, at Gilgamesh vi.80–2. However,
Zeus–Dione may be an ancient cultic pairing in Greece, with Indo-
European parallels.14 It seems the Iliad poet was able to reach back
to ancient, native conceptions to realize his adaptation of a Near
Eastern motif. Another example is the conception of gods who eat
ambrosia rather than feasting on men’s sacriWces and who drink
nectar rather than wine. Pulleyn argues that these are late develop-
ments in the tradition, though it is the early stage (gods feasting
on men’s sacriWces) that exhibits the Near Eastern parallels, while the
stage deemed late (nectar and ambrosia as ‘deathless’ substances) has
arguably Indo-European pedigree.15 We must, clearly, reckon with
frequent cross-fertilization between the categories of Greek (Indo-
European) and Near Eastern (Semitic); the interaction between old
and new in Homer’s religion will be correspondingly complex.
Another imponderable question is whether we are dealing primar-
ily with a literary or a cultural phenomenon. It is increasingly
accepted by scholars that, by Homer’s time, Greek culture was
saturated with elements from the Near East.16 If contemporary
Hellenic culture and religion were inXuenced by Near Eastern culture
and religion, and if Homeric poetry reXects its culture, then
the interaction between Homeric religion and the religion of Near
Eastern texts may simply be a function of the interaction between the
cultures. At least one interaction between Homeric religion and

12 Pertinent here is Burkert (2004) 47.

13 Cf. e.g. M. L. West (1997a) 60.
14 Pulleyn, pp. 59–60, with Dunkel (1988–91).
15 Pulleyn, pp. 62, 65–6, 70–2.
16 See esp. Burkert (1992); cf. M. L. West (1997a) 10–60.
336 Bruno Currie
the religion of the Near East is explicable along these lines: in the
Iliad, seers expert in the Mesopotamian skill of haruspicy (Il. 24.221
Ø . . . ŁıŒØ) feature alongside seers expert in the Greek (and
maybe Indo-European) art of bird augury (Il. 1.69 Nøºø).
Homer’s text seems here simply to reXect the cultural-religious
interaction between the Greek and Mesopotamian worlds.17 How-
ever, the interaction elsewhere seems to be a speciWcally poetic one.
Greek epic engages in the reception of quite substantial narrative
sequences of Near Eastern poetry: to give the most famous instances,
Il. 5.355–430 adapts the Babylonian Gilgamesh vi.1–91, and the
Succession Myth of Hesiod’s Theogony adapts the Hurro-Hittite
Song of Kumarbi (Kingship in Heaven).18 In such cases, the religious
interaction considered by Pulleyn coincides with the kind of literary
interaction considered in my chapter: Pulleyn reminds us that in
early Greek epic we Wnd (what neoanalysts would call) ‘transferred
motifs’ from Near Eastern poems as well as Greek ones.19 The
cultural channels of such a literary interaction are intriguing, though
obscure.20
Another point of contact—and divergence—between Pulleyn’s
chapter and my own lies in our use of inconsistencies in the Homeric
text as an indicator of innovation. Where I suggested that inconsist-
encies may be a self-conscious means of advertising innovation,
Pulleyn regards the inconsistencies as accidental survivals from an
earlier stage in the tradition.21 To see a self-conscious poet at work
requires us to be conWdent about laying the changes at the door of a
particular poet: ‘Homer’.22 It is notable, though, that some of the
anomalous elements occur in secondary narration: the motif of gods
feasting on men’s hecatombs rather than (as elsewhere) eating

17 Burkert (1985) 112–13, (1992) 48–9.

18 See e.g. M. L. West (1997a) 277–80, 361–2. It should not be assumed that
speciWc extant Near Eastern texts were the precise intertexts for Homer or Hesiod.
19 Kullmann (1992c) 104–8; R. B. Rutherford (1996) 6–8.
20 See M. L. West (1997a) 606–30. West (2005) 64 suggests that a form of the
Gilgamesh epic was known in Greek prior to the Homeric epics. Burkert (2004) 48
explains Greek acquaintance with Akkadian literature through Greeks getting a
rudimentary literary schooling in the Near East.
21 Pulleyn, p. 66: Il. 9.535 ‘represents the survival of an earlier, perhaps cruder,
conception’.
22 On this Pulleyn is understandably cautious: see pp. 56, 58, 60.
 Epilogue 337
ambrosia comes in a speech of Phoenix (Il. 9.535), and the motif of
Ganymede serving as ‘wine-waiter’ of gods whom the narrative
shows otherwise drinking nectar comes in a speech of Aeneas
(Il. 20.234).23 Homeric speeches may (it has long been held) be a
vehicle for traditional conceptions otherwise largely excluded from
the primary narrative.24 Such a distribution of the motifs in the
narrative would be consistent with the view that they are being
self-consciously (that is, allusively) deployed.25 A thoroughgoing
and profoundly realized contrast between gods and men is arguably
a particular concern of the poet of the Iliad.26 While the overall
consistency of this picture within the Iliad might suggest that it was
developed by a plurality of poets rather than just one, nevertheless if
such a picture were the distinctive vision of ‘Homer’, a high degree
of internal consistency with occasional hints of the traditional alter-
native, judiciously placed outside the primary narrative, might be
just what we would expect.27 We have here two diVerent approaches,
both of which value narrative inconsistencies as a sign of innovation.
One argues that these traditional conceptions slip through the poet’s
net; the inconsistencies, unintended by the poet, are useful to
the scholar for revealing the older strata with which the poet is
working.28 This may be analogous to the way that comparative
philology opens up to the modern scholar historical linguistic
perspectives of which native speakers are themselves ignorant.29
The other approach argues that the traditional conceptions are

23 Cf. GriYn (1980) 187 n. 22 on Il. 9.535.

24 GriYn (1980) 166, citing schol. Ven. A on Il. 19.108 (¼ Arist. fr. 163 Rose) ‘the
whole thing is mythical (ıŁH
 ); Homer neither says these things in his own person
nor does he include them in the action, but makes mention of them as traditional
material (‰
ØÆ

ø . . . ÆØ) concerning Heracles’ birth.’
25 Cf. similarly Currie, p. 33 n. 145.
26 See GriYn (2001 [1977]) 372, (1980) 166–7; Kullmann (1992d ).
27 Cf. how the theodicy of the Iliad consistently ignores the ‘justice of Zeus’
(so prominent in Odyssey, Hesiod, and elsewhere) except, famously, in a simile:
Il. 16.384–92. See GriYn (1980) 41 n. 101; Janko (1994) 365–6; Kearns (2004) 69 n. 14.
28 Compare the neoanalytical scholar J. T. Kakridis (1949) 10: ‘What if here and
there unassimilated points escape [the poet’s] attention? We should be grateful to
him for them, as otherwise it would be impossible for us to prove the extent, and
above all, the nature of his dependence on his predecessors.’
29 Cf. Pulleyn, p. 49: ‘Comparative philology here aVords modern scholars an
insight denied to the ancient Greeks . . .’.
338 Bruno Currie
admitted by the poet into the narrative, and that their inclusion in
the narrative constitutes a strategy of allusion; they are there for the
audience’s beneWt. Homer’s text may indeed admit both types of
inconsistency.
Christopher Pelling’s chapter brings us down to the Wfth
century bc , a century whose two most distinctive literary genres,
tragedy and history, show important interactions with Homer.
In discussing the epic interactions of Herodotus, Pelling draws on
J.-P. Vernant’s notion of a ‘tragic moment’ in Wfth-century Athens: a
time and place of seminal cultural interaction between the old
aristocratic values of the heroic world and the new democratic values
of the city-state.30 Pelling extends the notion from tragedy to history,
and from Athens to the Greek world at large; Herodotus’ interaction
with Homer is revealed as exploiting ‘interesting ‘‘interplays’’ of the
worlds of then and now’.31 As Pelling constructs it, the interaction is
not a crudely oppositional one, a modern narrative contrasted with
an archaic one. Rather, Pelling’s reading of Herodotus’ interaction
with Homer sees those oppositions as already implicit in the Hom-
eric poems: ‘whatever we Wnd happening in Herodotus or indeed in
tragedy, we may Wnd that Homer was already doing himself ’.32
Homer, that is, was already exercised by the interaction between
heroic and contemporary values, and between divine and human
causation.33 Not only does Herodotus suggest readings of the
Homeric poems that reveal them as unexpectedly ‘modern’, but
equally Herodotus suggests readings of modern times that reveal
them as (disturbingly) Homeric.
For Pelling, as for me, it is a question when and how we have an
allusion to the Homeric text.34 Sometimes there may be identical
wording: the Spartan ambassador at Herodotus 7.159.1 cites Nestor
at Il. 7.125.35 Sometimes situational similarities may suYce: the scene

30 Hardie (1997) 316–17 explores an application of Vernant’s notion of a ‘tragic

moment’ to the circumstances of post-Actium Rome in which Virgil’s Aeneid was
produced.
31 Pelling, p. 96.
32 Pelling, p. 75.
33 Pelling, pp. 76, 81–3.
34 Cf. Pelling, p. 77.
35 Hdt. 7.159.1 q je lœc oNlþneØe › —º
 `ªÆø, Il. 7.125 q je lœc
oNlþneie ªæø ƒºÆ —º .
 Epilogue 339
between Croesus and Cyrus in the Wrst book of the Histories evokes
the situationally similar scene between Priam and Achilles in Iliad
24.36 It is interesting that this Iliadic scene was already evoked
(I argued), again by situational similarities, in the Odyssey.37 In a
sense both the manner of Herodotus’ allusion to Homer and his
choice of intertext are very much in the Homeric mould. Pelling also
considers how allusion might be eVected even through proverbial or
commonplace language. Similarly, I argued in my chapter for
the possibility of allusion via formulaic language in the early epic
tradition.
The crucial point for Pelling about Herodotus’ interaction with the
Homeric poems is that it sets oV a chain-reaction of other inter-
actions: intertextuality with Homeric episodes is, very often, coupled
with intratextuality within the Histories themselves. The scene
between Priam and Achilles in Il. 24.480–4 is not only an intertext
for the Herodotean scene between Croesus and Cyrus (Hdt. 1.88.1),
but that Herodotean scene is also an intratext for the scene between
Psammenitus and Cambyses (3.14–16). This, too, is in the Homeric
mould. I argued that a scene from the *Memnonis (Aethiopis) where
Achilles Wghts and kills Memnon is an intertext for Il. 16.431–61,
666–83, where Patroclus Wghts and kills Sarpedon; and that scene is
intratextual with Il. 22.167–87, where Achilles Wghts and kills Hector.
Or again, Od. 7.234–97, where Arete quizzes Odysseus about the
clothes he is wearing, may be intertextual with a version in
which Penelope recognized Odysseus from his clothes; but it is also
intratextual with Od. 19.213–60, where Penelope indirectly quizzes
Odysseus about his clothes, and comes within a hair’s breadth of
recognizing him. In all these Homeric and Herodotean passages,
there is signiWcance in both the distance and the closeness
of the scene to its intertext and intratext. Another arguably Homeric
technique is the signalling of intertext or intratext. Pelling’s point
that the presence of Croesus in the scene at Histories 3.14–16 signals

36 Hdt. 1.88.1 (Cyrus and his retinue marvel at Croesus) Ipehþlaæœ  ˙qœym ŒÆd
ÆPe ŒÆd ƒ æd KŒE K  , Il. 24.483–4 (Achilles and his retinue marvel at
Priam) S `غf h›lbgsem Nd¿m —æ Æ ŁØ
Æ_ j ŁÆ
b ŒÆd ¼ººØ.
37 Od. 7.145 (Alcinous and the Phaeacians marvel at Odysseus) haúlaæom d
˙q
oymter. See Currie, p. 12.
340 Bruno Currie
its intratextual relationship with Histories 1.88 mirrors my point that
the presence of Antilochus at Il. 17.679–700 and 18.1–34, and that of
Penelope at Od. 19.476–9, signals the original poetic contexts from
which those motifs have been transferred.38 The reader may ponder
the extent to which Herodotus (or, for that matter, Virgil)39 may be
indebted to Homer for the technique.
Herodotus’ combination of glances back to the ‘beginning’ (that
is, to Homer) with glances forward to the most recent times (to
Herodotus’ own day) enables questions to be raised about both the
nature of history writing and about historical progress. In terms of
the former, the Histories can be seen continually to reposition them-
selves on a sliding scale stretching from archaic epic to the contem-
porary ‘scientiWc’ discourse of the Wfth-century enlightenment: the
way that ‘Thucydides was to write’,40 and the way some Presocratics
and Hippocratics were already writing and thinking. Interaction with
Homer thus constitutes an important part of the Histories’ explor-
ation of their generic status. In terms of historical progress, the events
of Herodotus’ main narrative, chieXy falling within the period c.560–
479 bc, are made to resonate with events both of Homer’s heroic
age and of contemporary history of the 470s–420s (and especially
430s–420s) bc. Here, interaction with Homer constitutes part of
Herodotus’ exploration of patterns of history. We may compare the
way the issue of progess or regress is explored in Virgil’s Aeneid,
sparked again, in part, by Homeric intertextuality.41 Or, keeping closer
to Herodotus’ own cultural milieu, one may think of tragedy: the
ability of the Histories to let Homeric scenes and personalities appear
behind historical ones is the Xip side of tragedy’s capacity to oVer
glimpses of historical situations and Wgures behind the heroic charac-
ters on the stage, ‘zooming’ from the world of the play to the present.42
Once again—a correlate of the question posed with Pulleyn’s
chapter—it is not clear how we are to unravel the literary and

38 Pelling, p. 88; Currie, pp. 26–7, 19.

39 Cf. Lyne (1987) ‘Index’ s.v. ‘ ‘‘Signals’’ to other texts’.
40 Pelling, p. 83.
41 Quint (1993) ch. 2.
42 S. R. West (1992) 117–18, on Agamemnon and Pausanias in Aesch. Ag.; Braswell
(1998) 40–1 n. 48, on Amphiaraus and Aristides in Aesch. Sept.; Bowie (1997), on
Philoctetes and Alcibiades in Soph. Phil.
 Epilogue 341
cultural elements in this interaction. To what extent is Herodotus’
interaction with Homer a historiographical or a historical
one? Unquestionably, the history of the Wfth and fourth centuries
interacted strikingly with the aristocratic and individualistic world
of the Homeric heroes.43 Historical persons of the Classical period
could also self-consciously emulate epic heroes in real life, Alexander’s
emulation of Achilles in the fourth century being a famous example.44
Such anachronisms as challenging an enemy champion to single
combat (Paris, Il. 3.18–20; Hector, Il. 7.39–40) still persist in the Wfth
century (the Athenian Sophanes, Hdt. 9.75). Individuals continue to
perform barely credible aristeiai in battle, halted by horriWc wounding
which turns out not to be fatal (the Aeginetan Pytheas, Hdt. 7.181,
8.92). It is notable, too, how many of the Homeric interactions
considered by Pelling occur in characters’ speeches: is then the epiciz-
ing rhetoric theirs, or Herodotus’?45 The truth lies, surely, unspec-
tacularly between the two: history itself presented some interactions
with Homer, but the Histories discovered many others, of a
profounder and more thought-provoking kind.
Herodotus, as Pelling presents him, shows an awareness of the
crucial open-endedness of such interaction. Herodotus’ narrative
interacts with Homer’s narrative, Herodotus’ narrative interacts
with itself, contemporary Wfth-century history interacts with Herod-
otus’ narrative, and subsequent history will duly interact with
Herodotus’ narrative. Pelling’s study of Herodotus’ interactions
embodies much that is central to the interactions considered in
this book: this is an interaction which is both prospective and
retrospective, cultural as well as literary. This chapter also raises the
question of what is entailed by reading Homer through Herodotus,
as other chapters explore the implications of reading Homer through
Virgil and Virgil through Ovid.46

43 Cf. GriYn (1998) 57–8 on the importance of ‘great personalities’ for contem-
porary 5th-cent. perceptions of history.
44 In general, see Hornblower (2002) 290 ‘Homeric reminiscences abound in both
of our two literary traditions about Alexander, and it is clear that this reXects not just
a literary reworking of the facts but the facts themselves’, ‘the inXuence [sc. between
history and historiography] Xowed both ways’. Note also Agesilaus’ imitation of
Agamemnon in 396 bc (Xen. Hell. 3.5.3).
45 Compare the reminiscence of Il. 4.35 in Cinadon’s rhetoric at Xen. Hell. 3.3.6.
46 Cf. Currie, pp. 36–8; Robinson, p. 213.
342 Bruno Currie
Gregory Hutchinson’s chapter takes us from the Classical into
the Hellenistic period. It also brings us back from an interaction
between a non-epic genre and epic (Herodotus’ Histories with
the Homeric poems) to an interaction within the epic genre
(Callimachus’ Hecale and Apollonius’ Argonautica with both the
Homeric epics and other early epics, such as the Heracleis and
Theseis, known to Aristotle, Poet. 1451a20).47 Hutchinson emphasizes
that, in interacting with Homer, the Hellenistic epic poets are also
interacting with a critical tradition on Homer which had been
developing in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, and is repre-
sented for us (chieXy) by Aristotle’s Poetics. The role of the critical
tradition in shaping epic poets’ interactions with their predecessors is
an important theme of the volume.48 It is relevant, of course, that
Callimachus and Apollonius were both poets and critics: part of the
interplay here is between practitioners and theoreticians of epic.
Callimachus, in the Hecale, engages in ‘conscious and subversive
play’ with Aristotle’s reading of Homer.49
Hutchinson’s focus is not the Hellenistic poets’ reception of
Homeric language or motifs, but rather their interaction with
Homer in their handling of epic form.50 The overriding critical
concept here is unity or ‘oneness’, after the Aristotelian precept that
an epic should have ‘one plot’ (¥ FŁ ) and should imitate ‘one
action’ ( Æ æA%Ø )—a feature judged to have separated Homer
from other archaic epicists (Poetics, chapter 8). In Hellenistic epic,
oneness is explored partly through the length of the poem: that is,
through the number of its books. For Hellenistic readers who knew
the Iliad and Odyssey in editions of 24 books, the one-book Hecale
already made a literal gesture to oneness.51 The Argonautica, with its
47 Cf. Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 96.
48 See especially below on the chapters of Leigh, Clarke, Wilson. Also, Robinson,
pp. 209, 211, on Ovid’s interaction with Virgil. Note also Jenkyns, passim (e.g. on
Arnold as poet and critic). Cf. Burrow (1997b) 90 for Milton’s use of 17th-cent.
commentaries on Virgil. The epics both use commentaries on their predecessors and
become commentaries on their predecessors: cf. Hardie (1993) 118.
49 Hutchinson, p. 113.
50 See, on this aspect of Apollonius’ interaction with Homer, Campbell (1981);
Knight (1995); Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 89–132, 266–82.
51 Hutchinson, p. 116 assumes a ‘Hellenistic book-division’ of Iliad and Odyssey.
For an argument that they were original, see Heiden (1998) and (2000), with
bibliography.
 Epilogue 343
four books, takes a more complex approach. The poem displays
overall unity, but the book divisions complicate; they suggest discrete
divisions, which are nevertheless transcended. The poem thus
presents itself as a unity, but with parts. The four books of the
Argonautica also constitute a formal interaction with Homer, evoking
the four-book narrative of Odysseus’ wanderings at Odyssey 9–12.52
In this formal interaction there is also opposition in imitation, since
that four-book Odyssean narrative seems already to have interacted
with an early Argonaut story.53 Formal interaction in terms of book
numbers of course continues in the epic tradition: most obviously,
Virgil’s 12-book Aeneid with the 24-book Homeric epics, and Ovid’s
15-book Metamorphoses with the 12-book Aeneid.54
Oneness is also explored by Callimachus and Apollonius in the
‘management’ (NŒ Æ) of their epics. Aristotle (Poetics, chapter 8,
again) insisted that a plot is not made one by virtue of having one
hero, but only by having one action. Callimachus and (especially)
Apollonius subject the critical notions of ‘one hero’ and ‘one action’
to intense pressure. As Hutchinson shows, there is in the Argonautica
constant interplay between the Argonauts’ ‘one’ labour, the recovery
of the Xeece from Colchis, and the multiple labours of their out-
bound and return voyage. Even the one climactic labour in Colchis
becomes double, as recovery of the Xeece entails yoking the bulls and
sowing the crop of warriors. There is sustained interplay too between
the one hero, Jason, and the many heroes, the Argonauts. Again, even
the one hero is bifurcated, since the climactic labour is ultimately to
be accomplished by the collaboration of Jason and Medea. The
Argonauts’ heroism is problematized (in contrast with Heracles,
who has a Wxed number of labours, and an unambiguously
active heroism); and there are problems with Jason as leader of the
expedition and hero of the poem. Complex questions are
consequently raised about male and female roles, active and passive
heroism—interestingly, both already themes (as I argued) of the

52 Hutchinson, p. 116.
53 Currie, p. 6; cf. Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 90.
54 Cf. Armstrong, p. 137 n. 14; Robinson, p. 214. Milton’s 10-book Paradise Lost
(1667) probably evokes Lucan’s 10-book Bellum Civile (Pharsalia)—although Lucan
had himself probably envisaged 12 books; the 12-book Paradise Lost (1674) evokes
Virgil’s Aeneid.
344 Bruno Currie
Odyssey’s interaction with the Iliad.55 The split heroism of Jason and
Medea in the Argonautica invites comparison with the split heroism
of Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey. Penelope has a metaphor-
ical ‘Odyssey’ within her own home, comparable to Odysseus’ on a
vast world stage (note the simile at Od. 23.231–40, answering the one
at 5.394–9). At the end of the poem, it is Penelope’s Œº , not
Odysseus’, that is accentuated (Od. 24.196–7: contrast Od. 9.20).
In the Argonautica, Medea has her own ‘labour’ to balance the
Argonauts’ (Argon. 4.1, cf. 4.1776). But in Apollonius’ epic
the juxtaposition of male and female and of active and passive
heroism is in a much less harmonious equipoise. In the Odyssey,
Odysseus’ suVering and his Œº are, ultimately, parallel and com-
plementary to Penelope’s suVering and her Œº ; and the suVerings
of both are ended in a single moment. In the Argonautica, however,
the suVerings and labours of Medea rise as those of Jason and the
Argonauts subside: ‘The symmetry [or perhaps ‘‘asymmetry’’, which
has both an intratextual and an intertextual aspect], and its disquiet-
ing implications, are made clear.’56
Hutchinson shows how ethical complexity is achieved by the
inclusion of additional lives and additional perspectives on
the narrative. We Wnd contrasting and interlocking stories: for
instance, of the sons of Phrixus and the Argonauts in the Argonau-
tica, and of Hecale and Theseus in the Hecale. Here too the Hellen-
istic epicists are seen to confront their reading of Aristotle with their
reading of Homer: the perspectives of (especially) Priam in the Iliad
and Penelope in the Odyssey deepen and complicate the heroism
of Achilles and Odysseus in those epics. Such deepening and
complication are, however, taken onto a new plane with Callima-
chus’ Hecale and Apollonius’ Medea: these poets’ interaction with
Homer in the ‘management’ of epic form enables them also to evoke
the tragic eVect of the Homeric epics, especially the Iliad.57 For
Hutchinson, therefore, the Hellenistic epicists’ interaction with
Homer raises searching ethical questions about the hero of a ‘mod-
ern’ (that is, Hellenistic) epic:58 we should compare Pelling’s argu-

55 Currie, p. 13. 56 Hutchinson, p. 126.

57 Hutchinson, pp. 121, 128.
58 Hutchinson, p. 129: ‘Critically and ethically, the reader is engaged and provoked’;
contrast (provocatively) Jenkyns, p. 325: ‘The Argonautica does little thinking’.
 Epilogue 345
ment that searching political questions are raised about ‘modern’
times by Herodotus’ interaction with Homer. Again as with Herod-
otus, the Hellenistic poets’ interaction with Homer enables generic
questions to be raised: is a poem like the Hecale still an epic poem?
There are also aesthetic questions: can epic poems written in this
manner still succeed, even if they Xout (or at least complicate) the
Poetics’ prescriptions for a good epic? The Hellenistic poets can be
seen to oVer a practical response to theoretical strictures.
The next four chapters are dedicated to Roman epic. Continu-
ities, of course, were strong between Greek (Hellenistic) and
Roman cultures: there is a seamless transition in a way there is
not with the vernacular literatures considered in the third part of
this book.
Emphasizing the vast range of the Aeneid ’s source-texts, and the
variety of their genres, Rebecca Armstrong presents the Aeneid ’s
appropriative interaction with not just earlier epic but ‘all’ earlier
literature as a self-conscious analogue of Rome’s treatment of its
provinces: this Roman epic and the Roman empire are both engaged
in acts of appropriation and redeWnition. On this reading, the Aeneid
emerges as a project of literary imperialism, cultural counterpart to
Roman (and speciWcally Augustan) military imperialism.59 Earlier
literature—not only Greek, but the Latin literature of the Republic—
is made to sing to a Roman tune. It is also transposed to the
appropriate key. Light-hearted source-texts from the Odyssey surren-
der their humour and intimacy to the stern coldness of the Aeneid
and a witty line of Catullus (66.39) is turned into a serious expression
of ‘raw emotion’, in keeping with the gravity of the Roman imperial
mission.60 Armstrong sees ‘conquest’ as a metapoetical Wgure for
Virgil’s relationship with his literary models (similarly, in a later

59 Cf. Hardie (1998) 57 ‘This act of literary aggrandizement also makes the Aeneid
a peculiarly apt complement to the ideology of the new princeps Augustus, buttressed
as it is by a claim to the universal power of Rome; Virgil’s poetic triumph, as vividly
described at the beginning of the third Georgic, makes of him the Wtting poet for the
triumphator Augustus; the literary imperialist rides by the side of the military
imperialist’. Cf. Hardie (1993) 1–2; Quint (1993) 7–8.
60 Cf. also Austin (1971) pp. xiii–xiv on the Virgilian transformation of the tone of
Homeric and Apollonian intertexts.
346 Bruno Currie
chapter, Leigh sees Capaneus’ ‘assault’ on heaven as a metapoetical
Wgure for Statius’ relationship with his Virgilian model).
The aspiration to subsume ‘all’ earlier literature is not new with
the Aeneid. The Iliad and Odyssey, too, incorporate other poetry
in what might be seen as a self-consciously appropriative way.61
The genres subsumed by the Iliad include heroic epic (the material
of the *Memnonis (Aethiopis), Cypria, etc.), theomachy-titanomachy
(Il. 21.385–520), theogony (Il. 14.200–4), ‘gods-poetry’ (Il. 1.153–
353),62 catalogue poetry (Il. 2.484–759), and Near Eastern poetry
(Il. 5.355–430).63 The Iliad and Odyssey vigorously appropriate
characters and episodes from other epics. In the Iliad, Diomedes
has been appropriated from the Theban cycle, while Sarpedon
belongs in Lycia and to an earlier generation. The Odyssey has lifted
Circe and the Sirens from an Argonaut epic, and Odysseus’ katabasis
is indebted to a Heracles epic.64 Hellenistic epic is no less appropria-
tive. Apollonius’ Argonautica subsumes (to mention just the obvious
appropriations) Archaic epic (especially the Odyssey), choral lyric
(especially Pindar’s fourth Pythian), and Attic tragedy (especially
Euripides’ Medea); it may be relevant to note that Athenian tragedy,
too, had already made a point of subsuming all the lyric genres.65
Such a strategy of literary appropriation therefore neither begins
nor ends with the Aeneid.66 But it is in a Roman context that it seems
to acquire a distinctively political aspect.67 With Polybius, the genre

61 Cf. Currie, p. 22 n. 102, citing Danek (1998) 231 ‘our Odyssey presents itself as
an epic which could potentially take up the material of all known epics and thus
ultimately replace all other epics’ (trans. from the German). The notion of the Iliad
and Odyssey as ‘totalizing’ texts, in this sense, is not just a later Greek construct
(contrast Hardie (1993) 1 ‘In the case of the Homeric epics the totalizing impulse is
perhaps perceived more clearly in the later Greek interpretation of the poems than in
the texts as they might present themselves to an ‘‘unbiased’’ modern eye’).
62 Janko (1994) 168 ‘Homer parades his mastery of other types of epic compos-
ition in his repertoire’. For the term ‘gods-poetry’, see Taplin (2000) 38.
63 Cf. Currie, p. 23 and n. 107.
64 See GriYn (1995) 3–4; Janko (1994) 371; M. L. West (2005) 43–7.
65 Herington (1985) 79.
66 Cf. Wilson, p. 275: Tasso and Milton ‘incorporate into epic themes, tropes, and
styles more often associated with other genres, including tragedy, comedy, mock-
heroic, pastoral, and history writing, as well as romance’.
67 One might contemplate a possible political dimension to the literary appropri-
ations of Greek tragedy and Apollonius’ Argonautica. Fifth-century Athens and
 Epilogue 347
of universal history came to present Rome as the end-point of world
history; at the same time, Polybius’ Histories set out to subsume
other forms of history writing.68 This teleological view of Rome
was incorporated into Ennius’ Annales; it was taken up from there,
and given a further dimension, by Virgil. As world history Wnds its
fulWlment in Rome and Augustus (Aen. 1.278–9, 286–96, 6.791–807;
cf. Ov. Met. 15.829–31), so too, we are now to understand, literary
history Wnds its fulWlment in this Augustan epic.69 But what
makes the expansiveness of the Aeneid ’s literary interactions imperi-
alistic and speciWcally Augustan? After all, a comparably inclusive
intertextuality can be found in Republican—neoteric—Latin poetry
(Lucretius, and Catullus’ Peleus and Thetis), where it lacks not just an
Augustan aspect, but also a patriotic-political one. An answer might
appeal to three things. First, the contemporary political context: the
Aeneid may be thought to chime with Augustan imagery of world
domination (we are obliged, though, to recognize that the Aeneid
also contrasts with contemporary propaganda, such as Augustus’
Res Gestae and the imperial monuments: see Harrison’s chapter).70
Second, there is Virgilian metaphor itself: the proem of the third
Georgic presents the poet contemplating the Augustan epic as an
imperial conqueror (G. 3.8–48) (again, though, we must recognize
that the Virgilian narrator also distances himself from the conquering
princeps, G. 4.559–66). Third, there is Ovid’s reception of the Aeneid,
which latches onto precisely this aspect of it (as Robinson’s chapter
investigates;71 we should not, however, expect Ovid to be an even-
handed reader of the Aeneid, as Robinson makes clear). The meta-
poetics of the Metamorphoses may indeed alert us to the metapoetics
of the Aeneid. As Ovid’s poem on ‘mutated forms’
(Met. 1.1 mutatas . . . formas) is itself engaged in a mutation of

Alexandria under the Ptolemies Soter and Philadelphus were both imperially ambi-
tious societies; on the relationship between Ap. Rhod. Argon. and Ptolemaic political
interest, cf. Hunter (1993a) 152–69, (1993b) p. xi.
68 Marincola (2001) 121 ‘just as Rome subsumed individual nations, so Polybius’
history subsumed all other forms of history’.
69 Cf. Quint (1993), e.g. p. 9.
70 Cf. Hardie (1986) 378–9.
71 Cf. Hardie (1986) 379 ‘Ovid’s greater explicitness and succinctness often makes it
possible to use him as a kind of commentary on what in Virgil is only hinted at’. Lucan’s
reception of the Aeneid might lead to similar conclusions: cf. Quint (1993) 7–8.
348 Bruno Currie
literary forms, so Virgil’s poem on Roman world conquest
(Aen. 1.279 imperium sine Wne dedi) may plausibly be seen as engaged
in a conquest of world literature.72
So we may see the Aeneid as ‘a growing literary empire which both
mirrors and contrasts with the political empire of Augustus’.73 With
this phrase, Armstrong hints that the Aeneid may also part company
with the Augustan imperialist enterprise. Armstrong herself empha-
sizes the ‘mirroring’; the ‘contrasts’ are developed in the chapters of
Harrison and Robinson. Armstrong is concerned to explore how the
Aeneid imposes meaning on the texts with which it interacts (it may
be tempting to think of the way in which the Roman imperialist is to
‘impose custom on peace’, Aen. 6.852). The reading of intertextuality,
however, is notoriously fraught.74 To keep the imperialistic meta-
phor, it is not clear whether we should think of the Aeneid as
annexing earlier literature or of earlier literature invading Virgil’s
text.75 Even imperialism, for that matter, need not involve a simple
imposition of the victor’s culture on the vanquished, as Horace
famously recognized (Epist. 2.1.156–7). It is, perhaps, above all tragic
intertexts that may be felt to redeWne the teleology of the Aeneid.
Rather than a triumphant appropriation of another genre by this
Roman epic, the intrusion of tragedy (Dido in book 4, Marcellus in
book 6, Amata in book 12) might be seen as complicating the
Aeneid ’s triumphalism.76
Indeed, Armstrong’s reading of the interaction of the Aeneid with
earlier literature also lends itself to more problematizing readings of
the poem. The case of Dido oVers an opportunity to see the Aeneid as
problematizing its own annexation of earlier literature. Dido in
Virgil’s hands is ‘The Epic Woman’, a summation of Homer’s Calypso

