Why Return to Greek Epic?

Greek epic has been done – copiously, variously, energetically – but at the same time it seeks to be un-done, re-done and done differently. In recent years, important work both specialist and introductory has continued to emerge on epic authors and texts and on the formal properties of epic more broadly.Footnote ¹ And yet the time has come to put new and further pressure on Greek epic as a concept: a cultural object, a self-reflexive agent, or a wide-ranging affective experience. Throughout its long history, Greek epic has continued to delight and excite those who encounter it because of how compellingly it interrogates the boundaries of its own form. On the one hand, the ‘quiddity’ of Greek epic is readily definable: it can be described through the connected matrix of the terms ἔπος (in its most basic sense: ‘word’)Footnote ² ἀοιδή (‘song’) and μῦθος (‘authoritative utterance’);Footnote ³ it is metrically marked by the dactylic hexameter; it is characterised by heroic themes and diction, or formal features such as length, recurring scenes and motifs;Footnote ⁴ and it occupied a firmly central place in (ancient) Greek education and culture.Footnote ⁵ On the other hand, the poems within this seemingly stable literary edifice, from the epics of Homer to Nonnus and beyond, have threatened to burst their own dams, finding inventive, disorienting ways to resist constructed taxonomies. These dynamics have long been recognised in certain individual poets, periods or groups. The present volume attempts a more holistic confrontation of what Greek epic is and does and takes into account a wide range of contemporary critical and theoretical developments in the field.

Epic studies have been pushed – and pulled – in new and exciting directions in the recent decades. In keeping with the broader trends in ancient literary scholarship, there has been a striking concentration of energy in a number of areas: notions of space and time; materiality; structural (re)-analysis; emotion and ethno-criticism. Within the spatial turn, work has focused on landscape, topography and ecology as well as vertical and horizontal movement.Footnote ⁶ Research on epic temporality has focused on how authors in the Greek epic tradition centralise and thematise time, viewing it both as a narrative force and as a poetic tool to reflect on their own position in literary history.Footnote ⁷ Further advances have been made in structuralist and poststructuralist readings, demonstrated most substantially in the recent monumental collection The Structures of Epic Poetry, in which fifty-seven scholars from different specialisms chart the scenes and arrangements of epic such as battles, journeys and rituals ‘whose set forms, sequences and recognisable features mark them as a lasting part of the tradition’.Footnote ⁸ Stimulating studies have also emerged on materiality and object ontology, which, together with the achievements of ecocritical readings, have done much to emphasise how our encounters with the epic world must move beyond mortal heroes and anthropomorphised gods.Footnote ⁹ Perspectives on human themes have also significantly widened and deepened. There has been an intense appreciation of the psychological dimensions of ancient epic, and of the role played by emotions, affect and sensory-aesthetic experiences.Footnote ¹⁰ And important new anthropological and sociological lenses are being rigorously applied, most markedly to consider what ancient epic has to say (and it has a lot to say) about race, racecraft and ethnicity.Footnote ¹¹

Another palpable shift in epic studies since the turn of the century is in conceptions of what is meant by ‘reception’. Greek epic is in a sense the ultimate reception genre. Techniques which later became central to modern theories of intertextuality and narratology – those of supplementation, competitive rewriting and creative imitation, which are all now key tools for analysing ancient poeticsFootnote ¹² – find ample expression in the earliest Greek hexameter texts. To take just two paradigmatic illustrations, consider Hesiod’s self-correction at the start of the Works and Days (‘so there was not just one birth of Strife after all’, Op. 11, in contrast to the genealogy given at Theogony 225) and the delicate embedding of alternative strands of the Trojan story within the Iliad and Odyssey, such as the ‘quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles’ mentioned obliquely in Demodocus’ song (Od. 8.75).Footnote ¹³

