Saturday, October 20, 2018

Access to HMT Facsimiles

The Homer Multitext is producing complex data. The complexity is irreducible, since it is our mission to publish digital editions mapped to their manuscript folios, with Iliadic texts associated with commentaries.

This complex data is published as a single CEX file, a plain-text serialization of the current state of the HMT. That data is also exposed via a web service, and an integrated web-application. For more straightforward access, we have published a facsimile view of the data.

This post is to announce the Homer Multitext Facsimile Index application, allowing users to access HMT data based on Iliadic citations, e.g. 2.100 (individual passages), or 2.1-2.10 (ranges of passages).

Because traditional citations assumed an audience of (clever, intuitive) human readers, some traditional practices do not translate to a computational environment. For example "1.1-10" is not a valid, that is, unambiguous citation. Does it mean "from 1.1 to 1.10" or "from Book 1, Line 1, through all of Book 10"? The unimaginative machine will assume the latter. So with this app, and with CITE data generally, users must be verbose and specific: 1.1-1.10, with [book].[line] on both sides of the hyphen.


As with all expressions of HMT data, this application was build with the CITE Architecture code libraries in Scala and Scala-JS.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

The Homer Multitext Microservice

The Homer Multitext produces integrated data on Greek Epic poetry, its language, its evolution over time, the traditions of scholarship surrounding it, and the physical artifacts, manuscripts and papyri, that are our only evidence. For a concise explanation of what the HMT publishes, please see https://github.com/homermultitext/hmt-archive/blob/master/overview.md.

At the same time, we Project Architects of the HMT, Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell, are interested in making this data as widely accessible as possible. The data is released in CEX Format, a plain-text serialization of data organized according to defined abstract data models. We have developed code libraries in Scala implementing these abstract data models. These libraries provide the greatest flexibility in manipulating, locating, aggregating, and transforming the data of the Homer Mulititext.

For users who may not want to write code directly, we have provided an online application offering a graphical user interface for interacting with HMT data using the Cite Architecture’s Scala libraries.

For those who might want to write their own applications that interact with the HMT data, we provide a collection of microservices.

The examples below demonstrate the Scala Cite Services (Akka) application, SCS-Akka, running at beta.hpcc.uh.edu/scs/, and (as of July 19, 2018) serving data from the 2018g Release of the Homer Multitext Data.

The service accepts requests via HTTP, and returns JSON expressions of CITE objects. We have published a library in Scala for de-marshalling those JSON expressions into CITE data objects.

The CiteApp web-based application for the Homer Multitext gets its data from this service, and indeed the web-application and the microservice were developed jointly.

This collection of microservices is serving current data from the Homer Multitext, edited by Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University.

For more information on this service, please see https://github.com/cite-architecture/scs-akka.

For information on the CITE Architecture, please see https://cite-architecture.github.io.

Report bugs by filing issues on GitHub.

Texts

About the Service’s Catalog

See the Text Catalog

Get the First Valid Reference in a text

Get Valid References

All references for a version of a text:

Valid references for parts of a text:

Get Passages

Passages for a specific version of a text:

Passages for all versions of a text:

NGrams

NGrams in works present in the library:

Find citations to NGrams:

Returning a Corpus of Passages containing an NGram:

String Searches

Token Searches

Collections of Objects

Catalog

Objects

Get objects from multiple collections:

Finding Objects

urn-match

regexmatch

stringcontains

valueequals

numeric less-than

numeric less-than-or-equal

numeric equals

numeric greater-than

numeric greater-than-or-equal

numeric within

Data Models

Images

Basic Image Retrieval

Defining a width

Defining MaxWidth and MaxHeight

Embedding

  • 12-recto
  • 12-recto-detail

Relations

CITE Relations are associations of URN to URN, with the relationship specified by a Cite2 URN.

Commentary Data Model

If a library includes CiteRelations and implements the Commentary datamodel, comments associated with passages of text can (optionally) be attached to replies for a corpus of texts.

Documented Scholarly Editions (DSE) Data Model

The DSE Data model consists of a CITE Collection of objects, each documenting a three-way relationship between (a) a text-bearing artifact, (b) a documentary image (ideally with a region-of-interest defined), and © a citable passage of text.

(The dse=true parameter is valid for all object-searching, as well as for retrieval of individual objects or ranges of objects.)

