A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald
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———. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore, 1990.
Page, Denys L. History and the Homeric Iliad. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959.
Parry, Adam. “Have We Homer’s Iliad?” Yale Classical Studies 20 (1966), 177–216.
———. “Language and Characterization in Homer.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972), 1–22.
———. “The Language of Achilles.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 87 (1956), 1–7.
———. The Language of Achilles and Other Papers. Oxford, 1989.
Parry, Anne Amory. Blameless Aegisthus. Leiden, 1973.
Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. and with introduction by Adam Parry. Oxford, 1971; rpt. 1987.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Tr. Laurence Scott 2nd ed. Austin, Texas, 1968; rpt. 1977.
Redfield, James. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector. Chicago, 1975.
Sacks, Richard. The Traditional Phrase in Homer: Two Studies in Form, Meaning and Interpretation. Leiden, 1987.
Schein, Seth. The Mortal Hero. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984.
Scott, William C. The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile. Leiden, 1974.
Shive, David M. Naming Achilles. Oxford, 1987.
Vivante, Paolo. The Epithets in Homer. New Haven, 1982.
———. The Homeric Imagination: A Study of Homer’s Poetic Perception of Reality. Bloomington, 1970.
Whitman, Cedric. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, Mass., 1958; rpt. New York, 1965.
IV. THE WORLD OF HOMER AND HIS HEROES: ARCHEOLOGY, “EVERYDAY LIFE,” LINGUISTICS
Bernai, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J., 1991.
Biegen, C. W., et al. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia. Princeton, 1966–73.
Boardman, John. The Greeks Overseas. 2nd ed. London, 1980.
Casson, L. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton, 1971.
Crouwel, J. H. Chariots and Other Means of Land Transport in Bronze Age Greece. Amsterdam, 1981.
Dicks, D. R. Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle. London, 1970.
Finley, Moses I. “Homer and Mycenae: Property and Tenure.” Historia 6 (1957), 133–59. Reprinted in Geoffrey S. Kirk, ed. Language and Background of Homer. Cambridge, 1964. Pp. 191–217.
Havelock, Eric. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present New Haven, 1986.
———. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass., 1963.
Lorimer, H. L. Homer and the Monuments. London, 1950.
Morrison, J. S., and R. T. Williams. Greek Oared Ships. Cambridge, 1968.
Nilsson, Martin P. Minoan-Mycenaean Religion. 2nd ed. Lund, 1950.
Powell, Barry. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge, 1991.
Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge, 1987.
Simpson, R. Hope, and J. F. Lazenby. The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer’s Iliad. Oxford, 1970.
Snodgrass, A. M. The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries B.C. Edinburgh, 1971.
———. Early Greek Armour and Weapons. Edinburgh, 1964.
Ventris, Michael, and J. Chadwick. Documents in Mycenaean Greek. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 1973.
Wace, Alan J. B., and Frank H. Stubbings, eds. A Companion to Homer. London and New York, 1962 (abbreviated as W&S).
Webster, T. B. L. From Mycenae to Homer. London, 1958.
V. THE WORLD OF HOMER AND HIS AUDIENCE: THOUGHT, CULTURE
Adkins, Arthur. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford, 1960.
Burkert, W. Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical. Tr. John Raffan. Oxford, 1985.
———. Homo Necans. Tr. Peter Bing. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983.
Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Tr. Janet Lloyd. Hassocks, 1978.
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951; rpt. 1964.
Lloyd Jones, Hugh. The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971.
Long, A. A. “Morals and Values in Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 90 (1970), 121–39.
Onians, R. B. The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge, 1951.
Vermeule, Emily Townsend. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. Tr. Janet Lloyd. Brighton and Atlantic Highlands, N.J. 1980.
———. The Origins of Greek Thought. Tr. Janet Lloyd. Ithaca, 1982.
VI. THE LEGACY OF HOMER: THE HOMERIC POEMS, ODYSSEUS, TRANSLATING HOMER
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” In R. H. Super, ed. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Vol. 1, On the Classical Tradition. Ann Arbor, 1960. Pp. 97–216.
King, Katherine Callen. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987.
Mason, Harold A. To Homer Through Pope: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and Pope’s Translation. New York, 1972.
Pavlock, Barbara. Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition. Ithaca, 1990.
Porphyry. Porphyry on the Cave of the Nymphs. Tr. Robert Lamberton. Barrytown, N.Y., 1983.
Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3d ed. Oxford, 1991.
Scherer, Margaret R. The Legends of Troy in Art and Literature. 2d ed. New York, 1964.
Simonsuuri, Kirsti. Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798). Cambridge, 1979.
Stanford, W. B. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. 2d ed. Oxford, 1963; rev. 1968.
Suzuki, Mihoko. Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Ithaca, 1990.
Williams, Carolyn D. Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning. London and New York, 1993.
Wolf, F. A. Prolegomena to Homer [1795]. Tr. with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James Zetzel. Princeton, 1985.