These markers of self-awareness, competitiveness and innovation in the early hexameter tradition strongly negate any simplistic binaries of oral ‘primitiveness’ versus literate sophistication which may once have held sway in conceptions of Greek epic.Footnote ¹⁴ But they should also make us wary of separating older, ‘canonical’ Greek epic from later, ‘derivative’ responses to it.Footnote ¹⁵ There are many signs that a more capacious approach to Greek epic across time is beginning to take hold. The increased recognition of and appreciation for postclassical and especially imperial Greek epic is one of the most salient features of ancient literary studies in recent years.Footnote ¹⁶ The surge in scholarly interest in late antique poets such as Quintus, Triphiodorus, Colluthus and Nonnus, and in Jewish and Christian Greek versifiers, has meant that long-standing clichés surrounding these authors which deemed them aesthetically lacklustre, or tired knock-offs of Homer, are now truly a thing of the past, and their rich, culturally fascinating poems are being brought more definitively into the framework of Greek epic as a whole.Footnote ¹⁷ The creative self-awareness of Greek epic also extends well beyond the end of genre in a formal sense. After the move from quantitative poetry to syllabic stress poetry discernible from the sixth century ce,Footnote ¹⁸ epic still inspired new readers and thinkers. As Markéta Kulhánková discusses in Chapter 19, the concept, themes and authority of Greek epic were far from obsolete in the Byzantine era of Greek literature. These same hallmarks and features of epic storytelling, Johanna Hanink demonstrates in Chapter 20, also became deeply integrated into modern Greek and Turkish poetry and nation-building; and, as Panayiotis Christoforou stresses in his Epilogue, they have a persistent and renewed relevance in notions of selfhood in the Greek lands today.

The current popular appetite for Greek mythological epic is also striking and significant. In the Anglophone sphere, the British Museum’s ‘Troy’ exhibition (2019–20), Stephen Fry’s series of books (most recently at the time of writing, the very epic-centred Troy, 2020), the new musical ‘EPIC: The Troy Saga’, with an EP album which passed three million streams on its first day of release,Footnote ¹⁹ Emily Wilson’s much anticipated translation of the Iliad (2023) and the ardent media attention surrounding it,Footnote ²⁰ and the cascade of novels on Trojan mythology such as Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021), Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) and the trilogy by Emily Reference HauserHauser (2016–18),Footnote ²¹ a contributor to this volume, as well as ventures on the big and small screen, all suggest that Greek epic is having a particular cultural moment.Footnote ²² This should not surprise us. Themes of war and dislocation, journeying and nostalgia, and emotions on an individual scale, set in and against vast topographical, environmental and cosmic perspectives, have all spoken to multiple different movements of the ‘now’. They have a stark relevance to a society which is grappling with a new European war, navigating the interminable ‘aftermath’ of a pandemic, working to confront multiple new regimes of power, and attempting to find new, better ways to self-express and communicate in a rapidly changing social world. This modern spotlighting of Greek epic themes sharply underlines the fact that we must also resist drawing firm lines between scholarly accounts of epic and salient popular trends: to do so would be limiting and misleading. Epic has inspired and continues to inspire radical interpretation and reworking, as the inbuilt antiquity and uncanny familiarity of the foundational Greek genre offers itself so readily as a vehicle to negotiate, celebrate and challenge our own visions of the world.

About This Volume

The volume has arisen from this charged and energising environment and aims to engage with some of these themes and approaches head-on, by centralising the ideas and concerns which drive Greek epic production across time and configuring epic as a mode constantly in conversation with itself. It has therefore been constructed with two connected aims. The first is quite simply to provide a thematic account of the Greek epic genre.Footnote ²³ The second is to approach Greek epic synchronically, to make extensive connections with other ancient genres and traditions (such as Latin epic and Near Eastern poetry), and especially (one of the most adamant intentions of the volume) to continue to move beyond the conventional canon of Greek hexameter poets and pay ample attention to imperial Greek mythological epic, late antique Christian poetics, and modern adaptations and retellings.

