This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.

This chapter considers H.D.’s translation of Euripides’s Ion (1937). H.D.’s Ion crystallizes her approach to Greek, redefining the practice of translation in the process; allows her to propose an alternative theory of psychic development contra Freud; and, finally, in its specific (mis)reading of the Euripidean play, foreshadows Pound’s treatment of Sophocles in Women of Trachis by making a strong case for the poetic and cultural relevance of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century. Pushing beyond accounts of the play available to her in the 1930s, H.D.’s interpretation of Euripides’ poetic strategies aligns with more recent scholarly accounts of his plays. Deploying differently the elements of commentary and translation in her multigeneric work, H.D. dramatizes both her own desire to believe in a triumphant narrative that would bind ancient and modern culture and would make poetry the cure or compensation for trauma, and the contingency or constructedness of such a position. The analysis of Ion is bookended by examinations of “Murex” (1926), and Trilogy (1944–46) that show the germination and evolution of the questions, ideas, and techniques that went into the translation of the play.

This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

This chapter explores connections between early Greek and Near Eastern narrative poetry and demonstrates how the Eastern Mediterranean context can help situate early Greek epic in an ancient cross-cultural framework. The chapter addresses methodological questions about how Near Eastern poetry has been related to Homer and Hesiod, and provides the literary-historical coordinates of the relevant Sumero-Akkadian, Hurro-Hittite and Ugaritic corpora. Given its particular closeness to Homer, the chapter discusses the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic among other works, as part of a broader thematic comparison of poetic composition and concepts of the cosmos and heroism. Ballesteros carefully outlines the various factors that may explain similarities and considers directions for future comparisons involving work on literary criticism, oral tradition, scribal culture and world mythology.

This chapter analyses the presentation of space in relation to the story narrated in the two Homeric epics. Tsagalis’ study is divided into two parts: in the first, he explores simple story space, i.e. how the narrator views the space in which the plot is unravelled in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the second part, he treats embedded story space, i.e. the way characters, functioning as thinking agents with stored experiences, perceive what is taking place in the story-world. The structure of this chapter locates and highlights for the readers the similarities and differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey with respect to these two categories of space and suggests the ways in which these categories could be taken up and manipulated by later proponents of the genre.

This chapter traces the shadow that ancient Greek epic, and the Homeric poems most particularly, have cast over the modern nations of Greece and Turkey, using case studies with a specific focus on how the epics came to figure in the nation-building work of both countries. Greece presents a unique case for the reception of these poems for two related reasons: Homeric Greek can be integrated into modern Greek literature without transl(iter)ation, and a long-standing national discourse casts the Greek heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey as the ancestors of Greeks living today. On the other hand, Turkey, whose borders encompass the ancient site of Troy, made different use of the Homeric tradition. During the self-conscious process of Westernisation in the twenty-first century, the Homeric poems were among the first great works of ‘Western’ – not Greek – literature to be translated by translators working in the employ of the state. Hanink uses these contrasting studies of the national receptions of ancient epic in the ‘Homeric lands’ to point to the range of ways that Homeric poetry has been invoked in modern nation-building projects.

This chapter introduces the key themes and characters in Byzantine literary reconfigurations of epic. After some introductory remarks about the reception of ancient Greek epic in Byzantium, the chapter is divided into two main parts: the first is dedicated to the only Byzantine epos Digenis Akritis (twelfth century CE), the other to late Byzantine romances which contain Homeric themes, especially the Byzantine Iliad, and Byzantine Achilleid, both from the fourteenth century. Kulhánková’s discussion also pays close attention to the question of genre, probing the overlapping of romance and epos in these works, and revealing their mutual influences.

