Margalit Finkelberg

Royal Succession in Heroic Greece

This article is about the rules of succession in Bronze Age Greece as reflected in Greek tradition. The question as to whether or not the figures dealt with by this tradition are historical is of little relevance to the present discussion: what I seek to recover is not the history of one royal house or another but rather the recurring patterns according to which the members of these houses – no matter whether real or fictitious – were expected to behave when it came to the question of accession to the throne and transmission of the kingship to their successors.

Patterns of human error in Homer

It has become habitual to approach Homeric mans mental functioning with the categories used today, only to show how different this man was from the later Greek and, moreover, from the modern individual. The studies in Homers mental terminology begun by Bruno Snell and other German scholars before World War II illustrate this tendency. Although the scholarly value of these studies, which have led us to realize that the Homeric vocabulary lacks terms explicitly designating the person as a whole, is incontestable, in everything concerning the better understanding of Homeric man their effect has been, paradoxically enough, rather negative. Indeed, insofar as such ideas as ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘character’ are said to be irrelevant to Homer, and what is proposed instead is a loose conglomerate of the so-called ‘mental organs’, Homeric man is turned into an incognizable entity altogether estranged from everything understood as human today or in classical Greece. At the same time, the essential humanity of Homeric man is immediately felt by every reader of Homer, and the incompatibility of this experience with the image created by terminological speculations about Homeric man is strong enough to call in question the relevance of the results obtained through the terminological approach.

Virtue and Circumstances: On the City-State Concept of Arete

The liberal man will need money for the doing of his liberal deeds, and the just man too will need it for the returning of services (for wishes are hard to discern, and even people who are not just pretend to wish to act justly); and the brave man will need power if he is to accomplish any of the acts that correspond to his arete, and the temperate man will need opportunity; for how else is either he or any of the others to be recognized? It is debated, too, whether the will or the deed is more essential to arete, which is assumed to involve both; it is surely clear that its perfection involves both; but for deeds many things are needed, and more, the greater and nobler the deeds are.1

Plato's Language of Love and the Female

In the course of his talk on Eros, the first in the Symposium , Phaedrus embarks on a demonstration of the ability of love to prompt people to noble and courageous deeds. Although the context of the discussion of love in the Symposium is primarily homosexual, “the most remarkable feature” of Phaedruss speech, as William K. C. Guthrie puts it, is that the exemplary figure illustrating his thesis is a woman. Alcestis, the wife of Admetus king of Therae, was the only one among her husbands relatives who volunteered to die in his stead:

ARISTOTLE AND EPISODIC TRAGEDY

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotles Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists. This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotles Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

Out of the Mainstream

the complex power-laden processes that shape the relationships between water rights, politics and identity are explored in ways that are academically stimulating, intellectually enriching and politically significant ... an indispensible guide to better understand how water rights and power intertwine and to formulate and engage in socially empowering and politically liberating strategies of resistance and transformation.’ Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester, UK

Canonising and Decanonising Homer: Reception of the Homeric Poems in Antiquity and Modernity

The Iliad and the Odyssey functioned in antiquity not merely as literary texts, but as literary texts that were highly privileged in the civilisation to which they belonged - in this respect, their status was closer to the status of the Bible and similar ancient corpora than to that of other works of literature produced in ancient Greece. This chapter argues that why this attitude did not last into the modern period is that, in the case of Homer. Although it is generally taken for granted that in antiquity the Homeric poems enjoyed the status of canonical texts, their canonicity is usually approached in terms of the Greek literary canon. The chapter outlines the reasons why the author believes that it would be more profitable to approach Homers status in antiquity against the background of canonical texts of other civilisations rather than that of the ancient Greek literary canon. Keywords:Bible; canonical text; civilisations; Greek literary canon; Homeric poems

Timē and aretē in Homer

Much effort has been invested by scholars in defining the specific character of the Homeric values as against those that obtained at later periods of Greek history. The distinction between the ‘shame-culture’ and the ‘guilt-culture’ introduced by E. R. Dodds, and that between the ‘competitive’ and the ‘cooperative’ values advocated by A. W. H. Adkins, are among the more influential ones. Although Adkinss taxonomy encountered some acute criticism, notably from A. A. Long, it has become generally adopted both in the scholarly literature and in general philosophical discussions of Greek ethics. Objections to Adkinss approach have mainly concentrated on demonstrating that his denial of the cooperative values to Homer is untenable on general grounds and is not supported by Homeric evidence. Characteristically, Adkinss thesis concerning the centrality to Homers ethics of the so-called ‘competitive values‘ has never received similar attention, probably owing to the fact that this is the point at which his picture of the Homeric society concurs with the influential reconstructions by W Jaeger and M. I. Finley. The present study of timē and aretē , generally held to be the two competitive values central to the Homeric poems, purports to address this issue.