72 For the metapoetic interpretation of Aen. 1.279, cf. Kennedy (1997) 152–3.
73 Armstrong, p. 157.
74 Cf. Hinds (1998) 100–4; D. P. Fowler (2000) 134 ‘intertextuality represents a
view of text as inherently open-ended, multiple, and unstable in opposition to
notions of univalent, self-contained meaning . . .’.
75 Cf. Lyne (1994); D. P. Fowler (2000) 128, on Verg. Aen. 6.851 and Lucr. 5.1128:
‘the question as to whether we make Aeneid 6 correct the Epicurean retirement of the
Lucretian intertext or the Lucretian traces subvert the Aeneid is obviously one that
cannot be kept within the sphere of the literary but which reaches out into many
aspects of our constructions of the transition from Republic to Empire’.
76 Hardie (1997).
 Epilogue 349
and Nausicaa, of Apollonius’ Hypsipyle and Medea, and of Catullus’
Ariadne.77 But she is also Dido (Elissa), a pre-existing literary Wgure
in her own right. The story of Dido and Aeneas’ love aVair is a
conspicuous innovation, though not necessarily Virgil’s; the trad-
itional stories of Aeneas and Dido could not have brought the two
together, given the traditional dates of the fall of Troy (1184 bc) and
of the foundation of Carthage (c.814 bc).78 The traditional story of
Dido was current in Virgil’s day: it is the version followed by Pom-
peius Trogus (perhaps following Timaeus) in his Philippic Histories.79
It is this version, up to the point of Dido’s founding of Carthage, that
is summarily recounted by Venus at Aen. 1.340–68.80 The traditional
Dido story is thus the one assumed by the Aeneid up to its point of
contact with the Aeneas story. The traditional story continued with
Elissa (Dido) immolating herself publicly on a pyre to avoid marriage
to the local Libyan king Hiarbas (Virgil’s Iarbas) and stay faithful to
her late husband Acharbas (Virgil’s Sychaeus) and with Dido subse-
quently being ‘worshipped as a goddess, as long as Carthage was
unconquered’ (Justin 18.6.8).81 In the Aeneid, the traditional Wgure
of Dido is subjected to a battery of literary models: she is infected not
just by the heroine of epic, but the even more unhappy heroines of
tragedy (Medea, Phaedra) and love elegy. Under the intertextual
pressure of these literary females, the traditional Wgure of Dido
comes apart at the seams—the honoriWc, virtuous death on the pyre
being redeWned as a tragic, guilty one. We may even see an acknow-
ledgement of the innovation, if 4.696 nec fato . . . peribat, ‘not by fate’,
may be allowed to carry the overtone ‘not according to tradition’.82

77 Armstrong, p. 149.
78 Austin (1971) pp. xi–xii takes the innovation to be Virgil’s. But the love aVair
may have featured in Naevius’ Bellum Poenicum (cf. Cyril Bailey and Philip Hardie in
OCD (3rd edn.) s.v. ‘Dido’) and in the generation before Virgil may have been known
to Varro (who had not Dido, but Anna, fall in love with Aeneas: Servius on Aen.
4.682) and Ateius Philologus (who wrote an essay on ‘Whether Aeneas loved Dido’).
Cf. Pease (1935) 17–21.
79 Trogus is ‘usually dated to the reign of Augustus’ (McDonald and Spawforth in
OCD s.v.). His Histories are preserved epitomized by Justin.
80 Cf. Justin 18.4–5.
81 Cf. Sil. 1.81–92.
82 For ‘fate’ as ‘tradition’, cf. Currie, p. 7; Janko (1994) 371 on Il. 5.662, 5.674–5:
‘The poet warns his hearers to revise their expectations, by saying that Sarpedon is not
yet fated to die.’
350 Bruno Currie
The subsequent meeting of Aeneas and Dido in the Underworld
(Aen. 6.440–76) can be seen as oVering a retrospective commentary
not just on Aeneas’ but on the Aeneid ’s treatment of Dido (granted,
especially, that a nekyia is a Wtting place for a poem to explore its
relationship to tradition).83 It is a shock, perhaps, for the reader, as
well as for Aeneas, to Wnd Dido in the Underworld. The shock is
accentuated by the implications of the intertextuality of Aen. 6.460
with Catullus 66.39 (The Lock of Berenice), which Oliver Lyne brilli-
antly explained.84 Berenice’s lock, translated to the heavens and
deiWed (Catull. 66, after Callim. fr. 110) mirrors Aeneas’ anticipated
translation and deiWcation (Aen. 1.259–60, 12.794–5), and contrasts
with Dido’s own relegation to the Underworld (Aen. 6.441); the
removal of a lock from Dido’s head by divine agency (Aen. 4.693–
705) links her further to Berenice, but in Dido’s case the severed
lock merely facilitates her soul’s passage to the Underworld. The
Catullan–Callimachean intertext and the scene as a whole brutally
juxtapose Aeneas’ prospective apotheosis with Dido’s very present
death. But this Underworld meeting needs to be read against the
tradition in which Dido (Elissa) was deiWed after a noble suicide.
This tradition is alluded to, in an ‘Alexandrian footnote’, at Aen.
4. 322–3 (sc. exstincta est,) qua sola sidera adibam / fama prior. In a
jarring departure from that tradition, the Aeneid here inscribes Dido
into a new Catalogue of Women, literary females who for the most
part killed themselves after a tragic or unholy love (Phaedra, Procris,
Eriphyle, Evadne, Pasiphae, Laodamia, and Caeneus: 6.445–9).85 The
Aeneid’s Dido is the most ‘recent’ addition to this roster of heroines
(6.450–1 ‘among whom Phoenician Dido was wandering, fresh
(recens) from her wound’). Arguably, the Aeneid here tropes its own
rewriting of literary history. Comparison with a passage from the
second book helps to make the point. At Aen. 2.268–97, the dream
visitation of Hector to Aeneas tropes the relationship of the Aeneid to
the Iliad, the literary succession from Iliad to Aeneid being Wgured in

83 Cf. Currie, pp. 21–2; Hardie (1993) 103–5, (1998) 53.

84 Lyne (1994).
85 Compare the comments of Lyne (1987) 17, on Virgil’s treatment of Amata in
book 12: ‘According to Vergil, but against the tradition, she hangs herself: a ‘‘degrad-
ing death’’ [‘informe letum’], as Vergil calls it (12.603), beWtting the desperate, the
self-disgusted: Jocasta, Phaedra, and—according to Vergil—Amata.’
 Epilogue 351
the succession from Hector to Aeneas.86 Here we have metapoetic
tropes which resonate throughout the epic tradition (see especially
Wilson’s discussion of Tasso and Milton): there is the dream, the
diYculty of recognition, the mutilation of the hero of the older
poem almost beyond recognition (Aen. 2.274–5 quantum mutatus
ab illo j Hectore . . . ). Comparable themes pervade the passage in book
6. The whole Underworld episode is a dream-like experience (Aen.
6.893–9).87 Here, too, we have diYculty of recognition (6.451–4, esp.
452 agnouit).88 The traditional heroine has once again suVered dis-
Wguring violence (6.450 uulnere).89 The ‘great wood’ (6.451 silua in
magna, cf. 6.444), in which Dido is now to be glimpsed, is metapoe-
tically suggestive:90 the Aeneid seems here to trope Dido’s incorpor-
ation into a vast body of literary material originally distinct from the
Dido story. The pull of literary stereotypes has seemingly redeWned,
distorted, the traditional Dido.
Above all, though, the Aeneid ’s rewriting of literary history in this
episode seems to be troped as a shocking, jarring one. The story of
Dido had, after all, been the traditional one up to its incorporation in
the plot of Rome (Aen. 1.340–68). There is, evidently, Virgilian
appropriation and redeWnition going on here.91 But it is not a
triumphalist nor necessarily a controlled redeWnition, especially if
(in speculative vein) we may see the surprise evinced by Aeneas at the
transformation he has eVected on Dido (6.458 ‘was I, alas, the cause
of your death?’, 463 ‘I could not believe . . .’) as troping a failure of
authorial control, the hero here as elsewhere serving as a Wgure for
the poet.92 Virgil’s Carthage episode symbolizes an act of Roman
imperialism (symbolically, Rome sacks Carthage: 4.669–71); it is also
an act of literary appropriation (the Aeneas story co-opts
86 See Hardie (1993) 102–3, esp. 102 ‘the hero of the Iliad hands over to the hero of
the Aeneid, just as the Roman Virgil takes over the epic mantle from Homer’, 112–13.
Note esp. the intertextuality with Ennius’ dream (Ann. bk. 1, frr. 1–4 Skutsch), where
Ennius is cast as the successor (reincarnation) of Homer.
87 Hardie (1998) 53. Explicitly a dream in Virgil’s source-texts, Cicero’s Dream of
Scipio and Ennius’ dream; also in Tasso’s adaptation, GL 14.1–19.
88 Cf. Hinds (1998) 9–10 on Luc. 1.686 agnosco.
89 Hinds (1998) 14 ‘ ‘‘violation’’ may have its metapoetic dimension too’. Cf. ibid.
p. 10 on Pompey’s deformis truncus (Luc. 1.685), and Lyne (1987) 17 (cited above,
n. 85) on the untraditional suicide of Amata as informis leti (Aen. 12.603).
90 Cf. Hinds (1998) 11–14; Wilson, p. 288.
91 Cf. Macrob. Sat. 5.17.5, quoted by Austin (1971) p. xii.
92 For Aeneas as ‘Virgil’, cf. Hardie (1993) 102; for Capaneus as ‘Statius’, cf. Leigh, ch. 8.
352 Bruno Currie
the Dido story). Arguably, Virgil tropes his rewriting of the tradition
as an unwitting trampling over the Dido story, as Aeneas unwittingly
tramples over Dido and Carthage. Empire in the Aeneid is partly, but
recurrently, a story of unwanted accidents (the ‘wounding’ of Dido,
re-enacted in the wounding of Silvia’s pet stag). Analogously,
perhaps, Virgil’s creation of a literary ‘empire’ presents itself as
containing accidents. The Aeneid combines a strong sense of tele-
ology with a sense of ‘this was not meant to be’, on the level of both
military and literary imperialism. The key agents of the poem
(Aeneas, Jupiter) do not seem fully in control of their actions.93
Nor (it seems) is the narrator clearly able to steer the plot exactly
as he intends. This seems especially to be the case if we see Jupiter as a
Wgure for the narrator, responsible for imposing closure, Wnis, on the
poem (cf. Aen. 1.241 and 12.793).94 There are, indeed, diYculties
(which the Aeneid does not obscure) in seeing the Aeneid as literary
telos and Rome as historical telos of the world, diYculties further
exposed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (see Robinson’s chapter).95
The analogy between Virgil’s interaction in the Aeneid with ‘world’
literature and Rome’s imperial interaction with world history is
an intriguing and suggestive one, ambiguous in itself between
panegyrical and oppositional readings of Virgil and prompting
further contemplation of the complexities and ambiguities involved
in ‘conquest’, in both the military and literary sphere.
The scope of the book is considerably expanded by Stephen
Harrison’s consideration of monuments as an ‘intertext’ of the
Aeneid: the Augustan building programme can be seen as another
kind of contemporary discourse with which the Aeneid interacts.
This widened conception of ‘text’ gives interaction a sense which
draws it into the realm of ‘cultural poetics’: an approach in which
literary texts and cultural artefacts are equally objects of critical
attention.96 It is an interesting question whether the imperial
discourse constituted by the Augustan monuments in turn interacts

93 Cf. Lyne (1990).

94 Cf. Kennedy (1997) 147–8; Feeney (1991) 137.
95 Cf. Feeney (1990); Hardie (1992) 70–1; Martindale (1993) 37–8.
96 On this more expansive construction of ‘text’, cf. e.g. D. P. Fowler (2000) 128–9.
On ‘cultural poetics’, cf. Dougherty and Kurke (1993), esp. pp. 5, 131 (after
Greenblatt).
 Epilogue 353
with the Aeneid. Harrison does not himself consider any such
instances; Robinson (brieXy) does.97
The interaction of epic poetry with physical monuments is a
theme of Homeric as well as Virgilian epic. Monuments provide a
powerful connection between past and present. The nature of the
connection, however, may be quite diVerently realized. In the Iliad
and Odyssey, monuments are present in the narrator’s own day
as ruined vestiges of a remote heroic past; in the Aeneid, the monu-
ments are present in the narrator’s own day as glorious manifest-
ations of contemporary Rome, introduced in the narrative by
prolepsis (Aen. 8.348 aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis).
Monuments may imply both a historical narrative and a generalized
view of history. A sinister bargain among the gods lies for the poet of
the Iliad behind the ruins of Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae (Il. 4.50–4),
which were presumably visible to the poet’s contemporaries; and this
narrative is emblematic of gods’ relations with humans as a whole.98
In the Aeneid, the architectural splendour of contemporary Rome
suggests the gods’ unceasing support for the Roman mission—
though Virgil’s text is, characteristically, more complex and ambigu-
ous.99 Epic monuments oVer a perspective on poetry, as well as on
history. In the Iliad, monuments such as a tomb are a medium for
transmitting a hero’s fame to posterity, and are thus parallel to the
bard’s song.100 In later Greek panegyrical poetry, especially Pindaric
97 Harrison, p. 178: ‘if there is allusion, we are (as in the other instances adduced
in this chapter) dealing with allusion by poet to building rather than vice versa’.
Robinson, p. 216 considers a possible reception of Aeneid on the Ara Pacis, and p. 191
the institution of the Ludi Saeculares as a possible response of Augustus to Virgil’s
fourth Eclogue. Horsfall (1995) 166 asks whether the presence of the statue of Aeneas
in the Forum of Augustus was ‘Provoked by the publication of the Aeneid ?’
98 On Il. 4.50–4, see GriYn (1980) 196–7 and n. 54.
99 Note esp. the ambiguity of Aen. 8.348, quoted above: ‘golden now, but some-
time [sc. in the past or in the future: see OLD s.v. olim 1 and 3] bristling with
woodland thorn-bushes’. The future site of Rome at the time of the narrative also
features ‘monuments/warnings’ (monimenta) of former men (8.312, cf. 356). These
were the inhabitants of Saturn’s Golden Age (324–5)—who thus inevitably raise
questions about the longevity of Augustus’ Golden Age (6.792–4). Compare, in
general, Scipio Aemilianus’ fears for the future of Rome at the sack of Carthage:
Polyb. 38.21; App. Pun. 132; Diod. 32.24. Cf. Hardie (1992) 59–60. For monuments
in subsequent epic, cf. e.g. Luc. 9.961–79; Tasso, GL 15.19–20; Milton, PL 1.692–9; in
Spenser: van Es (2002) 21–48.
100 For this function of song, cf. Il. 6.357–8; Od. 3.204, 8.580, 24.196–201; of a
tomb, cf. Il. 7.86–91; Od. 4.584, 24.80–4; Cic. Arch. 24. Cf. Ford (1992) ch. 4.
354 Bruno Currie
epinician, the concept is developed further: song is parallel to and in
competition with monuments (tomb, statue, temple) as instruments
of immortality (Pind. Pyth. 6.5–17, Nem. 4.79–81, 5.1–2).101
The theme is taken up into Augustan poetry in encomiastic contexts,
notably in the proem of Virgil’s third Georgic (G. 3.13–39).102
The metaphor of the poet as imperial monument-maker invites
comparison with the metaphor explored by Armstrong of the poet
as imperial conqueror.103
Yet the metaphor of the Aeneid as an Augustan literary ‘monu-
ment’ is, like the metaphor of the Aeneid as an Augustan literary
‘empire’, a powerfully ambiguous one. If Virgil encourages us at
G. 3.13–39 to see his epic poem as parallel to a monumental
commemoration of Augustus and imperial ideology, then the
practice of reading the Aeneid complicates the relationship: a diVer-
ence is reinstated between the poem and the monuments. ‘[T]he
Wltering of politically charged monuments through indirect literary
allusion, analogous to the Wltering and modiWcation of other literary
texts, allows (as in the Aeneid generally) more complex, nuanced and
humane views on the tragic aspects of heroic achievement to have a
place alongside undoubted compliments to the striking reconstruc-
tion of Rome under Augustus.’104 The Aeneid ’s interaction with the
Augustan monuments constitutes one aspect of Virgil’s reception of
imperial discourse; it may be seen alongside others, such as the
Virgilian reception of imperial sentiments subsequently codiWed in
the Res Gestae.105 (There may be irony—and a further proof of the
inescapable open-endedness of interaction—if we wish to see
post-Virgilian Augustan monuments, such as the Ara Pacis, as in
turn enforcing an imperialistic reading of the Aeneid.)106
The Aeneid encourages us to redeWne the monuments, just as
(Armstrong argued) Virgilian literary intertextuality encourages us
to redeWne its literary intertexts. Like the epic itself, the monuments
101 Cf. (in prose panegyric) Isoc. Evagoras 73. For Callimachean development of
the theme, see R. F. Thomas (1983) 96–9.
102 Cf. Hor. Carm. 3.30.1 V.; Prop. 3.2.17–26, 4.1.57 (Robinson, pp. 204–6),
4.1.65–7. In Neronian epic: Luc. 9.961–86.
103 Cf. also Prop. 4.1.57 V., exploiting the ambiguity of opus as denoting a literary
or architectural ‘work’.
104 Harrison, p. 183. 105 Tarrant (1997b) 181.
106 Cf. Robinson, p. 216.
 Epilogue 355
in the epic can be aVected by unforeseen tragedy. Harrison illustrates
the point with Augustus’ ‘mausoleum’: built as a dynastic tomb for
Augustus, the mausoleum came to house the body of his intended
heir Marcellus before it did his own. Monuments turn out to be texts
as open as Virgil’s literary source-texts, as liable to redeWnition and
recontextualization as they are.107 It seems to be in the nature of
monuments that their meaning changes as events overtake them.
A modern example makes the point with unusual explicitness: the
‘Siegestor’ in Munich, constructed in 1852 with the inscription ‘dem
bayerischen Heere zum Ruhme’, destroyed in the Second World War
and subsequently restored, now bears the inscription ‘dem Sieg
geweiht, vom Krieg zerstört, zum Frieden mahnend’.108
Such considerations suggest that Virgil would very likely have seen
his own ediWce, the Aeneid, as itself open to redeWnition, for all its
apparent pretensions to totality (closure, unassailability).109 Certainly,
it did not have long to wait for it, at the hands of Propertius and,
especially, Ovid. In discussing the Augustan poets’ responses to the
Aeneid, Matthew Robinson returns us to literary interaction with
the Aeneid. Here, as with Pelling’s exploration of Herodotus’ inter-
action with Homer, we are dealing with the interaction of non-epic
literary genres with an epic. Their diverse interactions with the Aeneid
reveal Horace, Propertius, and Ovid each as idiosyncratic, sometimes
wilful, contemporary readers of Virgil’s epic.
The interaction is played out partly on the level of genre. Virgil’s
career of generic ascent (from pastoral to didactic epos to heroic
epic) posed a dilemma for contemporary poets who, like Virgil,
started out in the professedly nugatory genres of lyric (Horace) and
love elegy (Propertius and Ovid). Such poets were now constrained
either to remain resolutely within those genres or else to copy Virgil’s
ascent.110 Ovid’s interactions with the Aeneid were expressed across
a range of diVerent genres. In the pre-exile poetry there is even a

107 Cf. D. P. Fowler (2000) 193–217, e.g. 206 ‘Nothing is more changeable than the
meaning of a monument.’
108 1852: ‘to the fame of the Bavarian army’. After 1945: ‘dedicated to victory,
destroyed in war, counselling peace’.
109 Cf. Hardie (1993) 2 and Armstrong, pp. 131–2.
110 Virgil’s ascent, set out in the spurious proem to the Aeneid, was a model, of
course, for Spenser (FQ proem canto 1: from Sheaperdes Calendar to Faerie Queene)
356 Bruno Currie
generic ascent mirroring, however parodically, Virgil’s: from love
elegy (Amores) to ‘didactic’ love elegy (Ars Amatoria, Remedia
Amoris) to ‘patriotic’ aetiological elegy (Fasti) to ‘epic’ (Metamor-
phoses). Horace and Propertius, on the other hand, worked out
sustained responses within, respectively, the genres of lyric and
elegy to Wrst the idea and then the reality of the Augustan epic.
Initially, in Horace’s Wrst three books of Odes and Propertius’ Wrst
three (four?)111 books of Elegies, the poets parade the ideological
opposition of lyric and elegy respectively to panegyric epic (pledging
commitment, for instance, to the proelia of the bedroom rather
than those of the battleWeld). Subsequently, in Horace’s Carmen
Saeculare and his Odes 4 and in Propertius’ ‘fourth’ book, all follow-
ing the publication of the Aeneid, we see them exploring the
patriotic potential inherent in those genres and placing them in
(playful) competition with the Augustan epic. Horace now espouses
increasingly the model of the public, encomiastic lyric poet Pindar,
capable of immortalizing his human subject, over the private,
sympotic lyric poet Alcaeus; Propertius realizes a patriotic element
latent in Callimachus’ aetiological elegiac poetry. These could
be responses to actual political pressure, but a literary dynamic is
also discernible.
Robinson portrays Horace as a reader sensitive to the ambiguities
and conXicts of Virgil, and not averse to prising them further apart.
According to Robinson’s metapoetic reading of Odes 1.3, Horace
avails himself of the Archaic lyric form of the propemptikon (e.g.
Sappho 5 LP) to exploit the sea voyage as a metaphor for writing
epic. In doing so he plays back to Virgil the nervousness Virgil had
himself expressed towards ‘the open seas’ (epic) in the Georgics
(2.44–5). Virgil, it now appears, is oV to accomplish a cultural
‘conquest’ of Greece for Rome, as Virgil had himself suggested
in another metapoetic metaphor in the Georgics (3.10–11)—the
metaphor investigated by Armstrong.112 Horace emphasizes the

and Milton (Epitaphium Damonis and Lycidas to Paradise Lost ; cf. Paradise Regained
1.1). Cf. Conte (1994) 289–90. Most (1993) 77 sees Hesiod as initiating the theme of
the poet’s career.
111 e.g. Lyne (1998b).
112 Robinson, p. 189 n. 31.
 Epilogue 357
‘audacity’ of Virgil’s enterprise (Carm. 1.3.25, 27):113 Virgil’s ‘sea
voyage’—undertaking an epic poem after Homer—seems
tantamount to challenging Jupiter (Carm. 1.3.37–40). This Horatian
Wgure is a signiWcant one: we will see it reappear in Statius (whose
narrator styles himself as Capaneus challenging Jupiter: see
Leigh’s chapter) and Milton (whose narrator styles himself as
Satan/Bellerophon challenging God: see Wilson’s chapter). Horace’s
Wgure interacts, moreover, with the end of his previous ode. There,
the narrator prayed that Augustus, a god among men, ‘may return
late into the sky’ (Carm. 1.2.44 serus in caelum redeas)—now the
subject of an infelicitous-seeming echo, 1.3.38 caelum ipsum petimus
stultitia, ‘we seek the very sky in our stupidity’. Thus, the end of Odes
1.3 ‘saps’ (to use Oliver Lyne’s metaphor) the end of the preceding
political ode; in Odes 1.3, the narrator not only distances himself
from Virgil’s epic project, and its implicit ideology, but also under-
mines the hyperbolical imperial panegyric of his own preceding
ode.114 Intertextuality again goes hand in hand with intratextual-
ity.115 Even the sapping may itself recall Virgilian technique, for the
dialectic of earlier passages with later was a fundamental feature of
Eclogues and Georgics—and was to be again of the Aeneid.116
In the Carmen Saeculare, produced after the appearance of the
Aeneid, Robinson argues that Horace ‘saw more than just a patriotic
voice in Virgil’s poem’.117 Whereas Armstrong sees Virgil as pressing
other literature into the service of the great Roman patriotic epic,
Robinson sees Horace in the Carmen Saeculare as having to sanitize
oppositional elements in Virgil’s version of the Aeneas myth, in order
to press them into a more unequivocally panegyrical context. Things
are diVerent again in the fourth book of Odes, where Horace begins
to meet Virgil on his own turf: lyric is now paraded as a panegyrical
medium to rival epic. The relegation of Aeneas to the Underworld
in Carm. 4.7.14–15 exploits an epic trope, the descent to the

113 Cf. Leigh, ch. 8 on the literary critical uses of audere and synonyms.
114 Lyne (1995) 163–4.
115 We may note that Odes 1.2 is intertextual with the end of Georgics 1 (Lyne
(1995) 43–9), as Odes 1.3 is intertextual with the beginning of Georgics 2.
116 Cf. Lyne (1995) 164; cf. ibid. p. vii for the relation between Horatian ‘sapping’
and (Virgilian) ‘further voices’.
117 Robinson, p. 194.
358 Bruno Currie
Underworld as a way of exploring the poet’s relationship with
predecessors. There is also the characteristic opposition in imitation:
where Virgil had put a traditionally deiWed Dido in the Underworld,
Horace now puts the traditionally deiWed Aeneas there.
Where Horace is sensitive to the ambiguities and complexities of
Virgilian epic, the Propertian narrator is (or feigns to be) oblivious to
them.118 Propertius responds to the Aeneid, before and after its
appearance, as if it were the Augustiad that Virgil didn’t write, and
may never, despite G. 3.8–39, have contemplated writing. The Wrst
poem of Propertius’ second book assumes an Augustan epic must
‘ground Caesar’s name in his Trojan forefathers’ (2.1.42, cf. Verg.
G. 3.35–6). The Aeneid, of course, reverses this procedure, oVering an
Aeneas epic that looks forward to Augustus.119 The last poem
of Propertius’ second book glosses the forthcoming Aeneid as a
narrative of the battle of Actium (2.34.61–2), a narrative whose
pitfalls Propertius illustrates in the central poem of his Wnal book
(4.6.11–68). The Aeneid, however, narrates the sea battle only in a few
lines, and then only in an ecphrasis (Aen. 8.675–728).120 In billing the
forthcoming Aeneid as ‘greater than the Iliad’ (2.34.67), Propertius
stylizes Virgil’s epic as a crude, perhaps reckless, emulation of
Homer. The Aeneid ’s actual emulation of the Homeric epics, and its
use of such language, is altogether more ambiguous (cf. Aen.
7.44–5).121 Throughout in Propertius, the Aeneid is seen through
the uncompromising eyes of the love-elegist. Nor is Homeric epic
immune to such reductionism: the Iliad was just a war for a beautiful
woman (2.3.31–40).
The dialogue between elegy and the Augustan epic is both two-way
and productive. Where, for instance, the Propertian narrator polem-
ically redeWnes his patriotic military duty as private love (militia
amoris: cf. 1.6.30), Virgil’s Aeneas redeWnes his private love as love
of country (amor patriae: cf. Aen. 4.347);122 the redeWnition is also a
negation. The opposition between the elegist and the military man
(compare especially the Propertius and Tullus of 1.6) arguably an-
ticipates the later antithesis between the ‘pitiful hero’ of romance

118 Robinson, p. 208. 119 Cf. GriYn (1985) 168.

120 Cf. GriYn (1984) 208–9. 121 Hardie (1998) 54–5.
122 For amor patriae, ‘love of country’, cf. Aen. 6.823.
 Epilogue 359
and the ‘martial hero’ of epic (see further below, on Wilson’s
chapter).123 Moreover, in the Propertian narrator’s striking identiW-
cation of himself with the type of Antony—a topic which Jasper
GriYn has illuminated—we have a theme of fundamental import-
ance not just for Virgil’s Aeneas, but also for the heroes of the
Renaissance epics of Camões, Ariosto, and Tasso, for whom playing
the part of the speciWcally epic (rather than romance) hero is
synonymous with embracing the model of Augustus, and rejecting
that of Antony.124
Ovid’s awareness of what, in Robinson’s words, would make Virgil
‘wince’125 is anticipated by Propertius, as much of Propertius’ fourth
book anticipates Ovidian developments. The aspects of the Aeneid
that Ovid especially latches onto—its totalizing tendency, its tele-
ology, its pretended unassailability—oVer some indication of what
Ovid saw in the Aeneid, and conWrmation of the reading of the
Aeneid given by Armstrong. The Metamorphoses is more totalizing
even than the Aeneid, beginning earlier and ending later; Ovid now
makes Virgilian intertexts sing to an Ovidian tune; and the Aeneid
itself ‘becomes a frame for stories about metamorphoses, subsumed
within Ovid’s own epic’.126 The teleology of the Aeneid is also sub-
verted: Rome is no longer the end-point in world history, but, by
implication, a stopping-point in that history (Met. 15.420–52).127
Ovid’s epic shows a keen awareness of working changes on literary
tradition, and of itself being subject to change (Met. 15.165 omnia
mutantur, nihil interit; cf. 1.2 nam uos mutastis et illa). Ovid is both
aware of and exaggerates ‘subversive’ elements in the Aeneid, such as
love elegy and metamorphoses.128 Ovid’s oppositional reading of
Virgilian epic—allowing full reign to the digressive, the fabulous,
and the amorous—anticipates even more strikingly than Propertius
does the later developments of romance.129

123 For the antithesis, cf. Burrow (1993) 4.

124 Propertius and Antony: GriYn (1985) ch. 2. Antony and Renaissance epic:
esp. Tasso, GL 16.4–7; cf. Quint (1993) 32–41. Aeneas and Antony: cf. Pelling
(1988) 17.
125 Robinson, p. 209. 126 Robinson, p. 213. Cf. Hinds (1998) 121.
127 Hardie (1992) 60–1. 128 Hardie (1992) 62–75.
129 Hardie (1992) 70 ‘I think one could describe the Metamorphoses as an epic moving
strongly in the direction of what was later to be romance’; cf. Burrow (2002) 312.
360 Bruno Currie
Robinson’s chapter reminds us that, while the Roman poets were
perceptive readers of Virgil, they were (unsurprisingly) selectively
so.130 The Aeneid is diVerently nuanced for diVerent readers with
diVerent agendas.131 The reader must judge what such contemporary
poetic readings can show us about the Aeneid: whether we should see,
for example, Ovid as a commentary on Virgil, capable of taking us
closer to an authentically Augustan understanding of the Aeneid;132
or whether we have another illustration of the fact that literary
meaning is created by readers, and that once we have seen these
features in Ovid, we are bound to Wnd them in Virgil.133
In Statius’ Thebaid, Matthew Leigh considers a Flavian response
to the Aeneid. As in Hutchinson’s chapter, we have here a response to
a foundational epic by a later epicist. Again, the interaction at stake is
not primarily an intertextual relationship:134 Leigh focuses on the
Thebaid ’s ways of talking about itself, explicitly and implicitly
through metapoetic metaphor; in other words, on the rhetoric
of Statius’ imitation (or emulation?) of Virgil. Leigh also draws
attention to the politics of modern scholars’ constructions of
literary history, reminding us that critics’ ways of talking about the
Aeneid, and about literary hierarchies in general, are ideologically
charged.135
Leigh’s chapter unites two recurring themes of the volume. First,
the use of a metapoetic Wgure to trope a poet’s interaction with a

