Myth and Poetics – serie

Gregory Nagy here provides a far-reaching assessment of the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society. Nagy illuminates in particular the forces of interaction and change that transformed the Indo-European linguistic and cultural heritage into distinctly Greek social institutions between the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C. Included in the volume are thirteen of Nagy's major essays—all extensively revised for book publication—on various aspects of the Hellenization of Indo-European poetics, myth and ritual, and social ideology.The primary aim of this book is to examine the Greek language as a reflection of society, with special attention to its function as a vehicle for transmitting mythology and poetics. Nagy's emphasis on the language of the Greeks, and on its comparison with the testimony of related Indo-European languages such as Latin, Indic, and Hittite, reflects his long-standing interest in Indo-European linguistics. The individual chapters examine the development of Hellenic poetics in the traditions of Homer and Hesiod; the Hellenization of Indo-European myths and rituals, including myths of the afterlife, rituals of fire, and symbols in the Greek lyric; and the Hellenization of Indo-European social ideology, with reference to such cultural institutions as the concept of the city-state.A path-breaking application of the principles of social anthropology, comparative mythology, historical linguistics, and oral poetry theory to the study of classics, Greek Mythology and Poetics will be an invaluable resource for classicists and other scholars of linguistics and literary theory.

Vedic Sanskrit literature contains a wealth of material concerning the mythology and religious practices of India between 1500 and 500 B.C.E.—a crucial period in the formation of traditional Indian culture. Stephanie W. Jamison here addresses the conditions that have limited our understanding of Vedic myth and ritual, such as the profusion and obscurity of the texts and the tendency on the part of scholars to approach mythology and ritual independently. Tracing two key myths through a variety of texts, Jamison provides insight into the relationship between early Indic myth and ritual as well as offering a new methodology for their study.After a brief survey of Vedic literature and religion, Jamison examines the recurrences of the myths "Indra fed the Yatis to the hyenas" and "Svarbhanu pierced the sun with darkness." Focusing on their verbal form and ritual setting, she essays a general interpretation of the myths and their ritual purpose. Her book sheds new light on some central figures in Vedic mythology and on the evolution of Vedic mythological narrative, and it points to parallels in other cultures as well.

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century.Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic.The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.

This fresh and thought-provoking book deepens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the creation of myth and the development of the ancient Greek polis, or city-state, during crucial periods in archaic and classical Greece. Examining the diverse texts which crystallized Greek oral tradition, nine chapters by a multidisciplinary group of scholars focus both on the role of the community as the shaper and transmitter of myth and on the function of myth and ritual in the development of political authority in Greek society.Myth and the Polis draws upon current research in such fields such as ancient history, philology, social anthropology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, psychoanalysis, folklore, and political theory. Taken together, the essays highlight the continuos struggle of Greek archaic and classical communities to keep their myths "true" in spite of the pull of pan-Hellenism. Shedding new light on the beginnings of Western civilization, Myth and the Polis will be of interest to a wide range of readers, including scholars and students of classics, folklore, myth, and ancient religion, politics, and history.

First published in French in 1988, this extraordinary book traces the meaning and function of reading from its very beginnings in Greek oral culture through the development of silent reading.One of the most haunting early examples of Greek alphabetical writing appears on the life-sized Archaic funerary statue of a young girl. The inscription speaks for Phrasikleia, who "shall always be called maiden," for she has received this name from the gods instead of marriage.

In Heroic Sagas and Ballads, Stephen A. Mitchell examines the world of the medieval Icelandic legendary sagas and their legacy in Scandinavia. Central to his argument is the view that these heroic texts should be studied in the light of the later Icelandic Middle Ages rather than that of the Viking age, although the stories, the tellers, and the audiences are clearly concerned with exactly this period of Scandinavian history.Viewing these sagas as the products of highly diverse forms of inspiration and creation—some oral, some written—Mitchell explores their aesthetic and social dimensions, demonstrating their function both as entertainment and as a literature with a more serious purpose, one with deep roots in Nordic literary consciousness. The traditions that these sagas relate possessed an importance beyond the temporal and geographical confines of medieval Iceland, and Heroic Sagas and Ballads considers the process by which these heroic materials were subsequently recast as metrical romances in Iceland and as ballads throughout the rest of Scandinavia. It is ultimately concerned with much more than just those stories that inspired such modern writers as Richard Wagner and H. Rider Haggard; its anthropological and folkloric approach to the legendary sagas shows how the extraliterary dimensions of medieval texts can be explored.Heroic Sagas and Ballads addresses issues of central importance to medievalists, folklorists, comparatists, Scandinavianists, and students of the ballad.

