The Odyssey is a central text in any discussion of ’the poet’s voice’ in Greek poetry. Not only is Homer throughout the ancient world a figure of authority and poetic pre-eminence against whom writers establish their own authorial voice, but also the text of the Odyssey demonstrates a concern with the major topics that recur throughout this book. For the Odyssey highlights the role and functioning of language itself, both in its focus on the hero’s lying manipulations and in its marked interest in the bewitching power of poetic performance. It is in the Odyssey, too, that we read one of the most developed narratives of concealed identity, boasted names and claims of renown, and the earliest extended first-¬person narrative in Greek literature. Indeed, the Odyssey is centred on the representation of a man who is striving to achieve recognition in his society, a man, what’s more, who is repeatedly likened to a poet.

The opening lines of Ajax are spoken by the goddess Athena, who addresses her favourite, Odysseus, as an adherent of Harm Enemies: he is tracking down an enemy as usual, in a manner worthy of his traditionally tricky persona. She is the dearest of gods to him, and they enjoy a solidarity inherited from the Odyssey. He places himself in her hands, as he has always done in the past. But despite the bond between them, a conflict of values emerges. When Odysseus is reluctant to view the mad Ajax Athena scolds him as a coward. She implies that any kind of fear or ’reluctance’ constitutes cowardice.

This chapter focuses on the figure of the Cyclops and the use of ‘the animal’ in thinking human difference. It presents the animalizing of certain humans (the attribution of animal features to them) as a potent strategy to dehumanize and thus marginalize certain ways of being human. In the ethnographic imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, the margins of the known world are shown to coincide with the margins of the human. The chapter further illustrates that this spatial concept of the human did not remain restricted to the ancient world but carries on into the modern: The figure of the Cyclops, whose problematic humanity is in sharp contrast to the enlightened, educated, and cunning Odysseus, in many ways anticipates that of ‘the savage’ as the quintessential ‘other’ in the modern Western ethnographic literature. And yet the question arises as to whether the ancient story does not already expose the kind of hubris at play when we normalize certain ways of being human while dismissing others.

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

This chapter explores how archaic Greek poets evoke and challenge prior traditions and texts through appeals to hearsay (e.g. φασί, λόγος). Case studies include the Iliad’s appropriation of theogonic and Theban myth; Homeric allusion to specific character traits (Antilochus’ speed, Nestor’s age, Achilles’ ancestry, Odysseus’ cunning); agonistic engagement with other traditions (the Iliad’s countering of Achillean immortality, the Odyssey’s positioning of Penelope against the Catalogue of Women); and further indexed allusions across the works of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and other epic fragments. Indexical hearsay is even more prominent in lyric poetry, from Archilochus to Pindar: case studies include Archilochus and fable, Simonides on Hesiod’s Arete, Theognis’ Atalanta, Bacchylides’ Heracles, Ibycus’ Cassandra, Sappho’s Tithonus, sympotic skolia on both Ajax and the tyrannicides, and Pindar’s flexible mythologising. Poets employed this device to signal mastery of tradition, to challenge alternative myths, to foreground major intertextual models, to invite audiences to supplement untold details, and to authorise creative reworkings of tradition. The ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.

Nietzsche criticizes Plato for having praised the philosophic life in such a way as to deprive the active political and military life of the honor and vitality it enjoyed in the Greek culture founded by Homer and therefore seems to call for a reversal of the moral and political legacy of Platonism and Christianity and a revival of Homeric culture. But Nietzsche ultimately criticizes Plato more seriously, not for explicitly celebrating the philosophic life as the best way of life for a human being, but rather for presenting the philosopher as a champion of morality and religion and thereby obscuring the skeptical nature of the philosopher and he therefore seeks, through his rhetorical presentation of philosophy as emphatically opposed to morality and religion, to reintroduce the radical moral and religious skepticism of philosophy to a world that has lost sight of it.

Homer first presents as a model of human excellence the hero Achilles, who lives a life of political and military virtue to the fullest, who becomes painfully aware of the limits of that way of life, and whose example as a tragic, suffering, questioning hero points to the contemplative singer Homer as the true model of human excellence in the Homeric poems. Through his explicit, skeptical judgments concerning gods and heroes; his scientific but compassionate accounts of death; and his similes, Homer points to himself as a philosophic thinker, but he deliberately hides his philosophic life in the poems to avoid incurring popular hostility and to encourage the most thoughtful members of his audience to discover the independent-minded life of philosophy on their own and for themselves.

Plato identifies Homer as the philosophic educator of Greece but severely criticizes the Homeric education for his portrayal of the gods, his portrayal of heroes as exemplars of human excellence, and his portrayal of himself. Homer reveals through his poems that nature limits the power of the gods and that the gods’ own immortal nature renders them incapable of understanding and caring for humans and hence incapable of providing for them.

This chapter outlines the key methodological framework to be used to analyse Homer and Parmenides and detail the specifics of their relationship. I first set out the terms that Foucault develops in his Archaeology of Knowledge, and then detail the ways that these terms do and do not make contact with established topics of classical and Homeric scholarship, including text-types and discourse modes, A-B-C patterns, the oimē and theme, and catalogues and catalogic discourse. I use the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 10 as a sample text to analyse according to this methodology; the result is a clearly defined textual architecture that the image of the hodos governs more generally.