130 Cf. Tarrant (1997b) 183.

131 Cf. D. P. Fowler (2000) 16, quoted by Pelling, p. 97 n. 59. Writers of Renais-
sance epic—Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser—continued to respond to the ideological
ambivalence of the Aeneid: Burrow (1997b), esp. 82, 85, 86.
132 Robinson, p. 213: ‘one could argue that his poems form a kind of commentary
on the Aeneid’; cf. Hardie (1986) 379 (cited above, n. 71).
133 Cf. Tarrant (2002) 26–7. These questions echo those posed by Pelling, p. 104;
cf. D. P. Fowler (2000) 130–1.
134 On Statius’ ‘multiple intertextual relationships with his predecessors’, see
Pollmann (2004) 53–8.
135 Leigh, p. 221. For the general point, cf. Martindale (1993) 23–9, 49, 66; Orgel
and Goldberg (2004) pp. xxvii–xxviii, on the acclamation of Milton’s Paradise Lost by
Dryden (The State of Innocence) and Addison (The Spectator, 1712): ‘[Dryden’s]
coupling of such terms as ‘‘noble’’ and ‘‘sublime’’ ascribes to the poem quasi-
aristocratic value; the coupling of generic and class markers ‘‘elevates’’ the poem in
ways that safeguard it against revolutionary or republican readings . . . Treating the
poem as a supreme instance of ‘‘the highest kind’’ of poetry, an epic that deserved to be
 Epilogue 361
predecessor:136 here Capaneus’ taking up arms against Jupiter in
book ten of the Thebaid (esp. 10.832–3, 842–5) is taken as a Wgure
for Statius’ poetic challenge to Virgil. This metapoetic reading of the
Capaneus episode has particular resonance with Robinson’s reading
of the end of Horace, Odes 1.3, ‘in our stupidity we seek the sky itself
and by our sin we do not allow Jupiter to put aside his angry
thunderbolts’—referring to Virgil’s attempt to emulate Homer with
the incipient Aeneid. The second recurring theme of Leigh’s chapter
is the mediation of the poetic interaction by the critical tradition—a
concern especially of Hutchinson’s chapter. Leigh’s metapoetic read-
ing of the Capaneus episode is underpinned by the fact that words
used of both Capaneus and the Statian narrator—terms for ‘sublim-
ity’, ‘great-mindedness’, ‘tumidity’, ‘insanity’, ‘audacity’, ‘following’,
‘rivalling’ (sublimis, magnanimus, tumidus, insania and synonyms,
audeo, sequor, tempto)—are terms of contemporary literary critical
discourse, employed by critics like ‘Longinus’, Quintilian, and Pliny,
as well as by poets speaking in a critical capacity: Statius in the Silvae,
Martial, and Petronius.
The explicit rhetoric of the Statian narrator, especially in the
apostrophes of Hopleus and Dymas (Theb. 10.445–8) and of the
Thebaid itself (12.816–17), is one of humble deference to Virgil
(10.446 inferiore lyra, 12.817 longe sequere et uestigia semper adora).
This stance needs to be seen against a background in which poets
(and critics) typically conceive literary relationships agonistically: a
contest between defending champion and aspiring challenger.137
Indeed, the literary scene from the early Greek tradition to Flavian
Rome featured actual competition between poets.138 On the whole,
called ‘‘divine’’, Addison sought at the same time to make it normative, the
realization of its genre; and beyond that, the embodiment of a comfortable and
conforming Christianity’. (Similarly, Orgel and Goldberg (1991) p. x.) On the
ideology involved in recognizing some intertexts and ignoring others, cf. D. P.
Fowler (2000) 128.
136 For the identiWcation of poet with hero, cf. Wilson, pp. 282–3, 295 (Tancredi
and Satan as Wgures for Tasso and Milton respectively). For Aeneas as a Wgure for the
Aeneid, see above on Aen. 2.268–97 and 6.440–76. For Odysseus ‘standing for’ the
Odyssey, cf. Currie, p. 22 n. 102. In general, cf. Hardie (1993) 99–116.
137 See Russell (1979) 16 on the competitive element in imitatio. Cf. Armstrong,
p. 135 n. 11 on Dares and Entellus at Aen. 5.362–484.
138 In the early Greek epic tradition: Currie, p. 6 (esp. Hes. Op. 26). In Flavian
Rome: Leigh, p. 241; cf. Pollmann (2004) 12.
362 Bruno Currie
Homer’s role as the defending champion was recognized.139 In Rome,
Ennius claimed supremacy as the Roman Homer.140 Subsequently,
Virgil supplanted Ennius.141 For Propertius, in an apparently mis-
chievous hyperbole, Virgil even supplanted Homer (2.34.65–6). In a
famous passage, Lucan measured himself against Homer, pointedly
overlooking Virgil (9.980–6).142 Statius’ pose, ostensibly refusing to
shape up to Virgil and settling for zero in this apparently zero-sum
game, is thus a striking one. Yet, as Leigh shows, the Statian rhetoric
of deference is complex.143 Through the metapoetic Wgure of Capa-
neus, Statius explores a model on which defeat brings a kind of
victory (the game is not, in fact, zero-sum). Capaneus is a mad
challenger, doomed to failure; but he is ennobled and uplifted by
the defeat.
Statius buys unstintingly into the notion of a ‘divine’ Virgil. But
the hierarchy implied is inherently unstable, for classical attitudes to
the divine are crucially ambiguous. On the one hand, there is recog-
nition of a qualitative diVerence between human and divine: ‘mortal
things beWt mortals’ (Pind. Isthm. 5.16). On the other hand, it is
quite proper for humans to be spurred to emulate the divine: ‘one
should not, as those who deal in precepts say, being human have
human thoughts or being mortal mortal ones, but should become
immortal as far as is possible’ (Arist. EN 1177b30–4).144 The divinity
of a Jupiter (or a Virgil) is therefore ambiguous, poised between
deterrent and inspiration. Also ambiguous is the fate of a Capaneus:
being struck by lightning betokens both divine displeasure and
divine election.145 In the Thebaid, Capaneus’ deeds go ‘not
unpraised by the Thunderer himself ’ (11.11).146 In Euripides Sup-
plices, the lightning-struck Capaneus was practically heroized

139 Cf. Morgan (1999) 28–32. A Wctional Contest of Hesiod and Homer, in which
Hesiod worsts Homer, may go back to Alcidamas in the 4th cent. bc.
140 Leigh, p. 219 n. 9.
141 Leigh, p. 219 nn. 9–10.
142 Leigh, p. 222.
143 Cf. Hardie (1993) 111 ‘The explicit statement of the poet may not of course
coincide with his poetic practice’.
144 Cf. Leigh, p. 230, on the human gaze being properly directed heavenwards.
145 Cf. Rohde (1925) i. 320–2.
146 Leigh, p. 240.
 Epilogue 363
(934–8, 980–3).147 The language of the envoi to the Thebaid implies
heroization or apotheosis as the forthcoming fate of the poem
(12.818–19 mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila liuor, j occidet,
et meriti post me referentur honores, ‘soon, if any cloudy envy covers
you, it will perish, and the honours due will be paid after my
death’).148 Capaneus’ assault on heaven will be recalled one last
time—and implicitly compared and contrasted with Statius’ poetic
enterprise—in the envoi (12.816), if we take nec tu diuinam Aeneida
tempta to mean not just ‘don’t rival’, but ‘don’t you make an assault
on149 the divine Aeneid ’.
Leigh’s discussion reveals several ‘fault-lines in Statius’ language of
deference’.150 How extensive the fault-lines are is a matter for debate.
Notably, in calling the Thebaid ‘for twelve years object of my wakeful
toil’ (Theb. 12.811 bissenos multum uigilata per annos), Statius
trumps Virgil, who was engaged on the Aeneid for eleven years
(Vita Donati 25).151 (Here we see another distinct mode of
epic poets’ interaction with their predecessors, mediated by the
biographical, rather than the critical, tradition.)152 Further, by fol-
lowing far behind in the footsteps of the divine Aeneid (Theb.
12.816–17), it may be implied that the Thebaid will itself become
divine, like an Epicurean following in footsteps of Epicurus (Lucr.
3.1–30, 6.1–8, 27–8),153 or like anyone treading in the footsteps of a
deiWed exemplar (as the sequence Hercules–Aeneas–Augustus in the
Aeneid). Finally, while Statius’ recognition of Virgil’s divinity is on
the face of it an expression of deference, it may on scrutiny amount to

147 Rohde (1925) i. 321.

148 Hardie (1993) 111 and n. 39, 113.
149 OLD s.v. tempto 9a ‘make an attempt on (by military force)’. Cf. Shackleton
Bailey’s translation in the Loeb Thebaid: ‘essay not’. Leigh discusses tempto in n. 23.
150 Leigh, p. 218.
151 Pollmann (2004) 13.
152 There are numerous other examples of such ‘autobiographical intertextuality’.
Ovid burned the Metamorphoses (Ov. Tr. 1.7.15–26), just as Virgil had instructed the
Aeneid to be burned (Vita Donati 39): see Robinson, p. 215 n. 177. (Compare too the
burning of the epic in Tennyson’s The Epic 25–38, quoted by Jenkyns, p. 328.)
Lucan wrote the Bellum Civile (Pharsalia) ‘before the age at which Virgil wrote his
Culex’ (Stat. Silv. 2.7.73–4): see Leigh, p. 221. Milton, like Homer, is blind
(PL 3.33–6). Tarrant (1997a) 57 recognizes ‘Virgilian biography . . . as an aspect of
Virgilian reception’.
153 Hardie (1993) 111.
364 Bruno Currie
a claim to equivalence. In fact, the notion of Statius laying siege to
a Jovian Virgil replicates the erstwhile situation of Virgil laying siege
to a Jovian Homer, the situation evoked (Robinson argued) at
Horace, Carm. 1.3.38–40. The theme of Statian diVerence from,
and deference to, Virgil then arguably collapses into aYnity and
legitimizes the aspiration of the later poet. The metapoetical Wgure
employed by Statius for his interaction with Virgil itself interacts
with a metapoetical Wgure for Virgil’s interaction with Homer.
In the last three chapters of the book, devoted to the literatures of
medieval and Renaissance Europe and of Victorian Britain, the
cultural and literary continuity that has obtained so far in the
tradition is broken; and this hiatus has implications for the nature
of their interactions with classical epic.
The heroic narratives of the medieval North, the subject of
Michael Clarke’s chapter, pose a unique problem in this volume.
How can medieval works be interacting with an ancient Greek epic
which their authors can hardly have known? Yet when we confront
the Iliad with the Old English poems Beowulf and The Battle of
Maldon and with the Old Irish prose narratives Togail Troı́ and
Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC), strikingly similar motifs appear: the call
for promises at the feast to be made good on the battleWeld (Il. 20.79–
85 and Beowulf 2633–8, 2646–9); complex narratives exploring the
ambiguity of the warrior’s manliness, delicately poised between
greatness and excess (Achilles’ and Hector’s Iªæ : Il. 9.699–700,
22.457; Heremod’s oferhygd and Byrhtnoth’s ofermod: Beowulf 1740,
Maldon 89); the warrior’s superhuman ‘warp’ (Il. 18.203–18 and
TBC1 2237–78). Clarke rejects the view that a common origin for
the ancient Greek, Old Irish, and Old English texts is to be sought in
Indo-European poetry.154 This leaves an apparent choice between
stark alternatives. First, a hypothesis of no interaction: the perceived
similarities between Homer and these narratives of the medieval
North may be the product of parallel development, arising from
basic similarities in the cultures which produced them. But, Clarke
argues, this hypothesis as generally formulated tends to make
questionable assumptions about ‘heroic poetry’, and fails to do

154 Clarke, p. 247 n. 16, cf. p. 260 n. 37. Cf. GriYn (1980) 39 n. 97.
 Epilogue 365
justice to our sense that we are dealing with non-coincidental resem-
blances. Second, a hypothesis of direct interaction: Homeric epic
may somehow have inXuenced the medieval works in a comparable
way to that considered in the previous chapters. Yet this seems to
founder on the virtual certainty that Northern Europe in the Middle
Ages was not acquainted with and could not have understood the
Greek epics.
Clarke attempts to relax the dilemma by exploring the possibility
of indirect and hidden routes of interaction between the texts. The
Irish narrative on the sack of Troy, Togail Troı́ 1, oVers a valuable
control. It has a demonstrable extant classical source: the Latin
Historia de excidio Troiae of ‘Dares Phrygius’, whose availability and
inXuence in the medieval period are well known.155 The Irish narra-
tive is a creative translation, with abundant expansion, of Dares’
narrative; the paradoxical result is something more Homeric-looking
in both style and content than the Latin original. This test case shows
that Homeric resemblance may be due to factors supervenient on any
actual interaction. Clarke identiWes two such factors. First, an expan-
sive Irish narrative aesthetic coincidentally similar to Homer’s, an
aesthetic ‘particularly liable to produce seemingly Homeric images in
this context’.156 Second, the injection of classical images culled from
anthologies (Xorilegia) or contained in rhetorical handbooks or
scholia, which were continuously transmitted throughout the period;
in some cases, images of ultimately Homeric provenance may have
been reapplied to new contexts coincidentally similar to their original
Homeric ones. We should reckon, then, with an infusion of both
native Irish and of classical (including quasi-Homeric) elements—
and with a seamless assimilation of the two. This test case has
suggestive implications. TBC1 is extremely close to Togail Troı́ 1:157
similar processes may also be suspected there. The implications for
the English poems Beowulf and Maldon are less clear. The Old
English Old Testament poems, at least, show a comparable contam-
ination of native and borrowed elements to Togail Troı́, although the
demonstrable borrowing here is from Christian rather than classical

155 See the edition of Meister (1873) and the translation of Frazer (1966) 11–15.
156 Clarke, p. 267.
157 Cf. Clarke, pp. 265–6.
366 Bruno Currie
sources.158 Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon stand in a similarly
close relation to the Old Testament poems as TBC1 does to Togail
Troı́ 1, so a comparable borrowing (and seamless assimilation) of
foreign elements—including classical elements—is conceivable
there. This kind of interpenetration of native and borrowed elements
mirrors what we found (above, on Pulleyn’s chapter) with
the Iliad ’s assimilation of Babylonian Anu–Antu and Greek Zeus–
Dione: the resources of the native culture are utilized to naturalize
cross-cultural borrowings.
The hypothesis of parallel development is thus upheld, but with an
important modiWcation. The parallel between Homeric and Old
English/Old Irish epic is not ‘merely sociological’.159 That is, it is
not a product simply of similar social structures in Iron Age Greece
and medieval northern Europe, and of these literatures reXecting
their society (compare above on the chapters of Pulleyn and Pelling);
rather, there is a parallel literary aesthetic at work as well.
The hypothesis of interaction is also both upheld and modiWed. In
the case of Togail Troı́, direct interaction is not with Homer himself,
but with ‘Dares’ ’ Historia de excidio Troiae. Again, we are reminded
(as we were by Leigh) that literary hierarchies are cultural,
and ideological, constructs: ‘the carriers of . . . inXuence seldom cor-
respond to the texts that later hindsight sees as the great classics of
international literature’.160 In a way, though, interaction with Dares
Phrygius entails indirect interaction with Homer (with whom Dares
interacts).161 Indirect interaction is also entailed by the use of Xor-
ilegia, rhetorical handbooks, and scholia. We have already amply seen

158 Clarke, p. 259: ‘the union between imported story and native poetic tradition is
smooth and seamless’.
159 Clarke, p. 250; cf. p. 261 n. 39 and pp. 270–1.
160 Clarke, pp. 270–1.
161 The Historia de excidio Troiae is a Latin translation ascribed to Cornelius Nepos
of the 1st cent. bc, but probably executed in the 5th or 6th cent. ad. The Greek
original, The Phrygian Iliad (,æıª Æ  (ºØ ), ought to antedate Aelian (c. ad 170–
235): Ael. VH 11.2; cf. Phot. Bibl. 190 p. 147 Bekker. The Historia de excidio Troiae is
evidently a response to the Iliad: its Wctional author, the Trojan Dares, has a walk-on
part in that poem (Il. 5.9, 27); it surpasses Homer by oVering an earlier, ‘contem-
porary’ account of the same events (for the hysteron proton, see Currie, p. 35 n. 152);
it replaces Homer’s perceived philhellenic perspective (e.g. schol. BTon Il. 10.14) with
a Trojan one; and it rewrites the heroic ethos of the Iliad with a more ‘romance’ one.
 Epilogue 367
how the interaction of many classical authors with Homer and Virgil
was informed by the critical tradition; for medieval writers, the
scholarly tradition and its oVshoots will sometimes have constituted
the sole mode of interaction.
The medieval northern narratives’ interaction with Homer is
thus a matter of parallel development reinforced with messy
cross-contaminations. This recognition destabilizes the notion of
Old English and Old Irish epic as ‘primary’ epic:162 in fact, writers
in these traditions ‘were quite capable of working with materials
imported from alien cultural worlds and transmitted by written
means’.163 Clarke’s chapter (and perhaps the study of epic inter-
actions in general) thus tends to undermine the distinction of
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ epic. In my chapter I also challenged the
view of Homeric epic as ‘primary’, identifying several Homeric
features characteristic of ‘secondary’ epic.164
For Emily Wilson, Tasso’s and Milton’s interaction with classical
(and especially Virgilian) epic is part of a complex negotiation by
these poets with their whole poetic tradition, the most crucial inter-
play being arguably between classical epic and vernacular
romance.165 Both these genres, or modes, were prone to stereotyping:
epic strove relentlessly towards a narrative telos, romance endlessly
deferred that telos; while the epic hero was motivated by an overrid-
ing sense of (patriotic) duty, the romance hero was swayed by a sense
of (personal) pity. In the generation before Tasso and Milton, Ariosto
in Orlando Furioso and Spenser in The Faerie Queene experimented
with hybrids of epic and romance.166 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century critics and poets (Tasso was both) thus inherited—and
critiqued—views both of what epic should be like and of what Virgil
in particular was like. Tasso and Milton can be seen highly product-
ively to confront the inherited poetical and critical tradition with
their own reading of the classical epics. Their Wrst-hand engagement

162 Cf. Clarke, p. 244.

163 Clarke, p. 259.
164 Currie, p. 38.
165 Wilson, p. 274. See Burrow (1993); Quint (1993) 31–41, chs. 6 and 7.
166 Burrow (1997b) sees Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as one of the ‘hybrids of
vernacular romance and classically inXuenced epic’ (p. 83) and Spenser’s Faerie
Queene as ‘an epic romance’ (p. 86).
368 Bruno Currie
with the classical texts renuanced the stereotypes and opened up new
possibilities of poetic meaning.167 This is another important, cyclical,
feature of the epic tradition. It is instructive to compare Hutchinson’s
discussion of how the Hellenistic poets reread the texts of Homer
against the dominant intervening critical tradition.
Against such a background, epic in the hands of Tasso and Milton
inevitably raises generic questions.168 Tasso and Milton steer a mid-
dle way between renouncing the classical epic tradition and slavishly
reproducing it. Wilson pursues these questions by considering
passages where intertextuality is coupled with metapoetic metaphor:
the key passages are Aen. 3.41–6 (the Polydorus episode) as an
intertext for Tasso, GL 13.38–47 (Tancredi in the enchanted forest);
and Aen. 2.274–9 (the dream apparition of Hector) as an intertext for
Milton, PL 1.84–7 (Satan’s opening address to Beelzebub).169 In these
passages the themes of change, of subsistence through change, of
recognition, and of failed recognition are seen as tropes for Tasso and
Milton’s relationship with their tradition. The theme of poets troping
their relationship with their predecessors is by now a familiar one in
this volume (see especially Leigh’s chapter). Like Leigh, Wilson can
support her metapoetic reading of Tasso, GL 13.38–47 by pointing to
the language of the contemporary critical tradition: in this case, the
metaphor of the ‘material of poetry’ as a ‘forest’ can be paralleled in
Tasso’s own Discourses on the Heroic Poem. Wilson’s argument for an
identiWcation of Tasso and Milton with their heroes Tancredi and
Satan also recalls Leigh’s argument for an identiWcation of Statius

167 Note Burrow (1997b) 88 ‘[There] is a continual oscillation between received

readings of the poet and direct responses to his works. The strongest means of
resisting a received reading is to return to the works themselves in order to show
that the received image of them is partial or misleading.’ Cf. Burrow (1993) 4–5
‘Sixteenth-century epic romance is underwritten by an urge to Wght back to Virgil,
and to unwrite prevalent readings of the Aeneid.’
168 Wilson, p. 276: ‘Renaissance epic raises problems of generic and literary-
historical identity. What makes one poem the same genre as another?’ Cf. Burrow
(1993) 285 ‘How can a new narrative, and a new heroic ethos, be both like and
diVerent from, a past work, without either replicating that earlier work, or forcibly
transforming it into the image of the present?’
169 On the metapoetic signiWcance of Virgil, Aen. 2.268 (already appreciated by
Petrarch: Hardie (1993) 103 n. 22; also an intertext for Tasso, GL 4.49), see above (as
well as Wilson, pp. 290–2). See Burrow (1993) 77 V., (1997b) 84 on Tasso and the
Polydorus episode.
 Epilogue 369
with his hero Capaneus. Leigh’s reading of Statius may itself be
inXuenced by a reading of Milton: in concluding, ‘I like Statius
because I think he was really of the Devil’s Party’, Leigh adapts a
phrase applied by Blake to Milton to express the latter’s sympathy
with his character Satan.170 If Leigh was guided to his reading of
Statius by Milton, then we have another striking illustration of how
readings of later stages in the tradition can aVect readings of earlier—
and also a reminder that, like any good commentary, a poet’s recep-
tion of his predecessors may oVer valuable critical insight, as well as a
potentially obfuscatory Wlter. The explicit self-comparison of the
Miltonic narrator with Bellerophon in the proem of book 7 (in
addition more generally to the implicit comparison with Satan171)
oVers a striking parallel to Leigh’s reading of Statius as a Capaneus in
Thebaid 10 and to Robinson’s reading of Virgil as a Bellerophon
Wgure in Horace, Odes 1.3 (37–40). Yet Milton has adapted the
Wgure with a twist—it tropes not so much the poet’s audacity of
grappling with a ‘divine’ poetic predecessor as grappling with a
subject matter that is divine and beyond human reach (note how
the subject matter of Paradise Lost frequently resembles that from
which Raphael warns Adam, PL 8.64–202).
For Wilson, Tasso’s and Milton’s interaction with classical
epic provokes complex ethical questions—as do, for Pelling and
Hutchinson, the interactions of Herodotus and the Hellenistic
poets with Homer. ‘For Milton, the proper relationship of a poet to
his sources is part of a broader ethical question: how to relate to the
past, and to change.’172 Religious questions are also raised: ‘Could the
presence in classical epic of pagan gods and pagan magic be adapted
in a Christian poem?’173 Pulleyn explores how in the Iliad Near
Eastern religious conceptions could be amalgamated with
Greek ones. Even in the polytheistic poem, intertextuality with Near
Eastern literature may accentuate religious diVerence. At Il. 5.428–30,
Zeus’ insistence that warfare is not Aphrodite’s province contrasts

170 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters
when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he
was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.
171 Note the eVect of the juxtaposition of PL 7.13–20 with PL 6.898–900.
172 Wilson, p. 295.
173 Wilson, p. 274.
370 Bruno Currie
suggestively with Babylonian Ishtar, Aphrodite’s intertextual
model.174 In Tasso and Milton, however, intertextuality with classical
epic articulates much profounder religious diVerences. Greeks and
Trojans share the same religion in the Iliad; Christians and Muslims
in Gerusalemme liberata do not. Homeric intertextuality underlines
the point. At Il. 6.297–311, when the Trojan women congregate in
Athena’s temple to pray that the goddess may break Diomedes’ spear,
Athena refuses because she is implacably opposed to the Trojans—
and because, simply, in the Iliad, ‘The plans and purposes of gods
can . . . be inscrutable’.175 In Tasso’s adaptation, the comparable
prayer of the Muslim women of Jerusalem for Godfrey’s spear to be
broken goes strikingly unheard for the more fundamental reason that
their god does not exist (GL 11.29–30).176
Christianity, perhaps, gives sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
epicists a similar cultural superiority vis-à-vis the ancient world to
oVset literary anxiety as the Roman empire gave Roman epicists
vis-à-vis the Greek world. Milton’s Christian epic outdoes classical
epic in much the same way that Virgil’s Roman epic surpasses
Homer; Milton, like Ovid before him, is able to build on the Aeneid ’s
all-inclusiveness, its teleology, its ‘conquest’ of world literature.177
The classical story of the expulsion of Cronus and the Titans from
Olympus and their relegation to Tartarus is subsumed in Paradise
Lost into the Christian story of Satan and the angels’ fall from Heaven
(PL 1.50, 508–14); the story of Zeus’ hurling Hephaestus from
Olympus is a reXex of the same event (PL 1.738–51).178 Milton
here can exploit a Renaissance humanist reading of classical literature

174 See above on the intertextuality of Il. 5.355–430 and Gilgamesh vi.1–91.
175 GriYn (1980) 169.
176 Cf. GL 20.114. There may be ‘contamination’ in Tasso of the Iliadic scene with
1 Kings 18. 18–40 (God—YHWH—hears Elijah, but Baal does not hear the 450
prophets of Baal), a reference I owe to Richard Rutherford.
177 On Milton’s ‘conquest’ of classical epic tradition, cf. Burrow (1993) 284–5. The
universal supremacy of Christ (Messiah) provides Milton with a Christian teleology
which can supplant the Roman imperial teleology provided by Augustus for Virgil:
note esp. the intertextuality of PL 12.370–1 ‘[Messiah shall] bound his reign j With
earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the heavens’ with Aen. 1.286–7 Caesar, j imperium
Oceano, famam qui terminet astris.
178 Cronus (Saturn) and Titans: Hes. Theog. 617–819. Hephaestus: Il. 1.590–4. Fall
of angels and Satan: 2 Peter 2: 4; Jude 6; Revelation 12: 7–9.
 Epilogue 371
as a Xawed revelation of the Christian truth.179 This accords with the
way the New Testament appropriates and redeWnes the prophecies
of the Old; but it is also in the tradition of long-standing classical
epic interactions, reminiscent of how (Armstrong shows) Virgil
appropriates and redeWnes Homeric prophecy.180 Robinson has sug-
gested a kind of classical precedent for even that most
notorious Christian appropriation of Virgil, the reading of the fourth
Eclogue as a prophecy of Christ’s birth, if the Augustan
regime hijacked that Eclogue to turn it into a prophecy of Augustus’
own birth.181
Richard Jenkyns explores Victorian writers’ interaction with,
above all, the idea of epic. Whereas the seventeenth century produced
an English epic that became a classic, Paradise Lost, the nineteenth
century did not. Nineteenth-century interactions with epic (which
had now to embrace Milton as well as Homer and Virgil) were played
out instead partly on the level of critical discussion, including critical
discussion in poetry. Once again, we see the role of the critical
tradition, discussed by Hutchinson, Leigh, and others in this volume;
and once again poetry and criticism are seen to inXuence each other
reciprocally.182 Victorian interactions with epic (at least, the more
notable ones) were otherwise played out in non-epic, or not clearly
epic, genres: thus Jenkyns’ investigation broadly invites comparison
with Robinson’s discussion of the interactions of the lyric and elegiac
Augustan poets with Virgil, and with Pelling’s discussion of the
Wfth-century historian’s interaction with Homer. This inevitably
raises, once again, generic questions. Did the novelists see themselves

179 Orgel and Goldberg (2004) p. xix ‘To the Renaissance humanist, the classical
world is a version of the biblical, but its stories are fables, the result of an imperfect
understanding of the truth of scripture, an incomplete revelation’.
180 Cf. Armstrong, p. 139, on Il. 20.302–8 and Aen. 3.94–8: ‘Virgil says what
Homer, had he only known the glorious truth, should have said’. For important
limits to the parallelism between typological biblical exegesis and Virgilian Homeric
intertextuality, see GriYn (1985) ch. 9, emphasizing that the Aeneid sets out not
merely to supersede its Homeric model, but to derive moral complexity from it.
181 Robinson, p. 191: ‘[Augustus] enforces a reading of the text that . . . identiWes
the mysterious puer as none other than himself, co-opting the poem and its proph-
ecies to the service of his regime’. Cf. also GriYn (1985) 188. On the Christian
appropriation of the Eclogue, see Clausen (1994) 126–8.
182 Jenkyns, p. 301: ‘[Arnold’s] Sohrab and Rustum is so saturated in Homer that
the essays On the Modern Element in Literature and On Translating Homer almost
seem to be continuing by other means a debate which the poem initiates.’
372 Bruno Currie
as ‘epicists in prose’? What was the status of the ‘verse novel’:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Robert Browning’s
The Ring and the Book? And what are we to make of Byron’s Don
Juan, styled by its author an ‘epic satire’?183
Like the Romantics before them, the Victorians ‘looked . . . upon
classical civilization as completed, over and done with; and they
debated their own relationship to that distant epoch’.184 Their
situation thus resembles that of the Renaissance writers; yet the
nineteenth-century response was diVerent. Whereas Virgil was the
more important classical epicist for the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, Homer was the more important for the Victorians. Stand-
ing at the beginning of the tradition, Homer provided the stronger
contrast with the present. The Victorian interaction with the idea of
epic is, Jenkyns shows, typically bound up with ideas of social and
cultural advance: epic becomes again a medium to explore cultural
development, as Pelling argued it was already for Herodotus in the
Wfth century bc. Yet while Herodotus used evocations of Homeric
style and content to call into question how far his century had
progressed from the time of Homer, the fact of social progress was
a given for the Victorians, and seemed to preclude their adoption of
the Homeric form or tone. For Blackwell and DuV in the eighteenth
century, and for the Victorians Macaulay and Peacock, epic was the
peculiar property of primitive cultures, and therefore inaccessible to
their own.185
The recurring perception of epic as totalizing, universal (compare
Armstrong on Virgil, Robinson on Ovid, Wilson on Tasso and
Milton), now becomes almost paralysing. ‘Virgil’s example, fortiWed
by Milton, . . . imposes on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the idea that epic must be colossal in its ambitions and immense in
its success’.186 The inhibiting eVect of the foreboding of poetic failure
seems to have been felt to an acute degree by the Victorians; but their

183 Jenkyns, p. 302: ‘if such works are not to be placed within the genre of epic, it
may indeed be worth our while to ask why’; p. 311 on Don Juan: ‘But what was epic?’,
‘Is Don Juan epic?’
184 Jenkyns, p. 305. On Homer and the Romantics, cf. Webb (2004).
185 To these writers, one might add also Hegel’s Aesthetics (T. M. Knox (1975)
ii. 1045; 1st pub. 1835–8), quoted by Burrow (1993) 1 n. 1.
186 Jenkyns, p. 323.
 Epilogue 373
response should perhaps be seen as diVerent in degree rather than
kind from their classical forerunners. ‘Greek poets went on compos-
ing epics after Homer, and Latin ones after Virgil without the sense
that they were taking oV on a kamikaze Xight.’187 But the fear of
the perilous ‘sea voyage’, at least, was there, in Augustan Rome
(Verg. G. 2.44–5; Hor. Carm. 1.3.1–24: see above). A characteristic
refuge for Victorian writers from the universalizing aspiration of epic
was found in ordinary life, the ordinary hero: this is the path taken in
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and the novels of George
Eliot. An important precedent here was set in Romantic poetry by
Wordsworth’s proclamation of the autobiographical subject matter
of his Prelude as ‘in truth, heroic argument, j And genuine prowess’
(1805: 3. 182–3): an intertextual interaction with Milton’s own
explicit interaction with the Iliad: ‘argument j Not less but more
heroic than the wrath j Of stern Achilles’ (PL 9.13–15).188 Notably,
where Milton outbids Homer and looks to a higher, more divine
plane, Wordsworth underbids both, turning inwards and closer to
home. In essence, this too is a response that has been anticipated
earlier: one thinks most immediately of Hellenistic epic, especially
the jarringly ordinary Hecale of Callimachus’ epyllion.189 But already
the Odyssey’s response to the Iliad consisted in giving greater
prominence to the lower social classes (especially Eumaeus) and to
everyday concerns.190
Jenkyns argues that epic is, or should be, a genre which ‘thinks’.191
The various chapters of this book have tried to show it also as a genre
which is peculiarly good to think with: about the place of a particular

187 Jenkyns, p. 324.

188 Jenkyns, pp. 326–7.
189 Or of the concern of Apollonius in the Argonautica to assimilate the heroic
action to ‘a construction of universal and ordinary experience’ (Fantuzzi and Hunter
(2004) 101).
190 e.g. Hutchinson (1988) 57; Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 197. A crucial medi-
ator between archaic and Hellenistic epic is again Euripidean tragedy: note esp. Ar.
Ran. 959–63; Arist. Rhet. 1404b24–5. The decision of the Odyssey poet (in the person
of Athena) to clothe his hero in rags (13.399–400) strikingly anticipates Euripidean
(cf. Ar. Ach. 412–15) and hence Hellenistic developments (e.g. Callim. Hec. fr. 30
Hollis, with Hollis’s note ad loc.). Compare the greater prominence of women in the
Odyssey: cf. Currie, pp. 13–14.
191 Jenkyns, p. 325: ‘the greatest epic poetry thinks’.
374 Bruno Currie
author, work, genre, or society within cultural and literary history.
The Victorian responses to epic can be seen to echo many earlier
other stages in the epic tradition; or perhaps to echo the way earlier
stages echo earlier stages. How many of these constitute complex
interactions, how many parallel developments, how many a simple
consequence of the fact that a reader will Wnd aspects of his or her
reading of later texts in earlier, and vice versa, is ultimately a question
that must be left for the reader of this volume to answer.192

192 I thank Anna Clark, Michael Clarke and Glenn Black for discussion through-
out the writing process, and Richard Rutherford for commenting on the written
version.
 References

For abbreviations of periodicals, please see L’Année philologique.