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Homer Multitext 2018d Data Release

We are pleased to announce the 2018d release of Homer Multitext data. This is the fourth release of 2018. With each release, we try to improve our automated validation and machine-assisted verification, and to improve integration of this data through refinements to the data models.

This is the work of over 170 editors.

A guide to understanding HomerMultitext data is online.

All current data is on the project’s GitHub site. The current release, 2018d, is in the releases-cex subdirectory.

The work of the Homer Multitext is focused on scholarly data. At the same time, we are interested in providing useful access to this data in as many ways as possible. With the 2018d release, we are also pleased to provide these new tools:

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Publishing the Homer Multitext project archive

The Homer Multitext project (HMT) is changing its publication practice in 2018.  All of our work in progress remains available from publicly visible repositories hosted on github, but we are adopting a new format for integrating material from our working archive into publishable units.

Our goals have always been first to specify a model for all HMT data structures independent of any publication format, and then to select a format that fully captures the semantics of the model.  In choosing a format for publication, we prefer one that, while completely expressing the model, is as simple as possible.  It should be intellegible both to human readers and to software, and readily usable by the widest possible range of digital tools.

Beginning in 2014, we adopted the TTL serialization format of the   Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate textual editions, data about physical artifacts like manuscripts, and documentary images into a single publishable file.  RDF was designed to facilitate dynamic exchange and automated linking of resources on the world wide web, and is widely used for that purpose in the digital humanities community today.  As a format for disseminating stable releases of HMT content, it is not ideal, however. RDF can be quite verbose:  to represent a single citable node of text in one of our editions, for example, requirs more than a half dozen separate RDF statements.  It is often not immediately intellegible to human readers, and although the RDF model can be implemented in multiple formats (JSON and XML, in addittion to TTL), RDF data can only be practically used with software specifically aimed at RDF processing.

This month, we are releaseing our first published data sets in the CITE Exchange format (CEX).  To quote the CEX specification, CEX is "a plain-text, line-oriented data format for serializing citable content following the models of the CITE Architecture."  CEX makes it possible to represent any of the fundamental models of the HMT archive — texts, citable collections of objects, and the complex relations among these objects that our archival data sets encode — as simple tabular structures in labelled blocks of a plain text file you can inspect with any text editor.  All blocks in a CEX file are optional, so we can equally easily publish a single updated body of material — a new set of photographs of a manuscript, or a newly edited section of a text — or an entire compilation of our current archive in a single plain-text file.  Because each CEX block is a table represented as lines of delimited text, generic tools from spreadsheets, databases, or ancient command-line utilities like `sed` and `grep` can be directly applied to CEX data, in addition to specialized code libraries we have developed that understand the semantics of citation with URNs.  (See https://cite-architecture.github.io/ for more information about the cross-platform code libraries.)

As a result, over the coming weeks you will see a series of short announcements of releases as we test and release one portion of our archive at a time.

Happy New Year, with complex data in simple formats!

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Summer 2017: Iliad 20, Multiformity, and Tradition

Ajax (Aias) fights Glaukos over the dead body of Achilles, while Paris and Aeneas look on. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
How many ways are there to tell the story of Troy? A passage from Iliad 20 makes me wonder just how flexible the Homeric tradition might be. At the beginning of book 20, Zeus calls the gods to an assembly. He tells them that they may now join the battle taking place before the walls of Troy on whatever side they wish, something that he had expressly forbidden the gods to do at the beginning of book 8. The reason he has changed his mind, he explains, is that Achilles is now preparing to return to battle for the first time since his withdrawal in book 1, and he is afraid that the Trojans will not be able to withstand him even for a little while:
καὶ δέ τέ μιν καὶ πρόσθεν ὑποτρομέεσκον ὁρῶντες·
νῦν δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ θυμὸν ἑταίρου χώεται αἰνῶς
δείδω μὴ καὶ τεῖχος ὑπερ μόρον ἐξαλαπάξῃ. (Iliad 20.28-30)