The Companion is divided into six major parts, each chosen to reflect one of the major developments in the world of epic studies highlighted above.Footnote ²⁴ In light of its two driving aims, it does not follow an author-by-author, chronographic approach, nor does it cover every introductory topic pertaining to the epic mode. Rather, the material has been selected and parameters have been drawn so as on the one hand, to cover as wide a temporal remit as possible, and on the other, to focus on close readings, with a particular emphasis on juxtaposing the best-known works of epic poetry with more unfamiliar or unexpected poems, passages and literary periods.Footnote ²⁵ As a result, there are necessarily areas that go unaddressed, and the volume’s panorama is chiefly textual rather than visual or archaeological.Footnote ²⁶ Readers looking for overviews of, for instance, heroics and characterisation, type scenes, similes and ecphrasis, or the oral tradition are very well served by existing literature, and there is little to be gained from retracing the same territory in another collection.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, each contributor was asked to write a piece for one of the Part themes, and to explore their topic in an epic text or texts of their choosing, to pursue the rich connections that are available between different Greek epics, and produce new and exciting readings and combinations. Some chapters take up familiar and influential ideas in epic scholarship (such as religion or the role of women) and interrogate them from a new angle; others represent the first stand-alone discussions of their subject (e.g. epic racecraft, the poetics of the diminutive, and Trojan temporality) or constitute the first forays into a subject in an introductory format (such as affect in postclassical epic). In all cases the pieces here represent new research, thoroughly grounded in the context of the relevant scholarly debates.

The volume is therefore decidedly, and proudly, kaleidoscopic. The chapters are united by their interest in six central themes and engage in multiple ways with one another (as will be detailed below), but they vary and sometimes even diverge in stance, approach and scope, and it has been my intention as editor to preserve and encourage these variations. However, many steps have also been taken to orient readers as they make their way through the diverse discussions in this book. The first chapter in each section aims to give an overview of the theme on a larger scale, in a fashion that paves the way for the more zoomed-in analyses which follow.Footnote ²⁸ The volume is accompanied by a free downloadable web resource (Cambridge.org/9781316514696) which contains plot summaries of all the poems featured in the chapters.Footnote ²⁹ At the end of the volume there is a timeline of all surviving Greek epic and a set of chapter abstracts, where the key epics discussed are highlighted in bold to aid those searching for discussions of a particular author or text. All features of this structure seek to draw together the different perspectives offered by the chapters into a coherent new look at the epic world, and to draw together the equally diverse audiences of the companion genre, from specialist scholars to new or general readers, and to offer them multiple ways of approaching the ideas found within these pages.

The Parts and the Whole

The final section of this Introduction surveys the main tenets of each part and draws attention to some of the key points of dialogue between the chapters. Each chapter has been designed to be read individually, but the contributions also form part of the wider ethos of the book and thus reward connected reading.

Part I, ‘Epic Engagements’, investigates the interrelations between Greek epic and other regions, genres or modes, forging extensive comparisons with Near Eastern poetry, lyric and didactic material. Bernardo Ballesteros 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. Henry Spelman then examines the relationship between epic and the unruly genre of lyric. He begins with brief historical orientation and then focuses on more theoretical questions of genre, and ultimately examines how and whether lyric works out a definition for itself in contradistinction to epic, and whether such a definition can offer a more nuanced understanding of what epic itself is. Emily Kneebone takes a related approach to the didactic tradition and analyses the interplay and boundaries between ancient heroic and didactic epic poetry, particularly in the Hellenistic and imperial periods. All three of these chapters draw attention to the complexity surrounding considerations of historical context, chronology, genre and classification, and show how these authors and traditions overlap and engage with epic material, and reveal not only their affiliations to heroic epic conventions, but also their divergences, distinctions and modes of adaptation.