This chapter applies the analysis of the preceding chapter to the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12, which I argue serves as a discursive template or blueprint for Parmenides in his ‘Route to Truth’. In addition to building on the notions of the rhetorical schema and types of dependence developed in Chapter 3, I extend my analysis of the discursive architecture governed by the hodos to include the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction which is a central feature of Od. 12.55–126. I also show how the hodos in Odyssey 12 has distinctive features – including the use of modally charged negation and unusually lengthy description sections followed by argumentatively rich units of text – which link it to Parmenides’ poem but differentiate it in crucial ways from other texts and phenomena, including general patterns of Homeric deliberation, polar expressions, the crossroads in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the so-called Orphic gold tablets.

The tragedian Aeschylus is said to have called his plays slices from Homer’s banquet, by which he presumably meant slices from what Homer had left behind on the table.1 It is much easier, as Aeschylus knew (and so famously did), to develop stories that Homer probably knew but did not tell or (as Roman poets eventually did) to weave new stories using Homeric techniques than it is to rework in an artistically effective way what Homer had already done in the Iliad and Odyssey. A change of genre may certainly make that task easier, and the aim of this essay is to look specifically at what happens when a slice from Homer’s own platter becomes a libretto and then, in turn, a performable opera. The specific process in question involves the self-styled poème lyrique of the prolific dramatist, librettist, and actor René Fauchois and Pénélope, the opera made from it by Gabriel Fauré.

The third chapter is concerned with a foundational moment in the history of the archive. The poetic ‘road’ to Hyperborea, there, rather than cult or sanctuaries, serves as the focus for looking at the earliest records of the Hyperborean nexus in archaic epic. A first section looks at trajectories from Hyperborea. The second section analyses Pindar's construction of a journey to Hyperborea in Pythian 10 and Bacchylides' instrumentalisation of Hyperborea in Ode 3. Both readings aim to shed some light on how the two poets composed their worlds with material that was already in place. The rest of the chapter proceeds to examine the nature of this earlier material. The third section looks at the scene of the Iliad (13.1–9) where Zeus turns his gaze towards the men of the distant North, and it sets out the evidence for other relevant early epic texts. The fourth section looks more closely at the fragments of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women where the circular travels of the winged Boreads bring them all the way to ‘the well-horsed Hyperboreans’. The fifth section revisits in some detail the fragments of Aristeas of Proconnesus' epic narrative of a journey to the distant North, the Arimaspeia.

Chapter One examines the representation of both choral and solo dance in Books 6–8 of the Odyssey, arguing that the representation of virtuosic Phaeacian dance in the eighth book of the poem underscores the tense relationship between Odysseus and his Phaeacian hosts and articulates distinctions between choral and solo dance that echo across Greek literature. While the Odyssey itself is much earlier than the late Archaic and Classical texts explored in subsequent chapters, the models of performance set forth in Archaic hexameter poetry retain their currency in Greek culture through the time of Plato and beyond. The chapter thus considers Homeric poetry as paradigmatic for the representation of both choral and solo dance. The chapter also advances a new reading of the role of dance in the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey, arguing that the Homeric poet presents embodied performance and action as a means by which Odysseus and the Phaeacians negotiate their fraught relationship. My analysis highlights the disruptive and competitive elements of dance that simmer beneath the surface of the poem, suggesting that the prevailing scholarly interest in choral dancing has occluded the unique and unusual elements of Phaeacian dance.

The Trojan Horse was a ruse devised by the Greeks to gain entrance within the walls of Troy, which were otherwise impervious. The narrative of the Trojan Horse is associated with story traditions of the sack of Troy and the wiliness of Odysseus.

This essay addresses the many-sided figure of Odysseus: his significance in the Iliad as well as – centrally – in the Odyssey, but also his mixed reputation in the traditions known to the Epic Cycle, and later in Athenian tragedy. The essay notes his uncertain relation to the warrior-hero ethos and details the way the Odyssey shapes a song around him, valorizing his mêtis and his nostos, his ultimate return to Ithaka ‒ and the restoration of right rule and order in the household (oikos) ‒ redeeming the ambiguity of his most distinctive epithet, polutropos (“of many turns”). En route the essay contrasts the powerful shaping logic of the Odyssey with the episodic Telegony; considers the aristeia the hero receives in the Odyssey (and not the Iliad); highlights the significance of Penelope and their “like-mindedness” (homophrosunê); and notes the treatment of Odysseus in Athenian tragedy, whose dramatists (Sophocles, Euripides) take a far less sanguine view of the hero than does the Odyssey.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.

This chapter focuses on select scenes of deliberative oratory in Roman epic and on the figure of the demagogue who inhabits them - Thersites in the Iliad, Drances in Virgil’s Aeneid 11, Odysseus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13, Cicero in Lucan, Varro in Silius. Tracing the ways in which poets use these orators as foils for their generic rivals, I suggest that far from chanelling disapproval of rhetoric, these demagogues are truly hybrid figures, who leverage anti-rhetorical discourse while simultaneously claiming for poetry the same power and persuasiveness of rhetoric.