Even before now they would tremble before him when they saw him.
And now when he is terribly angry in his heart because of [the death of] his companion
I fear lest the wall [of Troy] will be sacked beyond [i.e., contrary to] fate.
Apollo, the god of prophesy and the one besides Zeus most often associated with seeing into the future, likewise fears that the Trojan walls will come down too soon at Achilles’ hands: μέμβλετο γάρ οἱ τεῖχος ἐϋδμήτοιο πόληος/μὴ Δαναοὶ πέρσειαν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἤματι κείνῳ (“For he was concerned about the wall of the well-built city, lest the Danaans destroy it on that day beyond fate” Iliad 21.516–517). Zeus’ and Apollo’s fear in these passages is remarkable, and begs questions that anyone who has read the Iliad with undergraduates will be familiar with. If the walls of Troy are destined to fall at a particular moment, how could they fall before that? Is fate something that can be changed? Is Zeus subject to fate or can Zeus alter it? But we could could also reframe these questions in terms of narrative. If the Iliad tells a traditional story, shouldn’t Zeus and Apollo know how the story ends? Would it really be possible to change the story now, and have Troy fall while Achilles is still alive, and indeed at his hands?

In his 1979 book The Best of the Achaeans, Gregory Nagy argued that the first song of Demodokos in Odyssey 8, in which the Phaeacian bard narrates a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, is in fact a compressed reference to an epic tradition in which Achilles and Odysseus quarreled over whether Troy would be taken by cunning [mētis] or by force [biē]. Nagy reads the scholia preserved in the manuscripts at Odyssey 8.75 and 77 as likewise pointing to such a tradition, which is otherwise not attested in our surviving sources (Nagy 1979:46). Might we find here in the fears of Zeus and Apollo another glimpse of these two rival possibilities for the fall of Troy? If so, we have to wonder if the Iliadic tradition is indeed so multiform, so flexible, that such a radically different ending could be possible. Is there (or was there) an alternative epic universe, in which Achilles really did take Troy by force? And if not, why does Zeus entertain the idea?

As it turns out, ancient commentators on the Iliad were concerned about these same questions. And so the scholia in the margins of the so-called Townley manuscript (Burney 86, folio 220v) record for us a fascinating variation on these verses from book 20:
τινὲς γράφουσιν ἀντὶ τοῦ <δείδω, μὴ καὶ τεῖχος>

οὐ μέντοι μοῖρ’ ἐστὶν ἔτι ζῳοῦ Ἀχιλῆος
Ἰλίου ἐκπέρσαι εὖ ναιόμενον πτολίεθρον.
πέρσει δουράτεός <θ’> ἵππος καὶ μῆτις Ἐπειοῦ.

πῶς γὰρ ὁ εἰδὼς “μοῖράν τ’ ἀμμορίην τε” [= Odyssey 20.76] νῦν διστάζει;

Some write instead of “I fear lest the wall”

It is not fated, however, with Achilles still alive
to sack the well-inhabited citadel of Ilium.
A wooden horse will destroy it and the craftiness [mētis] of Epeios.

For how is he [= Zeus], knowing “what is fated and not fated” [= Odyssey 20.76], now in doubt?
These alternative verses make clear that Troy is not going to fall at the hands of Achilles, but rather as a result of the mētis of the wooden horse. Problem solved. But the commentator, in seeking to solve a narratological, mythological, and indeed existential problem, now presents us with a textual one. What is the source of these verses that “some write,” and how do we reconcile them with our received text?

***

Iliad 20 is a book that seems fixated on the danger of things happening at the wrong time, i.e. "beyond fate." In verses that were athetized (that is, deemed "not Homeric") by Aristrachus, Poseidon stated:
πάντες δ᾽ Οὐλύμποιο κατήλθομεν ἀντιόωντες
τῆσδε μάχης, ἵνα μή τι μετὰ Τρώεσσι πάθῃσι
σήμερον: ὕστερον αὖτε τὰ πείσεται ἅσσά οἱ αἶσα
γιγνομένῳ ἐπένησε λίνῳ ὅτε μιν τέκε μήτηρ. (20.125–128)

We all have come down from Olympus to participate
in this battle, in order that he not suffer anything among the Trojans
today. Later he will suffer in turn whatever things fate
spun for him with her thread as he was born, when his mother gave birth to him.
Poseidon seems to be suggesting that without their intervention, Achilles might have had died too soon. These verses still today bear Aristarchus' editorial condemnation: they are marked with the obelos in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad.

