In the century since Milman Parry argued that the Homeric poems arose from a long tradition of oral poetic performance, Homeric studies has been grappling in various ways with that argument. The most fundamental question has been the nature and function of the ‘formula’, famously defined by Parry as ‘an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse [1987], p. 13). In the fifty years between the end of World War II and the late 1990s debates about the implications of oral composition were the liveliest area of Homeric scholarship, a period whose vibrancy is best encapsulated in A New Companion to Homer (edd. I. Morris and B.B. Powell [1997]). After a comparatively unproductive interlude in the early 2000s, which was preoccupied with inconclusive debates about what a ‘formula’ is, the last ten to fifteen years have produced innovative studies of Homeric composition and aesthetics. Moreover, as has been the case for the last century, new approaches in other disciplines – including Embodied Cognition, New Materialism and Computational Linguistics – have been put to good use by Homerists. This essay discusses books published in the last decade that have made significant contributions to key scholarly developments both in Homeric scholarship and beyond, as well as new editions, commentaries and essay collections focussing on Homeric epic.

This article analyses a passage of Plutarch which relates that Alexander the Great visited Cyprus and appointed the gardener Abdalonymus, descendant of the Cinyrads, as king of Paphos. While historical records attest to a king Abdalonymus in Sidon, Plutarch’s account is clearly ahistorical. Alexander never set foot in Cyprus, and Abdalonymus never ruled over Paphos. The transfer of the story from Sidon to Cyprus was not a simple factual mistake, however, but a deliberate political and propagandistic device, created by an unknown author with strong Ptolemaic interests, most likely in conjunction with the establishment of Ptolemaic dominion over Cyprus by Ptolemy I. Through the long-standing Ancient Near Eastern tradition of royal gardening symbolism, which significantly influenced the island and the Levant, the story aims to legitimize the new Ptolemaic rule in Paphos, the capital of Ptolemaic Cyprus. By lending a venerable air to the new order, the story offers an alternative narrative to the dramatic death of Nicocles, the last king of Paphos and priest of the local great-goddess, who claimed descent from Cinyras and eventually committed suicide under pressure from Ptolemy I.

This Profile looks at two technologies that were developed to make source texts in the original Greek, Latin and, indeed, any language directly accessible to audiences who have not yet studied – and may never study – the language itself: (1) translations aligned at the word and phrase level with the original text and (2) rich linguistic annotations explaining the part of speech, regularised dictionary form and syntactic function of each word in a corpus (typically called treebanks, because the syntactic structure is commonly visualised as an inverted tree).