The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle

Author - Jonathan S. Burgess ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from The Johns Hopkins University Press was reviewed on 16-Mar-2009.

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1) Hardcover Book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Warned by this ominous opening sentence: "About half this book originated as a chapter in my 1995 dissertation..." I plowed ahead anyway until I became mired in the dry, stultifying, almost punishing, prose of this modestly embellished doctoral thesis, until I realized that I did not have to read this book. My advice: Unless you truly must, you shouldn´t.¤

2) Hardcover Book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Anyone who has an interest in the Homeric epics, the Trojan War, ancient Greek mythology and culture, should read this book. It´s an academic product, so the argument is detailed and sometimes complicated. But Burgess writes very clearly and presents his case in a masterfully logical process that builds on an enormous amount of textual, scholarly, critical, and artistic evidence. The notes are a treasure trove of previous scholarship. I wanted to learn more about the literary and mythological context of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I came away with a much greater understanding of the composition of the Homeric poems as well as the other (now lost) works of the ancient Greek oral tradition. Rarely have I read a book that answered so many of the questions that I brought to it, and left me so confident in the fairness of the author´s scholarship.¤

3) Hardcover Book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Truly, here is a very exciting book. The author clearly, in three long chapters (with appendices) discusses the Trojan War in the evidence of the Epic Cycle and its relation to the Homeric poems. The author has brought together philology, history, archaeology and good sense here. He shares bright arguments and suggestions in these pages that provoke thought for those interested specifically in the poems of Homer or in epic generally. Far from stealing the sparkle of the Homeric poems, this book provides the best discussion I have read of the variant threads of the stories of the Trojan War current in the age of the oral composition of the Iliad and Odyssey. It seemed so improbable that such magnificent, encyclopedic poems would stridently bound from the dark, poetic silence of the early Greek Mediterranean. Burgess shows that they didn´t and that already at the time of the composition of the Homeric poems there existed a bounty of versions of the Trojan War that bore no direct relation to the poems of Homer as we know them. I recommend this timely book (timely, for it seems there is enough research to be thoroughly convincing, to me,) to teachers of Homer, early Greek culture and epic.¤

4) Hardcover Book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Much of our understanding of the mythological tradition surrounding the Trojan War comes from Homer. Although the Iliad and Odyssey describe only the last years of this conflict, for centuries these works have been the primary source for literary and scholarly inspiration. They have largely overshadowed other Trojan War narratives, particularly the poems collectively known as the Epic Cycle, which chronicle the whole conflict. Although long-since lost, references to the Epic Cycle poems by ancient writers abound, and the influence of their tradition can be detected in the works of poets and artists. In The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Jonathan Burgess challenges Homer´s authority on the history and legends of the Trojan War, placing the Iliad and Odyssey in the larger, often overlooked context of the entire body of Greek epic poetry of the Archaic Age.

Burgess describes the Epic Cycle tradition as reflected in surviving commentaries, poems, and works of art. He traces the development and transmission of the Cyclic poems in ancient Greek culture, finding that they were far more influential than has previously been thought. And he compares the Cyclic and Homeric poems in detail, identifying mythological characters and events found only in the earlier works. Burgess´s rigorous and insightful examination of the poetic tradition that produced the Epic Cycle will give classicists and others captivated by the Iliad and Odyssey a greater appreciation of both Homer and the Trojan War.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Apr-2009, 08018665299780801866524, 370-860-650-280-560-290-550-5X0-341-961-8

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