Adler, E. (2003), Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Lanham).
Ahl, F. (1986), ‘Statius’ Thebaid: A Reconsideration’. ANRW ii.
32.5.2803–912.
Albinus, L. (2000), The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology
(Aarhus).
Alden, M. J. (2000), Homer Beside Himself: Para-narratives in the Iliad
(Oxford).
AlfÖldy, G., and Chioffi, L. (2000) (eds.), Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
vi. viii.iii (Berlin).
Allan, W. (2005), ‘Arms and the Man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the Death of
Patroclus’. CQ 55: 1–16.
Allison, J. W. (1980), ‘Virgilian Themes in Propertius 4.7 and 8’. CPh 75:
332–8.
Aloni, A. (2001), ‘The Proem of Simonides’ Plataea Elegy’, in Boedeker and
Sider (eds.): 86–105.
Amandry, P. (1952), ‘Observations sur les monuments de l’Héraion d’Argos’.
Hesperia 21: 222–74.
Andersen, Ø. (1977), ‘Odysseus and the Wooden Horse’. SO 52: 5–18.
Anderson, W. S. (1964), ‘Hercules Exclusus: Propertius 4.9’. AJPh 85: 1–12.
—— (1966), ‘Horace Carm. 1.14: What Kind of Ship?’. CPh 61: 84–98.
Andersson, T. M. (1996), ‘Sources and Analogues’, in Bjork and Niles
(eds.): 125–48.
Ando, C. (2002), ‘Virgil’s Italy: Ethnography and Politics in First-Century
Rome’, in Levene and Nelis (eds.): 123–42.
Armstrong, R. (2002), ‘Crete in the Aeneid: Recurring Trauma and Alter-
native Fate’. CQ 52: 321–40.
Asheri, D. (1988), Introduction, Text and Commentary, in D. Asheri and
V. Antelami (eds.), Erodoto: Le Storie. Libro I: La Lidia e La Persia (Milan).
—— (1990), Introduction and Commentary in D. Asheri, M. Medaglia, and
A. Fraschetti (eds.), Erodoto: Le Storie. Libro III: La Persia (Milan).
Aura Jorro, F., and Adrados, F. R. (1985), Diccionario Griego-Español:
Diccionario Micénico i (Madrid).
Austin, R. G. (1971) (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Primus (Oxford).
—— (1977) (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Sextus (Oxford).
376 References
Autenrieth, G. (1984), Homeric Dictionary (London) (1st pub. as Wörter-
buch zu den Homerischen Gedichten, 1873).
Bakker, E. J. (1997), Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse
(Ithaca).
—— (2002), ‘The Making of History: Herodotus’ Histories Apodexis’, in
Bakker et al. (eds.): 4–32.
—— de Jong I., and Wees, H. van (2002) (eds.), Brill’s Companion to
Herodotus (Leiden).
Baldi, P. (1999), The Foundations of Latin (Berlin).
Ball, R. J. (1975), ‘Tibullus 2.5 and Virgil’s Aeneid’. Vergilius 21: 33–50.
Balot, R. K. (1998), ‘Pindar, Virgil, and the Proem to Georgics 3’. Phoenix
52: 83–94.
Barchiesi, A. (1984), La traccia del modello: EVetti omerici nella narrazione
virgiliana (Pisa).
—— (1989), ‘Voci e istanze narrative nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio’. MD 23:
55–97.
—— (1991), ‘Discordant Muses’. PCPhS 37: 1–21.
—— (1994a), ‘Rappresentazzioni del dolore e interpretazione nell’Eneide’.
A&A 40: 109–24.
—— (1994b), ‘Immovable Delos: Aeneid 3.73–98 and the Hymns of
Callimachus’. CQ 44: 438–43.
—— (1996), ‘Poetry, Praise, and Patronage: Simonides in Book 4 of
Horace’s Odes’. ClAnt 15: 5–47.
—— (1997), The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles).
—— (2001a), ‘Simonides and Horace on the Death of Achilles’, in Boedeker
and Sider (eds.): 255–60.
—— (2001b), Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other
Latin Poets (London).
—— (2002), ‘The Uniqueness of the Carmen Saeculare and its Tradition’, in
A. J. Woodman and D. Feeney (eds.), Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry
of Horace (Cambridge): 107–23.
Barnes, W. R. (1995), ‘Virgil: The Literary Impact’, in Horsfall (ed.):
257–92.
Barth, C. (1664), P. Papinii Statii quae exstant ex recensione et cum anim-
adversionibus locupletis (Cygneae).
BartolomØ, H. (1935), Ovid und die antike Kunst (Leipzig).
Basham, A. L. (1967), The Wonder that was India (3rd edn., London).
Basto, R. (1982), ‘Horace’s Propempticon to Vergil: A Re-Examination’.
Vergilius 28: 30–43.
Bate, W. J. (1971), The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London).
 References 377
Bateley, J. M. (1986), ‘Evidence for Knowledge of Latin Literature in Old
English’, in P. Szarmach (ed.), Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture (Kalama-
zoo): 35–52.
Bauer, H. (1930a), Die EntziVerung der Keilschrifttafeln von Ras Shamra
(Halle).
—— (1930b), ‘Zur EntziVerung der Keilschrifttafeln von Ras Shamra’. For-
schungen und Fortschritte 6: 306–8.
Baumgartner, W. (1958), Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros (Leiden).
Belfiore, E. S. (1992), Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion
(Princeton).
Belmont, D. E. (1980), ‘The Vergilius of Horace, Ode 4.12’. TAPhA 110: 1–20.
Berlin, I. (1953), The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoi’s View of
History (London).
BernabØ, A. (1987) (ed.), Poetae epici Graeci. Pars i (Leipzig).
—— (2004) (ed.), Poetae epici Graeci. Pars ii. Fasc. 1 (Munich and Leipzig).
Bernal, M. (1987), Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civiliza-
tion (London).
—— (2001), Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics
(Durham, NC, and London).
Berthold, O. (1911), Die Unverwundbarkeit in Sage und Aberglauben der
Griechen (Giessen).
Bews, J. (1984), ‘The Metamorphosis of Virgil in the Tristia of Ovid’. BICS
31: 51–60.
Binder, G. (1971), Aeneas und Augustus: Interpretationen zum 8. Buch der
Aeneis (Meisenheim).
Bjork, R. E., and Niles, J. D. (1996) (eds.), A Beowulf Handbook (Exeter).
Black, J., George, A., and Postgate, N. (2000), A Concise Dictionary of
Akkadian (Wiesbaden).
Blackwell, T. (1972), An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer
(Menston, Yorkshire) (1st pub. 1735).
Blair, H. (1763), A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, in Mac-
pherson (1996 (1760–73) ): 343–408.
Bleisch, P. (1996), ‘On Choosing a Spouse: Aeneid 7.378–84 and Callima-
chus’ Epigram 1’. AJPh 117: 453–72.
Blessington, F. C. (1979), Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic (Boston).
Bloom, H. (1973), The Anxiety of InXuence (Oxford).
Bloomfield, M. W. (1969), ‘Beowulf, Byrhtnoth and the Judgment of God’.
Speculum 44: 545–59.
Bl
ßner, N. (1992), Review of Usener (1990). Gnomon 64: 385–90.
Blmer, W. (2001), Interpretation archaischer Dichtung: Die mythologischen
Partien der Erga Hesiods i–ii (Münster).
378 References
Boardman, J. (1990), ‘Herakles Dodekathlos’. Lexicon Iconographicum
Mythologiae Classicae v. i. 5–16.
Boedeker, D. (2001a), ‘Heroic Historiography: Simonides and Herodotus
on Plataea’, in Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 120–34.
—— (2001b), ‘Paths to Heroization at Plataea’, in Boedeker and Sider (eds.):
148–63.
—— (2002), ‘Epic Heritage and Mythical Patterns in Herodotus’, in Bakker
et al. (eds.): 97–116.
—— (2003), ‘Pedestrian Fatalities: The Prosaics of Death in Herodotus’, in
Derow and Parker (eds.): 17–36.
—— and Sider, D. (2001) (eds.), The New Simonides: Contexts of Praise and
Desire (Oxford).
Bogan, Z. (1658), Homerus  ¯ æÆ'ø, sive comparatio Homeri cum scriptor-
ibus sacris quoad normam loquendi (Oxford).
B
mer, F. (1957–8) (ed.), P. Ovidius Naso: Die Fasten (Heidelberg).
Boucher, J.-P. (1965), Études sur Properce: Problèmes d’inspiration et d’art
(Paris).
Bowie, A. M. (1997), ‘Tragic Filters for History: Euripides’ Supplices and
Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, in Pelling (ed.): 39–62.
Bowie, E. L. (2001), ‘Ancestors of Historiography in Early Greek Elegiac and
Iambic Poetry?’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of
Herodotus (Oxford): 45–66.
Bowra, C. M. (1928), ‘Horace, Odes IV.12’. CR 42: 165–7.
—— (1952), Heroic Poetry (London).
—— (1964), Pindar (Oxford).
Boyd, B. W. (2002) (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Ovid (Leiden).
Boyle, A. J. (1993), ‘The Canonic Text: Virgil’s Aeneid’, in A. J. Boyle (ed.),
Roman Epic (London): 79–107.
Braswell, B. K. (1988), A Commentary on the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar
(Berlin).
—— (1992), A Commentary on Pindar Nemean One (Fribourg).
Braund, D., and Wilkins, J. (2000) (eds.), Athenaeus and his World:
Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire (Exeter).
Bremer, J. M., de Jong, I., and Kalff, J. (1987) (eds.), Homer: Beyond Oral
Poetry: Recent Trends in Homeric Interpretation (Amsterdam).
Briggs, C. A., and Briggs, E. G. (1986), A Critical and Exegetical Commen-
tary on the Book of Psalms i–ii (Edinburgh).
Brink, C. O. (1972), ‘Ennius and the Hellenistic Worship of Homer’. AJPh
93: 547–67.
—— (1982), Horace on Poetry: Epistles Book 2: The Letters to Augustus and
Florus (Cambridge).
 References 379
Brock, S. P. (1968), ‘ºªæÆ ¼ rkb ‘rpt’. Vetus Testamentum 18: 395–7.
Brooks, P. (1984), Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Oxford).
Bruford, A. (1994), ‘Why an Ulster Cycle?’, in Mallory and Stockman
(eds.): 23–30.
Buccino, C. (1913), Le opere d’arte nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Naples).
Bhler, W. (1964), Beiträge zur Erklärung der Schrift vom Erhabenen (Göt-
tingen).
Burgess, J. S. (1997), ‘Beyond Neoanalysis: Problems with the Vengeance
Theory’. AJPh 118: 1–19.
—— (2001), The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle
(Baltimore).
Burkert, W. (1979), Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual
(Berkeley).
—— (1985), Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford) (1st pub. as
Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart,
1977) ).
—— (1988), ‘Oriental and Greek Mythology: The Meeting of Parallels’, in
J. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London): 10–40.
—— (1992), The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern InXuence on Greek
Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.) (1st pub. as Die
orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (Heidel-
berg, 1984) ).
—— (1997), ‘The Song of Ares and Aphrodite: On the Relationship be-
tween the Odyssey and the Iliad’, in Wright and Jones (eds.): 249–62 (1st
pub. as ‘Das Lied von Ares und Aphrodite’. RhM 103 (1960): 30–44).
—— (2001), ‘The Making of Homer in the 6th Century B.C.: Rhapsodes
versus Stesichorus’, in Cairns (ed.): 92–116 (1st pub. in D. von Bothmer
et al., Papers on the Amasis Painter and his World (Malibu, 1987): 43–62).
—— (2004), Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture
(Cambridge, Mass., and London) (1st pub. as Da Omero ai Magi: La
traduzione orientale nella cultura greca (Venice, 1999) ).
Burnyeat, M. F. (1996), ‘Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Rationality of
Rhetoric’, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley):
88–115.
Burrow, C. (1993), Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford).
—— (1997a), ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in Martindale (ed.): 21–37.
—— (1997b), ‘Virgils, from Dante to Milton’, in Martindale (ed.): 79–90.
—— (2002), ‘Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives’, in Hardie (ed.):
301–19.
380 References
Bury, R. G. (1932) (ed.), The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge).
Butterworth, J. (1986), ‘Homer and Hesiod’, in J. H. Betts, J. T. Hooker,
and J. R. Green (eds.), Studies in Honour of T. B. L. Webster (Bristol):
33–45.
Buttmann, P. (1840), Lexilogus (2nd edn., London) (tr. by J. Fishlake from
German original of 1818).
Buttrey, T. V. (1972), ‘Halved Coins, the Augustan Reform, and Horace,
Odes 1.3’. AJA 76: 31–48.
Byrne, F. J. (1963) (ed. and tr.), ‘Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna’. Studia
Hibernica 3: 54–94.
Cairns, D. L. (2001) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford).
—— (2003), ‘Ethics, ethology, terminology: Iliadic anger and the cross-
cultural study of emotion’, in S. Braund and G. W. Most (eds.), Ancient
Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen (YClS 32, Cambridge): 11–49.
Cairns, F. (1984), ‘Propertius and the Battle of Actium (4.6)’, in D. West and
Woodman (eds.): 129–68.
—— (1989), Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge).
Calasso, R. (1988), Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Milan).
Cameron, A. (1995), Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton).
Campbell, J. S. (1987), ‘Animae Dimidium Meae: Horace’s Tribute to Vergil’.
CJ 82: 314–18.
Campbell, M. (1981), Echoes and Imitations of Early Epic in Apollonius
Rhodius (Mnemosyne Suppl. 72, Leiden).
Camps, W. A. (1959), ‘A Second Note on the Structure of the Aeneid ’. CQ 9: 53–6.
—— (1965) (ed.), Propertius Elegies Book IV (Cambridge).
—— (1967) (ed.), Propertius Elegies Book II (Cambridge).
—— (1970), An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford).
Carney, J. (1955), Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin).
Caruth, C. (1996), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore).
Casali, S. (1995), ‘Altre voci nell’ ‘‘Eneide’’ di Ovidio’. MD 35: 59–76.
—— (1999), ‘Facta impia (Virgil, Aeneid 4.596–9)’. CQ 49: 203–11.
Castelvetro, L. (1576), Poetica d’Aristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta (Basle).
Cavalchini, M., and Samuel, I. (1973) (tr.), Torquato Tasso, Discourses on
the Heroic Poem (Oxford) (trans. of Discorsi del Poema Eroico, 1584).
Cave, T. (1988), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford).
Cavell, S. (1969), ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, in S. Cavell, Must we
mean what we say? (New York): 238–66.
—— (1987), Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge).
Cavill, P. (1995), ‘Interpretation of Battle of Maldon Lines 40–90: Overview
and Assessment’. Studia Neophilologica 67: 149–64.
 References 381
Cesare, M. A. di (1992), ‘Recognition and Epic Tradition: The Motif in
Homer, Vergil, and Milton’, in C. E. Lucente (ed.), The Western Pennsyl-
vania Symposium on World Literatures: Selected Proceedings 1974–1991
(Greensberg): 87–105.
Chadwick, H. M. (1912), The Heroic Age (Cambridge).
—— and Chadwick, N. K (1932–40), The Growth of Literature (Cam-
bridge).
Chantraine, P. (1958), Grammaire homérique i (Paris).
—— (1968–80), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris).
Cherniss, M. D. (1972), Ingeld and Christ (The Hague).
Chiasson, C. C. (2003), ‘Herodotus’ Use of Attic Tragedy in the Lydian
Logos’. ClAnt 22: 5–36.
Christ, M. R. (1994), ‘Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry’. ClAnt 13:
167–202.
Clare, R. J. (2002), The Path of the Argo: Language, Imagery and Narrative in
the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Cambridge).
Clark, M. E., and Coulson, W. D. E. (1978), ‘Memnon and Sarpedon’. MH
35: 65–73.
Clarke, M. (1995), ‘Between Lions and Men: Images of the Hero in the
Iliad ’. GRBS 36: 137–59.
—— (1999), Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer (Oxford).
—— (2002),‘Spartan atê at Thermopylae?’, in A. Powell and S. Hodkinson
(eds.), Sparta Beyond the Mirage (London and Swansea): 63–84.
—— (2004), ‘Manhood and Heroism’, in Fowler (ed.): 74–90.
Clausen, W. V. (1987), Virgil’s Aeneid and the Traditions of Hellenistic
Poetry (Berkeley).
—— (1994), A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues (Oxford).
Clauss, J. J. (1993), The Best of the Argonauts: The RedeWnition of the Epic
Hero in Book 1 of Apollonius’ Argonautica (Berkeley and Oxford).
—— (1997), ‘Conquest of the Mephistophelian Nausicaa: Medea’s Role in
Apollonius’ RedeWnition of the Epic Hero’, in J. J. Clauss and S. I. Johnston
(eds.), Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art
(Princeton): 149–77.
Clay, J. S. (1989), The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major
Homeric Hymns (Princeton).
—— (2001), ‘The New Simonides and Homer’s hêmitheoi’, in Boedeker and
Sider (eds.): 182–4.
Coarelli, F. (1996), ‘Iuppiter Feretrius, Aedes’. Lexicon Topographicum
Urbis Romae 3: 135–6.
Colie, Rosalie L. (1973), The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renais-
sance (Berkeley).
382 References
Commager, S. (1962), The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (New Haven).
Connor, W. R. (1984), Thucydides (Princeton).
Conte, G. B. (1966), ‘hupsos e diatriba nello stile di Lucrezio’. Maia 18:
338–68.
—— (1986), The Rhetoric of Imitation (Ithaca and London).
—— (1991), Generi e lettori (Milan).
—— (1994), Latin Literature: A History, tr. J. B. Solodow, revised by D. P.
Fowler and G. W. Most (Baltimore).
Cook, E. F. (1995), The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins
(Ithaca).
Cornford, F. M. (1907), Thucydides Mythistoricus (London).
Coste-MesseliØre, P. de la (1957), Fouilles de Delphes iv.4: Sculptures du
trésor des Athéniens (Paris).
Courtney, E. (1993) (ed.), The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford).
Cova, P. V. (1989), Il Poeta Vario (Milan).
Csapo, E., and Slater, W. J. (1994), The Contexts of Ancient Drama (Ann
Arbor).
Curtius, E. R. (1953), European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, tr.
W. Trask (London).
Cuypers, M. P. (2004), ‘Apollonius of Rhodes’, in I. de Jong, R. Nünlist, and
A. L. Bowie (eds.), Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek
Literature (Mnemosyne Suppl. 257, Leiden): 43–62.
Dalman, G. (1930), Jerusalem und sein Gelände (Gütersloh).
Danek, G. (1992), Review of Usener (1990). WS 105: 263–5.
—— (1998), Epos und Zitat: Studien zu den Quellen der Odyssee (WS
Beiheft 6; Vienna).
—— (2002), ‘Traditional Referentiality and Homeric Intertextuality’, in
F. Montanari and P. Ascheri (eds.), Omero tremila anni dopo (Rome):
3–19.
David, G. (1991), Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse
(Berkeley).
Davies, M. (1981), ‘The Judgement of Paris and Iliad Book 24’. JHS 101:
56–62.
—— (1988) (ed.), Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen).
—— (1989), The Epic Cycle (Bristol).
De Angeli, S. (1996), ‘Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus, Aedes,
Templum, fasi tardo-repubblicane e di età imperiale’. Lexicon Topographi-
cum Urbis Romae 3: 148–53.
DeForest, M. M. (1994), Apollonius’ Argonautica: A Callimachean Epic
(Mnemosyne Suppl. 148, Leiden).
Degrassi, A. (1937), Inscriptiones Italiae 13.3: Elogia (Rome).
 References 383
—— (1945), ‘Virgilio e il foro di Augusto’. Epigraphica 7: 88–103.
Delarue, F. (2000), Stace, poète épique: Originalité et cohérence (Louvain
and Paris).
Denniston, J. D. (1954), The Greek Particles (2nd edn., Oxford).
Derow, P., and Parker, R. (2003) (eds.), Herodotus and his World (Oxford).
Devine, A. M., and Stephens, L. D. (1999), Discontinuous Syntax: Hyper-
baton in Greek (Oxford).
Dewald, C. (1999), ‘The Figured Stage: Focalizing the Initial Narratives of
Herodotus and Thucydides’, in T. Falker, N. Felson, and D. Konstan (eds.),
Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue (Festschrift Per-
adotto) (Lanham): 221–52.
—— (2002), ‘ ‘‘I didn’t give my own genealogy’’: Herodotus and the
Authorial Persona’, in Bakker et al. (eds.): 267–89.
Dillery, J. (1996), ‘ReconWguring the Past: Thyrea, Thermopylae, and
Narrative Patterns in Herodotus’. AJPh 117: 217–54.
Dillon, M. (1948), Early Irish Literature (Chicago).
Dilts Swartz, D. (1986), ‘The Problem of the Classical InXuence in Táin Bó
Cuailnge: SigniWcant Parallels with Twelfth-century Neo-classical Rhet-
oric’. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 6: 96–125.
Doane, A. N. (1978) (ed.), Genesis A: A New Edition (Madison).
—— (1991) (ed.), The Saxon Genesis (Madison).
Doblhofer, E. (1961), Voices in Stone: The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts
and Writings (London).
Dodds, E. R. (1951), The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley).
—— (1960) (ed.), Euripides: Bacchae (2nd edn., Oxford).
Dominik, W. J. (1994), The Mythic Voice of Statius: Power and Politics in the
Thebaid (Leiden).
Dougherty, C., and Kurke, L. (1993) (eds.), Cultural Poetics in Archaic
Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics (New York and Oxford).
Dover, K. J. (1980) (ed.), Plato: Symposium (Cambridge).
—— (1993) (ed.), Aristophanes: Frogs (Oxford).
Dowden, K. (1996), ‘Homer’s Sense of Text’. JHS 116: 47–61.
—— (2004), ‘The Epic Tradition in Greece’, in Fowler (ed): 188–205.
Drger, P. (1993), Argo Pasimelousa: Der Argonautenmythos in der grie-
chischen und römischen Literatur. Teil 1: Theos Aitios (Stuttgart).
—— (2001), Die Argonautika des Apollonios Rhodios: Das zweite Zorn-Epos
der griechischen Literatur (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 158, Munich).
Duckworth, G. E. (1956), ‘Animae dimidium meae : Two Poets of Rome’.
TAPhA 87: 281–316.
DuØ, C. (2002), Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis (Lanham).
Duff, W. (1964), An Essay on Original Genius (Gainesville) (1st pub. 1767).
384 References
DumØzil, G. (1934), Ouranos-Varuna (Paris).
Dunkel, G. E. (1988–91), ‘Vater Himmels Gattin’. Die Sprache 34: 1–26.
—— (1991–3), ‘Nachgedanke zu Vater Himmels Gattin’. Die Sprache 35: 1.
Durante, M. (1976), Sulla Preistoria della tradizione poetica greca (Incu-
nabula Graeca xiv, Rome).
Durling, R. (1965), The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge,
Mass.).
Dyer, R. (1965), ‘DiVugere nives: Horace and the Augustan Spring’. G&R 12:
79–84.
Easterling, P. E. (1993), ‘Gods on Stage in Greek Tragedy’, in J. Dalfen,
G. Petersman, and F. F. Schwarz (eds.), Religio Graeco-Romana: Festschrift
für Walter Pötscher (Grazer Beiträge Suppl. v; Graz–Horn): 77–86.
—— (1997a), ‘Constructing the Heroic’, in Pelling (ed.): 21–37.
—— (1997b) (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cam-
bridge).
Eckermann, J. P. (1971), Conversations with Goethe, tr. J. Oxenford (London).
Edel, D. (2001), The Celtic West and Europe (Dublin).
—— (2002), ‘Stability and Fluidity in the Transmission of Narrative Texts:
The Delineation of Characters in Táin Bó Cuailnge’, in Nı́ Chatháin and
Richter (eds.): 313–25.
Edmunds, L. (1997), ‘Myth in Homer’, in Morris and Powell (eds.): 415–41.
—— (2001), Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry (Baltimore).
Edwards, A. T. (1985), ‘Achilles in the Underworld: Iliad, Odyssey, and
Aethiopis’. GRBS 26: 215–27.
Edwards, C. (2000), Suetonius: Lives of the Caesars (Oxford).
Edwards, G. P. (1971), The Language of Hesiod in its Traditional Context
(Oxford).
Edwards, M. W. (1987a), Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore).
—— (1987b), ‘Topos and Transformation in Homer’, in Bremer et al. (eds.):
47–60.
—— (1990), ‘Neoanalysis and Beyond’. ClAnt 9: 311–25.
—— (1991), The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 5: Books 17–20 (Cambridge).
Eissfeldt, E. (1904), ‘Zu den Vorbildern des Statius’. Philologus 17: 378–424.
Eissfeldt, O. (1932), Baal Zaphon, Zeus Kasios und der Durchzug der
Israeliten durchs Meer (Beiträge zur Religionsgeschichte des Altertums i,
Halle).
Elder, J. P. (1952), ‘Horace, C., 1.3’. AJPh 73: 140–58.
Eliade, M. (1978), A History of Religious Ideas i (Chicago).
Emlyn-Jones, C. (1998), ‘The Reunion of Penelope and Odysseus’, in
I. McAuslan and P. Walcot (eds.), Homer (Oxford): 126–43, with Adden-
dum, pp. 153–4 (1st pub. in G&R 31 (1984): 1–18).
 References 385
—— Hardwick, L., and Purkis, J. (1992) (eds.), Homer: Readings and
Images (London).
Enright, M. J. (2002), ‘Fires of Knowledge: A Theory of Warband Educa-
tion in Early Medieval Ireland and Homeric Greece’, in Nı́ Chatháin and
Richter (eds.): 342–67.
Erbse, H. (1956), ‘Der erste Satz im Werke Herodots’, in H. Erbse (ed.),
Festschrift Bruno Snell zum 60. Geburtstag (Munich): 209–22.
—— (1972), Beiträge zum Verständnis der Odyssee (Berlin).
Evans, S. (1971), ‘Odyssean Echoes in Propertius IV.8’. G&R 18: 51–3.
Fairfax, E., Lea, K., and Gang, T. M. (1981) (eds.), Godfrey of Bulloigne:
A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme
Liberata, together with Fairfax’s Original Poems (Oxford).
Fantuzzi, M., and Hunter, R. (2004), Tradition and Innovation in Hellen-
istic Poetry (Cambridge) (1st pub. as Muse e modelli. La poesia ellenistica
da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto (Rome, 2002) ).
Farnell, L. R. (1932), The Works of Pindar: A Critical Commentary (Lon-
don).
Farrell, J. (1991), Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The
Art of Allusion in Literary History (New York and Oxford).
—— (1997), ‘The Virgilian Intertext’, in Martindale (ed.): 222–38.
Favro, D. (1996), The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge).
Fedeli, P. (1965), Properzio: Elegie Libro IV (Bari).
—— (1985) (ed.), Properzio: Il Libro Terzo delle Elegie (Bari).
Feeney, D. C. (1986), ‘History and Revelation in Virgil’s Underworld’.
PCPhS 32: 1–24.
—— (1990), ‘The Reconciliations of Juno’, in Harrison (ed.): 339–62
(1st pub. in CQ 34 (1984): 179–94).
—— (1991), The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition
(Oxford).
—— (1998), Literature and Religion in Rome (Cambridge).
Feldherr, A. (2002), ‘Stepping Out of the Ring: Repetition and SacriWce in
the Boxing Match in Aeneid 5’, in Levene and Nelis (eds.): 61–79.
Felson, N., and Slatkin, L. M. (2004), ‘Gender and Homeric Epic’, in
Fowler (ed.): 91–114.
Fenik, B. (1968), Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad (Wiesbaden).
—— (1974), Studies in the Odyssey (Wiesbaden).
—— (1986), Homer and the Nibelungenlied (Cambridge, Mass.).
Ferguson, M. W. (1983), Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry
(New Haven).
FernÆndez-Galliano, M. (1992), Commentary on Odyssey Books
XXI–XXII, in Russo, Fernández-Galliano, and Heubeck (eds.): 131–310.
386 References
Finkelberg, M. (2000), ‘The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multi-
formity in Oral and Written Tradition’. CPh 95: 1–11.
Finnegan, R. (1977), Oral Poetry: Its Nature, SigniWcance, and Social Context
(Cambridge).
Fireman, G. D., McVay, T. E. Jr., and Flanagan, O. J. (2003) (eds.),
Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain (Ox-
ford).
Fitzerald, E. (1889), Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald
i–iii, ed. W. A. Wright (London).
Flower, M. A., and Marincola, J. M. (2002) (eds.), Herodotus: Histories
Book IX (Cambridge).
Foley, J. M. (1988), The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Method-
ology (Bloomington).
—— (1990), Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-
Croatian Return Song (Berkeley).
—— (1991), Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral
Epic (Bloomington).
—— (1995), The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington).
—— (1997), ‘Oral Tradition and its Implications’, in Morris and Powell
(eds.): 146–73.
—— (1999), Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park, Pennsylvania).
—— (2002), How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana-Champaign).
—— (2004), ‘Epic as Genre’, in Fowler (ed.): 171–7.
Fontenrose, J. (1959), Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins
(Berkeley).
Ford, A. (1992), Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca and London).
—— (2002), The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in
Classical Greece (Princeton).
Fornara, C. W. (1971), Herodotus (Oxford).
Fowler, D. P. (2000), Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin
(Oxford).
Fowler, R. (2003), ‘Herodotus and Athens’, in Derow and Parker (eds.):
305–18.
—— (2004a) (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge).
—— (2004b), ‘The Homeric Question’, in Fowler (ed.): 220–32.
Fraenkel, E. (1932), ‘Vergil und die Aethiopis’. Philologus 87: 242–8.
—— (1957), Horace (Oxford).
Franchet d’EspŁrey, S. (1999), ConXit, violence et non-violence dans la
Thébaı̈de de Stace (Paris).
Frank, T. (1938), ‘Augustus, Vergil and the Augustan Elogia’. AJPh 59: 91–4.
Frnkel, H. (1977), Die homerischen Gleichnisse (2nd edn., Göttingen).
 References 387
Frazer, R. M. (1966) (tr.), The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete
and Dares the Phrygian (Bloomington and London).
Freud, S. (1955), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. and ed. J. Strachey (New York)
(1st pub. as Jenseits des Lustprinzips in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18: 3–64 (London, 1920)).
—— (2003), The Uncanny, tr. D. Mclintock (London) (1st pub. as Das
Unheimliche, 1919).
Friis Johansen, K. (1967), The Iliad in Early Greek Art (Copenhagen).
Frisk, H. (1960–72), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch i–iii (Heidelberg).
Froning, H. (1992), ‘La forma rappresentiva ciclica nell’arte classica’, in
R. Olmos (ed.), Coloquio sobre Teseo y la copa de Aison (Madrid): 131–54.
Frost, C. (1991), ‘Propertius 3.3.45–46: Don’t Go Near the Water’. AJPh
112: 251–9.
Galinksy, G. K. (1975), Ovid’s Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic
Aspects (Oxford).
—— (1996), Augustan Culture (Princeton).
Gantz, T. (1981) (tr.), Early Irish Myths and Sagas (Harmondsworth).
Garvie, A. F. (1994) (ed.), Homer: Odyssey Books VI–VIII (Cambridge).
Gelb, I. et al. (1956–) (eds.), The Assyrian Dictionary (Chicago).
Genesius, W., Kautzsch, E., and Cowley, A. E. (1910), Genesius’ Hebrew
Grammar (ed. and enlarged by E. Kautzsch; tr. and ed. by A. E. Cowley)
(2nd edn., Oxford) (1st pub. in German: Halle, 1813).
George, A. (1999) (ed. and tr.), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London).
GØrard-Rousseau, M. (1968), Les Mentions religieuses dans les tablettes
mycéniennes (Incunabula Graeca 29, Rome).
Gibson, J. C. L. (1978) (ed. and tr.), Canaanite Myths and Legends (2nd edn.,
