The Structure of the Iliad (STR)

Latacz, Joachim

doi:10.1515/9781501501746-011

Cited by 42 publications

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“…37 Apollo's divine identity is asserted through the speed, appearance, and purpose derived from his likeness to the night: he is swift, invisible, deadly. This is a simile whose "chilling power" 38 is due partly to the associations of night with eeriness, danger, and death, 39 partly to the swiftness, silence, invisibility, and inevitability of night's descent, and partly to the brevity of the simile itself ("as brief as possible" says Simon Pulleyn 40 ) which enacts at the level of form the swiftness and decisiveness with which night descends. 41…”

Section: Personificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides

Michelakis¹

2019

American Journal of Philology

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This article focuses on the language used to describe the plague, and more specifically on the oscillation of its vocabulary between literal and figurative meaning, in Homer's Iliad (1.1-487), Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1-215), and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (esp. 2.47.3-2.54). It is argued that the plague spreads in the language of the three narratives by association or contiguity, exploiting existing links with related words, most notably the broader vocabulary of disease and calamity, but it also spreads by analogy, comparison, or similarity, establishing links with other domains such as famine, blight, war and destruction.The Greek word for the plague, λοιμός, is relatively absent from the surviving texts of the archaic and classical periods. It is used once in Homer, once in Hesiod, three times in tragedy and in Herodotus, four times in Thucydides and Plato, and once in Demosthenes and Aeschines. 1 Robin Mitchell-Boyask may well be right that superstition plays a role in this, especially for the period following the great plague of Athens of the early 420s. 2 In the context of this article, however, I am more interested in the broader consequences of the phenomenon and in the possibilities it opens up for how the plague can be transmitted in poetic and historical narrative. If the plague is identified through other words and phrases that shift within and across a wide range of registers and blur the distinction between the literal and the figurative, such associations exemplify something fundamental about how pestilence spreads linguistically: it spreads not by maintaining an essence and an identity (be it biological, metaphysical, cognitive, or semantic) but through a dynamic process based on the exploitation of its linguistic hosts and on its own ability to adapt. It spreads by association or contiguity, Clarke, Michael. 1995. "The Wisdom of Thales and the Problem of the Word ΙΕΡΟΣ."

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Section: Personificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides

Michelakis¹

2019

American Journal of Philology

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Desire in the Iliad

Lesser

2022

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This book is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way and to explain its relationship to the epic’s narrative structure and audience reception. It offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters’ desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters’ desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as erōs, himeros, pothē, menos, thumos, boulē, and eeldōr as well as through the epic’s thematic emotions of grief and anger. This book shows how the mortals’ and gods’ triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus’ withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the “superplot” of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener’s—or reader’s—own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad’s full story, sympathetic desire for characters’ welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.

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Lesser

2022

Desire in the Iliad

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The Structure of the Iliad (STR)

Cited by 42 publications

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Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides

Naming the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides

Desire in the Iliad

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