’Aυαγυώρισις γàρ διόλov, says Aristotle of the Odyssey,2 and throughout the poem's second half, with which we are here concerned, there is indeed a series of progressive recognitions as Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachos, Eurykleia, Eumaios, the suitors, Penelope and finally Laertes. So the importance of the opposite is not surprising; without concealment and deception there could be no eventual recognition. Concealment is of course necessary if Odysseus is to survive in the face of so many enemies, as Athena tells (...) him. But in addition, in any work of imaginative literature, so long as the reader or audience is aware of the truth, concealment and unperceived identity open the door to all sorts of half-truths and ironies – possibilities most obviously explored in tragedy and later comedy, but also made use of in the Odyssey. The irony which may be inherent in the arrival of the ‘nameless stranger’ has been most thoroughly explored by Fenik;3 here we examine a further implication. (shrink)

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to (...) him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

Li. 263 and 264 have been much vexed, and a string of conjectures will be found in Wecklein's appendix. All of them produce roughly the same meaning–‘it is useless to enquire into the future, which is bound to be disastrous.’.

Li. 263 and 264 have been much vexed, and a string of conjectures will be found in Wecklein's appendix. All of them produce roughly the same meaning–‘it is useless to enquire into the future, which is bound to be disastrous.’.

It is often claimed that in the ancient world character was believed to be something fixed, given at birth and immutable during life. This belief is said to underlie the portrayal of individuals in ancient historiography and biography, particularly in the early Roman Empire; and tc constitute the chief point of difference in psychological assumptions between ancient and modern biography. In this article, I wish to examine the truth of these claims, with particular reference to Plutarch and Tacitus.

In this book, Eric Havelock presents a challenging account of the development of the idea of justice in early Greece, and particularly of the way justice changed as Greek oral tradition gradually gave way to the written word in a literate society. He begins by examining the educational functions of poets in preliterate Greece, showing how they conserved and transmitted the traditions of society, a thesis adumbrated in his earlier book Preface to Plato. Homer, he demonstrates, has much to say (...) about justice, but since that idea is nowhere in the epics directly stated or expressed, it must be deduced from the speech and actions of the characters. Havelock's careful reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey is original and revealing; it sheds light both on Homeric notions of justice and on the Archaic Greek society depicted in the poems. As Havelock continues his inquiry from Hesiod to Aeschylus, his findings become more complex. The oral Greek world shades into a literate one. Words lose some kinds of meanings, gain others, and steadily become more suited to the conceptualization that Plato strove for and achieved. This evolution of language itself, Havelock shows, was one of the principal accomplishments of the Greek world. Lucidly written and forcefully argued, this book is a major contribution to our knowledge of ancient Greece--its politics, philosophy, and literature, from Homer to Plato. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the behaviour of and in the Homeric poems. These words are allotted a variety of different ‘meanings’ by the lexicographers. For example, LSJ s.v. I. pray, II. vow, III. profess loudly, boast, vaunt; s.v. I. prayer, II. boast, vaunt, or object of boasting, glory; s.v. I. thing prayed for, object of prayer, II. boast, vaunt. I shall, of course, discuss the whole range of these words; but I begin with some observations on ‘prayer’. It may appear (...) at first sight that ‘prayer’ is a simple word, with only one conceivable ‘meaning’, which must have that ‘meaning’ in any language. We might suggest that ‘request addressed to a god’ is an adequate representation of that ‘meaning’, and that when we have rendered by ‘pray’ in what appear to us to be appropriate contexts we have conveyed the full sense of the original. (shrink)