Edinburgh).
Gill, C. (1996), Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy (Oxford).
—— and Wiseman, T. P. (1993) (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World
(Exeter).
Girard, P. (1919), ‘ ‘‘L’Année a perdu son printemps’’ ’. REG 32: 227–39.
Giraudeau, M. (1984), ‘L’Héritage épique chez Hérodote’. Bulletin de
l’Association G. Budé : 4–13.
Gneuss, H. (1976), ‘Battle of Maldon 89: Byrhtnoth’s ofermod Once Again’.
Studies in Philology 73: 117–34.
—— (1981), ‘A Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in
England up to 1100’. Anglo-Saxon England 9: 1–60.
Godden, M., and Lapidge, M. (1991) (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Old English Literature (Cambridge).
Goethe, J. W. von (1989), Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, tr. E. A. Black-
all from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Princeton) (1st pub. 1795).
388 References
Goldhill, S. (1986), Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge).
—— (1991), The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cam-
bridge).
Gonda, J. (1960), ‘Some Observations on Dumézil’s View of Indo-European
Mythology’. Mnemosyne 13: 1–15.
Goold, G. P. (1990), Propertius Elegies (Harvard).
Gordon, C. H. (1947), Ugaritic Handbook i–iii (Analecta Orientalia 25,
Rome).
—— (1965), Homer and the Bible (New York).
Gordon E. V. (1937) (ed.), The Battle of Maldon (London).
Gotoff, H. C. (1984), ‘The Transformations of Mezentius’. TAPhA 114:
191–218.
Gould, J. (1989), Herodotus (London).
—— (1996), ‘Tragedy and Collective Experience’, in M. Silk (ed.), Tragedy
and the Tragic (Oxford): 217–43.
Gransden, K. W. (1996), Virgil in English (London).
Graus, F. (1989), ‘Troja und trojanische Herkunft im Mittelalter’, in
W. Erzgräber (ed.), Kontinuität und Transformation der Antike im Mittel-
alter (Sigmaringen): 26–43.
Graziosi, B. (2002), Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cam-
bridge).
—— and Haubold, J. (2005), Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London).
Greene, T. (1963), The Descent from Heaven (New Haven and London).
Greenwood, E., and Irwin, E. (forthcoming) (eds.), Reading Herodotus.
Griffin, J. (1980), Homer on Life and Death (Oxford).
—— (1984), ‘Caesar qui cogere posset’, in F. Millar and E. Segal (eds.),
Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (Oxford and New York): 189–218.
—— (1985), Latin Poets and Roman Life (Oxford).
—— (1986), Virgil (Oxford).
—— (1987a), Homer: The Odyssey (Cambridge).
—— (1987b), ‘Homer and Excess’, in Bremer et al. (eds.): 85–104.
—— (1990a), ‘Characterization in Euripides: Hippolytus and Iphigenia in
Aulis’, in C. B. R. Pelling (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek
Literature (Oxford): 128–49.
—— (1990b), ‘Die Ursprünge der Historien Herodots’, in W. Ax (ed.),
Memoria Rerum Veterum: Festschrift für Carl Joachim Classen zum 60.
Geburtstag (Stuttgart): 51–82.
—— (1991), Review of Usener (1990). CR 41: 288–91.
—— (1992), ‘Heroic and Unheroic Ideas in Homer’, in Emlyn-Jones et al.
(eds): 21–31.
—— (1995) (ed.), Homer: Iliad IX (Oxford).
 References 389
—— (1998), ‘The Social Function of Attic Tragedy’. CQ 48: 39–61.
—— (2001) [1977], ‘The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer’, in
Cairns (ed.): 365–84 (1st pub. in JHS 97 (1977): 39–53).
—— (2002), ‘Look your last on lyric: Horace, Odes 4.15’, in T. P. Wiseman
(ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford):
311–32.
Griffith, M. (1990), ‘Contest and Contradiction in Early Greek Poetry’, in
M. GriYth and D. Mastronarde (eds.), The Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on
Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer
(Atlanta): 185–207.
Griffith, R. D. (1998), ‘The Origin of Memnon’. ClAnt 17: 212–34.
Gros, P. (1993), ‘Apollo Palatinus, Aedes’. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis
Romae 1: 54–7.
—— (1996), ‘Iulius, Divus, Aedes’. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae
3: 116–19.
—— (1999), ‘Theatrum Pompei’. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae
4: 364–7.
Grossardt, P. (2001), Die Erzählung von Meleagros: Zur literarischen Entwick-
lung der kalydonischen Kultlegende (Mnemosyne Suppl. 215, Leiden).
Gruen, E. S. (1992), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome
(Ithaca).
—— (1996), ‘The Expansion of the Empire under Augustus’, in
A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott (eds.), The Cambridge
Ancient History (2nd edn.), vol. x: The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–A.D.
69 (Cambridge): 147–97.
Guillemin, A. (1924), ‘L’Imitation dans la littérature latine’. REL 2: 35–47.
Gntert, H. (1919), Kalypso (Halle).
Gnther, H.-C. (1997), Quaestiones Propertianae (Leiden).
Gurval, R. A. (1995), Actium and Augustus (Ann Arbor).
Gutzwiller, K. (1981), Studies in the Hellenistic Epyllion (Beiträge zur
klassischen Philologie 114, Königstein).
Hainsworth, J. B. (1969), Homer (Oxford).
—— (1988), Commentary on Odyssey Books V–VIII, in Heubeck, West,
and Hainsworth (eds.): 249–385.
—— (1993), ‘The Iliad as Heroic Poetry’, in J. B. Hainsworth (ed.), The
Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 3: Books 9–12 (Cambridge): 32–53.
Hamel, A. G. van (1933) (ed.), Compert Con Culainn and Other Stories
(Dublin).
Harder, M. A., Regtuit, R. F., and Wakker, G. C. (2000) (eds.), Apollo-
nius Rhodius (Hellenistica Groningana 4, Leuven).
390 References
Hardie, A. (1983), Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the
Graeco-Roman world (Liverpool).
Hardie, P. (1986), Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford).
—— (1992), ‘Augustan Poets and the Mutability of Rome’, in A. Powell
(ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol):
59–82.
—— (1993), The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge).
—— (1994), Virgil Aeneid IX (Cambridge).
—— (1997), ‘Virgil and Tragedy’, in Martindale (ed.): 312–26.
—— (1998), Virgil (Oxford).
—— (2002) (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge).
Harrison, J. E. (1963), Themis (London).
Harrison, S. J. (1985), ‘Vergilian Similes: Some Connections’. Papers of the
Liverpool Latin Seminar 5: 99–107.
—— (1987), ‘Vergil and the Cult of Athena Parthenos’. Hermes 115: 124–6.
—— (1989), ‘Augustus, the Poets and the Spolia Opima’. CQ 39: 408–14.
—— (1990a) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford).
—— (1990b), ‘The Praise Singer: Horace, Censorinus and Odes 4.8’. JRS 80:
31–43.
—— (1991), Vergil Aeneid 10: With Introduction, Translation and Commen-
tary (Oxford).
—— (1992), ‘The Arms of Capaneus: Statius Thebaid 4. 165–77’. CQ 42:
247–52.
—— (1995), ‘Horace, Pindar, Iullus Antonius, and Augustus: Odes 4.2’, in S.
J. Harrison (ed.), Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration (Oxford):
108–27.
—— (1998), ‘The Sword-Belt of Pallas (Aeneid X.495–506): Symbolism and
Ideology’, in H.-P. Stahl (ed.), Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political
Context (London): 223–42.
—— (2002), ‘Ovid and Genre: Evolution of an Elegist’, in Hardie (ed.):
79–94.
—— (2005), ‘Vergil and the Mausoleum Augusti: Georgics 3. 12–18’. Acta
Classica 48: 185–8.
—— (forthcoming), Forms of Appropriation: Generic Enrichment in Virgil
and Horace.
Haslam, M. (1997), ‘Homeric Papyri and the Transmission of the Text’, in
Morris and Powell (eds.): 55–100.
Hatto, A. T. (1980–9) (ed.), Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry (London).
Haubold, J., and Graziosi, B. (2003), ‘Homeric Masculinity: ênoreê and
agênoriê ’. JHS 123: 60–76.
Hauvette, A. (1894), Hérodote: Historien des Guerres Médiques (Paris).
 References 391
Heath, M. (1985), ‘Hesiod’s Didactic Poetry’. CQ 35: 245–63.
—— (1989), Unity in Greek Poetics (Oxford).
—— (1999), ‘Longinus On Sublimity’. PCPS 45: 43–74.
Heiden, B. (1998), ‘The Placement of ‘‘Book Divisions’’ in the Iliad’. JHS
188: 68–81.
—— (2000), ‘The Placement of ‘‘Book Divisions’’ in the Odyssey’. CPh 95:
247–59.
Heinze, R. (1993), Virgil’s Epic Technique (London) (1st pub. as Virgils epische
Technik, 1902).
Henderson, J. (1991), ‘Statius’ Thebaid / Form Premade’. PCPhS 37: 30–79.
Herington, J. (1985), Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic
Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London).
Hershkowitz, D. (1998), The Madness of Epic (Oxford).
Hesberg, H. von (1996), ‘Mausoleum Augusti: Das Monument’. Lexicon
Topographicum Urbis Romanae 3: 234–7.
Heubeck, A. (1954), Der Odyssee-Dichter und die Ilias (Erlangen).
—— (1965), ‘,-ˇ˜(˙ ,(¸ˇ ˙˜˙’. Beiträge für Namenforschung
16: 204–6.
—— (1988), ‘General Introduction’, in Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth
(eds.): 3–23.
—— (1992), Commentary on Odyssey Books XXIII–XXIV, in Russo,
Fernández-Galliano, and Heubeck (eds.): 313–418.
—— West, S. R., and Hainsworth, J. B. (1988) (eds.), A Commentary on
Homer’s Odyssey, Vol.1: Introduction and Books I–VIII (Oxford).
Heyworth, S. J. (1993), ‘Deceitful Crete: Aeneid 3.84 V and the Hymns of
Callimachus’. CQ 43: 255–7.
—— (1994), ‘Some Allusions to Callimachus in Latin Poetry’. MD 33: 51–79.
Highbarger, E. L. (1935), ‘The Pindaric Style of Horace’. TAPhA 66:
222–55.
Hinds, S. (1987), ‘Generalising about Ovid’. Ramus 16: 4–31.
—— (1998), Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman
Poetry (Cambridge).
—— (2000), ‘Essential Epic: Genre and Gender from Macer to Statius’, in
M. Depew and D. Obbink (eds.), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and
Society (Cambridge, Mass.): 221–44.
Hofmann, R. (1988), ‘Some New Facts Concerning the Knowledge of Virgil
in Early Medieval Ireland’. Études Celtiques 25: 189–212.
Hollis, A. S. (1965), ‘Some Fragments of Callimachus’ Hecale’. CR 15: 259–60.
—— (1990), Callimachus Hecale (Oxford).
—— (1991a), ‘Callimachus fr. 535 Pf.: Another Piece of Hecale ?’ ZPE 86: 14–16.
—— (1991b), ‘Callimachus, Hecale fr. 36,2 H. ¼ fr. 37 H.’ ZPE 89: 25–6.
392 References
Hollis, A. S. (1992), ‘Hellenistic Colouring in Virgil’s Aeneid’. HSCPh 94:
269–85.
—— (1993), ‘Callimachus, Hecale frs. 3–5 H.’ ZPE 95: 45–7.
—— (1994), ‘Supplementum Hellenisticum 948–9: Callimachus, Hecale?’
ZPE 100: 17–21.
—— (1997a), ‘The Beginning of Callimachus’ Hecale’. ZPE 115: 55–6.
—— (1997b), ‘Three Possible Fragments of Callimachus’ Hecale in
Hesychius’. ZPE 117: 47–9.
—— (1998), ‘Darkness on the Mountains: A Fragment of Callimachus’
Hecale’. ZPE 123: 72.
—— (2000), ‘Another Rare Epithet in Callimachus’ Hecale?’ ZPE 130: 16.
—— (2004), ‘Hecale’s Babies’. ZPE 148: 115–16.
H
lscher, U. (1988), Die Odyssee: Epos zwischen Märchen und Roman
(Munich).
Hornblower, S. (1987), Thucydides (London).
—— (1994a) (ed.), Greek Historiography (Oxford).
—— (1994b), ‘Introduction’, in Hornblower (ed.): 1–72.
—— (2002), The Greek World 479–323 BC (3rd edn., London).
Horsfall, N. M. (1979), ‘Stesichorus at Bovillae?’ JHS 99: 26–48.
—— (1995) (ed.), A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden).
—— (1999), Virgil Aeneid 7: A Commentary (Leiden).
—— (2003), Virgil Aeneid 11: A Commentary (Leiden).
Hubbard, M. (1974), Propertius (London).
Huber, L. (1965), ‘Herodots Homerverständnis’, in H. Flashar and K. Gaiser
(eds.), Synusia: Festgabe für Wolfgang Schadewaldt (Pfullingen): 29–52.
Huehnegard, J. (2000), A Grammar of Akkadian (Winona Lake).
Hunter, R. L. (1988), ‘ ‘‘Short on Heroics’’: Jason in the Argonautica’. CQ 38:
436–53.
—— (1989) (ed.), Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica Book III (Cambridge).
—— (1993a), The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies (Cambridge).
—— (1993b) (tr.), Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason and the Golden Fleece (The
Argonautica) (Oxford).
—— (1996), Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge).
—— (2001), ‘The Poetics of Narrative in the Argonautica’, in T. D. Papan-
ghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius
(Mnemosyne Suppl. 217, Leiden): 93–125.
Huskey, S. (2002), ‘Ovid and the Fall of Troy in Tristia 1.3’. Vergilius 48:
88–104.
Hutchinson, G. O. (1988), Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford).
—— (2002), ‘The Publication and Individuality of Horace’s Odes, Books
1–3’. CQ 52: 517–37.
 References 393
—— (2003), ‘The Aetia: Callimachus’ Poem of Knowledge’. ZPE 145: 47–59.
—— (2004), ‘Euripides’ Other Hippolytus’. ZPE 149: 15–28.
Huxley, G. L. (1969), Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis
(London).
Hyams, E. (1957) (tr.), Taine’s Notes on England (London).
Immerwahr, H. (1966), Form and Thought in Herodotus (Cleveland).
Instone, S. (1996) (ed.), Pindar: Selected Odes (Warminster).
Isager, S. (1998), ‘The Pride of Halicarnassus’. ZPE 123: 1–23.
—— and Pedersen, P. (2004) (eds.), The Salmakis Inscription and Hellen-
istic Halikarnassos (Halicarnassian Studies iv, Univ. of Southern Den-
mark).
Jackson, K. H. (1964), The Earliest Irish Tradition: AWindow on the Iron Age
(Cambridge).
Jacoby, F. (1961), ‘Die geistige Physiognomie der Odyssee’, in F. Jacoby,
Kleine Philologische Schriften i (Berlin): 107–38 (1st pub. in Antike 9
(1933): 159–94).
Janan, M. (2001), The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV (Berkeley).
Janda, M. (1996), ‘Das Einsperren der Totengeister: Homerisch Ææø’. Die
Sprache 38: 76–86.
Janko, R. (1982), Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns (Cambridge).
—— (1990), ‘The Iliad and its Editors: Dictation and Redaction’. ClAnt 9:
326–34.
—— (1991), ‘Philodemus’ On Poems and Aristotle’s On Poets’. Cronache
Ercolanesi 21: 5–64.
—— (1994), The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 4: Books 13–16 (Cambridge).
—— (2000), Philodemus On Poems Book 1, edited with Introduction, Trans-
lation, and Commentary (Oxford).
Jenkyns, R. (1999), Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History, Times, Names,
and Places (Oxford).
Jenni, E., and Westermann, C. (1997) (eds.), Theological Lexicon of the Old
Testament, i–iii tr. M. Biddle (Peabody, Mass.).
Johnson, D. M. (2001), ‘Herodotus’ Story-Telling Speeches: Socles (5.92)
and Leotychidas (6.86)’. CJ 97.1: 1–26.
Jong, I. J. F. de (1995), ‘Homer as Literature: Some Current Areas of
Research’, in J. P. Crielaard (ed.), Homeric Questions (Amsterdam): 127–46.
—— (2001), A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge).
Jordan, B. (1988), ‘The Honors for Themistocles after Salamis’. AJPh 109:
547–71.
Kahil, L., and Jacquemin, A. (1988), ‘Harpyiai’. Lexicon Iconographicum
Mythologiae Classicae iv. i. 444–50.
Kakridis, J. T. (1949), Homeric Researches (Lund) (1st pub. in Greek, 1944).
394 References
Kakridis, P. J. (1961), ‘Achilleus’ Rüstung’. Hermes 89: 288–97.
Kate, R. ten (1955), Quomodo heroes in Statii Thebaide describantur quaer-
itur (Groningen).
Kates, J. A. (1974), ‘The Revaluation of the Classical Heroic in Tasso and
Milton’. Comparative Literature 26.4: 299–317.
—— (1983), Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian Epic (Lewisburg).
Kearns, E. (2004), ‘The Gods in the Homeric Epics’, in Fowler (ed.): 59–73.
Keith, A. (2002), ‘Sources and Genres in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1–5’, in
Boyd (ed.): 235–70.
Kellum, B. (1985), ‘Sculptural Programs and Propaganda in Augustan
Rome: The Temple of Apollo on the Palatine’, in R. Winkes (ed.), The
Age of Augustus (Louvain): 169–76.
Kelly, A. (2006), ‘Neoanalysis and the Nestorbedrängnis: A Test Case’,
Hermes 134: 1–25.
Kelly, P. (1992), ‘The Táin as Literature’, in Mallory (ed.): 70–102.
Kennedy, D. (1997), ‘Virgilian Epic’, in Martindale (ed.): 145–54.
Kenney, E. J. (1974), ‘Vivida vis: Polemic and Pathos in Lucretius I. 62–101’,
in A. J. Woodman and D. West (eds.), Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry
(Cambridge): 18–30.
—— (1976), ‘Ovidius prooemians’. PCPhS 22: 46–53.
—— (2002), ‘Ovid’s Language and Style’, in Boyd (ed.): 27–89.
Kidd, D. A. (1977), ‘Virgil’s Voyage’. Prudentia 9: 97–103.
Kirk, G. S. (1960), ‘Homer and Modern Oral Poetry: Some Confusions’. CQ
10: 271–81.
—— (1962), The Songs of Homer (Cambridge).
—— (1990), The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 2: Books 5–8 (Cambridge).
Klinnert, T. C. (1970), Capaneus-Hippomedon: Interpretationen zur Hel-
dendarstellung in der Thebais des P. Papinius Statius (Heidelberg).
Knauer, G. N. (1964), Die Aeneis und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik
Vergils mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis (Göttingen).
—— (1990), ‘Vergil’s Aeneid and Homer’, in Harrison (ed.): 390–412
(1st pub. in GRBS 5 (1964): 61–84).
Knight, V. (1995), The Renewal of Epic: Responses to Homer in the Argo-
nautica of Apollonius (Mnemosyne Suppl. 152, Leiden).
Knox, P. E. (1995) (ed.), Ovid: Heroides, Select Epistles (Cambridge).
—— (2002), ‘The Heroides: Elegiac Voices’, in Boyd (ed.): 117–39.
Knox, T. M. (1975) (tr.), G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
i–ii (Oxford) (1st pub. as Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Berlin,
1835–8)).
Koch, J. T. (1994), Windows on the Iron Age: 1964–1994’, in Mallory and
Stockman (eds.): 229–38.
 References 395
Kockel, V. (1995), ‘Forum Augustum’. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae
2: 289–95.
Kopff, E. (1981), ‘Virgil and the Cyclical Epics’. ANRW ii. 31.2: 919–47.
Korenjak, M. (1997), ‘Têlikleitê Ariadnê: Exemplum mit Folgen’. WS 110:
19–25.
—— (1998), ‘Homerische Intertextualität ohne Formeln? Zwei phorminx-
spielende Helden in Ilias und Odyssee’. MD 133–43.
Kossatz-Deissmann, A. (1981), ‘Achilleus’. Lexicon Iconographicum Mytho-
logiae Classicae i. i. 37–200.
—— (1992), ‘Memnon’. Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae vi. i.
448–61.
Kraus, C. S. (1999) (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative
in Ancient Historical Texts (Mnemosyne Suppl. 191, Leiden).
Krevans, N. (2000), ‘On the Margins of Epic: The Foundation-Poems of
Apollonius’, in Harder et al. (eds.): 69–84.
Krischer, T. (1965), ‘Herodots Prooimion’. Hermes 93: 159–67.
Kroll, W. (1924), Studien zum Verständnis der Römischen Literatur (Stuttgart).
Kullmann, W. (1960), Die Quellen der Ilias (Wiesbaden).
—— (1992a), Homerische Motive (Stuttgart).
—— (1992b), ‘Oral Poetry Theory and Neoanalysis in Homeric Research’,
in Kullmann (1992a): 140–55 (1st pub. in GRBS 25 (1984): 307–23).
—— (1992c), ‘Ergebnisse der motivgeschichtlichen Forschung zu Homer’,
in Kullmann (1992a): 100–34 (1st pub. in J. Latacz (ed.), 200 Jahre
Homerforschung—Rückblick und Ausblick (Stuttgart, 1991): 425–55).
—— (1992d), ‘Gods and Men in the Iliad and the Odyssey’, in Kullmann
(1992a): 243–63 (1st pub. in HSCPh 89 (1985): 1–23).
Kurke, L. (2005), ‘Choral Lyric as ‘‘Ritualization’’: Poetic SacriWce and
Poetic Ego in Pindar’s Sixth Paian’. ClAnt 24: 81–130.
Kytzler, B. (1969), ‘Imitatio und Aemulatio in der Thebais des Statius’.
Hermes 97: 209–32.
Lachmann, C. (1882), In T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Commentarius
(4th edn., Berlin).
Lambert, W. G., and Millard, A. R. (1969) (eds.), Atra-Hası̄s: The Baby-
lonian Story of the Flood (Oxford). ˘
Landsberger, B., and Krumbiegel, I. (1934), Die Fauna des alten Mesopo-
tamien nach der 14. Tafel der Serie Har-ra¼Hubullu (Abhandlungen
der philologisch-historischen Klasse ˘der Sächsischen
˘ Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Band xlii, Nr. vi, Leipzig).
Lang, A. (1893), Homer and the Epic (London).
La Penna, A. (1980), ‘Mezenzio: una tragedia della tirannia e del titanismo
antico’. Maia 32: 3–30.
396 References
Lapidge M. (1985), ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, in
M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon
England (London): 1–60.
—— (1988), ‘The Study of Greek at the School of Canterbury in the
Seventh Century’, in M. Herren (ed.), The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks:
The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages (London):
169–94.
Larson, J. (2001), Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore (Oxford).
Laser, S. (1955), ‘¼Łº ’, in Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (Göttingen): i.
151–2.
Laslo, N. (1935), ‘RiXessi d’arte Wgurata nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio’.
Ephemeris Dacoromania 6: 368–440.
Latacz, J. (2001), ‘Rhapsoden’, in Der Neue Pauly (Stuttgart): x. 947–8.
Lateiner, D. (1989), The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto).
Lattimore, R. (1962), Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana).
Leaf, W. (1886) (ed.), The Iliad, Edited with English Notes and Introduction
i–ii (London).
Lehmann, W. P. (1993), Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics
(London).
Lehnus, L. (1997), ‘Ipotesi sul Wnale dell’Ecale’. ZPE 117: 45–6.
Leigh, M. G. L. (1997), Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement (Oxford).
—— (2004), Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford).
Lem, S. (1970), Solaris, tr. J. Kilmartin and S. Cox (New York).
Lendinara, P. (1991), ‘The World of Anglo-Saxon Learning’, in Godden
and Lapidge (eds.): 264–81.
Leumann, M. (1993), Homerische Wörter (Darmstadt) (1st pub., Basle,
1950).
Levene, D. S., and Nelis, D. P. (2002) (eds.), Clio and the Poets: Augustan
Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient Historiography (Mnemosyne Suppl.
224, Leiden).
Levin, S. (1971), ‘The Etymology of nektar’. SMEA xiii: 31–50.
Lewalski, B. (1985), Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms
(Princeton).
Lightfoot, J. L. (1999), Parthenius of Nicaea, the Poetical Fragments
and the Erotica Pathemata: Edited with Introduction and Commentaries
(Oxford).
Littlewood, R. J. (1980), ‘Ovid and the Ides of March’, in C. Deroux (ed.),
Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History (Brussels): 301–21.
Lloyd-Jones, H. (1994), ‘Notes on the New Simonides’. ZPE 101: 1–3.
—— (1999), ‘The Pride of Halicarnassus’. ZPE 124: 1–14.
 References 397
Lockyer, C. W. (1967), ‘Horace’s Propempticon and Vergil’s Voyage’. CW 61:
42–45.
Loraux, N. (1986), The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the
Classical City, tr. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.) (1st pub. as L’Invention
d’Athènes (Paris, 1981) ).
—— (1995), The Experiences of Teiresias, tr. P. Wissing (Princeton) (1st pub.
as Expériences de Tirésias (Paris, 1989)).
Lord, A. B. (1960), The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.).
—— (1979), ‘Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts’, in J. Latacz (ed.),
Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (Darmstadt): 308–19 (1st pub. in TAPhA
84 (1953): 124–34).
—— (1981), ‘Memory, Fixity, and Genre in Oral Traditional Poetries’, in
J. M. Foley (ed.), Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates
Lord (Columbus): 451–61.
—— (1991), Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca).
—— (1995), The Singer Resumes the Tale (Ithaca).
Lowe, N. J. (2000), The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative
(Cambridge).
Luce, T. J. (1982) (ed.), Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome (New York).
Lundstr
m, S. (1976), ‘Der Eingang des Proömiums zum dritten Buche der
Georgica’. Hermes 104: 163–91.
Luraghi, N. (2001) (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus
(Oxford).
Lyne, R. O. A. M. (1980), The Latin Love Poets (Oxford).
—— (1987), Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford).
—— (1989), Words and the Poet: Characteristic Techniques of Style in Vergil’s
Aeneid (Oxford).
—— (1990), ‘Vergil and the Politics of War’, in Harrison (ed.): 316–38 (1st
pub. in CQ 33 (1983): 188–203).
—— (1994), ‘Vergil’s Aeneid: Subversion by Intertextuality: Catullus
66.39–40 and Other Examples’. G&R 41: 187–204.
—— (1995), Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (New Haven and London).
—— (1998a), ‘Propertius and Tibullus: Early Exchanges’. CQ 48: 519–44.
—— (1998b), ‘Propertius 2.10 and 11 and the Structure of Books ‘‘2A’’ and
‘‘2B’’ ’. JRS 88: 21–36.
Maass, M. (1993), Das antike Delphi: Orakel, Schätze und Monumente
(Darmstadt).
McCone, K. (1990), Pagan Past and Christian Present in Medieval Irish
Literature (Maynooth).
Macdonell, A. A. (1917), A Vedic Reader for Students (Oxford).
398 References
Mac Eoin, G. (1960), ‘Das Verbalsystem von Togail Troı́ ’. Zeitschrift für
celtische Philologie 28: 73–223.
Mac Gearailt, U. (1996), ‘Change and Innovation in Eleventh-Century
Prose Narrative in Irish’, in H. L. C. Tristram (ed.), (Re)Oralisierung
(Tübingen): 443–93.
—— (2000/1), ‘Togail Troı́: An Example of Translating and Editing in
Medieval Ireland’. Studia Hibernica 31: 71–86.
McKeown, J. (1984), ‘Ovid’s Fasti and Augustan Politics’, in D. West and
Woodman (eds.): 169–87.
—— (1989), Ovid, Amores. A Commentary on Book One (Liverpool).
Maclennan, K. (2003) (ed.), Virgil: Aeneid VI (Bristol).
Macleod, C. W. (1976), ‘Propertius 4,1’. Papers of the Liverpool Latin
Seminar 1: 141–53.
—— (1982) (ed.), Homer: Iliad, Book XXIV (Cambridge).
—— (1983), Collected Essays (Oxford).
McNelis, C. (2003), ‘Mourning Glory: Callimachus’ Hecale and Heroic
Honors’. MD 50: 155–61.
Macpherson, J. (1996), The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (1st pub.
1760–73), ed. H. Gaskill (Edinburgh).
Malamud, M. A. (1995), ‘Happy Birthday, Dead Lucan: (P)Raising the
Dead in Silvae 2.7’. Ramus 24: 1–30.
Mallory, J. P. (1989), In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London).
—— (1992) (ed.), Aspects of the Táin (Belfast).
—— and Stockman, G. (1994) (eds.), Ulidia: Proceedings of the First
International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales (Belfast).
Maltby, R. (2002a), ‘Tibullus 2.5 and the Early History of Rome’, Kleos 7:
291–304.
—— (2002b), Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction and Commentary (Cam-
bridge).
Manakidou, F. (1995), ‘Die Seher in den Argonautika des Apollonios
Rhodios’. SIFC 3rd ser., 13: 190–208.
Mandelbaum, Allen (1982) (tr.), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
(New York).
Marcovich, M. (1999–2002) (ed.), Diogenes Laertius. Vitae philosophorum
i–iii (Stuttgart).
Marg, W. (1965) (ed.), Herodot: Eine Auswahl aus der neueren Forschung
(Munich).
Marincola, J. (1997a), Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography
(Cambridge).
 References 399
—— (1997b), ‘Odysseus and the Historians’, Histos 1 (online at: www.dur.
ac.uk/Classics/Histos/1997/marincola.html).
—— (2001), Greek Historians (Oxford).
—— (forthcoming) (ed.), Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography
(Oxford).
Marsden, R. (2004), The Cambridge Old English Reader (Cambridge).
Martindale, C. (1986), John Milton and the Transformation of Classical
Epic (Totowa, NJ).
—— (1993), Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of
Reception (Cambridge).
—— (1997) (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge).
Martz, L. (1964), The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne and
Milton (New Haven).
Mastronarde, D. J. (2002) (ed.), Euripides: Medea (Cambridge).
Matthews, V. J. (1974), Panyassis of Halikarnassos: Text and Commentary
(Mnemosyne Suppl. 33, Leiden).
Mayrhofer, M. (1995), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen ii,
instalment 18 (Heidelberg).
Mazzucchi, C. M. (1992) (ed.), Dionisio Longino Del Sublime (Milan).
Meister, F. (1873) (ed.), Daretis Phrygii de excidio Troiae historia (Leipzig).
Merkelbach, R. (1969), Untersuchungen zur Odyssee (Munich).
Merriam, C. U. (2001), The Development of the Epyllion Genre through the
Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Lewiston).
Miller, J. F. (1998), ‘Horace’s Pindaric Apollo (Odes 3.4.60–4)’. CQ 48:
545–52.
Minadeo, R. (1975–6), ‘Vergil in Horace’s Odes 4.12’. CJ 71: 161–4.
Moles, J. L. (1993), ‘Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides’, in
Gill and Wiseman (eds.): 88–121.
Mondi, R. (1990), ‘Greek Mythic Thought in the Light of the Near East’, in
L. Edmunds (ed.), Approaches to Greek Myth (Baltimore): 142–98.
Monro, D. B. (1901) (ed.), Homer’s Odyssey XIII–XXIV (Oxford).
Moreau, A. (1994), Le Mythe de Jason et Médée: Le va-nu-pied et la sorcière
(Paris).
Morgan, L. (1999), Patterns of Redemption in Virgil’s Georgics (Cam-
bridge).
Morris, I., and Powell, B. (1997) (eds.), A New Companion to Homer
(Leiden).
Morris, S. (1997), ‘Homer and the Near East’, in Morris and Powell (eds.):
599–623.
Morrison, J. V. (1992), Homeric Misdirection: False Predictions in the Iliad
(Ann Arbor).
400 References
Most, G. (1992), ‘Il poeta nell’Ade: Catabasi epica e teoria dell’epos’. SIFC
85 (ns 10): 1014–26.
—— (1993), ‘Hesiod and the Textualization of Personal Temporality’, in
G. Arrighetti and F. Montanari (eds.), La componente autobiograWca nella
poesia greca e latina fra realtà e artiWcio letterario (Pisa): 73–92.
Muellner, L. (1996), The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic (Ithaca).
Mullen, E. T. (1980), The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew
Literature (Cambridge, Mass.).
Mller, F. M. (1875), Chips from a German Workshop iv (London).
—— (1888), Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (London).
Munson, R.V. (1991), ‘The Madness of Cambyses (Herodotus 3.16–38)’.
Arethusa 24: 43–65.
—— (2001), Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the
World of Herodotus (Michigan).
Murgatroyd, P. (1994) (ed.), Tibullus, Elegies II (Oxford).
