‘Epic’ is of course an invented concept, a Western imposition on the natural heterogeneity of long narrative forms from cultures around the world. Stemming ultimately from ancient Greek epos, which spans the field from ‘word’ to ‘tale’ in Homer, and the popular term epopoiia (‘verse composition’), ancient Greek epic has been described as a genre in some depth since Aristotle; once canonized, it became a literary tool of unquestioned usefulness and applicability worldwide, primarily on the cultural and ideological strength of its Greco-Roman origins.
Like all genre labels, ‘epic’ can help focus our vision, creating categories that facilitate comparison and contrast as well as filling in a background against which individual tales can be understood. In that sense it can function as an effective organizing principle, and generic identity can certainly serve as a tool for effective reading. But, as already adumbrated, neither ‘the epic’ nor any other genre is an archetype. The nation and individuals who produce ‘epics’ have no uniform code of generic requirements; indeed, even their internal systems of nomenclature for various kinds of verbal art prove radically divergent... and in applying this concept and label uncritically to long narrative forms from other cultures we run the risk of unintentionally colonizing their verbal art...
Relatively few epics are smaller in extent than the Homeric poems – Beowulf at 3 182 lines and the hundred-odd medieval French chansons de geste at about the same or lesser length are examples – but many are far longer. A more dependable characteristic of epic across cultures is the often-cited feature of ‘omnibus genre’, that is, the extent to which the epic absorbs or is in conversation with other poetic genres in the cultural repertoire. Critics have identified prayers, laments, proverbs, catalogues and inset stories within the Iliad and Odyssey...
The presence of formulas, such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’ or ‘wine-dark sea’, has often been cited as an indication of the Homeric poems’ debt to an ancient Greek oral tradition, as the recurrence of typical scenes like Arming the Hero or Feasting... When Andromache pleads with Hector in Iliad 6 to remain inside Troy with her and Astyanax, her use of traditional scene of Lament – customarily a vehicle for actually mourning the dead – suggests the inevitability of her husband’s demise. The Return story pattern of the Odyssey, mirrored in a host of Indo-European epic traditions, accounts for the order and sequence of the poem, for Penelope’s trademark intransigence, and for the closure of the poem after XXIII, 296...
Homeric epic has drawn definition from other stylistic features as well, very prominently from its prologues, catalogues and similes. The Iliad begins with an appeal to the Muse and a sketch of the mythic background to the action that follows, and the Odyssey starts similarly, with particular attention to Odysseus strivings and an exhortation to the Muse to ‘speak also to us’. Correspondingly, The Siri Epic begins with an extensive series of invocations, while South Slavic songs also make use of pripjevi, or prologues, to start up the narrative action.
National character – the epic as a charter of group identity, myth in the service of indigenous social history – is an aspect of many scholars’ concept of the genre. The Iliad glorifies the Achaean achievement in battle and the Odyssey memorializes the post-Troy return to one’s homeland with all the dangers and challenges such a journey and homecoming pose... The ‘epic ethos’ reaches far beyond its most immediate context, and well beyond where document-based history can go: the Kalevala has long fuelled the emergence of the Finns as an individual nation, as well as the discipline of folk-lore studies and the music of Sibelius.
National characters and group identity are often encoded in heroic actions, with a central focus on martial achievement, but there are other sorts of epic vehicles as well. The heroism in the Iliad – the acts of war and winning of kleos on the battlefield, irrespective of whether one lives or dies - is not entirely coincident with heroism in the Odyssey, which consists of winning survival, return and re-establishment of the social order.
John Miles Foley
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...the straight truth is that we can say next to nothing for certain about the original circumstances of production of our two poems, neither about their audience nor their author nor their context of communication. For a start, they come from a time well before any kind of firm external historical record...
'Homer' never in any way declares who he is, where he comes from, or who he is making poetry for. Even if he did, we would have to treat the declaration with care - it need not be literally true - but he has covered his own tracks so completely that this question does not arise. More than in almost any other poetry, the craftsman suppresses his own presence, and effaces his own identity.