Later in the book, the two great heroes of Greek and Roman epic tradition, Achilles and Aeneas, come face to face on the battlefield, and once again, Poseidon is concerned that the mythological and poetic tradition will go awry:
ἔνθά κεν Αἰνείας μὲν ἐπεσσύμενον βάλε πέτρῳ
ἢ κόρυθ᾽ ἠὲ σάκος, τό οἱ ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον,
τὸν δέ κε Πηλεΐδης σχεδὸν ἄορι θυμὸν ἀπηύρα,
εἰ μὴ ἄρ᾽ ὀξὺ νόησε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων:
αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς μετὰ μῦθον ἔειπεν:
ὢ πόποι ἦ μοι ἄχος μεγαλήτορος Αἰνείαο,
ὃς τάχα Πηλεΐωνι δαμεὶς Ἄϊδος δὲ κάτεισι
πειθόμενος μύθοισιν Ἀπόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο
νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ χραισμήσει λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
ἀλλὰ τί ἢ νῦν οὗτος ἀναίτιος ἄλγεα πάσχει
μὰψ ἕνεκ᾽ ἀλλοτρίων ἀχέων, κεχαρισμένα δ᾽ αἰεὶ
δῶρα θεοῖσι δίδωσι τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν;
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγεθ᾽ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπὲκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν,
μή πως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴ κεν Ἀχιλλεὺς
τόνδε κατακτείνῃ: μόριμον δέ οἵ ἐστ᾽ ἀλέασθαι,
ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται
Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων
οἳ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο γυναικῶν τε θνητάων.
ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἔχθηρε Κρονίων:
νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει
καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. (Iliad 20.288-308)
Aeneas would then have struck Achilles as he was springing towards him, either on the helmet, or on the shield that covered him, and Achilles would have closed with him and dispatched him with his sword, had not Poseidon lord of the earthquake been quick to mark, and said forthwith to the immortals, “Alas, I feel grief for great Aeneas, who will now go down to the house of Hades, vanquished by the son of Peleus. Fool that he was to give ear to the counsel of Apollo. Apollo will never save him from destruction. Why should this man have grief when he is guiltless, to no purpose, and in another's quarrel? Has he not at all times offered acceptable sacrifice to the gods that dwell in heaven? Let us then snatch him from death's jaws, lest the son of Kronos be angry should Achilles slay him. It is fated, moreover, that he should escape, and that the race of Dardanos, whom Zeus loved above all the sons born to him of mortal women, shall not perish utterly without seed or sign. For now indeed has Zeus hated the blood of Priam, while Aeneas shall reign over the Trojans, he and his children's children that shall be born hereafter.” (translation adapted from that of Samuel Butler)
It is clear that Aeneas cannot be allowed to die at this moment. So much of the poetic tradition will be ruined if he does! The passage reminds me of another in Odyssey 8, where Odysseus specifically requests that Demodokos sing the song of the sack of Troy by means of the wooden horse. Odysseus says to Demodokos:
αἴ κεν δή μοι ταῦτα κατὰ μοῖραν καταλέξῃς,
αὐτίκ᾽ ἐγὼ πᾶσιν μυθήσομαι ἀνθρώποισιν,
ὡς ἄρα τοι πρόφρων θεὸς ὤπασε θέσπιν ἀοιδήν. (Odyssey 8.496-498)

If you relate these things to me in accordance with destiny
Straightaway I will speak words before all men,
saying how a god readily bestowed upon you a wondrous song.
Odysseus’ words imply that there is a correct or authoritative way to perform this song, but also that other singers might perform it differently. Here again we find competing epic traditions evaluated in terms of fate or destiny (moira). What is “fated” is the traditional and hence authoritative version of the story. What is tradition for the external audience of the epic and even for the internal audience, the Phaeacians, is in fact, for Odysseus, his own life experiences, which took place only ten years prior to the current occasion of performance. He is therefore uniquely qualified to judge the authoritativeness of the current performance. His reaction, namely his tears, reveals to us that Demodokos has succeeded.

***

It is the nexus of multiformity and tradition in Iliad 20 that we will explore at this year's undergraduate summer seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies. As we will see, the mythological and narratological questions being grappled with by the scholars of Alexandria and the later authors whose comments survive in the scholia of our medieval manuscripts can sometimes have profound implications for the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey. The scholion on Iliad 20.30 with which I began is a perfect example of the interdependence of the two. In this one comment, not only can we possibly catch a glimpse of a now lost epic tradition in which Achilles and Odysseus contend to be the sacker of Troy and the “best of the Achaeans,” we also learn about three verses that do not survive in our medieval manuscripts of the poem. All we are told, in the typically compressed way of the scholia, is that some (presumably editors) write these verses (presumably in their editions). They are not a seamless replacement for Iliad 20.30, however. If we replaced 20.30 with the verses that “some write,” we would get this:
20.28 καὶ δέ τέ μιν καὶ πρόσθεν ὑποτρομέεσκον ὁρῶντες·
20.29 νῦν δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ θυμὸν ἑταίρου χώεται αἰνῶς
20.30a οὐ μέντοι μοῖρ’ ἐστὶν ἔτι ζῳοῦ Ἀχιλῆος
20.30b Ἰλίου ἐκπέρσαι εὖ ναιόμενον πτολίεθρον.
20.30c πέρσει δουράτεός <θ’> ἵππος καὶ μῆτις Ἐπειοῦ.