Murnaghan, Sheila (1981), Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey
(Princeton).
Murphy, G. (1961), Saga and Myth in Ancient Ireland (Dublin).
Murray, G. (1925), Five Stages of Greek Religion (London).
—— (1934), The Rise of the Greek Epic (4th edn., Oxford).
Murrin, M. (1980), The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline
(Chicago).
Myers, S. (1994), Ovid’s Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Meta-
morphoses (Ann Arbor).
—— (1999), ‘The Metamorphosis of a Poet: Recent Work on Ovid’. JRS 89:
190–204.
Myrick, L. D. (1993), From the De Excidio Troiae Historia to the Togail Troı́:
Literary Cultural Synthesis in a Medieval Irish Adaptation of Dares’ Troy
Tale (Heidelberg).
Nagy, G. (1979), The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore).
—— (1987), ‘Herodotus the logios’. Arethusa 20: 175–84.
—— (1990a), ‘The Death of Sarpedon and the Question of Homeric
Uniqueness’, in G. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca): 122–42.
—— (1990b), Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Balti-
more).
—— (1996), Homeric Questions (Austin).
Nappa, C. (2002), ‘Experiens laborum: Ovid Reads the Georgics’. Vergilius 48:
71–87.
Nash, Ralph (1987) (ed. and tr.), Torquato Tasso: Jerusalem Delivered
(Detroit) (trans. of Gerusalemme liberata, (1st pub. 1581).
 References 401
Neils, J. (1987), The Youthful Deeds of Theseus (Rome).
—— and Woodford, S. (1994), ‘Theseus’. Lexicon Iconographicum Mytho-
logiae Classicae vii. i. 922–51.
Nelis, D. (2001), Vergil’s Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius
(Leeds).
Nethercut, W. R. (1970), ‘The Ironic Priest: Propertius’ Roman Elegies III,
1–5: Imitations of Horace and Vergil’. AJPh 91: 384–407.
Neville, J. (1977), ‘Herodotus on the Trojan War’. G&R 24: 3–12.
Newman, J. K. (1997), Augustan Propertius: The Recapitulation of a Genre
(Hildesheim).
N ChathÆin, P., and Richter, M. (2002) (eds.), Ireland and Europe in the
Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission (Dublin).
Nilsson, M. P. (1967), Geschichte der griechischen Religion i (3rd edn.,
Munich).
Nisbet, R. G. M., and Hubbard, M. (1970), A Commentary on Horace, Odes
Book I (Oxford).
—— and Rudd, N. (2004), A Commentary on Horace, Odes Book III (Oxford).
Norden, E. (1899), ‘Ein Panegyrikus auf Augustus in Virgils Aeneis’. RhM
54: 466–82 (repr. in E. Norden, Kleine Schriften, ed. B. Kytzler (Berlin,
1996): 422–36).
—— (1927) (ed.), P. Virgilius Maro Aeneis VI (3rd edn., Leipzig).
Notopoulos, J. A. (1964), ‘Studies in Early Greek Oral Poetry’. HSCPh 63:
1–77.
Nutt, A. T. (1900), Cuchulainn: The Irish Achilles (London).
Nyberg, L. (1992), Unity and Coherence: Studies in Apollonius Rhodius’
Argonautica and the Alexandrian Epic Tradition (Lund).
Obbink, D. (2001), ‘The Genre of Plataea’, in Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 65–85.
O’Brien O’Keeffe, K. (1991), ‘Heroic Values and Christian Ethics’, in
Godden and Lapidge (eds.): 107–25.
O’Flaherty, W. (1975) (tr.), Hindu Myths (Harmondsworth).
O’Hara, J. J. (1990), Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Virgil’s Aeneid
(Princeton).
—— (1996a), True Names: Virgil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymo-
logical Wordplay (Ann Arbor).
—— (1996b), ‘Vergil’s Best Reader? Ovidian Commentary on Vergilian
Etymological Wordplay’. CJ 91: 255–76.
Ó hUiginn, R. (1992), ‘The Background and Development of Táin Bó
Cúailnge’, in Mallory (ed.): 29–68.
—— (1993), ‘Zu den politischen und literarischen Hintergründen der Táin
Bó Cúailnge’, in H. L. C. Tristram (ed.), Studien zur Táin Bó Cúailnge
(Tübingen): 133–57.
402 References
Olson, S. D. (1995), Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer’s
Odyssey (Leiden).
Onians, R. B. (1951), The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the
Mind, the World, the Soul, Time, and Fate (Cambridge).
O’Rahilly, C. (1967) (ed. and tr.), Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of
Leinster (Dublin).
—— (1976) (ed. and tr.), Táin Bó Cúailnge Recension I (Dublin).
Orgel, S., and Goldberg, J., (1991) (eds.), John Milton (Oxford).
—— —— (2004) (eds.), John Milton Paradise Lost (Oxford).
Osborn, M. (1996), ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, in Bjork and Niles
(eds.): 341–72.
Otis, B. (1963), Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford).
Page, D. L. (1955), The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford).
Palmer, L. R. (1963), The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts (Oxford).
—— (1980), The Greek Language (London).
Parker, Patricia A. (1979), Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a
Mode (Princeton).
Parry, A. (1971), ‘Introduction’, in M. Parry (1971): pp. ix–lxii.
Parry, M. (1971), The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of
Milman Parry, ed. A. Parry (Oxford).
Parsons, P. J. (1992), ‘3965: Simonides, Elegies’. Oxyrhynchus Papyri 59: 4–50.
—— (2001), ‘ ‘‘These fragments we have shored against our ruin’’ ’, in
Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 55–64.
Pavlock, B. (1990), Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition (Ithaca).
Pease, A. S. (1935) (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Cam-
bridge, Mass.).
Pelliccia, H. (1992), ‘Sappho 16, Gorgias’ Helen, and the Preface to
Herodotus’ Histories’. YClS 29: 63–84.
Pelling, C. B. R. (1988), Plutarch: Life of Antony (Cambridge).
—— (1997) (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford).
—— (1999), ‘Epilogue’, in Kraus (ed.): 325–60.
—— (2000), ‘Fun with Fragments: Athenaeus and the Historians’, in
Braund and Wilkins (eds.): 171–90.
Pestalozzi, H. (1945), Die Achilleis als Quelle der Ilias (Zurich).
Pietsch, C. (1999), Die Argonautika des Apollonios von Rhodos: Unter-
suchungen zum Problem der einheitlichen Konzeption des Inhalts (Hermes
Einzelschriften 80, Stuttgart).
Pinsent, J. (1992), ‘The Odyssised Iliad ’, in J. Pinsent and H. V. Hurt (eds.),
Homer 1987: Papers of the Third Greenbank Colloquium, April 1987
(Liverpool): 75–84.
 References 403
Ploix, C. (1868), ‘Les Noms qui proviennent de la racine DIV’. Mémoires de
la Société de Linguistique de Paris 1: 213–22.
Pohlenz, M. (1937), Herodot, der erste Geschichtsschreiber des Abendlandes
(Leipzig).
Pollmann, K. F. L. (2004), Statius, Thebaid 12: Introduction, Text, and
Commentary (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich).
Poppe, E. (2003), ‘Personal Names and an Insular Tradition of Pseudo-
Dares’. Ériu 53: 53–60.
Porter, D. H. (1972), ‘Horace, Carmina, iv, 12’. Latomus 31: 71–87.
Postgate, J. P. (1901) (ed.), Select Elegies of Propertius (London).
Powell, B., and Morris, I. (1997) (eds.), A New Companion to Homer
(Leiden).
Pucci, J. (1991), ‘The Dilemma of Writing: Augustine, Confessions 4.6 and
Horace, Odes 1.3’. Arethusa 24: 257–81.
—— (1992), ‘Horace and Virgilian Mimesis: A Re-Reading of Odes 1.3’. CW
85: 659–73.
Pucci, P. (1987), Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey
and the Iliad (Ithaca).
Puhvel, J. (1989), Comparative Mythology (Baltimore).
Pulleyn, S. (2000), Homer, Iliad Book One: Edited with an Introduction,
Translation, and Commentary (Oxford).
Putnam, M. C. J. (1971), ‘Aes triplex (Horace, Odes 1.3.9)’. CQ 21: 454.
—— (1986), ArtiWces of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes (Ithaca and
London).
—— (1992), ‘Umbro, Nireus and Love’s Threnody’. Vergilius 38: 12–23.
—— (1998), Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven).
—— (2000), Horace’s Carmen Saeculare: Ritual Magic and the Poet’s Art
(New Haven and London).
Quadlbauer, F. (1958), ‘Die genera dicendi bis Plinius d. J.’ WS 71: 55–111.
Quinn, K. (1963), ‘Virgil’s Tragic Queen’, in K. Quinn, Latin Explorations:
Critical Studies in Roman Literature (London): 29–58.
Quint, D. (1986), Origins and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions
of the Source (New Haven).
—— (1993), Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to
Milton (Princeton).
Raaflaub, K. (1987), ‘Herodotus, Political Thought, and the Meaning of
History’. Arethusa 20: 221–48.
Reckford, K. (1995–6), ‘Recognising Venus (I): Aeneas Meets his Mother’.
Arion 3.2: 1–42.
Reichel, M. (1994), Fernbeziehungen in der Ilias (Tübingen).
404 References
Reid, D. (1991), ‘Tasso and Milton on How One Sees Oneself ’, in
M. A. Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions
(Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 90; Binghamton): 445–62.
Reinhardt, K. (1938), Das Parisurteil, Wissenschaft und Gegenwart 11
(Frankfurt) (repr. in Reinhardt (1948): 11–36 and (1960): 16–36).
—— (1948), Von Werken und Formen: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Godesberg).
—— (1960), Tradition und Geist, ed. C. Becker (Göttingen).
—— (1961), Die Ilias und ihr Dichter, ed. U. Hölscher (Göttingen).
Remley, P. G. (1996), Old English Biblical Verse (Cambridge).
Renfrew, C. (1987), Archaeology and Language (London).
Rengakos, A. (2004), ‘Die Argonautika und das ‘‘kyklische Gedicht’’ ’, in
A. Bierl, A. Schmitt, and A. Willi (eds.), Antike Literatur in neuer Deutung
(Festschrift J. Latacz) (Munich): 277–304.
Rhu, Lawrence (1993), The Genesis of Tasso’s Literary Theory (Detroit).
Rich, J. W. (1996), ‘Augustus and the spolia opima’. Chiron 26: 85–127.
—— (2002), review of Spannagel (1999): BMCRev (http://ccat. sas.upenn.
edu/bmcr/) 2002.030.21.
Richardson, L. (1977), Propertius. Elegies I–IV (Norman).
—— (1992), A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Balti-
more).
Richardson, N. (1974) (ed.), The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford).
—— (1984), ‘Recognition Scenes in the Odyssey and Ancient Literary Criti-
cism’. Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 4: 219–36.
—— (1993), The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 6: Books 21–24 (Cambridge).
Richardson, S. (1990), The Homeric Narrator (Nashville).
Ricur, P. (1983–5), Temps et récit i–iii (Paris).
Roberts, W. R. (1912) (ed.), Longinus On the Sublime (2nd edn., Cam-
bridge).
Robinson, F. (1993), The Tomb of Beowulf and Other Essays (Oxford).
Robinson, M. (forthcoming), Ovid’s Fasti Book 2. A Commentary (Oxford).
Rohde, E. (1925), Psyche i–ii (9th and 10th edns., Tübingen).
Rollin, R. B. (1973), ‘Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’ Milton Studies 5:
3–37.
Roscher, W. H. (1883), Nektar und Ambrosia (Leipzig).
Rosen, R. (1997), ‘Homer and Hesiod’, in Powell and Morris (eds.): 463–88.
—— and Sluiter, I. (2003) (eds.), ANDREIA: Studies in Manliness and
Courage in Classical Antiquity (Leiden).
Rowell, H. T. (1940), ‘The Forum and Funeral Imagines of Augustus’.
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 17: 131–43.
—— (1941), ‘Virgil and the Forum of Augustus’. AJPh 62: 261–76.
 References 405
Rudd, N. (1986), ‘The Idea of Empire in the Aeneid’, in R. A. Cardwell and
J. Hamilton (eds.), Virgil in a Cultural Tradition: Essays to Celebrate the
Bimillennium (Nottingham): 28–42.
Russell, D. A. (1964) (ed.), Longinus, On the Sublime (Oxford).
—— (1979), ‘De Imitatione’, in A. J. Woodman and D. West (eds.), Creative
Imitation and Latin Poetry (Cambridge): 1–16.
Russo, J. (1992), Commentary on Odyssey Books XVII–XX, in Russo, Fer-
nández-Galliano, and Heubeck (eds.): 3–127.
—— FernÆndez-Galliano, M., and Heubeck, A. (1992) (eds.), A Com-
mentary on Homer’s Odyssey vol. iii: Books XVII–XXIV (Oxford).
Rutherford, I. (2001), ‘The New Simonides: Towards a Commentary’, in
Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 33–54.
Rutherford, R. B. (1982), ‘Tragic Form and Feeling in the Iliad ’. JHS 102:
145–60.
—— (1985), ‘At Home and Abroad: Aspects of the Odyssey’. PCPhS 31:
133–50.
—— (1986), ‘The Philosophy of the Odyssey’. JHS 106: 145–62.
—— (1992) (ed.), Odyssey XIX and XX (Cambridge).
—— (1996), Homer (Oxford).
—— (2001), ‘From the Iliad to the Odyssey’, in Cairns (ed.): 117–46 (1st
pub. in BICS 38 (1991–3): 47–54).
—— (forthcoming), ‘Tragedy and History’, in Marincola (ed.).
Said, E. W. (1993), Culture and Imperialism (London).
Salemme, C. (1980), Strutture semiologiche nel De Rerum Natura di Lucrezio
(Naples).
Sandbach, F. H. (1985), Aristotle and the Stoics (PCPhS Suppl. 10, Cam-
bridge).
Sayers, W. (1996), ‘Homeric Echoes in Táin Bó Cúailnge?’ Emania 14:
65–73.
Schadewaldt, W. (1951), ‘Einblick in die ErWndung der Ilias: Ilias und Mem-
nonis’, in W. Schadewaldt, Von Homers Welt und Werk (Stuttgart): 155–202.
Schein, S. (1984), The Heart of Achilles (Berkeley).
—— (1995), ‘Female Representations and Interpreting the Odyssey’, in
B. Cohen (ed.), The DistaV Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s
Odyssey (Oxford): 17–27.
Schetter, W. (1960), Untersuchungen zur Epischen Kunst des Statius (Wies-
baden).
Schlunk, R. R. (1974), The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid: A Study of the
InXuence of Ancient Literary Criticism on Vergil (Ann Arbor).
Schmidt, J.-U. (2003), ‘Die Blendung des Kyklopen und der Zorn des
Poseidon’. WS 116: 5–42.
406 References
Schmit-Neuerberg, T. (1999), Vergils Aeneis und die antike Homerexegese
(Berlin and New York).
Schmitt, R. (1967), Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit
(Wiesbaden).
—— (1968) (ed.), Indogermanische Dichtersprache (Darmstadt).
Schoeck, G. (1961), Ilias und Aithiopis: Kyklische Motive in homerischer
Brechung (Zurich).
Sch
ffel, C. (2002), Martial, Buch 8. Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kom-
mentar (Stuttgart).
Schwabl, H. (1982), ‘Traditionelle Gestaltung, Motivwiederholung und
Mimesis im homerischen Epos’. WS 16: 13–33.
Schwinge, E. R. (1993), Die Odyssee—nach den Odysseen: Betrachtungen zu
ihrer individuellen Physiognomie (Göttingen).
Scodel, R. (2002), Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative and Audience
(Michigan).
—— (2004), ‘The Modesty of Homer’, in C. Mackie (ed.), Oral Performance
and its Context: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece v (Leiden): 1–19.
Scragg, D. G. (1991) (ed.), The Battle of Maldon AD 991 (Oxford).
Segal, C. (1971), The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad
(Mnemosyne Suppl. 17, Leiden).
Severyns, A. (1928), Le Cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque (Liège–
Paris).
Shapiro, H. A. (1994), Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece
(London).
Sharrock, A. (1994), Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 2
(Oxford).
—— (2000), ‘Intratextuality: Texts, Parts, and (W)holes in Theory’, in
A. Sharrock and H. Morales (eds.), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman
Textual Relations (Oxford): 1–39.
Shaw, P. J. (2001), ‘Lords of Hellas, Old Men of the Sea: The Occasion of
Simonides’ Elegy on Plataea’, in Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 164–81.
Sherratt, E. S. (1992), ‘ ‘‘Reading the Texts’’: Archaeology and the Homeric
Question’, in Emlyn-Jones et al. (eds.): 145–65.
Sihler, A. (1995), New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Oxford).
Silver, I. (1961), Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance in France, vol. 1:
Ronsard and the Greek Epic (St Louis).
Simon, E. (1992), ‘Neues zu den Mythen von Aineias, Sarpedon und Itys in
der etruskischen Kunst’. AA: 233–42.
Simons, J. (1952), Jerusalem in the Old Testament (Leiden).
 References 407
Simonsuuri, K. (1979), Homer’s Original Genius: 18th Century Notions of
the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798) (Cambridge).
Sivan, D. (2001), A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Handbuch der
Orientalistik 28, Leiden).
Skulsky, S. (1985), ‘ ‘‘Inuitus, regina . . .’’: Aeneas and the Love of Rome’.
AJPh 106: 447–55.
Slatkin, L. (2001), ‘The Wrath of Thetis’, in Cairns (ed.): 409–34 (1st pub.
in TAPhA 116 (1986): 1–24).
Smith, G. A. (1907), Jerusalem, i (London).
Snodgrass, A. (1998), Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek
Art (Cambridge).
Soden, W. von (1965), Akkadisches Handwörterbuch i–iii (Wiesbaden).
Solodow, J. B. (1988), The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill).
Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1988), ‘Myth as History: The Previous Owners of
the Delphic Oracle’, in J. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Myth-
ology (London): 215–41.
Spannagel, M. (1999), Exemplaria Principis: Untersuchungen zu Entstehung
und Ausstattung des Augustusforums (Heidelberg).
Spanoudakis, K. (2002), Philitas of Cos (Mnemosyne Suppl. 229, Leiden).
Stadter, P. A. (1973a) (ed.), The Speeches in Thucydides (Chapel Hill).
—— (1973b), ‘Thucydidean Orators in Plutarch’, in Stadter (1973a) (ed.):
109–23.
—— (1989), A Commentary on Plutarch’s Pericles (Chapel Hill).
Stafford, F. (1996), ‘Introduction: The Ossianic Poems of James Macpher-
son’, in Macpherson (1996 (1760–73)): pp. v–xix.
Stahl, H.-P. (1985), Propertius: ‘Love’ and ‘War’: Individual and State under
Augustus (Berkeley).
Stambler, S. (1982), ‘Herodotus’, in Luce (ed.): 209–32.
Stanford, W. B. (1947) (ed.), The Odyssey of Homer (London).
Starr, R. J. (1987), ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’.
CQ 37: 212–23.
Steadman, J. (1976), Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost (Chicago).
Stehle, E. (2001), ‘A Bard of the Iron Age and his Auxiliary Muse’, in
Boedeker and Sider (eds.): 106–19.
Stokes, W. H. (1877), ‘Cuchulainn’s Death: Abridged from the Book of
Leinster’. Revue Celtique 3: 175–85.
—— (1884) (ed. and tr.), Togal Troı́, in W. H. Stokes and E. Windisch,
Irische Texte 2.1 (Leipzig): 1–141.
Strasburger, H. (1955), ‘Herodot und das perikleische Athen’. Historia 4:
1–25 (repr. in Marg (ed.): 574–608).
—— (1972), Homer und die Geschichtsschreibung (Heidelberg).
408 References
Strecker, G. (1962), ‘Entrückung’. RAC 5: 461–76.
Sullivan, F. A. (1969), ‘Mezentius: A Virgilian Creation’. CPh 64: 219–25.
Sullivan, J. P. (1976), Propertius: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge).
Super, R. H. (1960) (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold i:
On the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor).
SzemerØnyi, O. (1996), Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (Oxford).
Taplin, O. (1990), ‘The Earliest Quotation of the Iliad ?’, in E. M. Craik
(ed.), Owls to Athens (Oxford): 109–12.
—— (1992), Homeric Soundings (Oxford).
—— (2000) (ed.), Literature in the Greek World (Oxford).
Tarrant, R. J. (1997a), ‘Aspects of Virgil’s Reception in Antiquity’, in
Martindale (ed.): 56–72.
—— (1997b), ‘Poetry and Power: Virgil’s Poetry in Contemporary Context’,
in Martindale (ed.): 169–87.
—— (2002), ‘Ovid and Ancient Literary History’, in Hardie (ed.): 13–33.
Tatum, J. (1984), ‘Allusion and Interpretation in Aeneid 6. 440–76’. AJPh
105: 8–14.
Tennyson, H. (1897), Alfred Lord Tennyson i–ii (London).
Thieme, P. (1952a), ‘Nektar’, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Säch-
sischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Phil.-Hist. Klasse, vol. 98,
instalment 5 (Berlin): 5–15 (repr. in Schmitt (1968): 102–12).
—— (1952b), ‘Ambrosia’, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Phil.-Hist. Klasse, vol. 98, instal-
ment 5 (Berlin): 15–34 (repr. in Schmitt (1968): 113–32).
—— (1961), ‘Nektar’. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung 77: 88
(repr. in Schmitt (ed.): 324).
—— (1965), ‘Īśopanishad (¼ Vājaseneyi-Samhitā 40) 1–14’. Journal of the
American Oriental Society 85: 89–99.
—— (1974), ‘Nektar—und kein Ende’, in M. Mayrhofer et al. (eds.), Anti-
quitates Indogermanicae: Gedenkschrift für H. Güntert (Innsbruck):
158–63.
Thomas, R. (2000), Herodotus in Context (Cambridge).
Thomas, R. F. (1982), Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry (Cambridge).
—— (1983), ‘Callimachus, the Victoria Berenices and Roman Poetry’. CQ
33: 92–113.
—— (1985), ‘From Recusatio to Commitment: the Evolution of the Vergi-
lian Programme’. Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 5: 61–73.
—— (1988) (ed.), Virgil: Georgics (Cambridge).
—— (2001), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge).
Thome, G. (1979), Gestalt und Funktion des Mezentius bei Virgil—mit einem
Ausblick auf die Schlussszene der Aeneis (Frankfurt am Main).
 References 409
Thompson, S. (1955–8), Motif Index of Folk Literature (2nd edn., Copen-
hagen).
Thomson, D. S. (1987), ‘Macpherson’s Ossian: From Ballads to Epics’, in
B. Almqvist, S. Ó Catháin, and P. Ó Héalaı́ (eds.), The Heroic Process (Dún
Laoghaire): 243–64.
Thurneysen, R. (1921), Die Irische Helden- und Königsage (Halle).
Tissol, G. (1992), ‘An Allusion to Callimachus’ Aetia in Vergil’s Aeneid 11’.
HSCPh 94: 263–8.
—— (1993), ‘Ovid’s Little Aeneid and the Thematic Integrity of the Meta-
morphoses’. Helios 20: 69–79.
—— (1997), The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Princeton).
Toorn, K. van der, Becking, B., and Horst, P. W. van der (1999) (eds.),
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd edn., Leiden).
Treip, M. (1994), Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition
to Paradise Lost (Lexington).
Treves, P. (1941), ‘Herodotus, Gelon, and Pericles’. CPh 36: 321–45.
Tristram H. L. C. (1994), ‘What is the Purpose of Táin Bó Cúailnge?’, in
Mallory and Stockman (eds.): 11–22.
—— (1995), ‘The ‘‘Cattle-Raid of Cuailnge’’ in Tension and Transition
between the Oral and the Written: Classical Subtexts and Narrative
Heritage’, in D. Edel (ed.), Cultural Identity and Cultural Integration:
Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Dublin): 61–81.
Tucker, H. (2002), ‘Epic’, in R. Cronin, A. Harrison, and A. Chapman
(eds.), A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Malden): 25–41.
Ullendorff, E. (1963–4), ‘Ugaritic Studies within their Semitic and Eastern
Mediterranean Setting’. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 46: 236–49.
Usener, H. (1896), Götternamen (Bonn).
Usener, K. (1990), Beobachtungen zum Verhältnis der Odyssee zur Ilias
(Tübingen).
van Es, B. B. (2002), Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford).
Vernant, J.-P. (1988), ‘The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of
the Social and Psychological Conditions’, in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-
Naquet (eds.), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, tr. J. Lloyd (New
York): 23–8 (1st pub. as Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1972)).
Vessey, D. W. T. C. (1969–70), ‘Nescio quid maius’. PVS 9: 53–76.
—— (1973), Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge).
—— (1982), ‘Flavian Epic’, in E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen (eds.), The
Cambridge History of Classical Literature (Cambridge): ii. 558–96.
—— (1996), ‘Honouring Statius’, in F. Delarue et al. (eds.), Epicedion:
Hommage à P. Papinius Statius (Poitiers): 7–24.
410 References
Vincent, H. (1912), Jérusalem: Recherches de topographie, archéologie et
d’histoire, i: Jérusalem antique (Paris).
Visser, E. (1997), Homers Katalog der SchiVe (Stuttgart and Leipzig).
Walbank, F. W. (1957–79), A Historical Commentary on Polybius i–iii
(Oxford).
—— (1972), Polybius (Berkeley).
Waldstein, C. H. (1902–5), The Argive Heraeum (Boston).
Warden, J. (1982), ‘Epic into Elegy: Propertius 4,90,70f.’ Hermes 110:
228–42.
Wardle, D. (1994), Suetonius’ Life of Caligula: A Commentary (Brussels).
Watkins, C. (1977), ‘A propos de mênis’. Bulletin de la Société Linguistique
de Paris 72: 187–209.
—— (1995), How to Kill a Dragon (Oxford).
Webb, T. (2004), ‘Homer and the Romantics’, in Fowler (ed.) 287–310.
Wȩcowski, M. (1996), ‘Ironie et histoire: Le Discours de Soclès (Hérodote
V 92)’. Anc. Soc. 27: 205–58.
—— (2004), ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox: Form and Meaning in the Pro-
logue of Herodotus’. JHS 124: 143–64.
Wees, H. van (1992), Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer
and History (Amsterdam).
Weinstock, S. (1971), Divus Iulius (Oxford).
Weiss, C. (1986), ‘Eos: IV Eos und Memnon’. Lexicon Iconographicum
Mythologiae Classicae iii. i. 779–88.
Welcker, F. G. (1849), Der epische Cyclus oder die Homerischen Dichter
(Bonn).
West, D. (1990), ‘Multiple-Correspondence Similes in the Aeneid ’, in Har-
rison (ed.): 429–44 (1st pub. in JRS 59 (1969): 40–9).
—— (1993), ‘The Pageant of Heroes as Panegyric’, in H. D. Jocelyn (ed.),
Tria Lustra: Essays in Honour of John Pinsent (Liverpool): 283–96.
—— and Woodman, A. J. (1984) (eds.), Poetry and Politics in the Age of
Augustus (Cambridge).
West, M. L. (1966) (ed.), Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford).
—— (1978) (ed.), Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford).
—— (1993), ‘Simonides redivivus’. ZPE 98: 1–14.
—— (1997a), The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry
(Oxford).
—— (1997b), ‘Homer’s Meter’, in Morris and Powell (eds.): 218–37.
—— (1998), ‘The Textual Criticism and Editing of Homer’, in G. Most
(ed.), Editing Texts/Texte editieren (Göttingen): 94–110.
—— (1998–2000) (ed.), Homeri Ilias i–ii (Munich).
—— (1999), ‘The Invention of Homer’. CQ 49: 364–82.
 References 411
—— (2000), ‘Iliad and Aethiopis on Stage: Aeschylus and Son’. CQ 50:
338–52.
—— (2001), Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (Leipzig and
Munich).
—— (2003a) (ed. and tr.), Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, Mass.).
—— (2003b), ‘Iliad and Aethiopis’. CQ 53: 1–14.
—— (2003c) (ed. and tr.), Homeric Hymns; Homeric Apocrypha; Lives of
Homer (Cambridge, Mass., and London).
—— (2005), ‘Odyssey and Argonautica’. CQ 55: 39–64.
West, S. R. (1988), ‘Commentary on Odyssey Books I–IV’, in Heubeck,
West, and Hainsworth (eds.): 51–245.
—— (1992), ‘Textile Homage: A Note on Aeschylus, Agamemnon 895–974’,
in Apodosis: Essays Presented to W. W. Cruickshank to Mark his Eightieth
Birthday (London): 111–18.
—— (2001), ‘Phoinix’s Antecedents: A Note on Iliad 9’. SCI 20: 1–15.
—— (2002), Demythologisation in Herodotus (Xenia Toruniensia 6, Toruń).
—— (2003), ‘Crete in the Aeneid: Two Intertextual Footnotes’. CQ 53:
302–8.
Wheeler, S. M. (1999), A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Philadelphia).
White, P. (1988), ‘Julius Caesar in Augustan Rome’. Phoenix 42: 334–56.
—— (1991), ‘Maecenas’ Retirement’, CPh 86: 130–8.
—— (1993), Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome (Cam-
bridge, Mass.).
Whitehead, D. (1986), The Demes of Attica 508/7–ca 250 BC (Princeton).
Whitney, W. D. (2000), Sanskrit Grammar (5th edn., Delhi).
Wigodsky, M. (1972), Virgil and Early Latin Poetry (Wiesbaden).
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von (1984), Der Glaube der Hellenen
(repr., Darmstadt) (1st pub. Berlin, 1931).
Wilkinson, L. P. (1969), The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cam-
bridge).
—— (1970), ‘Pindar and the Proem to the Third Georgic’, in W. Wimmel
(ed.), Forschungen zur römischen Literatur (Wiesbaden): 286–90.
Willcock, M. M. (1983), ‘Antilochus in the Iliad ’, in Mélanges Édouard
Delebecque (Aix-en-Provence): 477–85.
—— (1987), ‘The Final Scenes of Iliad XVII’, in Bremer, de Jong, and KalV
(eds.): 185–94.
—— (1997), ‘Neoanalysis’, in Morris and Powell (eds.): 174–89.
—— (2001), ‘Mythical Paradeigmata in the Iliad’, in Cairns (ed.): 435–55
(1st pub. in CQ 14 (1964): 141–54).
Williams, F. (1978), Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo: A Commentary (Oxford).
412 References
Williams, G. (1968), Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford).
—— (1978), Change and Decline (Berkeley).
—— (1986), ‘Statius and Virgil: Defensive Imitation’ in J. D. Bernard (ed.),
Virgil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and his InXuence (New
York): 207–224.
Williams, M. F. (2003), ‘The Sidus Iulium, the Divinity of Men, and the
Golden Age in Virgil’s Aeneid ’. LICS 2.1 (online at: http://www.leeds.ac.
uk/classics/lics/2003/200301.pdf).
Williams, R. D. (1960) (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quintus
(Oxford).
—— (1972) (ed.), The Aeneid of Virgil: Books 1–6 (London).
Wilson, D. F. (2002), Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad
(Cambridge).
—— (2003), ‘Lion Kings: Heroes in the Epic Mirror’. Colby Quarterly 38:
231–58.
Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1980), Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cam-
bridge).
Wiseman, T. P. (1984), ‘Cybele, Virgil and Augustus’ in D. West and
Woodman (eds.): 117–28.
Wood, R. (1996), ‘Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer’, in
I. de Jong (ed.), Homer: Critical Assessments i (London): 20–6 (partial
reprint; orig. pub. in 1767).
Woodman, A. J. (1988), Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London).
Woolf, R. (1976), ‘The Ideal of Men Dying with their Lord in the Germania
and in The Battle of Maldon’. Anglo-Saxon England 5: 63–81.
Wray, D. (2000), ‘Apollonius’ Masterplot: Narrative Strategy in Argonautica
I’, in Harder et al. (eds.): 239–65.
Wright, G. M., and Jones, P. V. (1997) (eds.), Homer: German Scholarship
in Translation (Oxford).
Wyke, M. (1987), ‘The Elegiac Woman at Rome’. PCPhS 33: 153–78.
Zanker, G. (1994), The Heart of Achilles (Ann Arbor).
Zanker, P. (1968), Forum Augustum: Das Bildprogramm (Tübingen).
—— (1988), The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor).
Ziegler, K. (1952), ‘Polybios (1)’. RE xxi: 1440–578.
Zwierlein, O. (1986), ‘Lucans Caesar in Troja’. Hermes 114: 460–78.
 Index of Passages

