This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.

This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

The Introduction makes the case for why it is important and timely to return afresh to ancient greek epic, despite or even because of the huge amount of scholarship that already exists on this genre. After a brief overview of the current state of the field, it outlines the main points of innovation and interventions of the volume, focusing on its thematic structure, its emphasis on the lesser-known authors or dimensions of Greek epic, and its integration of ancient material and modern responses to it. It ends with a brief overview of the sections of the volume and draws out the connections between the chapters within them.

This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Pound’s early work with Greek lyric – in particular, the Greek Anthology and Sappho. It traces Pound’s skeptical, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory use of Greek in the 1910s as he tries to articulate his poetics of the image, tracking the differing prisms (Provençal lyric, Bengali poetics, Chinese ideograms, Primitivism, Vorticism) through which he interprets the value of Greek as his own artistic alliances shift between 1908 and 1918. It contrasts Pound’s varying approaches, whether outlined in his prose writings on prosody and the visual arts or actually followed in his early poems based on Greek lyric to H.D.’s already highly sophisticated and well-developed perspective, as seen in her translations also from the Greek Anthology and Sappho – translations which are the basis of some of her best-known poems. The author argues, moreover, that H.D.’s engagement with Greece even at this early stage is more deeply textual, self-conscious, and historically aware than has been recognized. Nonetheless, she show that despite striking differences in tone and some distinction in approach, Pound and H.D.’s poetics were subtly evolving in similar ways.

This chapter considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema. The cinema has been fundamentally heroic and epic in both subject matter (the mythic past) and elevated visual style since its birth in 1895. Rather than resurvey this prominence of epic themes in the history of film, Winkler demonstrates their power through a reading of the cinema’s own epic genre par excellence – the Western. The chapter first shows how the American Western follows archetypal heroic models in both plot and character and how many films are patterned explicitly on Homeric epic. Winkler then turns to specific archetypal aspects of ancient epic, primarily Homer’s, in the Western. These include fame (kleos); rivalry to be the best (aristos Akhaiôn / fastest on the draw); the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (arming before duels/showdowns as forms of aristeia); and fundamental story patterns, primarily the development from savagery to civilisation (chaos to kosmos) in the form of ktisis narratives connected with revenge (tisis). Winkler details the power of these archetypes by examining one of the most profound epic-mythic Westerns.

This chapter tracks Pound’s plunge into Greek studies – especially focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949). An opening reading of the Pisan Cantos (wr. 1945) argues that Pound explicitly ties the fate of his epic poem, and of American poetry tout court, to a re-engagement with Greek, and especially tragic, poetics. The bilingualism of his Elektra – the play is half in English, half in transliterated Greek – encodes its antithetical ambitions, one poetic and the other political, as Pound uses the translation on the one hand to devise a new prosody for his writing after the war, returning to the prosodic experiments of his early years, and on the other, to continue the fascist ghost theater of the Pisan Cantos.

This chapter is centred on the controversial epic ‘sub’ genre of the epyllion. Verhelst first underlines the scholarly debates surrounding epyllion as a category and then turns to look more closely at poems which themselves could be termed ‘epyllionic’, starting with the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and moving through the Hellenistic age (Theocritus’ Idyll 24, Moschus’ Eros the Runaway, and the Batrachomyomachia) to late antiquity (the Orphic Argonautica and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen). Verhelst focuses not just on the aesthetic dimensions of these poems, but also on the characters contained within them: ‘small’ characters in small epic (children, Hermes, eros, frogs and mice) and foreboding cameos by ‘large’ figures like Achilles. Verhelst shows how these texts manipulate their mythological, primarily Homeric, models to put grand epic heroics into a new perspective, be it comical or dark, and suggests how characterisation, size and speed are key ways to understand how these poems negotiate their own position in relation to Homer and the epic tradition, as ‘shrunken’, but not diminutive epic.

This chapter examines the elusive notion of humour in Greek epic. According to Aristotle (Poetics 1448b24) it was Homer who, along with founding most other genres of literature, established ‘the schema of comedy’. Hosty begins by surveying our limited evidence for Homeric humour – both within the Iliad and Odyssey and in mysterious works like the Margites – and proceeds to examine the relationship between Greek epic and the humorous, analysing the potentially whimsical elements of the Epic Cycle, the wry domestic detail of Callimachus’ Hecale, the determinedly straight-faced pastiche of the Batrachomyomachia, and the gleeful absurdity of Lucian’s ‘prose epic’ the True Histories.

This chapter examines the interplay and boundaries between ancient heroic and didactic epic poetry, particularly in the Hellenistic and imperial periods, treating didactic poets such as Aratus, Nicander, Dionysius the Periegete, Oppian, ps.-Oppian, and ps.-Manetho, whose poems are rooted in the early didactic epic tradition associated with Hesiod. Emphasising that didactic poetry was widely deemed a subset of the epic genre by ancient literary critics, the chapter examines didactic epic as both a controversial form of verse and a perceived vehicle for cultural prestige and wider cosmic truths in the ancient world. Setting didactic poetry against prose literature, heroic epic poems and allegorical readings of the Homeric epics, Kneebone draws attention to the rich and assimilative traditions of post-classical didactic epics.