Even before now they would tremble before him when they saw him.
And now when he is terribly angry in his heart because of [the death of] his companion…
It is not fated, however, with Achilles still alive
to sack the well-inhabited citadel of Ilium.
A wooden horse will destroy it and the craftiness [mētis] of Epeios.
If we assume an ellipsis here (as sometimes occurs, as at Iliad 1.135-136), we can make it work, but it is more likely that the scholia here are quoting from an edition where the entire passage was substantially different from what we find in the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad. But these verses are in no way objectionable beyond the fact that they don’t survive elsewhere. There is nothing “un-Homeric” about them, they are simply an attested multiform of the verses transmitted by our medieval manuscripts.

When we understand the Iliad and Odyssey to have been composed in a dynamic process of composition-in-performance over many centuries, we have no reason to necessarily privilege one formulaic variation over another, even if one is well attested in our medieval manuscripts and one is known only from another source. Both are at least potentially authentically generated performance multiforms, and both have something to teach us about the compositional process and the poetics of the system in which they were generated. Not all surviving multiforms would have been known to all singers at all times and in all places, but each has the potential to reveal something about the poetics of the tradition in the time and place in which that multiform is attested.

But just how fluid, how multiform, was the Greek epic tradition? If the tradition was, as I have claimed in my research, quite fluid in its early phases, why do our medieval manuscripts present us with a relatively uniform text? How do we get from a creative and vibrant oral epic song tradition like that which Albert Lord describes in The Singer of Tales to the seemingly fixed text of the more than 500 manuscripts of the Iliad that survive from medieval times? Conversely, when we accept that earlier forms of the Iliad were mulitform, what poetic possibilities open up for us?

Aristarchus athetized at least seven passages of three verses or more in book 20 alone. Each athetesis gives us insight into an editor who was struggling to account for a mythological and poetic tradition that was multiform and at times contradictory. But where he wanted to take away, we will take back. Building on the work of earlier scholars who have demonstrated why we should expect the Iliad to be multiform (especially Lord 1960 and Nagy 1996), our seminar will explore two basic questions: First, what kinds of multiformity are attested in our surviving sources? And secondly, what are the implications of multiformity for our interpretation of the reception and transmission of Homeric poetry? These questions and our preliminary answers to them have emerged from fifteen years of collaborative work and discussion. I have often joked that the aim of the Homer Multitext is to “unedit” the Iliad. But the joke is serious in that a central goal of the project is to present the historical witnesses of the Iliad unmediated by the interventions of editors seeking to reconstruct an hypothesized “original.” Only in this way can we gain a clear picture of the multiformity with which the Iliad has been transmitted to us. In our experience, it can be incredibly difficult, sometimes impossible, to ascertain what our historical sources actually transmit if one relies on existing publications of the scholia in print or the cryptic reporting of an apparatus criticus. The Homer Multitext allows each document to be viewed and considered on its own terms.

This summer, as we do every summer, we'll remove the bindings so to speak from the medieval manuscripts and fully examine their contents, study surviving papyrus fragments in all their multiform messiness, and try to visualize without judgment the Iliad known to Plato and Aeschines. The attested multiforms of the Iliad give us an opportunity to know and appreciate a wider range of performance traditions for this remarkable poem than most of us have been taught to do. Although our attested multiforms derive from the later stages of the evolution of the poem, even so I submit that they give us a glimpse of the very long history of the text, access to even earlier Iliads, and a greater awareness of the mechanisms by which such a poem could be composed in performance.

Works cited

Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA, 1960.
Nagy, G. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore, 1979.
–––. Poetry as Performance. Cambridge, 1996.