Achilles is uncompromising, overt in his feelings, unhesitatingly ready to die in order to make good his failings: Odysseus, the great survivor, is subtle, always ready to temporize, to disguise, and to lie...
The archetypal anitypes go far beyond the two heroes. The Iliad tells directly of only a few crucial days out of the whole Trojan War; and it is almost entirely set, claustrophobically almost, at Troy. At the same time, the poem extends understanding towards a wide range of characters, and to both sides in the war. While the Odyssey narrates only a small number of days directly - those leading up to Odysseus' return and revenge on Ithake - it covers, by means of flashbacks, a wide spread of places, including the varied story-worlds of Odysseus' adventures. And his adventures (and those of Menelaos) are spread over some ten years. Yet, for all its range of time and place, the Odyssey is centred on one man and his close associates in a way quite different from the multiplicity of the Iliad.
The Odyssey is fundamentally a crime-and-punishment story: the good and the likeable triumph, and the wicked are in the end brought low. It all moves towards reunion and the establishment of a stable and peaceful society, even though that is not fully acheved by the end of the poem (the eventuality is profesied). The Odyssey's overall direction is from suffering and disruption towards restoration and the united family. The Iliad, on the other hand, is not evidently a story of right and wrong; it tells of a world in which all suffer, and where the suffering is not apportioned by deserving. The finest people and the finest relationships - Achilles, Patroklos, Hektor, Andromache, Priam - are destroyed. The best gets wasted; anger and conflict rule human life. The prosperous and civilized city of Troy is to go up in flames; and by no means all of leading Achaians will get home - and even fewer will enjoy the fruits of victorious peace. Two quite different views of the human condition, then, and yet somehow a pair, like non-identical twins.
Oliver Taplin
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The Theogony, in about 1 000 lines, covers the origin and the genealogies of some 300 gods (many in lists of course) and it all leads up towards the establishment of Zeus as supreme divine ruler. The shorter Works and Days is a kind of discursive collection of wise advice, especially about good husbandry; it tells what a man should do to fit into the natural and moral order of the world. Unlike any other early hexameter poetry, W&D is addressed to fellow contemporaries, mostly to Hesiod's layabout brother Perses, and partly to the local lords whom he accuses of corruption.
Although so different in tone and subject from Homer, Hesiod's poems are in the same hexameter metre, and in a pretty similar style and diction. There has been much dispute over which cane the first, but it may well be that the two poets were contemporaries, or at least their lives may have overlapped. Homer almost certainly came though, from the other side of the Aegean Sea, from the middle part of the Asia Minor coast known as Ionia, near its border with the more northern part known as Aiolis. Even so, it is not impossible that they both participated in the same poetic occasions sometimes. The ancient Greeks certainly liked to believe that they did, and stories about a great 'Contest' between them grew up early, probably within a few generations of their own day. This sets up a kind of contest within the whole nature of poetry: the story-teller of glamorous champions versus the font of homely wisdom…
It was surely Hesiod himself who established the Muses, traditionally from Mount Olympos far to the north, on his local mountain, Helikon. He even seems to have coined, in his Theogony, their canonical nine names…
Hesiod performed his poetry then (or made out that he preformed) at a big public occasion which attracted visitors and competitors. Competition can be good, he claims elsewhere (W&D 25-6). So a picture begins to take shape of poets who travel, and whose venues include big public occasions where they can compete to win attention, prestige, and reward.
In W&D Hesiod casts himself as a grim old bugger, tough, without illusions, worn down by hard labour, pessimistic (174-177). But this does not mean that Hesiod's audience listened to him in order to get depressed. What does his poetry offer them, then? Explicitly: vivid wisdom, mythical and religiouy lore, and glorification of the gods, above all of Zeus. But there is an important passage in the Theogony which brings out a further, key reason for audiences to give time to this special form of discourse, poetry. Hesiod is talking of the behaviour and blessings of a good basileus (lord), and emphasizing the importance to him of the poet: (97-103).
Oliver Taplin
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John Miles Foley. Epic as a genre. In: Robert Fowler ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge UP, 2004-2007.
Oliver Taplin. The spring of the Muses: Homer and related poetry. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature in the Greek World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
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