Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis PDF
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Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches Series Editor: Gregory Nagy, Harvard University Assistant Editor: Timothy Power, Harvard University On the front cover: A calendar frieze representing the Athenian months, reused in the Byzantine Church of the Little Metropolis in Athens. The cross is superimposed, obliterating Taurus of the Zodiac. The choice of this frieze for books in Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches reflects this series' emphasis on the blending of the diverse heritages-Near Eastern, Classical, and Christian-in the Greek tradition. Drawing by Laurie Kain Hart, based on a photograph. Recent titles in the series are: Nothing Is As It Seems: The Tragedy of the Implicit in Euripides' Hippolytus by Hanna M. Roisman Lyric Quotation in Plato by Marian Demos Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition by Nancy Sultan The Classical Moment: Viewsf rom Seven Literatures Edited by Gail Holst-Warhaft and David R. McCann Nine Essays on Homer Edited by Miriam Carlisle and Olga Levaniouk Allegory and the Tragic Chorus in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus by Roger Travis Dionysism and Comedy by Xavier Riu Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue Edited by Thomas M. Falkner, Nancy Felson, and David Konstan The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad by Jinyo Kim Between Magic and Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society Edited by Sulochana Asirvatham, Corinne Ondine Pache, and John Waltrous Iambic Ideas: Essays on a Poetic Tradition From Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire Edited by Antonio Aloni, Alessandro Barchiesi, Alberto Cavarzere The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Second Edition by Margaret Alexiou revised by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis Roilos Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis by Casey Due HomericV ariationso n a Lament by Briseis CASEYDJJE ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham• Boulder• New York• Oxford ROWMAN& LITTLEFIELDP UBLISHERS,I NC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright © 2002 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication lnfonnation Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 0-7425-2218-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-7425-2219-9 (paper: alk paper) Printed in the United States of America 8 ... The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for lnfonnation Sciences--Pennanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992. Contents Foreword by Gregory Nagy vii Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations XI Introduction: Variations on Briseis I 1. Briseis and the Multiformity of the Iliad 21 2. Prize 37 3. Girl 49 4. Wife 67 Conclusion: Tradition and Innovation 83 Afterword: Elegizing Briseis in Augustan Rome 91 Appendix: Selected Ancient Literary References to Briseis 115 Bibliography 121 Index 137 About the Author 141 Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches Foreward by Gregory Nagy, General Editor Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, this series concerns not just the archaic and classical periods of Greek traditions but the whole continuum-along with all the discontinuities-from the second millennium BCE to the present. The aim is to enhance perspectives by applying various disciplines to problems that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of a single given discipline. Besides the crossing-over of the older disciplines, as in the case of historical and literary studies, the series encourages the application of such newer ones as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and comparative literature. It also encourages encounters with current trends in methodology, especially in the realm of literary theory. Homeric Variations on a lament by Briseis, by Casey Due, centers on the figure of Briseis in the Jliad--who may seem at first sight to be marginal to the plot of that epic but who turns out to be essential to it-and even to the character-definition of the central hero of the Iliad, Achilles himself. Moreover, Briseis turns out to be a central character in local epic traditions that are still reflected, albeit indirectly, in Homeric poetry. Briseis thus becomes a most vivid illustration of the multiformity that typifies epic traditions in the preclassical Greek-speaking world. In the classical period and beyond, Briseis is appreciated as an exquisite literary construct inherited from Homer as the ultimate artist. For a Roman poet like Propertius, she is a masterpiece of artistic characterization, a model for the esthetics of poetic lament over death and unrequited love. A key to Due's discovery procedure is her form-analysis of direct "quotations" or indirect retellings of women's laments and love songs in Homeric poetry. She proves that the morphology of these traditional genres is integrated into the overall morphology of the epic genre that displays them through such characters as Briseis, especially in the Iliadic passage where this character is "quoted" as lamenting the death of Patroklos. Due's treatment of this passage is a tour de force in literary interpretation, where all her formal viii analysis comes together decisively in illuminating the beauty and precision inherent in the system that we call Homeric poetry. This book combines keen literary insight with a profound expertise in the methodology originally developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in their study of oral poetics. Unlike many classicists who display only a cursory under standing of the cumulative research of these two scholars, Due has mastered the Parry-Lord techniques of close reading of the text combined with comparative applications based on empirical methods of analyzing records of living oral traditions, such as the South Slavic materials archived in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard (with which she has been affiliated since 1998: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~mpc/). The description of mastering the required techniques can be taken literally: the author's deftness in the praxis of analyzing the formulaic system of Homeric poetry is a technical mastery, acquired through countless hours of careful reading of the text-which is after all the fundamental teaching legacy of the Parry-Lord research tradition. This book integrates the intellectual legacy of Parry and Lord into the proud old discipline of classical philology. Acknowledgments I wish to thank the following people, who have inspired, aided, and encouraged me in this work: Leonard Muellner, who first suggested that I think about Briseis; Mary Ebbott, Gloria Ferrari, and Albert Henrichs, each of whom read several drafts and greatly improved the book with their precision and clarity of thought; and Gregory Nagy, whose influence and vision will, I trust, be obvious in the following pages. I am indebted to the Classics Department at Harvard University, under whose aegis most of my research and the writing of this book was undertaken. In addition to those members of the department already mentioned, I am grateful to Christopher Jones, Richard Tarrant, Richard Thomas, the late Charles Segal, and Jan Ziolkowsky, as well as Stephen Mitchell of Folklore and Mythology, each of whom has had a profound impact on my thinking. I would also like to acknowledge my new colleagues at the University of Houston, Richard Armstrong and Francesca Behr, for their encouragement in the final stages. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Paul and Genny Due, my sisters, Domigne, Monique, and Celeste, and above all my husband, Ryan Hackney, for their love and devoted support.
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