Part II, ‘Epic Space’, considers the ways in which space, broadly conceived, is thematised and problematised in Greek epic. Building on the growing interest within many specialisms of literary studies in geography, topography and ecology,Footnote ³⁰ the section explores space from a number of angles: narrative conceptualisations of place and plot, vertical movements and journeys, travel and dislocation. It also examines the more formalistic notions of size and scale – the verbal, material or structural ‘space’ that epic takes up. Christos Tsagalis analyses the presentation of space in relation to the story narrated in the two Homeric epics. The chapter locates and highlights for the readers the similarities and differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey with respect to categories of space and suggests the ways in which these categories could be taken up and manipulated by later proponents of the genre. Karolina Sekita moves us onto a vertical axis, providing a wide-ranging account of epic katabases (journeys to the underworld) and treating the underworld as both a theme and a location in early hexameter poetry. Alexander Loney moves from Sekita’s vertical axis to a horizontal perspective, focusing on the epic return journey (the nostos) and the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces – dislocation, nostalgia and homesickness – in an analysis which connects the more structural aspects of epic’s physical geography with its temporal, social and psychological dimensions, which will be picked up and centralised in the next three parts of the volume (respectively, on epic time, epic people and epic feelings). Berenice Verhelst considers space in a more formalistic sense, in a chapter centred on the controversial epic ‘sub’ genre of the epyllion. She 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’, focusing not just on the aesthetic dimensions of these poems, but also and especially on the characters contained within them: ‘small’ characters like children and mice, and foreboding cameos by figures like Achilles. Verhelst shows how these texts put grand epic heroics into a new perspective, be it comical or dark, to negotiate their own position in relation to Homer and the epic tradition.

Part III, ‘Epic Time’, takes up another highly topical area of scholarship: temporality. Taking their cue from the central and complex role of time within the ancient Greek epic tradition and its inheritors, the three chapters in this section trace treatments of temporality in Greek epic from Homer and Hesiod through Apollonius to imperial Greek poetics, revealing the transformations which took place in epic temporal structuring, and assessing the influence of Hellenistic aesthetics, imperial Greek politics, and the dawning of Christianity. Simon Goldhill explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality: foundational – how epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things; narratological – how epics make time a subject of their narrative; and poetic – how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. After this panoramic purview, Tom Phillips zooms in to show how Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica offers a particularly powerful example of epic temporality at work. 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. Phillips’ readings, like those in Loney’s chapter, also reveal the emotional layers at work in his passages, and thus pave the way for the fifth part of the volume, where Apollonius will also make a poignant return. My own chapter considers the prominence of and play with temporality in imperial Greek epic through a reading of three poems which return directly to the mythic time of Troy: Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen. Treating some key moments of temporal reflexivity in these poems, the readings outline the specific imperial Greek temporality that they share, which renders them distinct from Apollonius’ Alexandrian epic as analysed by Phillips. By emphasising how Troy operates in these poems not only as a physical space and geographical place, but also as a marker of time, this chapter seeks to underscore the deep interconnection between space and time within the Greek epic tradition that has been suggested in various ways by the contributions across these two parts.

Part IV, ‘Epic People’, focuses on the social fabric of epic. Moving beyond conventional topics of characterisation and heroic identity,Footnote ³¹ this section incorporates newer perspectives to address and re-address religion, morality, gender and ethnicity. Renaud Gagné tackles the vast topic of religion in epic through a specific and innovative lens: the detailed descriptions of animal sacrifice found in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the dominant referential role that they continued to play in Greek representations of sacrifice, creating what he terms ‘the ritual archive’ of Greek epic. Jackie Murray offers an illuminating 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. Using this model, 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, and shows how this order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial. Emily Hauser investigates the roles and relevance of women in Greek epic, and argues, like Gagné, that the ideas and motifs developed in Homeric epic have intense and complex relevance to the later development of the tradition. Following the emphasis placed in this Introduction on reversing the customary ‘post-scripting’ view of modern reception of ancient epic, Hauser shows that looking back to gender, and women, in Homer is as important now as ever. She surveys key moments in the Iliad and Odyssey featuring women and looks forward to the reception of Homer’s women in recent novelistic reworkings.