This chapter treats Pound’s collaboration with Eliot from 1917 into the late 1930s from the perspective of their engagement with Greek. It focuses on the interconnection between drama (whether Japanese Noh or Greek tragedy) and the ambition of the long poem; consistent with their turn to formal verse in 1917, the two poets view theater through a similarly formalist lens. The author traces Pound and Eliot’s joint obsession with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon through an examination of their essays – especially Pound’s multi-part “Hellenist Series” (1918–19) and his writings on Jean Cocteau – private correspondence, and select poetic work and translations (e.g., Pound’s unpublished “Opening for Agamemnon,” Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”). Whereas Eliot “declines the gambit, shows fatigue” and chooses to treat Aeschylus from a distance, Pound is both more ambivalent about Aeschylus’s value and more in thrall to elements of his poetic technique and language. Though Pound and Eliot’s abortive Greek projects would lie dormant for some years, the chapter examines the attempted rekindling of their Greek collaboration in the mid-1930s, which provides the transition between the early texts discussed in this chapter and their mature work.

This chapter treats love, desire and eroticism, arguing that eros and philotes serve as metapoetic structuring principles of epic narrative. It begins with a preliminary survey of the foundational texts, focusing on the scene of Helen at the loom as she weaves a tapestry of warriors in battle, essentially a figuration of the Iliad as an artistic product of sexual longing. The chapter then moves forward to consider how these same erotic structuring principles play out in imperial Greek epic, which absorbs Homer’s models through the filter of romantic fiction. Smith focuses on the first three books of Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica – the events surrounding Penthesileia, Memnon, and the death of Achilles – reading them as flirtatious manipulations that intensify readerly anticipation, and then turns to Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, specifically the tendril imagery in the Ampelos episode and its sequel, the romance of Calamus and Carpus. These episodes serve as exemplars of the regenerative powers of epic desire.

This chapter explores the complex relationship between epic and the tricky genre of lyric. Spelman begins with brief historical orientation and then focuses on broader and more theoretical questions of genre, which have been given new impetus by Culler’s Theory of the Lyric. Taking ‘lyric’ in a broad sense to include iambos and elegy as well as melic poetry, Spelman considers some of the most famous and important lyric passages (especially drawing from Pindar and Sappho) that engage with Homeric epic, the Homeric Hymns and the Epic Cycle. Spelman ultimately examines how and whether lyric works out a definition for itself in contradistinction to epic—and whether such a definition can offer us a more nuanced understanding of what epic itself is.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

This chapter focuses on emotions and affects in Greek epic. Leven demarcates the difference between emotion and affect in this context: emotions are defined as complex phenomena that involve embodied minds, gendered individuals and their societies, as well as instincts, cognition and values; and affects are understood as more ineffable feelings, which lie ‘beneath’ the surface: the innumerable microevents that bodies and selves undergo in their experience of the world around them, rarely indexed in conventional language. The chapter then starts by outlining the main questions that have divided scholarship on ancient emotions in general, and epic emotions in particular, with special focus on two cases, anger and fear. It then turns to episodes featuring what Leven calls ‘scenes of affect’ and argues, first, that epic is not in fact solely dominated by ‘big emotions’ but is rather shaped by a multitude of affects. Focusing on representative passages of the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Posthomerica, the chapter ultimately shows that epic provides its own tools to conceptualise these affects.

This chapter probes the powerful presence of Greek epic in the world of late antique Christianity. The chapter begins by exploring the dynamic variety of uses to which hexameter verse was put by late antique Christians, including poems on surprisingly salacious themes. It then turns to consider hexameter poems on specifically Christian topics. First it examines the earliest examples of such texts, the Sibylline Oracles and the poems in the Codex of Visions. He then analyses the group of poems all composed in the fifth century CE: the Metaphrase of the Psalms of ps.-Apollinaris, the Homeric Centos and Martyrdom of St Cyprian of Eudocia and the Paraphrase of John’s Gospel by Nonnus. Each of these is, in a different way, a transcription into hexameter verse of a pre-existing Christian text — a striking development in the history of Greek poetry. Whitmarsh shows how this shift enacts, and indeed puts pressure on, the distinction between form and content. Yet for all that they have in common, each of the three fifth-century poets has a different agenda, and reflects a unique poetic vision and aesthetic.