Friday, July 1, 2016

Poetry in Stone: The Poetics of Iliad 24

Statue of Niobe and her youngest daughter from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
This year's Homer Multitext summer seminar has focused on book 24 of the Homeric Iliad, with teams of faculty and students creating a complete edition of the text and scholia of the Venetus A manuscript for that book. An additional goal for the seminar has been to explore the poetics of the book from an oralist perspective, which is to say, we wanted to explore how the fact that the Iliad is a work composed within an oral tradition affects our understanding of the poetry of Iliad 24. Olga Levaniouk from the University of Washington and Casey Dué from the University of Houston led the discussion. Among the topics we discussed were how to interpret the simile in which Priam is compared (as he arrives within the tent of Achilles, to the astonishment of all) to an exiled murderer, and its resonance in the wider epic tradition. Olga showed that Achilles' father Peleus has a history of taking in such figures, and in some traditions was such a figure himself. For a traditional audience familiar with Peleus' backstory, the simile reveals Achilles to be like his father by taking Priam in and treating him with dignity in Iliad 24.

Olga also showed how Achilles' telling of the story of Niobe ("Even Niobe remembered food..." 24.602) comments on the nature of poetic tradition. Building on the arguments of Gregory Nagy in Homer the Classic, in which he discusses petrification as a metaphor for the notional unchangeability of epic poetry, Olga discussed how Niobe's transformation into a weeping rock is a metaphor for the still living nature of the poetic tradition even after it has achieved the status of "monument" (or stone).

Niobe will weep for all time, her sorrow is eternal. So too will Achilles be mourned for all time, as we learn in Odyssey 24, not only by his immortal mother and her sisters, but also by the Muses, and by extension, the audience of epic poetry. But even though Achilles' death is constantly foreshadowed in the Iliad, the poem ends not with his own glorious death, laments for that death, and his funeral, but with Hektor's, his greatest enemy. As Casey Dué has written, the laments of Andromache and the other women of the Iliad therefore have a dual function. On the level of narrative they are laments for the dead, the warrior husbands and sons who inevitably fall in battle. They protest the cruel fate of the women left behind, and narrate the very personal sorrows of each woman in war. The grief expressed by these women is raw and real. But for the audience of ancient epic the laments for these husbands and sons are also the prototypical laments of heroes, who, for them, continue to be lamented and mourned on a seasonally recurring basis. The poetry of epic collapses the boundaries between the two forms of song.

In the Iliad, grief spreads quickly from individual to community. As each lament comes to a close, the immediately surrounding community of mourners antiphonally responds with their own cries and tears. It is not insignificant then that the final lament of the Iliad and indeed the final lines of the poem, sung by Helen (who is the cause of the war), ends not with the antiphonal wailing of the women (as at Iliad 6.499, 19.301, 22.515, and 24.746), but of the people: “So she spoke lamenting, and the people wailed in response” (Iliad 24.776).

The Iliad looks at humanity without ethnic or any other distinctions that make people want to kill each other. It is not a poem that is anti-war: war was a fundamental and even sacred part of Greek culture. But it is poem that can transcend ethnicity and lament the death of heroes in battle, whether they are Greek or Trojan, and it can even lament the death of the greatest Greek hero of them all, Achilles, by lamenting the death of his greatest enemy. It is a poem that can view Achilles through the eyes of his victims, through the sorrow that he generates, and at the same time experience and appreciate his own never-ending sorrow.

Dué, C. 2007. “Learning Lessons From The Trojan War: Briseis and the Theme of Force.” College Literature 34: 229-262.

Nagy, G. 2008. Homer the Classic. Washington, DC.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Summer Seminar 2016 set to begin next week

Priam supplicates Achilles for the return of the body of Hector.
Athenian red-figure vase, ca. 500-450 BCE. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 3710.
Image courtesy of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology
The annual Homer Multitext Summer Seminar begins next week at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. This year students and faculty from Brandeis University, the College of the Holy Cross, Furman University, Gustavus Adolphus College, the University of Houston, Leiden University in the Netherlands, Trinity University in San Antonio, the University of Washington, and Washington and Lee University will come together to learn about the theoretical underpinnings of the Homer Multitext and to create a complete edition of book 24 of the Iliad. You read that right—we are closing in on a complete edition of the entire Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that has been over a decade in the making.

In addition to our editorial work, we will seek to gain a better understanding of the poetics of Iliad 24, and how a multitextual approach to Homeric epic enhances our understanding of those poetics. Stay tuned for more about our discussion next week.