Jan Haywood - Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War: Dialogues on Tradition

Homers Iliad and the Trojan War

Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception

Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception presents scholarly monographs offering new and innovative research and debate to students and scholars in the reception of Classical Studies. Each volume will explore the appropriation, reconceptualization and recontextualization of various aspects of the Graeco-Roman world and its culture, looking at the impact of the ancient world on modernity. Research will also cover reception within antiquity, the theory and practice of translation, and reception theory.

Also available in the Series:

Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Filippo Carl and Irene Berti

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989, edited by Justine McConnell and Edith Hall

The Codex Fori Mussolini, Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse

The Gentle, Jealous God, Simon Perris

Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform, edited by Henry Stead and Edith Hall

Imagining Xerxes, Emma Bridges

Julius Caesars Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife, Miryana Dimitrova

Ovids Myth of Pygmalion on Screen, Paula James

Victorian Classical Burlesques, Laura Monrs-Gaspar

Homers Iliad and the Trojan War

Dialogues on Tradition

Jan Haywood and Naose Mac Sweeney

This book began with a conversation. In 2014, we were both involved in teaching an undergraduate module on Troy and the Trojan War at the University of Leicester, which led to friendly debate about what aims such a module might have and what potential material it might cover, given the widespread and multifarious responses that this tradition has generated. This resulted in a broader discussion about the traditions surrounding the Trojan War, and, inevitably, about receptions of the Iliad and Homeric poetry more broadly. Both traditions and reception, we felt, were essentially constructed through engagements, interactions, and, ultimately, dialogue; it was from this point on that the concept of dialogue became core to the project. We hope that the structure of this book goes some way towards capturing this, allowing our individual authorial voices to be heard and retaining something of the fundamental multivocality of classical receptions.

We are very grateful to several people who have read and commented on parts of the book, including: Tom Harrison, Johannes Haubold, Greta Hawes, Fiona Hobden, Gregory Nagy, Robin Osborne, Nicholas Postgate, Seth Schein, and Martin Worthington. Where this book is successful we owe these individuals a great debt; but we claim sole credit for the flaws and weaknesses that remain. Thanks are also due to Harvards Center for Hellenic Studies (in particular to Lanah Koelle and Gregory Nagy); both of us were fortunate to spend some time at the centre during the researching and writing of this book. We are also grateful to the wonderful editorial team at Bloomsbury, including Alice Wright and Clara Herberg, for their patience and good counsel. Finally, we would also like to thank Craig Cipolla and Ollie Harris, who have been both friends and colleagues of ours at the University of Leicester. Craig and Ollies new book (Harris and Cipolla 2017) was conceived and written at broadly the same time as our own and also makes use of the dialogic form. We have enjoyed and benefitted from our conversations with them over the years, and from reading their own innovative concluding dialogue.

In the spelling of proper nouns, we have been consistent only in following convention. In the majority of cases, Latin spellings have been used in preference to Greek. All translations are our own, unless specified otherwise.

Jans Note:

Many individuals have contributed to this book over the period of its gestation. I am grateful to audiences at the University of Leicester, the University of Manchester, and The Open University, who listened to, and offered a number of instructive comments on, earlier versions of my sections in , as well as the Conclusion. I am also thankful to numerous friends and colleagues for their encouragement and advice along the way, notably: Tom Harrison, Fiona Hobden, Jason Wickham, Tao Ziyuan, Andy Merrills, Dave Edwards, Neil Christie, Graham Shipley, and Mary Harlow. A special debt of gratitude on my part is also due to Naose for initiating the conversation that eventually led to this volume. Lastly, I am indebted above all to my parents and other loved ones for their unfailing support.

Naoses Note:

I am grateful to participants of a research seminar at the Department of Classics in Nottingham in 2016, where an early version of my section in

The Contest of Homer and Hesiod 9

In the second century CE, an unknown writer composed The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, a playful text in which the two poets try to outdo each other in wit and wordcraft. In the section quoted above, Hesiod (on the left) offers his opponent a series of freshly composed lines of hexameter verse, to each of which Homer (on the right) must improvise a continuation. In every case, Homers response is robust; his unshakable gravitas counters Hesiods snares to comic effect. But it is Hesiod who was eventually judged the victor by the assembled crowd, with his peacetime poetry elevated above Homers songs of war. The text has much to teach us concerning ancient ideas about poets, and particularly on later conceptions of Homer and Hesiod at the forefront But it also reminds us that no poet, poem, or work of literature ever stands alone. Homer here appears in dialogue with Hesiod, and both the composition and the reception of Homeric poetry are represented as embedded within a much wider poetic tradition.

This book is concerned with this idea of Homeric epic as set within a broader tradition specifically, the place and role of the Iliad within the tradition of myths, stories, and representations of the Trojan War. We have chosen to think about this in terms of dialogue because of the way that such traditions work. They are not passively received, or simply handed down from one generation to the next. Rather, they are in a continuous process of construction and development, with each new intervention adding to, but also fundamentally transforming, the tradition itself. Indeed, the dialogue between new and existing elements is what creates a tradition the engagements, interactions, borrowings, subversions, and transformations. Yet within the Trojan War tradition, the Iliad occupies a central place. For the best part of three millennia, any representation of the tale of Troy entailed some kind of response to Homeric epic. While in some cases this response was direct (i.e. to the text of the Iliad), in others it was indirect (e.g. to expectations and patterns established by the Iliad, through the complex mediations of intermediary texts, or even more loosely to the idea of the Homeric). In this book, we set out to explore more fully the dialogical workings of the Trojan War tradition, but also the place of the Iliad within them.

As dialogue is our subject, it is also our method. The main body of the book consists of paired case studies. Each case study focuses on an individual work (e.g. an Athenian pot, a Hollywood movie), and considers that texts engagement and dialogue with the Iliad.each chapters central theme into sharper relief. Over the course of the book, it is intended that the interchange between our two distinct perspectives will lead to a more nuanced appreciation of the Homeric dialogues that we explore. In other words, for us the enactment of a dialogue is a crucial heuristic, and our own dialogue on Homeric dialogues forms a kind of metadialogue on the contexts of Iliadic reception.