Acknowledgments
During my last two years of college (many years ago), I read for the first time in their original languages Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. This intense exposure to the ancient and medieval European epics at a formative period of my studies deepened what was already a long-standing love affair with epic and romance. Homer’s poetry and the story of Odysseus have been special delights over the years, even if I have devoted my research and scholarly writing more often to Homer’s—and Odysseus’—descendants than to the originals. For that reason it has been a great pleasure to undertake the present Guide to The Odyssey, which I have done not as a specialist in the Homeric epics (which I am not) but as a classicist and comparatist, as a lover of the poem, and above all as a teacher of literature both ancient and modern.
Every commentary passes on a large proportion of inherited material. It would not have been appropriate, given the intended audience of the present guide, for me to cite previous authorities at every point where I agree with one or more of them, nor I believe would this have been expected in a “school” commentary, where originality is rarely a virtue. I refer readers at important junctures to W. B. Stanford’s two-volume commentary and the collaborative three-volume commentary recently issued by Oxford University Press, and I cite other scholars when their formulation of a particular point seems unusually valuable or thought-provoking. I have suggested a large number of books for further study in the Bibliography, but I have not attempted to list all the items users might find interesting or all those which helped form my views. For example, it is unlikely that I would have developed in the
Introduction my concept of the “archeological reader” had I not read (as most literary scholars do today) the works of Michel Foucault. However, it would have served little purpose to distract readers of this guide with a discussion of the similarities and differences between my “archeological reader” and Foucauldian archeology. Nor will I apologize for all the matters of substance I chose not to address: for the crafter of a commentary, exclusion is a more difficult discipline than inclusion.
My list of debts is a long one. Given the purpose of this guide, it is right for me to begin with those teachers who inspired in me a love of literature and who taught me, at various stages of my schooling, how to read: my family, Jean and Burton Randall, Frank Warnement, Jean Slingerland, Betsy Walsh, B.J. Whiting, Morton Bloom-field, Zeph Stewart, Margaret Howatson, Thomas Greene, Lowry Nelson, Jr., Jack Winkler, and Paul de Man. As a classicist, I am grateful for encouragement and insight to many—teachers, colleagues, students, too many to name. I owe a great debt of thanks to my first teacher of Greek, Gregory Nagy. Special thanks to those who have seen me through this project: Penélopê Laurans and LuAnn Walther, for their trust and patience; Alecia Dantico, who helped me with some of the technical aspects of preparing the manuscript in Boulder, as Stephen Wolf and Sally Arteseros did in New York and Susan Brown did in Belmont; John Boswell, Joe Gordon, and Daniel Selden, for inspiration and encouragement; Sheila Murnaghan and Matthew Gumpert for that and for so generously offering improvements and corrections at short notice; and Manfred Kollmeier, for unwavering confidence. I made important progress on parts of the Commentary during the academic year 1991–92, when, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I was at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Villa I Tatti in Florence. I thank the NEH for their support of all my projects that year, the director of Villa I Tatti, Walter Kaiser, its staff, and my fellow fellows for making this year a wonderful intellectual Odyssey. I also thank Salvatore and Diane Vacca, my “Alkinoös” and “Arêtê,” whose hospitality permitted me to write some of the final pages on Capri, gazing out on waters some believe Odysseus sailed in his travels, before I too returned home.
About the Author
Ralph Hexter is Professor of Classics and Director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has also taught at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D., was a guest lecturer at the Folger Institute, and in 1991–92 was a fellow of the Villa i Tatti, Harvard Center for Studies in the Italian Renaissance, in Florence. He is the author of books and articles on Virgil, Horace, a variety of topics in medieval Latin, and Goethe. He is co-editor of Innovations of Antiquity, published in 1992 in Routledge’s series “The New Ancient World.” His current projects include Homer and Virgil, classical and medieval literary history, Renaissance Latin drama, and the development of comparative literature.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 1993
Copyright © 1993 by Ralph Hexter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint illustrations in this volume:
Illustration 2: Oxford University Press: from A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals by Spiro Kostoff. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted by permission. Illustration 5: Harvard University Press: from Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey by Denys Page, Cambridge, Mass. Copyright © 1973 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission. Illustration 6: Oxford University Press: from A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey by Joseph Russo, et al. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission. Illustration 8: By permission of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Illustration 9: By permission of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Amherst Greek Papyrus 23. Illustration 10: By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hexter, Ralph J., 1952–
A guide to the Odyssey : a commentary on the English translation of Robert Fitzgerald / Ralph Hexter.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Vintage original”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76089-0
1. Homer. Odyssey. 2. Epic poetry, Greek—History and criticism.
3. Odysseus (Greek mythology) in literature. 4. Greek language—
Translating into English. 5. Fitzgerald, Robert, 1910–1985.
I. Fitzgerald, Robert, 1910-1985. II. Title.
PA4167.H5 1992
883′.01—dc20 91-58053
v3.0