Part V, ‘Epic Feelings’, leads on naturally from the analyses of epic people, and brings into sharp focus the emotional dimensions prevalent in the chapters from earlier sections. The chapters here delve deeply into the emotional texture of epic works, focusing on the matrix of feelings existing within and beneath desire, laughter, rage and fear. Pauline LeVen conceptualises and close-reads emotion and affect in Greek epic, with special focus on two cases, anger and fear. Treating from this perspective some of the same passages of Apollonius discussed by Phillips and of Quintus analysed in my chapter, she argues that epic is not in fact solely dominated by ‘big emotions’ but is rather shaped by a multitude of affects, and ultimately shows that epic provides its own tools to conceptualise them. Matt Hosty takes up a theme introduced in nuce in Verhelst’s chapter and examines the elusive notion of humour in Greek epic. Hosty begins by surveying our limited evidence for Homeric humour and proceeds to examine the complex and critical relationship between Greek epic and the humorous. Steven Smith treats love, desire and eroticism, arguing that eros and philotes serve as metapoetic structuring principles of epic narrative. His readings thus offer another angle through which to interrogate the temporal shaping of epic surveyed in Goldhill’s chapter, and another perspective on the Hellenistic and imperial authors treated by the earlier chapters. Smith begins with a preliminary survey of the foundational Homeric epic scenes, returning anew to some of the major scenes involving Homeric women analysed by Hauser, and then moves forward to consider how these same erotic structuring principles play out in Apollonius and imperial Greek epic, which absorbs Homer’s models through the filter of romantic fiction, showcasing the regenerative powers of epic desire.

Part VI, ‘Epic Without End’, takes the place of what would conventionally be the ‘Reception’ compartment of a companion. Just as postclassical and modern adaptations are prominent in many of the earlier sections of this volume, so too do the chapters here include discussions of more ‘ancient’ material from Hellenistic Alexandria and Egypt, late antiquity and Byzantium. In keeping with the volume’s focus on (comparatively) unfamiliar material, and its aim to create new juxtapositions, the section seeks to celebrate responses which have received relatively little attention in previous scholarship; so, in the place of for example Romantic poetry or Renaissance art, here one will find Hollywood Westerns and Modern Greek literature. Richard Hunter first considers the place of epic, above all Homer, in three overlapping areas of ancient Greek and Roman culture – education at all levels, elite literary culture, and the more specialised interpretations of scholars and philosophers. Tim Whitmarsh probes the powerful presence of Greek epic in the world of late antique Christianity, returning to many of the Christian epics featured in earlier chapters (especially Goldhill’s and my own) to ask the crucial question of why Greek-speaking Christians continued to write epic poetry. Markéta Kulhánková picks up the story from where Whitmarsh’s chapter leaves off and 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 offers close readings of the only Byzantine epos, Digenis Akritis (twelfth century ce), and the Byzantine romances which contain Homeric themes. Johanna Hanink moves the story on even further in time, and 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. Martin Winkler concludes this section with a turn to the big screen and considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema, especially in its own epic genre par excellence – the Western. Winkler returns to some of the archetypal aspects of Greek epic which have underpinned many of the discussions in this volume: fame; rivalry; the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (centralised in Gagné’s chapter); and fundamental story patterns (the focus of Tsagalis’). He demonstrates the enduring power of these archetypes, exemplified in one of the most profound epic Westerns.

Panayiotis Christoforou ends the volume with an impressionistic essay on encounters with ancient Greek epic in modern Greek lands. In an alternative, personal perspective on the political account provided in Hanink’s chapter, he explores the problematic ownership of the past in Greece and how the central place of Greek antiquity, and in particular epic, in the construction of western civilisation has created a strange distance between Greeks and the Greek past and its literature. Reflecting on his own experience as a Grecophone classicist, Christoforou shows how the story of Greekness and epic is now played out in the background of Greeks performing their Hellenicity in a world that does not always trust their inheritance.

All of the chapters are united by their commitment to the driving foci of this collection – on the more uncommon dimensions of Greek epic, and on the interconnection between ancient creativity and ‘later’ responses. Collectively, they form this volume’s own particular response to Greek epic; a response that treats epic as a fluid but meaningful concept across time; accommodates many, sometimes contrasting perspectives and methodologies; and above all is rooted in detailed readings of the epic texts themselves. No matter how much structural analysis or theoretical interrogation one marshals to explain the phenomenon of epic, it is only close reading and re-reading that fully animates it. This Companion will have succeeded in its approach if it provides further stimulus and new resources for reading epic – more broadly, more adventurously, and again. Through this process of re-reading, we shall no doubt continue to find new revelations in this most ostensibly over-scrutinised of genres. In the persistent relevance of its human and non-human themes and in the uncomfortable questions of canon, hierarchy and legacy that it poses, we may catch in a new key the notes of epic’s long continuous song.