Hilary 2008 – Wed. 11
Elton T E Barker
elton.barker@chch.ox.ac.uk
HOMER – THE ILIAD
COURSE OUTLINE
1. About the anger of Peleus’ son, sing Muse: Beginnings
a. The Iliad as history?
b. The Iliad as oral poetry?
c. Death of an author?
d. The proem.
2. Achilles calls an assembly: Strife and the Achaean camp (Iliad 1)
a. Chryses makes his plea;
b. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon;
c. Mediation;
d. The fall-out.
3. The best of the Achaeans: Heroes and the People
a. The shepherd of the people;
b. The best of the Achaeans;
c. The catalogue of ships (Iliad 2).
4. Respect your house: The Embassy to Achilles (Iliad 9)
a. Preliminaries;
b. Odysseus’ (Agamemnon’s) offer;
c. Achilles’ reply;
d. Negotiation and aftermath.
5. War is a man’s thing: Hector, Troy and the Trojan women
a. Hector inside Troy (Iliad 6);
b. Hector outside Troy (Iliad 22);
c. Helen of Troy.
6. And the will of Zeus was being accomplished: The divine comedy?
a. Divine intervention;
b. Zeus’ plan;
c. Thetis and Zeus.
7. And the laos clamoured on either side: Memorialising Strife
a. Reconciliation? (Iliad 19);
b. Funeral games (Iliad 23);
c. Achilles’ shield (Iliad 18).
8. Such was the burial of Hector: The End of Epic (Iliad 24)
a. The assembly of the gods;
b. Achilles and Priam;
c. The burial of Hector.
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(VERY) SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Future weeks’ bibliography will be supplied]
‘Companions’
Fowler, R. B., Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2005).
Foley, J. M., ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford, 2005).
McAuslan, I. and Walcot, P., eds., Homer: Greek and Roman Studies (Oxford, 1998).
Morris and Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997).
‘Homeric Society’
Collins, D., Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry (Cambridge, MA.,
2004).
Finley, M. I., The World of Odysseus (London, 1977 [1954]).
Osborne, R., Greece in the Making: 1200-479 BC (London, 1996).
Raaflaub, K.A., “A historian’s headache: how to read ‘Homeric society’?,” in Fisher and van Wees,
eds., Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London, 1998) 169-93.
Snodgrass, A., “An historical Homeric society?,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 94 (1974) 114-25.
‘Homeric Criticism’
Allan, W., ‘Arms and the man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the death of Patroclus,’ CQ 55 (2005) 1-16.
Currie, B. G. F., ‘Homer and the early epic tradition,’ in Clarke, Currie and Lyne, Epic Interactions:
Perspectives on Homer, Virgil and the Epic Tradition (Oxford, 2006) 1-45.
Foley, J. M., ‘Oral tradition and its implications,’ in Morris and Powell (Leiden, 1997) 146-73.
“Analogues: modern oral epics,” in Foley (Oxford, 2005) 196-212.
Graziosi, B., Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Homer (Cambridge, 2002).
Scodel, R., Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience (Ann Arbor, 2002).
Willcock, M. M., “Neo-analysis,” in Morris and Powell (Leiden, 1997) 174-89.
Literary Studies
Ford, A., Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, 1992).
Griffin, J., Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1983).
de Jong, I., Narrators and Focalisers: The Presentation of the Story on the Iliad (Amsterdam, 1987).
Lowe, N. J., The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (Cambridge, 2000).
Minchin, E., Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender (Oxford, 2007).
Richardson, S., The Homeric Narrator (Nashville, 1990).
Rutherford, R. B., Homer. Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics No. 26 (Oxford, 1996).
Schein, S. L., Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley, 1984).
The Proem
Burgess, J. S., The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001).
Davies, M., The Greek Epic Cycle (Bristol, 2003[1989]).
Graziosi B. and Haubold J., Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London, 2005).
Griffin, J. and Hammond, M., ‘Critical Appreciation: Homer Iliad 1.1-52,’ in McAuslan and Walcot
(Oxford, 1998) 65-82.
Griffin, J., “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer,” JHS 97 (1977) 39-53.
Marks, J. R., “The junction between the Kypria and the Iliad,” Phoenix 56 (2002) 1-24.
Mayer, K., “Helen and the ∆ΙΟΣ ΒΟΥΛΗ,” AJP 117 (1996) 1-15.
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