from texts in Akkadian, Greek, Hebrew, Hittite, Italian, Latin, Modern English, Old
English, Old Indic, and Old and Middle Irish.
For details of editions used, see p. 432.

A K KA DI A N

Epic of Gilgamesh
VI 1–91 59, 336 XI 162 65
VI 80–2 335

GREEK

Aelian 1.97–100 124–5 n.48

VH 11.2 366 n.161 1.149–50 116 n.21, 124 n.45
[Aelius Aristides] 1.247–305 120
Rhetorica 1.142 Schmid 224 n.25 1.251–2 124
1.253–5 122 n.36, 124 n.46
Aeschylus 1.255 118, 120
Choe. 231–2 18 n.82 1.256 124
Sept. 424–5 225 n.26 1.259 124
427–8 228 1.263–305 122–4
441 226 n.37 1.268–77 126 n.54
529–30 227 n.41 1.278 124
Supp. 381 54 n.33 1.284–9 124
TrGF iii.375 32 n.143 1.286 122 n.35
Alcman (PMG) 1.341 122 n.35
3.1–3 44 n.194 1.362 117 n.24
14(a)1–3 44 n.194 1.404–5 118
fr. 42 68 1.441–2 117
Anthologia Palatina 1.448 122 n.35
9.190.2 105 n.1 1.466–8 227 n.41
1.557–8 127
Antipater of Sidon 1.627–30 119
LVIII.2 Gow-Page, HE 105 n.1 1.630–9 150
Apollodorus 1.637–8 119 n.29
Epit. 20.1 25 1.675–96 150
Apollonius Rhodius 1.793–833 150
Argon. 1.685 122 n.36
1.15–16 117 n.24 1.742–6 119 n.29
414 Index of Passages
Apollonius Rhodius (cont.) 2.803 123
1.769–72 119 n.29 2.833–4 120
1.685–8 119 2.858–63 121
1.836–41 150–1 2.885–93 121
1.861–74 151 n.52 2.985–95 120
1.879–82 151 2.1090–1227 120
1.896–7 151 2.1098–1103 123
1.901–3 117 n.24, 118 n.26 2.1140 123 n.43
1.919–21 122–3 n.39 2.1152 123
1.989–1011 119 2.1208–13 119 n.30
1.1003–5 128 n.59 3.210–41 12
1.1213–17 119 n.31 3.250–2 127
1.1211–69 125 3.253–67 123
1.1265–72 119 n.31 3.304–13 124
1.1298–1308 120 3.423 123 n.43
1.1310–28 120 3.528–33 127
1.1315 125 3.584–8 124 n.45
1.1318 118 3.594–605 124 n.45
1.1339 125 3.623–7 119 n.29, 126
1.1345 125 3.656–63 126 n.54
2.1 119 3.732–5 127
2.38–40 119 3.876–86 143 n.22, 155 n.68
2.88–91 119 3.983 128
2.135–41 123 n.41 3.997 118
2.147–50 125 n.50 3.1054 119
2.154 125 3.1105 127
2.183 122 n.37 3.1134–6 127
2.197–201 122 n.37 3.1189 118 n.27
2.218 122 n.36 3.1306–7 118 n.26, 27
2.221 122 n.37 3.1327–9 119
2.236–9 122 n.38 3.1407 118
2.239 122 n.37 3.1407, 4.1 126
2.254 122 4.1 344
2.257–8 122 n.39 4.50–65 127
2.310 121 4.151 119 n.30
2.311–425 120–2 4.193 126
2.327 122 4.203 126 n.52
2.410 123 n.43 4.241–3 127
2.419–20 122 n.35 4.360–5 126
2.424 118 n.27 4.368–9 127
2.444–7 121 4.411–13 128
2.615–18 117 n.24 4.468–9 119 n.31
2.662–8 119 4.541 127
2.715–19 120 4.560 127 n.57
2.744–91 123 4.560–1 117
2.757–8 123 n.41 4.576–9 125 n.50
2.762–71 120 4.587–8 127 n.57
2.776 123 4.661 153 n.57
2.796–9 123 4.730–7 120 n.32
 Index of Passages 415
4.783–832 125 1453a29 108 n.5
4.811–16 127 1454b15–18 107
4.1028 35 n.152 1455b10 109
4.1031–5 119 n.29, 126 1459a30–34 109
4.1036–40 126 1459a30–7 111
4.1060–7 126 n.54 1460a11–b5 109
4.1121–69 125 Rh.
4.1775–6 118, 126 1357a22–b1 109 n.7
4.1275–6 117, 118 n.27 1365a31–3 91
4.1307 117 1402b12–1403a10 109 n.7
4.1319–21 117 1404b24–5 373 n.190
4.1651–88 127–8 1411a 2–4 91
4.1682–6 128 n.59 Fragments (Rose)
4.1776 344 fr. 70 107
Fragments (Powell) fr. 163 337 n.24
fr. 5.4–5 122 n.37 [Aristotle]
fr. 12.15 127 n.58 Mund. 1.1 232 n.65
Appian Arrian
B Civ. 1.16 177 Anab. 3.10.1–2 228 n.46
Pun. 132 353 n.99
Athenaeus
Aristophanes 4.138 b-c 100 n.65
Acharn. 412–15 373 n.190
Ran. 959–63 373 n.190 Bacchylides
Lys. 1295 44 n.194 9.9 44 n.194
Peace 435–6 80 n.16
Aristotle Callimachus
Eth. Nic. Aet., bks 1–2 (Massimilla)
1145a27 95 n.56 fr. 1 145, 148
1177b30–4 362 fr. 1.3–4 108
Metaph. fr. 9.13–14 214 n.173
˜1015b36–1016a12 108 n.5 fr. 25.21–2 113
˜ 1016a20–4 109 n.9 Aet., bks 3–4 (Pfeiffer)
˜ 1023b26–1024a10 109 n.8 fr. 67.9–10 147 n.37
˜ 1023b26–36 110 fr. 110 350
( 1052a19 108 n.5 Ia.
1077a20–36 110 13 114 n.18
Ph. Hecale (Hollis)
1.185b7 108 n.5 fr. 2.1 114, 115 n.19
Poet. fr. 7 113
1450b24 110 fr. 10 116
1450b29–30 109 fr. 13 116
1450b36–1451a6 110 fr. 17 124
1451a16 109 n.9 fr. 17.2–4 116
1451a20 342 fr. 17.3 113–14
1451a25–6 116 n.23 fr. 18 116
1451a27–8 109 fr. 30 373 n.190
1451a31–2 110 frr. 47–9 115 n.19
1452a15 108 n.5 fr. 49.2–3 114, 116 n.22
1452a29–31 279 fr. 60 116
416 Index of Passages
Callimachus (cont.) Little Iliad, Proclus § 2 21
fr. 68 118 n.26 n.101
fr. 69.1 112 Naupacti[c]a fr. 6.3 118 n.27
fr. 69.4–9 116 See also Panyassis.
fr. 79 113 n.17 Epictetus
fr. 80.1–2 116 n.22 1.6.19 230 n.59
fr. 80.5 114 Epicurus
fr. 101 112 127 Arrighetti 107 n.3
Hymn 2
105–13 145 n.29, 189 n.29 Euripides
Epigr. (Pfeiffer) Bacch. 141 67
1.9–10 147 n.38 El. 539–40 18 n.82
6 107 IT 407–21 191 n.40
28.1 23 n.110 Phoen. 1130–3 225 n.26
Fragments (Pfeiffer) 1172 234 n.80
fr. 407. XL 107 Supp. 934, 980–3
fr. 491 115 n.19 362–3
Crinagoras (Gow-Page, GP) Heraclitus
X 166 n.20 fr. 104 DK 3 n.16
XI.1 105 n.1
Herodotus
Dio Cassius Proem 78–85
51.19.2 171 n.33 1.4.1–2 85
53.26.1 166 n.20 1.5.3 85
53.30.5 167 1.8.2 83
Dio Chrysostom 1.13.2 83
52.14 21 n.101 1.32 86
53.1 107 1.35.1 86 n.30
1.45.2–3 86 n.30
Diodorus Siculus 1.67 90 n.40
4.59.6 113 n.16 1.86.6 86
32.4 353 n.99 1.87.2 84 n.24
Diogenes Laertius 1.88.1 86, 339
5.22–7 107 1.155.1 100
Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.86.3 73 n.118
Pomp. 3 78 n.8 2.117 77 n.6
Comp. 25 (Usener-Radermacher, 3.14–16 87–9, 339
ii.132–3) 105 n.1 3.119 100
De Imit. fr. 6.2.4 (Usener-Radermacher, 4.32 77 n.6
ii.204) 108–9 5.32 100 n.64
Thuc. 10 (Usener-Radermacher, 5.91–3 101–3
ii.338.4–10) 108 n.5 5.97.3 79
6.11.1–2 80
Dosiadas 6.109.3 81 n.18
Ara 5–8 128 n.59 7.5.2 98–9
7.11.1 100
Epici Graeci (West) 7.20 78
Cypria, Proclus § 6 10 7.103–4 95
Aethiopis, Proclus § 1 24 7.105.1 94
Aethiopis, Proclus § 2–4 25–41 7.156.2 90 n.40
 Index of Passages 417
7.157.2 91 1 15 n.73
7.158.4 91 35 77 n.7
7.159.1–162.2 89–92 36 15 n.73
7.159.1 338–9 188–93 59
7.178.2 94 n.53 535–60 66
7.181 341 640 68 n.91
7.197.3 95 984 41 n.182
7.208.3 93–4 987–91 33 n.144
7.209.1–2 94 992–1001 117 n.24
7.217.2 92 n.48 Op.
7.219.2 92 n.48 26 6
7.220.2–4 92–5 415 51
7.223 92 n.48 684–94 191 n.40
7.223.3 95 n.55 Fragments (Merkelbach-West)
7.225 92 n.48, 97. n.60 fr. 23a.17–26 33 n.144
7.226.2 94 fr. 23a.20 60 n.61
7.229.2 95–6 fr. 357.2 41 n.184
7.231 96 Homer
7.234–7 94 Il.
7.238 92–3 n.48, 99 1.1 125
8.3.2 100 n.64 1.2 13
8.56 83–4 1.5 82 n.20
8.60a 81 n.18 1.6–8 81–2
8.64.1 84 n.24, 97 n.60 1.25 47
8.65.1–2 84 n.24 1.43–6 192 n.51
8.77 84 n.24 1.69 335–6
8.78.1 97 n.60 1.153–353 346
8.83.1 92 n.48 1.189–92 125
8.84.2 84 n.24 1.240–4 25, 103
8.92 341 1.260–72 123
8.114.2 98 1.352 30
8.118.2 80 n.18 1.353 53
8.124.2–3 95 n.56 1.354 51
9.7b.2 96 1.358 57 n.49
9.26 97 n.60, 98 1.399 53
9.27.4 90 n.42 1.396–406 76 n.2
9.47 92 n.48 1.416–18 30
9.48 94–5 1.420 53
9.62.2 97 n.60 1.463 69 n.95
9.71.3–4 96 1.495–510 144 n.27
9.75 341 1.497–9 53
9.78–9 98–100 1.498 32, 51
9.78.2 94 n.53 1.502–6 32
9.88 100 1.503 50
9.113.2 100 1.518–21 58, 82
9.120.4 100 1.528–30 82 n.20
Hesiod 1.530 54
Theog. 1.541–2 32
418 Index of Passages
Homer (cont.) 5.662 349 n.82
1.560 51 5.674–5 349 n.82
1.566 54 5.699 41 n.182
1.580 51 5.777 63 n.73, 67
1.590–4 76 n.2 5.788–9 90 n.41
1.597–8 68 5.803–8 42 n.187
2.11 94 n.52 6.15 115 n.19
2.13 54 6.42 62
2.87–90 151 n.53 6.100–1 252
2.149–54 83–4 6.199 41 n.182
2.260 8 n.43 6.258 68
2.300–32 9 6.297–311 370
2.412 51 6.305 57
2.488–93 189 6.357–8 97, 353 n.100
2.484–759 346 6.407–39 115 n.19
2.486 15 n.73 6.407 252
2.547 57 6.429–30 127
2.549–51 33 n.144 6.457–8 88 n.36
2.552–4 90 6.490–3 8 n.47
3.18–20 341 6.521–5 97 n.61
3.95 101–2 n.68 7.39–40 341
3.126–8 97, 117 n.24 7.85 33 n.146
3.380–2 33 n.145 7.86–91 353 n.100
3.385 72 7.92 101–2 n.68
4.8 57 7.114–15 90 n.41
4.29 102 7.125 90, 338–9
4.30 51 7.141 48
4.35 341 n.45 7.345–420 42 n.187
4.49 65 8.2–4 56–7
4.50–4 353 8.10–17 76 n.2
4.123 48 8.17–27 53, 57
4.166 51 4.354 8 n.43 8.32 57
4.336–421 97 8.48 57
4.370–418 76 8.80–129 332 n.3
4.384–98 42 n.187 8.229–34 249
5.23 33 n.145 8.306–8 155 n.66
5.62–3 79 8.360–9 111
5.64 79–80 n.14 8.363 117 n.24
5.91 51 9.28–30 101
5.311–18 33 n.145 9.168 42
5.338 67 9.182–98 42
5.339–42 58, 61–3 9.352–5 90 n.41
5.349 58 9.410–16 30
5.355–430 335–6, 346 9.434–605 122
5.370 59 9.485–95 116 n.23, 127
5.381 59 9.535 65–6, 336–7
5.383–404 76 n.2 9.556–65 122 n.37
5.388 61 n.65 9.590–5 122 n.37
5.428–30 369–70 9.617–22 42
 Index of Passages 419
9.646 258 n.33 16.431–61 32–3
9.678–9 258 n.33 16.443 102
9.693–5 101 16.480–505 25–41
9.699–700 252, 364 16.666–83 32–3
10.173–4 80–1 17.91–105 96 n.59
10.216 71 17.91–3 97
10.313 101–2 n.68 17.125 28
10.579 69 n.95 17.126–7 92–3 n.48, 99
11.1–2 92 n.48 17.132–7 228 n.50
11.146 99 n.62 17.140–68 97 n.61
11.368 79 n.13 17.193–6 62–3 n.72
11.404–10 96 n.59 17.194–7 28
11.604 79–80 n.14 17.274 92 n.48, 97 n.60
11.608–10 42 17.281–5 228 n.50
11.631 68 n.93 17.361–2 92 n.48
11.794–7 30 17.414–9 96 n.59
12.46 251–2 17.434–5 92 n.48
12.275 51 17.502–4 92–3 n.48
12.445–9 76 17.556–9 96 n.59
13.35 63 n.73 17.626–33 92 n.48
13.120–2 97 n.61 17.645–7 228 n.51
14.54 51 17.679–700 340
14.153–360 57 17.715–61 25
14.170–1 64 17.746–53 228 n.50
14.170–8 67 18.1–34 340
14.200–4 346 18.1–2 26 n.121, 38 n.167
14.319 60 n.61 18.8–11 30
15.18–24 76 n.2 18.17 26 n.121, 38 n.167
15.138–41 34 18.25 72
15.184–92 53 18.26 40
15.221 41 n.182 18.35–71 25
16.1–3 26 n.121, 38 n.167 18.56 90
16.36–9 30 18.59–60 57 n.49
16.50–1 30 18.79 53
16.64–857 25–41 18.84–5 28
16.72 42 18.95–6 29–31
16.221–4 72 18.98–126 97
16.233 60 18.117–19 34
16.384–92 337 n.27 18.144 29
16.431–61 35–6, 38 n.167, 339 18.176–7 92–3 n.48, 99
16.456 33 n.146 18.189–91 29
16.521–2 34 18.203–18 263–4, 364
16.567 62–3 n.72 18.232–3 92 n.48
16.666–83 339 18.316–30 268
16.670 34, 64, 67 n.89 18.369–19.13 28
16.753 252 18.437 90
16.680 34, 67 n.89 18.464–7 29
16.674 33 n.146 18.534–5 99
16.130–44 28 19.1–2 92 n.48
420 Index of Passages
Homer (cont.) 22.484–507 124
19.12–13 28 23.24–7 99
19.38 34 n.150, 68 23.82–92 27 n.124
19.205–32 73 23.186–7 34 n.150
19.39 73 23.110–897 25
19.113 117 n.24 23.676–7 101–2 n.68
19.221–4 267 n.50 24.15–22 99
19.287–302 115 24.22–30 82
19.302 248 24.31–140 13
19.347 34 n.150, 71–2 24.84–112 32
19.348 73 24.221 335–6
19.353 34 n.150 24.235 71
20.4–6 57 n.49 24.281–508 11–15
20.47 53 24.480–4 86, 339
20.79–85 249, 364 24.487–9 88 n.35
20.234–5 33 n.145, 336–7 24.493–512 115
20.264–8 29 24.505–6 86 n.30
20.291–340 33 n.145 24.516 86 n.30
20.302–8 137–9, 371 n.180 24.518–51 80
20.234 69 24.525–6 86 n.30
20.332 92–3 n.48 24.543–9 115, 122 n.38
20.443–4 33 n.145 24.547 53
21.34–114 122 24.718–81 248 n.18
21.108–12 122 n.39 24.734 117 n.24
21.109–10 34 Od.
21.122–35 122 n.39 1.1–5 111 n.12
21.199 53 1.4 13
21.385–520 346 1.10 15
21.505 53 1.22–87 13
21.507 67 1.33–43, 64–79 82–3
21.594 29 1.161–2 13
21.597 33 n.145 1.235–43 13
22.33–92 124 n.45 1.339 15 n.73
22.60–5 88 1.349 62
22.105–8 252–3 1.356–64 8 n.47
22.126 77 n.7 2.82–4 101–2 n.68
22.135–6 96 n.59 2.163–76 9
22.166–87 38 n.167, 339 3.204 353 n.100
22.181 102 4.12–14 124–5 n.48
22.322–63 25 4.83–5 28 n.127
22.323 29 4.170 117 n.24
22.359–60 25 4.240–64 19
22.368 28 4.187–8 24
22.385 27 n.124 4.240–64 43
22.395–404 99 4.240–3 117 n.24
22.416–29 115 4.285–6 101–2 n.68
22.422 13 4.445 34 n.150
22.455–9 253, 364 4.445–6 64 n.78
22.477–514 248 n.18 4.534–5 119 n.31
 Index of Passages 421
4.584 353 n.100 10.519 68
4.703–66 123 11.27 68
4.722–8 111 n.12 11.110–17 117 n.25
5.1–224 13 11.181–204 124
5.5–20 144 n.27 11.225–332 22 n.102
5.55 57 n.49 11.330 62 n.72
5.94 63 n.73 11.333 101–2 n.68
5.165 68 11.409–11 119 n.31
5.221–4 111 n.12 11.468 27
5.335 57 n.49 11.482–91 22 n.102
5.372 18 n.84 11.522 24
5.394 ff. 12 n.58 11.532–3 8 n.47
5.394–9 344 11.601–26 6, 15, 22 n.102
6.8 62 11.622 117 n.24
6.102–9 143 n.22, 155 n.68 12.37–110 121
6.130–6 13 12.61–3 67
6.149–85 142–3 12.70 6, 15
6.228 18 n.84 12.137–41 117 n.25
6.255–7.154 11–15 12.258–9 111 n.12
6.328–31 141 n.20 13.1–3 101–2 n.68
7.145 339 13.189–93 143 n.24
7.211–12 111 n.12 13.261 62
7.234–97 17–18, 339 13.287–302 141
7.259–60 34 n.150, 67 n.89 13.399–400 373 n.190
7.265 34 n.150, 67 n.89 14.196–8 111 n.12
8.80–1 57 15.246 88 n.35
8.155 111 n.12 15.348 88 n.35
8.363 57 16.393–9 101–2 n.68
8.364–5 62 n.72 17.36–56 123
8.461–8 152 n.54 17.312–23 124
8.480–8 122 n.39 17.383 3 n.16
8.500 15 n.73 18.151 68
8.523–30 126 n.54 18.193 34 n.150
8.530–1 80 n.15 19.96–604 16–23
8.560 353 n.100 19.129 111 n.12
9.6 3 n.16 19.164 77 n.7
9.19–20 15 19.213–60 339
9.20 344 19.344–8 111 n.12
9.37–8 111 n.12 19.357 41 n.183
9.191 62 19.476–9 340
9.227–8 227 n.39 19.483–4 111 n.12
9.263–7 13 19.491 41 n.183
9.359 63 n.73 20.18–21 111 n.12
9.447–60 122 20.69 68
9.526–36 117 n.25 20.88–94 20
9.532–5 117 20.134 41 n.183
9.542–5 121 20.320–1 101–2 n.68
10.135–9 121 21.207–8 111 n.12
10.222 62–3 n.72 21.56–7 20
422 Index of Passages
Homer (cont.) KN V 52 57
21.350–8 8 n.47 [Longinus]
21.381 41 n.183 Subl.
22.411–18 99 1.3 230 n.56
23.101–2 111 n.12 1.4 233 n.76
23.212 88 n.35 2.2 224 n.25
23.231–40 344 3.3 237 n.91, 240
23.233ff. 12 n.58 8.2 226 n.34, 230
23.242–3 62–3 n.72 8.4 234 n.81
23.248–50 117 n.24, 118 n.27 9.2 229
23.300–9 111 n.12 9.10–11 233
23.310–41 21 9.10 228 n.51, 229 n.52
24.16 27 9.11–15 229–30
24.36–7 22 n.102 9.11 234 n.81
24.40 40 12.4 233 n.76
24.47–62 25 13.1 230
24.59 34, 67 n.89 13.2 77, 234 n.81
24.71–84 27 n.124 13.4 240
24.76–9 35 n.152 15.3–4 233–4
24.77–9 27 33 237
24.80–4 353 n.100 35. 2–4 230 nn.56, 58, 231
24.85–92 25 n.61
24.93–4 22 n.102 36 230 n.56, 237 n.90
24.124–85 21 38.5 224 n.25
24.192–202 22 n.102
24.196–201 353 n.100 Lycophron
24.196–7 344 Alex. 1274 153 n.57
24.296 33
Megaclides
Homeric Hymns
F9 Janko 125 n.50
Hymn. Hom. Ap. 174–5 15
Ven. 202–6 33 nn.144, 145 Mimnermus
Cer. 237 34 n.150 fr. 11.3 West 117 n.24
Cer. 311–12 65 n.87
Merc. 1–9 2 Nicander
Merc. 130–2 66 Ther. 500–5, 674–5, 685–8 147
Merc. 247–8 67
Hymn. Hom. 18.1–9 2 Panyassis
frr. 19–22 West 125 n.50
Ion of Chios (FGrH 392) Pausanias
F16 92 n.47 9.11.6 112
Isocrates Philodemus
Evag. 73 354 n.101 Poem.
1.15.21–6 Janko 107–8
Josephus 1.42.5–8 Janko 108 n.5
AJ 15.89 173 n.39 5.x.24–31 Mangoni 108 n.5
Ap. 2.58 173 n.39 5.xiv–xv Mangoni 108 n.5
PHerc.
Linear B Tablets 207 107
PY Tn 316 57, 59 1581 107
 Index of Passages 423
Pindar Per. 8 233 n.76
Ol. 8.9 91 n.46, 92 n.47
1. 43–5 35 n.152 28.4 91 n.46, 92 n.47
1.62–3 34 n.150 28.7 92 n.47
2.78–80 32, 197 n.86 Polybius
3.4–6 44 n.194 1.3–5 108
6.103–4 189 n.26 3.1–5 108 n.4
9.48–9 44 12.9.1 108 n.5
13.96–8 79 n.13 36.9.9–11 228
Pyth. 38.21 353 n.99
2.62–3 189 n.26
4.110 124–5 n.48 Oxyrhynchus Papyri
4.120–3 124 n.48 POxy 2258A fr. 9 back 114 n.18
4.142 119 n.31 3434 114 n.18
4.165 117 n.24 3698 127 n.58
4.205 119 n.31 4640 118 n.26
4.220 118 n.27 4712 126 n.51
4.229–33 118 n.27
4.244–6 120 n.33 Sappho
6.5–17 353–4 fr. 5 L-P 356
6.28–42 332 n.3 Scholia ad Ap. Rhod. Argon.
9.63 34 n.150 2.178–82b 122–3 n.39
11.39–40 189 n.26 Scholia ad Hom. Il.
Isthm. 6.491 108 n.5
4.37–44 78 18.312–13a 108 n.5
5.16 362 19.108 337 n.24
5.62–3 44 n.194
7.16–19 197 n.83 Simonides
Nem. fr. 531 PMG 94 n.51
3.9 79 n.13 fr. 564.4 PMG 3 n.16
3.26–7 189 n.26 fr. 11 West 78
4.79–81 354 Sophocles
5.1–2 354 Aj. 124–6 80 n.15
5.2–3 189 n.26 762–77 228
7.12–13 197 n.83 Ant. 135 234 n.80
7.62–3 79 n.13 Phil. 591–7 21 n.101
8.20–1 44 n.194 603–21 21 n.101
9.27 96 n.59 TrGF iv fr. 704–5 122–3
Plato n.39
Ion 534b 234 n.81 Strabo
Meno 99d 95 n.56 5.3.8 167–8
Phaedr. 264c2–269a3 110 7.7.12 59–60
n.10 13.1.53 138 n.15
Resp. 372c-d 100 n.65
586a 230 Suda
Symp. 208c 94  521.15–16 105 n.1
Ti. 90a, 91e 230 Supplementum Hellenisticum
Plutarch (Lloyd-Jones and Parsons)
Alex. 31.11–12 228 339A.14 108 n.5
424 Index of Passages
Theocritus 4.87.6 94 n.53
1.71–2 147 6.15–16 93 n.50
16.40–6 197 n.83 Timotheus
16.76–7 147 791.202–36 PMG 44 n.194
Thucydides Xenophon
1.72.4 101 Hell. 3.6 341 n.45
2.12.3 80 n.16 5.3 341 n.44
2.25.2 95 n.56 Mem. 4.11 230 n.59
2.35–46 91 n.46, 92 n.47

HEBREW

Old Testament 68.4 52 n.26

Exodus 14.1 54 78.25 66 n.88
1Kings 18.18–40 370 82.1 56
n.176 89.7 56
Psalms 48.1–2 55 14.12 292
51.16–17 66

HIT TITE

Myth of Telepinus ANET p. 126 65

I TA L I A N

Dante Alighieri 12.86–9 285

Inferno 13.48 286 12.86.1–4 284
Tasso, Torquato 12.91–3 284
Gerusalemme Liberata 12.94 285
3.22 281–4 13.38–47 285–9, 368
3.23.1–2 282 13.49 289
4.49 368 n.169 14.1–19 351 n.87
11.29–30 370 15.19–20 353 n.99
12.67.8 284 16.4–7 359 n.124
12.68 284 18.25–38 289
12.78–9 285 20.114 370 n.176

LATIN

Anthologia Latina 19–21 159–83

225 S-B 222 n.20 19 162 n.7
Augustus 20.1 174–5
Res Gestae 20.4 175
2 164 n.14 31 179
 Index of Passages 425
Catullus 155 185 n.3
11.21–4 155 n.66 363 134 n.7
34.17–24 193 n.55 Epigr. (Vahlen)
62.39–44 155 n.67 18 187 n.13
64.89 155 n.68 Aulus Gellius
64.132–3 155 n.63 2.18.7 218 n.2
64.250 155 n.63 6.14.4–5 237 n.91
64.312–3 148 n.42 12.8.2 177
64.335 155 n.63 13.27[26].2 218 n.2
66 350 17.10.7 215 n.177
66.28 229 n.54
66.39 147 n.37, 156, 345, 350 Horace
68b 210 Carm.
76.3 155 n.63 1.1.34 194 n.66
85 210 1.26.11 194 n.66
87.3 155 n.63 1.32.4–5 194 n.67
101 155 nn.64, 65 1.1.36 190
1.2.44 357
Cicero
1.3 188–91, 356–7, 361, 364, 369, 373
Arch. 18 234 n.81
1.4 195
24 353 n.100
2.13.24–8 194 n.66
Leg. 1.26 230 n.59
3.30.1ff. 354 n.102
Nat. D. 2.140 230 n.59
3.30.13 194 n.66
Orat. 234 233 n.76
4.2 195
Tusc. 1.3–1.5 133
4.2.1–12 304 n.9
1.5 219 n.8
4.2.1 218 n.2
Att. 15.1a.2 233 n.76
4.2.27–32 304 n.9
2.25.1 235 n.83
4.4 195
Fam. 4.5 144 n.26
4.7 195–8
Columella 4.7.14–16 195–6, 357–8
Rust. 1 praef. 29–30 241 n.106 4.7.23–6 196
1 praef. 30 219 n.8, 220 n.14, 4.8 196–8
233 n.76 4.9.1–12 198
10 praef. 3–4 220 4.9.25–34 197–8
10.433–6 220 n.14 4.12.25 191 n.42
Curtius Rufus 4.14 195
4.13.8–9 228 n.46 4.15 189 n.27
4.15.31–2 198
Dares Phrygius Carm. saec.
16 268 9 194 n.63
10–11 192 n.48
Donatus
13–14 194 n.62
Vita Vergili (Hardie)
17–24 192 n.48
25 135 n.10, 363
33 192
27 186 n.12
41–4 192–3
31 215 n.181
49–52 193–4
39 215 n.177, 363 n.152
50 192 n.48
Ennius Epist.
Ann. (Skutsch) 1.19.32–3 194 n.67
1.1–4 350–1 n.86 1.20 223
426 Index of Passages
Horace (cont.) 3.3–6 218 n.2
2.1.50 219 n.9 5.117–19 232
2.1.156–7 348 5.1161–3 225 n.28
2.1.245–7 191 n.41 6.1–8 363
2.1.252–3 238 n.93 6.27–8 363
2.2.99 194 n.67 Macrobius
Sat. Saturnalia
1.4.9–10 304 n.9 2.4.31 186 n.11
1.10.67–71 304 n.9 5.17.5 351 n.91
2.1.10–12 191
2.7.28–9 235 n.83 Manilius
3.9–13 128 n.59
Hyginus Martial
68.2 228 n.47 Epigrams
Jerome 3.38 236
Ep. 121.10.5 219 n.9 7.23 223 n.21
8.18 224 n.23
Justin
11.48, 11.49 220
18.4–5 349 n.80
18.6.8 349 Ovid
Am.
Juvenal 1.1.1 235 n.86
1.1–18 238 n.95 1.5 210
[Lactantius Placidus] 1.15.25 235 n.86
Commentarius in Statii Thebaida 3.11.33–4 210
10.828 235 n.83 Ars am.
10.850 226 n.34 1.453 210
12.816 224 n.23 3.337–8 210 n.148
Fast.
Livy
1.4 189 n.27
1.55.6 176
1.81–2 177
4.20 164 n.17, 165
2.3 189 n.27
5.13.6 171
2.195–242 210 n.154
6.37.12 171
2.331–52 210
25.12.9 171
2.533–42 163
42.47.4–9 228
2.543–6 162
Lucan 2.863–4 189 n.27
Bellum Civile 3.463 209
1.685 351 n.89 3.697–710 162–3
1.686 351 n.88 3.790 189 n.27
6.246 234 n.79 5.51–70 178 n.54
9.961–86 354 n.102, 362 Met.
9.961–79 353 n.99 1.1–4 213–4
9.980–6 221–2 1.1 347
9.990–6 222 1.2 359
Lucilius 1.82–6 230–1
fr. 1189 Marx 219 n.9 1.222–3 225 n.32
6.273–4 292
Lucretius 7.433–50 113 n.16
1.62–79 231 12.64 211
3.1–30 363 13.623 211
 Index of Passages 427
13.638–74 211 1.9 200
13.722–3 212 1.9.9 199
14.78–81 211 1.17.19–24 207 n.130
14.116–18 212 2.1.17–45 186 n.9
14.120–1 212 2.1.17–36, 39–46 199–200
14.157 211 2.1.40 201 n.100
14.464–511 211 2.1.42 358
14.530–65 211 n.158 2.1.72 201 n.100
15.165 359 2.1.78 202 n.103
15.420–52 359 2.3.31–40 358
15.431–49 212 2.10 148 n.44
15.829–31 347 2.10.19–26 186 n.9
Rem. am. 2.13.17–42 207 n.130
811–12 189 n.27 2.13.31–4 201 n.100
Tr. 2.16.39–42 202 n.107
1.7.15–26 215 n.177, 363 n.152 2.31.3–4 173
1.7.23–4 214–5 2.31.9–10 169
2.1.63 214 2.31.13–14 172
2.533 209 n.140 2.31.15 170
4.10.51 208 2.34 200–3
Paulus 2.34.61–2 358
Fest. p.103M 50 2.34.65–6 219, 362
2.34.67 358
Petronius 3.1.7 203
115.2 232 n.67 3.2.17–26 354 n.102
115.5 234 n.81 3.3.1–52 186 n.9
116.1 238 n.93 3.3.5 201 n.100
118.6 232 n.67, 234 n.81 3.3.22–4 189 n.27, 28
123 v. 209 238 n.93 3.4 203
124.2 232 n.67 3.7.1–8 191 n.40
Pliny, Elder 3.9.3–4, 35–6 189 n.28
HN 3.9.35–60 186 n.9
7.114 215 n.177 3.16.21–30 207 n.130
35.27 182 3.18 183 n.63
35.93–4 182 4.1 203–6
36.91 172 4.1.57ff. 354 n.102, 103
Pliny, Younger 4.1.65–7 354 n.102
Ep. 4.3 213
1.2.2 239 n.102 4.5 207
1.5.12–13 218 n.2 4.6 172, 207
6.21.1 240 n.105 4.6.11–68 358
7.12.4 237 n.91 4.6.65–8 202 n.107
7.20.4 239 n.102 4.7 207
7.30.4–5 218 n.2, 224 n.24, 236 4.8 207
9.26.2–9 236–7 Quintilian
9.26.4 240 n.105 Inst.
Propertius 1.2.21–6 218 n.2
1.6 358–9 10.1.46 213 n.167, 220 n.15
1.7 200 10.1.54 109 n.6
428 Index of Passages
Quintilian (cont.) 1.3 235 n.84
10.1.81 220 n.12 3.600 229, 238
10.1.85–6 219–20, 224 3.602 226 n.37
10.1.88 209 3.604–5 225
10.2.17 218 n.2 3.661 225
10.2.18 220 n.12 3.668–9 234 n.80
10.5.5 218 n.2 4.165 232 n.67
Sallust 4.175–6 225
Cat. 1.1 230 n.59 5.567–8 225
48.1 235 n.83 5.653 229 n.54
Seneca 6.479 238
Ep. 79.7 220 6.731 232 n.67
92.30 230 n.59 6.734–6 226 n.38
94.56 230 n.59 6.753–5 225
Dial. 8.5.4 230 nn.59, 60 6.823 238
Med. 910–15 128 n.59 6.827 229 n.54
Tranq. 1.14 229 n.54 8.357 229 n.54
8.406–7 234 n.79
Servius 9.547 229
Aen. 1.242 193 n.58 9.548–50 227 n.40
1.294 181–2 9.550 226 n.37
1.488 193 n.58 10.32 234 n.80
4.682 349 10.258–9 227
5.45 160 10.445–8 220–1, 361, 361
6.69 171–2 10.482–6 227
6.861 167 n.21, 215 n.181 10.486 234 n.80
6.900 211 n.159 10.607, 609 234 n.79
7.170 177 10.632–782 234 n.79
7.778 147 n.37 10.657–9 234 n.79
8.720 169 10.662 229 n.54
Silius Italicus 10.677 234 n.79
1.81–92 349 n.81 10.711–12 234 n.79
1.84 168 n.26 10.745 232
2.337 235 n.83 10.751–5 234 n.80
8.592–4 222 n.19 10.781–2 234
15.227–8 238 n.93 10.804 234 n.79
15.405–6 238 n.93 10.827–37 232–6
Statius 10.832–3 360–1
Achil. 10.842–5 360–1
1.733 229 n.54 10.845–52 232
Silv. 10.847 225
1. praef. 324 10.849–52 226
2.7.35 224 n.23 10.870–2 232
2.7.73–4 221, 363 n.152 10.874–5 225–6
2.7.79–80 222 10.897–8 232
4.2.8–10 222 10.899–906 226
4.4.53–5 220 n.11 10.907–10 233, 234 n.80
4.7.25–8 224, 235 10.909 238
Theb. 10.915–20 232
 Index of Passages 429
10.915–17 226 3.10–11 189 n.31, 356
10. 918–9 234 n.80 3.12–16 168
10.927–30 233 3.12 205
11.1–2 234 n.80 3.13–39 354
11.1 229, 234 n.79 3.13 205 n.118
11.7–8 226 n.35 3.16 148
11.10–11 240–1, 362 3.17–22 219
11.14–15 232 n.67 3.22–3 163
11.122–4 235 3.30 187
12.795 229 n.54 3.34–6 200 n.94, 358
12.800 235 n.86 3.36 187
12.808 234 n.81 3.45–6 187
12.810–19 223–4 4.162–9 151 n.53
12.811–12 324, 363 4.559–66 347
12.814 229 n.54 4.565–6 190 n.36
12.816–7 220–1, 324, 361 Aen.
12.816–19 363 1.1–7 201 n.98
Suetonius 1.7 205
Aug. 7.2 185 n.3 1.8 206, 214
28.3 175 1.227–53 144 n.27
29.1 178 1.241 352
31 179 1.259–60 36, 196 n.75, 350
31.1 172 1.260 229 n.54
40.5 215 n.181 1.278–9 347, 348
89.2 185 n.3 1.286–96 347
89.3 186 n.6 1.286–9 36, 370 n.177
1.291–6 181
Tibullus 1.297–304 149 n.48
2.5 172 n.34, 203–4 1.314–493 12
Valerius Flaccus 1.326–30 142–3
4.148–53 226 n.38 1.340–68 349, 351
8.106–8 128 n.59 1.364 150
Virgil 1.387–401 143–4
Ecl. 1.430–6 151
4.5 191 n.45 1.488–93 137 n.14
5.51 235 n.83 1.488 193
6.1–8 186 n.9 1.498–504 143 n.22, 155 n.68
6.1–2 136 n.12 1.572–4 150
6.3–5 147–8, 202 1.586–613 12
6.3 187 n.14 1.601–21 214 n.176
8.6–12 187 n.15 1.605–6 143 n.23
9.27–9 235 n.83 1.610 151 n.52
G. 2.225–7 160 n.2
1.40 190 n.36 2.268–97 350
2.40–6 189 2.268 368 n.169
2.44–5 356, 373 2.270–97 207 n.133
2.175–6 190 n.36 2.274–9 290–2, 368
3.8–48 347 2.274–5 351
3.8–9 187 n.13 2.289 276
3.10 187 n.15 3.41–6 286, 368
430 Index of Passages
Virgil (cont.) 6.847–53 133–5
3.44 276 6.851–3 193–4
3.73–98 147 n.36 6.852 348
3.94–8 137–40, 371 n.180 6.854–9 165
3.103 139 6.872–4 167
3.156–68 139–40 6.878–81 166, 181
3.658 156 6.882–6 155 n.65
3.692–708 146 n.34 6.882 166
3.710–15 162 6.893–9 351
4.1–2 153 n.63 6.898–9 211
4.31–53 150 6.900 211
4.103 203 n.111 7.1–4 153 n.57, 211
4.265–76 151 n.52 7.44–5 201 n.99,
4.300–4 151 358
4.305 155 n.63 7.116–7 140 n.17
4.327–30 152 7.170–8 176–7
4.335–6 151 7.178–91 177
4.339 155 n.63 7.192 177
4.340–7 150–1 7.378–83 146–7
4.347 358 7.407–66 147 n.36
4.421 155 n.63 7.759–60 147
4.457 168 n.26 7.648 226 n.37
4.520 155 n.63 7.765–9 196 n.76
4.622–9 152 n.53 8.7 226 n.37
4.693–705 350 8.105 77
4.696 349 8.122–3 203 n.110
5.45–60 161–4 8.188–9 203 n.110
5.320 239 n.102 8.293–302 113 n.16
5.461–84 226 n.38 8.301 36
5.731–42 207 n.133 8.126–74 140–1
5.815 226 n.38 8.312 353 n.99
6.9–13 170 8.324–5 353 n.99
6.20–33 172 8.328–32 146 n.34
6.45–97 212 8.347–8 175, 353
6.69–76 171 8.356 353 n.99
6.122 172 8.360–1 203
6.128–9 210–12 8.382–4 37
6.129–30 239 n.102 8.470–523 140–1
6.440–76 350–2 8.609–15 141 n.19
6.460 147 n.37, 156 8.653 175
6.494–500 277–8 8.675–728 358
6.679 141 n.19 8.703–5 172
6.692–3 155 n.64 8.720–3 169–70
6.756–892 178–83 9.77–122 211 n.158
6.783 205 n.122 9.433–7 155 n.66
6.791–807 182, 347 9.446–9 175–6
6.792–4 353 n.99 10.449–51 165–6
6.798–800 147 n.39 10.464–73 36–41
6.806–7 179 10.469–70 6
6.836 175 10.495–505 173
6.846 134 n.7 10.693–6 228
 Index of Passages 431
10.707–16 228 11.581–2 147 n.37
10.723–9 228 11.68–71 155 n.67
10.732–5 227 11.271–4 211 n.158
10.763–8 226 n.36 12.192 206 n.126
10.773–4 227 12.409–19 147
10.774–6 226 n.38 12.603 350 n.85, 351 n.89
10.789–820 332 n.3 12.793 352
10.825 166 12.794–5 196 n.75, 350
10.880 227 n.39 Vitruvius
11.1–6 226 n.38 De arch. 2.1.2 230 n.59
11.42 166

M OD E R N E N G L I S H

Milton 3.682–5 297

PL 4.774 297
1.50 370 4.800 297
1.84–7 292, 368 4.823–39 297–8
1.84 293 6.898–900 369 n.171
1.94–9 293–4 7.13–20 369 n.171
1.184 294 8.64–202 369
1.242–4 294 9.13–19 327 n.37, 373
1.253–6 294 9.33–8 274
1.508–14 370 9.44–5 295
1.692–9 353 n.99 12.370–1 370 n.177
1.738–51 370 Paradise Regained
2.727–8 297 1.1 355–6 n.110
3.33–6 363 n.152
For English authors after Milton, please see General Index.

OL D ENGL I SH

Battle of Maldon 2345–7 257–8

86–8 254 1740–2 257, 363
89–90 255, 364 2518–37 255
93–5 254 2633–8, 2646–9 248–9, 364
212–24 249 n.20 3150–5 247–8
251 256 Genesis B
312–13 256 272 255 n.31
Beowulf Instructions for Christians
677–80 254 1.130 255 n.31
685–7 254
1711–13 257

OLD INDIC

Atharvaveda 1.32.4 51
432 Index of Passages
4.35.1 71 1.160 51
6.4.3 51 1.185 51
Isopanishad 4.56 51
14 71 6.70 51
7.53 51
Rigveda
1.159 51

OLD AND MIDDLE IRISH

Clann ollaman uaisle Emna 2264–5 268

13–14 269 n.54 2711–17 266–7
Táin Bó Cuailnge 1 Togail Troı́ 1
955 261 n.39 724–31 268
2088ff. 263 n.42 1159–66 267
2237–78 261–4, 364 1471–88 269

The following are the editions of Greek and Latin texts used (for other abbreviations, see
p. xi and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, pp. xxix–liv).
Arrighetti, G. (2nd edn., 1973), Epicuro. Opere (Torino).
Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (6th ed., 1951), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker i-iii (Berlin).
Gow, A. S. F. and Page, D. L. (1968), The Greek Anthology. The Garland of Philip and
Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge).
Gow, A. S. F. and Page, D. L. (1965), The Greek Anthology. Hellenistic Epigrams i
(Cambridge).
Hardie, C. (1966), Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae (Oxford).
Hollis, A. S. (1990), Callimachus Hecale (Oxford).
Janko, R. (2000), Philodemus On Poems (Oxford).
Lobel, E. and Page, D. (1955), Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford).
Lloyd-Jones, H. and Parsons, P. (1983), Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin and New
York).
Mangoni, C. (1993), Filodemo, Il quinto libro della Poetica (Naples).
Marx, F. (1904–5), C. Lucilii carminum reliquiae (Leipzig).
Massimilla, G. (1996), Aitia Libro primo e secondo (Pisa).
Merkelbach, R. and West, M. L. (1967), Fragmenta Hesiodea (Oxford).
Page, D. L. (1962), Poetae melici Graeci (Oxford).
Pfeiffer, R. (1949–53), Callimachus i–ii (Oxford).
Powell, J. U. (1924), Collectanea Alexandrina (Oxford).
Rose, V. (1886), Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta (Leipzig).
Schmid, W. (1926), Arisitidis qui feruntur libri Rhetorici II (Leipzig).
Skutsch, O. (1985), The Annals of Quintus Ennius (Oxford).
Usener, H. and Radermacher, L. (1899–1929), Dionysii Halicarnasei Opuscula i–ii
(Leipzig).
Vahlen, J. (1903), Ennianae Poesis Reliquiae (Leipzig).
West, M. L. (2nd ed., 1992), Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati i–ii
(Oxford).
 General Index
Greek words have been alphabetized as they would be transliterated.
Achilles 11–14, 25–32, 41–3, 58, 72–3,
62–3; see also clothes,
76, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89–91, 95, 97,
103, 114, 127, 245, 251–2, 258,
262–4, 268, 270, 290, 321, 339, 341,
344
Actium 164, 167, 169, 170, 173, 186,
200–1, 207, 358
active and passive heroism 13, 111, 113,
116, 118, 126, 324 n. 31, 343–4
Adam 293, 296, 323, 369
Aeacus 197
Aeetes 118, 123–4
Aegisthus 82
aemulatio 218, 360
Aeneas 36, 137–45, 150–3, 155–6,
160–4, 170–2, 180, 192–3, 195–8,
203, 211–12, 222, 226, 276–8,
286–8, 290–3, 349–52, 357–9, 363
Aethiopis 23–41, 137 n. 14
¼ŁºØ see labours
Agamemnon 82, 89–91
Iª
øæ=Iªæ  252; see also
manhood
Ajax 96–7 n. 59, 228–9
Alcaeus 194–5, 356
Alcimede 123–4
Alexander the Great 182, 341
Alexandrian scholars see criticism,
interaction with literature
¼ºªÆ 13, 124; see also suffering
alius 35 n. 153; see also secondariness;
succession
¼ºº
35; see also secondariness;
succession
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 319
Amata 348, 350 n. 85
ambition, poetic 131–2, 145, 156–7,
see excellence
224, 239–41, 323; see also self-
) 17–18, 41, 142, 339
confidence
ambrosia 34, 63–7, 335, 337
¼æ
immortal
Amphimedon 21
Amycus 119, 121
analepsis 10, 40, 116 n. 23, 154 n. 61
analysis, Homeric 16, 19, 21, 261 n. 39
Anchises 133–4, 139, 155, 160–4, 179,
182, 193–4, 207
Andromache 76, 115 n. 20, 127, 252–3,
322
Anius 211
Anna, sister of Dido 150
Antilochus 25–7, 31, 35 n. 152, 38, 41, 340
Antimachus 309
Antony, Mark 167, 359
Antu 60–1, 335, 366
Anu 58, 335, 366
anxiety of influence 132, 135–6, 209,
221, 239, 275, 288, 290, 370, 373;
see also secondariness
Apelles 181
Aphrodite 57–9, 61–3, 67, 73–4,
369–70; see also Venus
Apollo 25, 32–3, 82, 138–40, 192, 203,
206
Cynthian 187, 202
Palatine 169–74
Apollonius of Rhodes 105–29, 145–6,
149–53, 323, 324, 325, 342–5
apotheosis 31–6, 160–4, 196–7, 222,
234–5, 349, 350, 357, 362–3, 369;
see also divine author; heroization;
immortality; nekyia; sky, seeking
the
Apsyrtus 117, 125 n. 50, 127–8
Ara Pacis 163, 216, 354
Iæ
Arete ( `æ
Argo, Argonauts 6, 12 n. 59, 15, 37 n.
161, 109, 117–28, 150–1, 343–4, 346
434 General Index
Ariadne 118, 149, 155, 207
Ariosto, Lodovico 274, 286–7, 359, 367
Aristotle 106–14, 279, 342
arma 201, 210, 235
armour, divinely made 28–9
Arnold, Edwin 302
Arnold, Matthew 301, 302, 305, 307–9,
310, 317, 320, 326, 328–9
assembly of gods 56–8
Athena 11–14, 17, 19–20, 35, 57, 73, 83,
84, 141–4, 333
Athens 90–2
Atys, son of Croesus 86
audacity 188, 190, 220, 224–5, 233, 235,
237, 357, 361, 369
audere see audacity
audience 3–4, 16, 43, 78
augury 336
Augustus, Emperor 36, 159–83, 185–8,
191–5, 198–200, 209 n. 140,
215–16, 347–8, 358–9, 363, 371
Austen, Jane 316
Baal 52, 54–5, 58, 370 n. 176
Bailey, Philip James 302
Battle of Maldon 253–9, 260, 364–7
Bellerophon 357, 369
Beowulf 248, 254–8
Beowulf 243–71, 364–7
Berenice, wife of Ptolemy III 350
biographical tradition of poets 135 and
n. 10, 221, 363
Blackwell, Thomas 245 n. 4, 303–4,
305, 372
Blair, Hugh 244
Blake, William 310, 326, 369
blood see Yøæ
Boiardo, Matteo Maria 274
book numbers 105, 116, 118, 120–1,
137 n. 14, 214, 311, 328, 342–3
Boreadae 120, 123
Brennus, the Gaul 172
Bridges, Robert 310
Briseı̈s 85, 115, 248
Brontë, Emily 318
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 312–16,
326, 372, 373
Browning, Robert 310, 314, 315, 326, 372
Brutus, L. Iunius 182
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George 301
Burges, James Bland 301
burning an epic poem 135, 215 and
n. 177, 363 n. 152
Byrhtnoth 253–7
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 302, 306,
311–12, 321–2, 326, 372
Caesar see Augustus, Emperor; Julius
Caesar
Calderón, Pedro de la Barca 307
calendars, Roman 162–3
Callimachus 105–29, 139 n. 16, 145–8,
189, 200, 202, 204–5, 206, 214,
342–5, 350, 356
Calypso 13–14, 141, 149
Cambyses, son of Cyrus 87–9, 339
Camões, Luis de 302, 359
Campus Martius 168
Candaules, of Lydia 83
Capaneus 217, 219, 225–9, 232–40, 346,
357, 361–3, 369
Capitol 174–8
Carlyle, Thomas 321
catalogue 112, 113 n. 16, 128 n. 59
of Ships 90, 112
of Women 22 n. 122, 350
Catullus 154–6, 192, 210, 347, 350
causation 81–5, 109, 116, 117 n. 25, 338
cedere 201, 219 nn. 7–8
Chadwick, Hector Munro and Nora
Kershaw 245
Chalciope 123–4, 127
change 276–7, 279, 290–6, 299, 347,
359, 368
characterization 22–3
‘childhood’ of society 245, 306–7; see
also cultural progress
Choerilus 309
Christianity 259, 274–5, 283–5, 289,
292–3, 295, 317, 365–6, 369–71
Chryseı̈s 85
Cicero 133, 236
Circe 121, 141
civil war 199
Cleopatra:
queen of Egypt 136, 173
wife of Meleager 43
wife of Phineus 122 n. 37
 General Index 435
clichés 77, 80, 332, 339; see also Dido 141, 149–53, 155, 207, 211, 309,
formulas 323, 348–52, 358
Clorinda 276, 278, 281–5, 288–90, 299 Diomedes 58, 61, 67, 252, 346, 370
closure 117, 118, 124, 126, 206, 352, 355 Dione 59–61, 335, 366
clothes: Dionysius, of Phocea 80–1, 91
immortal 34, 67, 72 divine author 219–21; see also
token of recognition 18, 339 apotheosis
Clough, Arthur Hugh 301, 312, 327 Dodds, E. R. 245
comedy see humour Doliones 125
commonplaces see clichés Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 316
competition, poetic 6, 10, 39, 224, dreams 20, 207 n. 133, 288–90, 351, 368
240–1, 244, 361–2 Drusus, Claudius Nero 194–5
composition in performance 1–2 Dryden, John 217, 225, 239
Conan Doyle, Arthur 318–19 Duff, William 304, 372
conquest 345; see also imperialism Dutch painting 319–20
contamination (contaminatio) 37 and Dyaus 50–1, 53–4
n. 160
Corneille, Pierre 307–8 elegy 199–208, 214, 349, 358, 359; see
Cottle, Joseph 301 also Propertius
Crassus, M. Licinius 164 elevation 78–9, 91, 230 and n. 56; see
criticism, interaction with literature 37 also grandeur; sublimity
and n. 161, 104, 106–29, 209, 211, Eliot, George 317–18, 319, 373
217–41, 342, 343, 345, 361, 366–7, Eliot, T. S. 304
367–8, 371 ellipse 7, 30, 40
Croesus, of Lydia 84, 85–9, 339 Empedocles 107
Cronus 370; see also Saturn empire see imperialism
Cú Chulainn 245, 261–3, 265, 268–70 Ennius 154, 187, 213, 219, 318,
cultural poetics 352 347, 362
cultural progress 245, 304–7, 340, 372 envy 363
cultural revivalism 244 Epic Cycle 1, 10, 15, 22 n. 102, 23–4, 37,
Cupid 198 43–4, 45, 84, 137 n. 14; see also
Cybele 139, 159 n. 1 Aethiopis
Cyclops 62, 82, 121–2, 155–6, 227 Epicurus 231
n. 39 epitaphioi 90–1 n. 42, 91–2
Cyrus the Great 85–9, 339 epithets 246
Cyzicus 120 Ethiopians 28 n. 127
Eumaeus 373
Daedalus 172, 190 Euripides 233–4, 373 n. 190
Danaids 173–4 Euryalus 155; see also Nisus and
Dante Alighieri 286–7, 289, 307–8 Euryalus
Dares and Entellus 135 n. 11, 226 Eurycleia 17, 19, 43
n. 38 Evander 140, 175–7
Dares Phrygius 261 n. 39, 265–8, 271, Eve 293, 296, 297, 323
365–6 and n. 161 excellence 251–3, 256–7
Dawn (Eos) 31–5 excess 227, 251–3, 256–8, 269, 364
Deiphobus 212, 277–8 exclusus amator 207
Demaratus, of Sparta 94–5
Diana 170, 172, 193–4, 196 fable 87
Dickens, Charles 318–19 fabula 10
436 General Index
fame 78, 81 n. 18, 93–5, 97–8, 344, 353
fate, synonymous with tradition 7, 30,
35, 333, 349 and n. 82; see also gods,
figure for poet / narrator
Ferguson, Samuel 301
Fitzgerald, Edward 321
fixed texts 2–3, 8, 43, 45, 331
florilegia 267, 365, 366
fluidity see fixed texts
foreshadowing 18–19
formulas 4–5, 9, 10, 26 n. 121, 56, 77 n.
7, 88, 246–7, 292–3, 331–2, 339; see
also clichés; type scenes
Forum of Augustus 178–83
Freud, Sigmund 280, 287 n. 31
funeral oration see epitaphioi
further voices 135, 275
Ganymede 69
Gelon, son of Deinomenes 89–92
genre 105–6, 131, 145–7, 214, 274–6,
302, 309–11, 316, 340, 342, 344,
345, 346, 355–6, 368, 371–2
Giants / Gigantomachy 119, 128 n. 59,
190, 225–6, 230, 232
Gilgamesh 59
Gilgamesh, Epic of 59–61, 86, 369–70
Glaucus 120, 125
Godfather, The 250
gods:
and causation 81–5
as figure for poet / narrator 19, 238,
333, 352, 357, 361; see also fate
(don’t) feast on sacrifices see sacrifices
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 307–8,
316, 321, 327
Golden Age 353 n. 99
grandeur 76, 78, 83, 237, 247, 316–18
grand style 81, 246–7, 305, 307–8; see
also grandeur; sublimity
Gray, Thomas 318
Grendel 254–5
Gyges, of Lydia 83
Hades 53
Hardy, Thomas 319
Harpies 121
haruspicy 336
Hecale 113–16, 344, 373
Hector 13, 25, 28, 38, 41, 74, 76, 89, 90,
99, 103, 115, 207, 251–3, 290–2,
313, 320, 322, 339, 341, 350, 368
Helen, of Sparta 19, 72, 85, 95, 97
Hellenistic kingship 167
Hephaestus 28–9, 68–9, 370
Hera 35–6, 57, 58–9, 64, 67, 83, 125
Heracles 6, 106–14, 118–20, 123, 125,
127, 342, 343, 346; see also Hercules
Hercules 36, 207, 363; see also Heracles
Hermes 11–15
hero, as figure for narrator/poet 217,
233–41, 282 and n. 22, 287, 289,
299, 351, 357, 368–9
hero cult see heroization
‘hero’s moon’ see lúan láith
heroes, Roman 179–82; see also heroism
heroic poetry 243–4, 246–7, 270–1,
273–4, 309, 364
heroism 13–14, 74, 75–6, 83, 94, 98,
116, 119, 132, 145–6, 183, 226–8,
240, 243, 252–3, 291, 311, 313, 318,
338, 340, 341, 343–4, 364; see also
active and passive heroism;
manhood; ordinariness, opposed to
the heroic
heroization 94 n. 51, 113, 219, 222,
362–3; see also apotheosis
Herodotus 75–104, 338–41
Hesiod 7, 356 n. 110
hexameters (manqués), in prose 90 and
n. 40, 94 and n. 53
hierarchy of genres 145–7; see genre;
grandeur; grand style
Hippolytus 196–7
historical epic 148, 185–6
historical romance 316
historiography 75–104, 108, 154,
338–41
Holford, Margaret 301
Homer, cult of 219–20, 222 n. 19
Homeric Hymns 2, 7, 66–7
honey 67–8
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 310
Hopleus and Dymas 220, 361
Horace 188–98, 304, 355–8
hospitality 110–11, 114, 120
Hrothgar 257–8
humour 58, 140–5, 214 n. 176, 229, 311
 General Index 437
hygd (Old English) 257–8 Œº
see fame
Hylas 125 knights 274, 315; see also romance
hypotactic narrative see narrative, Kumarbi, Song of 336
hypotactic and paratactic
Hypsipyle 119, 125, 149–52 labours (¼ŁºØ; Ø, labor) 112–14,
oł
see sublimity 116–20, 125–6, 210, 212, 343–4; see
also suffering
Yøæ 61–3 labyrinth 172
ideology 159–83, 185–216, 247, 251, lamentation 124, 248
346–60; see also imperialism; Lampon, son of Pytheas 98–100
politics Laomedon 193
Idmon 120 Lausus 166
imitatio 218, 360 Leighton, Frederic 320
immortality 62–5, 93, 125, 185, 195–8, length of poem 105, 112–13, 116,
328; see also apotheosis; fame 145–6, 201, 214, 342
immortalization see apotheosis Leonidas, of Sparta 92–8
imperialism 92, 132–57, 287–8, 323, Leto 172
345, 347, 348, 351–2, 354, 370 Linear B 47 n. 2, 48, 57, 59–60
impiety 190, 225–7 lightning see thunderbolt
Indo-European 48 and n. 5, 49–54, 56, literary hierarchies 355, 360 and n. 135,
61, 62, 64–5, 70–2, 247 and n. 16, 366; see also genre
334–6 lives, narratives of 111, 113–16, 121–8,
intention 78 344
intertextuality 2, 4, 5, 11–12, 26, 160, Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 320
264, 276, 327, 331, 334, 340, 347, [Longinus] 217, 229–30, 233–4, 237,
348, 350, 354, 357, 360 n. 134, 368, 240
370, 373 lúan láith (hero’s moon) 262, 270
intratextuality 5, 11–12, 26, 38, 156, Lucan 221–3, 264, 311, 325
275–6 and n. 8, 339, 340, 357 Lucretius 154, 213, 231, 347
inversion 13, 22, 29, 32, 36, 124, 136, Ludi Saeculares 191
198; see also opposition in imitation Lycaon 122 and n. 39
Irving, Henry 310 Lycus 120, 123
Ishtar 59, 370 lyric 308
Islam 283, 370 Greek 44, 78, 195 n. 71, 346, 356
Horatian 188–99, 356–8
Jason 116–28, 151–3, 343–4 See also Horace; Pindar
Johnson, Samuel 303, 307, 316, 322
Joyce, James 318 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 306–7
Julius Caesar 36, 221–2, 265 Macpherson, James 244–5
temple of 160–4 madness 234–41, 252, 290, 307, 326,
Juno 193 361, 362
Jupiter 36, 50, 139, 221, 232–3, 236, 238, Maecenas, Gaius 186, 187 n. 16, 188,
352, 357, 362, 364 189, 199 n. 93
Feretrius, temple of 164–6 Maginn, William 320
Capitoline, temple of 174–8 magnanimity 229
male and female 13–14, 85, 120, 123–4,
katabasis 6, 346; see also nekyia; 126–8, 149–50, 207, 283, 343–4
Underworld man and beast 230
Keats, John 301, 310, 312 manhood 251–2, 364
438 General Index
Manlius, M. Capitolinus 175
Marcellus, M. Claudius 165–6, 180
Marcellus, son of Octavia 155, 166, 167,
169, 180–1, 183, 348, 355
Mardonius, of Persia 94, 98–9
Mars Ultor 178–9
Mausoleum of Augustus 167–9, 355
Medea 35 n. 152, 124, 126–8, 149, 152,
343–4
Meleager 43, 122
Memnon 23–41, 137 n. 14, 332,
339
memory, literary 275–6
Menelaus 97, 123
BØ
95–8, 125, 258 nekyia 21–2, 172, 196, 210, 211–12, 333,

252, 255–6
*Memnonis (Aethiopis) 23–41
metamorphosis 211 and n. 158, 213,
359; see also change
metapoetic (metaliterary) 35 n. 153,
114, 122 n. 39, 135 and n. 11, 188,
192, 238, 288 and n. 32, 333, 345–6,
347, 351, 356, 360, 362, 364, 368;
see also ‘troping’
metopes, of temple 112, 121
Mezentius 226–7
Milton, John 37 n. 158, 274, 276–81,
292–9, 302, 303, 306–8, 318, 322,
323, 326, 333, 350, 357, 360–1 n.
135, 367–71, 373
Minos 118
Minotaur 175
mirror-story 21
misdirection 16 n. 78, 22
mise en abyme 110
Mnesiphilus, of Athens 83
Mnestheus 90
mod (Old English) 255–8
monuments 159–83, 205–6, 347,
352–5
Morris, Lewis 302
Morris, William 302, 310
‘multiple correspondence’, between
source text and target text 14–15,
26, 38–9, 136, 333
Murray, Gilbert 322–3
mutation see change
FŁ
see plot ordinariness, opposed to the heroic 98,
mutilation 98–9, 276–7, 350–1, 352
narrative, hypotactic and
paratactic 110–29
narrative inconsistencies 7, 16–21, 29,
42, 333, 336–7
narrative, primary and secondary 10,
18, 21, 30, 33 n. 45, 43, 122, 336–7;
see also perspective; speeches,
characters’
naturalism 319
Nausicaa 13–14, 35 n. 152, 143–4, 149,
152 n. 54
Near East 23 and n. 107, 47–74, 334–6,
346, 369–70
nectar 67–73, 335, 337
350, 357–8; see also katabasis;
Underworld
neoanalysis 4, 14, 16, 17, 24, 26, 27, 31,
37, 39 n. 173, 41, 43, 332 and n. 3,
336, 337 n. 28
Nestor 80–1, 90, 123
Newman, F. W. 320
Niobe 172
Nisus and Euryalus 175–6, 220
‘nod’, Homeric 20; see also narrative
inconsistencies
novel 316–19
novelty 41, 44, 305
Octavian see Augustus, Emperor
Odysseus 9–23, 73, 82, 83, 84, 103,
110–11, 114, 116, 117, 123–4,
141–5, 153, 229, 321, 322, 339,
343–4, 346
oferhygd (Old English) 257–8, 364
ofermod (Old English) 255–6, 364
NŒ Æ 109, 343
Old Testament 54–6, 58, 66, 259,
365–6
Olympus 53–7, 334
oneness 105–29, 342–3
opposition in imitation (oppositio in
imitando) 13, 22, 27 n. 124, 29,
35–6 and n. 152, 38 and n. 162,
333, 358
oral(-derived) poetry 1–45, 243, 246–7,
331–4
312–13, 318–19, 373
 General Index 439
Ossian 244 Ø see labours
Ovid 208–16, 293, 324, 355–6, 359–60 Poseidon 53, 82, 137–8
Poynter, Edward John 319
Palatine 169–74, 203 æA%Ø
109 n. 9, 342
Pallas 36, 141, 155, 165–6, 173–4 Priam 11–14, 84, 86, 87–9, 114–15, 122,
Panyassis 108–9, 309 322, 339
parallel development 243–4, 247, 250, ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ epic 35 n.
258–9, 261, 264, 269–71, 305, 364, 152, 38, 243, 311, 367
366, 367 Prithivi 51
paratactic narrative see narrative, Proclus 23; see also Epic Cycle
hypotactic and paratactic progress see cultural progress
Parentalia 161, 163 prolepsis 40, 154 n. 61, 172, 353
Paris 25, 38, 82, 341 Prometheus 66
Pater, Walter 301, 304–5 propaganda see ideology
Patroclus 25–8, 38, 41–3, 72–3, 93, 99, Propertius 199–208, 355–6, 358–9
115, 207, 248, 251, 268, 339 prophecy 10, 29–31, 137–40, 117, 120,
Pausanias, of Sparta 98–9 171, 212, 371
Peacock, Thomas Love 306 proverbs 77 and n. 7, 88, 91–2 n. 46,
Peleus 28 339; see also clichés
Penates 139–40 Psammenitus, of Egypt 87–9, 339
Penelope 17–23, 42, 111, 114, 123, 207, Pytheas, son of Ischenous 341
322, 340, 342, 344
Penthesilea 24, 137 n. 14 Quirinus see Romulus
Pericles, of Athens 91–2
peripeteia 115, 121–2, 124 reading 78, 111, 118, 129; see also
perspective 111, 115, 121–9, 344 reception
Petrarch 282, 283 reception 3–4, 37–9, 76, 78, 103–4, 213,
Philodemus 107 333–4, 341, 336, 338, 347, 354, 357,
Phineus 120–2 358–60, 369, 374
Phoenix 42–3, 122 recitation 188 n. 19
Phrixus 120, 124, 344 recognition 17–22, 113, 116, 277–99,
pietas 164, 196; see also pius 339, 351, 368
Pindar 23, 24, 32, 44, 79 n. 13, 116–17, recusatio 147–8, 186–7, 199–200
168, 187, 189, 195–8, 304, 307–8, renewal 192–4; see also ‘new’ songs
346, 353–4, 356 resonance see traditional referentiality
pity, pitiful hero 359, 36 rhapsodes 44–5
pius 190 n. 34, 193, 196, 222; see also pietas riastartha (Old Irish) 261
plot 106–29, 342 rkb (Semitic) 52
poet, identified with hero see hero, as romance 274–5, 317, 358–9, 366 n. 161,
figure for narrator/poet 367; see also knights
politics 76, 87, 92, 100–3, 345; and Romantics 305, 372, 373
literary criticism 217, 221–2, Romulus 165, 180, 182
360–1 and n. 135; and poetry: see Ruskin, John 315 n. 20
ideology
Polybius 108, 346–7 sacrifices 65, 69, 335, 336
Polydeuces 119, 121 sāpôn (Hebrew) 54–5
Polydorus 276–7, 286–7, 368 ˙‘sapping’ 357 and n. 116
Polyphemus see Cyclops Sarpedon 25, 27, 32–6, 38, 41, 64,
Polyxo 150 339, 346
440 General Index
Satan 256, 259, 276, 278, 292–9, 357, speeches, characters’ 80–1, 90–1, 124,
368–9 337, 341; see also narrative, primary
Saturn 353 n. 99; see also Cronus and secondary
Schiller, Friedrich 304, 307–8 Spenser, Edmund 274, 353 n. 99, 367
scholia, Homeric 90 n. 41, 104, 108, spolia opima 164–6
229, 337 n. 24 Statius 10 n. 54, 217–41, 264, 324, 357,
Scott, Walter 316 360–4
sea 188–90, 356–7, 373 Stevenson, Robert Louis 319
secondariness 37 n. 161; see also sequel; story, opposed to fabula 10; see also
sequi; succession lives, narratives of; plot
secondary narrative see narrative, sublimity 229–30, 237, 308–9, 361
primary and secondary succession 221, 227, 243, 318, 350; see
self-confidence of poet 137, 221–2, 295; also secondariness; sequel; sequi
see also ambition suffering 115, 117, 126, 172; see also
Semitic see Near Eastern active and passive heroism
sequel 8, 11; see also secondariness; supplication 13, 41
sequi; succession Swinburne, Algernon Charles 310,
sequi 220, 223–4, 239 n. 102, 361, 363; 328–9
see also secondariness; sequel;
succession Táin Bó Cúailnge 260–70, 364–7
Shakespeare, William 307–8 Taine, Hippolyte 319
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 310 Tancredi 276, 278, 281–90, 299, 368
Sibyl 171, 211–12 Talos 128
‘signalling’: Tasso, Torquato 274–8, 281–90, 299,
of intratext 339–40 302, 333, 351, 359, 367–70
of source text 6, 15 n. 71, 19 and n. Telemachus 123
89, 26–7, 35–6, 88 and n. 37, 333, teleology 108, 212, 347, 348, 352, 359,
339–40 367, 370
Silius Italicus 10 n. 54, 220 Telepinus 65
similes 126 n. 54, 151 and n. 53, 210, Tennyson, Alfred 310, 311, 327–9
228, 251, 266–8, 270, 289, 337 Terry, Ellen 310
n. 27 Teucer 139
single action 316; see also oneness; plot Themistocles, of Athens 83
sky: Theocritus 107 n. 3, 114 n. 18, 147
god 50–3, 334 Theseus 106–7, 112–16, 172, 342, 344
raising gaze to the 230–1 Thetis 29–32, 35, 53–4, 58, 72, 125,
seeking / assaulting the 188, 226, 357, 144 n. 27
361, 363–4, 369 Thucydides 78, 83, 84, 85
Sleep and Death 32–4 thunderbolt 51, 188, 233 and n. 76, 361,
Smith, Alexander 301 362
Soclees, of Corinth 101–2 Tiberius, Julius Caesar Augustus 194–5,
Solon, of Athens 86 203–4
Sophanes, of Decelea 341 Tibullus 187 n. 17
Sophocles 307–8, 317 Tiphys 120
Southern Slavian epic see Yugoslavian Togail Troı́ 265–9, 364–7
epic Tolstoy, Leo 316
Southey, Robert 302 totalizing, epic as 131–57, 322, 345–8,
Sparta 93–8 355, 359, 370, 372
 General Index 441
traditional referentiality 5 n. 24, 9 n. Vedas 48, 50–2, 71
48, 331 Venus 142–4, 193, 198
tragedy 4, 22, 44–5, 75, 77, 86 n. 30, Victorians 301–29, 371–4
124, 141, 154, 228, 297, viewpoint see perspective
309–10, 317, 318, 338, 340, 346, violation see mutilation
348, 349 Virgil, cult of 219–21, 222
transferred motif 4–5, 14, 17, 18, 19,
31–4, 36, 336, 340 Wagner, Richard 66–7
transformation (‘warp’) of hero 261–4, washing feet 18–19
269, 364 Wilde, Oscar 310
translation 244, 245, 265, 267, 273, 320, wine, gods drinking 68–9, 335, 337
365 Wolf, Friedrich August 321
translation of hero from women 85, 123, 149–53, 248, 321; see
battlefield 31–4 also male and female
troping 333, 350–1, 357, 368; see also wood 285–90, 351, 368
metapoetics Wordsworth, William 326–7, 373
Turnus 173–4 wound see mutilation
type scenes 5, 12, 17 n. 81, 22, 24, 33 n. wrath see BØ

45, 36, 331
Xerxes, of Persia 94, 100, 313
Ugaritic 52
Ulster Cycle 260 Yugoslavian epic 1–2, 5, 246
Underworld 165, 196–7, 207 n. 133,
277, 357–8; see also katabasis; Zaphon, Mt 54
nekyia Zeus 35–6, 49–61, 67, 73, 82, 112, 138,
unity 274; see also oneness 333, 334–5, 366
universality, of epic see totalizing, Zeus’ will (˜Øe
. . . ıº
) 117, 125
epic as Zion, Mt 55