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an. While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and evaluate the qasidah. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych here offers the first aesthetics appropriate for this orally composed Arabic verse, an aesthetics that is built on—and tested on—close readings of a number of the poems.Drawing on the insights of contemporary literary theory, anthropology, and the history of religions, Stetkevych maintains that the poetry of the qasidah is ritualized in both form and function. She brings to bear an extensive body of lore, legend, and myth as she interprets individual themes and images with references to rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice. Her English translations of the poems under discussion convey the power and beauty of the originals, as well as a sense of their complex intertextuality and distinctive lexicon.The Mute Immortals Speak will be important for students and scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures, Islamic studies, folklore, oral literature, and literary theory, and by anthropologists, comparatists, historians of religion, and medievalists.

Like the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys interpretations of Helen in Greek literature from the Homeric period through later antiquity. He looks most closely at a revisionist myth according to which Helen never sailed to Troy, but remained blameless, while a libertine phantom or ghost impersonated her at Troy. Comparing the functions of contradictory images of Helen, Austin helps to clarify the problematic relations between beauty and honor and between ugliness and shame in ancient Greece.Austin first discusses the canonical account of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Helen as the archetype of woman without shame. He next considers different versions of Helen in the Homeric tradition. Among these, he shows how Sappho presents Helen as an icon of absolute beauty while she defends her own preference of eros over honor and her choice of woman as the object of desire. Austin then turns to three major authors who repudiated the traditional Helen of Troy: the lyric poet Stesichorus and the dramatist Euripides, who embraced the alternative myth of Helen's phantom; and the historian Herodotus, who claimed to have found in Egypt a Helen story that dispenses with both Helen and the phantom. Austin maintains that the conflicting motives that prompted these writers to rehabilitate Helen led to further revisions of her image, though none have endured as a credible substitute for the Helen of epic tradition.

One of the special charms of the Odyssey, according to Charles Segal, is the way it transports readers to fascinating places. Yet despite the appeal of its narrative, the Odyssey is fully understood only when its style, design, and mythical patterns are taken into account as well. Bringing a new richness to interpretation of this epic, Segal looks closely at key forms of social and personal organization which Odysseus encounters in his voyages. Segal also considers such topics as the relationship between bard and audience, the implications of the Odyssey's self-consciousness about its own poetics, and Homer's treatment of the nature of poetry.

"Nicole Loraux brilliantly elucidates how Athenian politics were 'gendered' in the Classical period. She investigates the Athenian state's interdiction of ritualized mourning by women, in a city where public mourning constituted a vital act of civic self-definition and solidarity. "As Loraux shows, the silencing and exclusion of female—especially maternal—claims to a crucial relationship with the city's fallen war heroes served, and was reinforced by, the ideologically charged, distinctively Athenian notion of the polis as mother of its citizens. But, Loraux points out, the voice and audience that were denied the bereaved women in the political arena were made available to them in the Athenian theater. She focuses on the representation of mothers in mourning in the myths that are the substance of epic poetry and, principally, in Athenian drama, where the dire, menacing implications of their relentless grief are exposed and played out."Using evidence from sources as diverse as legal inscriptions, forensic oratory, ancient historiography, and early religious treatises, Loraux once again illuminates the culture of democracy, specifically the institutional suppression of women as a political and social force in the most flourishing period of Athenian history."—Laura M. Slatkin, University of ChicagoThis volume includes translations of the book "Les meres en deuil" and the essay "De l'amnistie et de son contraire."

Does thinking differ in western and non-western cultures. Read the results as a team of philosophers, psychologists, theologians, anthropologists and narrativises grapple with the question

A study in poetic interaction, The Odyssey in Athens explores the ways in which narrative structure and parallels within and between epic poems create or disclose meaning. Erwin F. Cook also broadens the scope of this intertextual approach to include the relationship of Homeric epic to ritual. Specifically he argues that the Odyssey achieved its form as a written text within the context of Athenian civic cults during the reign of Peisistratos. Focusing on the prologue and the Apologoi (Books 9–12), Cook shows how the traditional Greek polarity between force and intelligence informs the Odyssean narrative at all levels of composition. He then uses this polarity to explain instances of Odyssean self-reference, allusions to other epic traditions—in particular the Iliad—and interaction between the poem and its performance context in Athenian civic ritual. This detailed structural analysis, with its insights into the circumstances and meaning of the Odyssey's composition, will lead to a new understanding of the Homeric epics and the tradition they evoked.

An astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide a context for social interaction and commentary. Reynolds's account is based on performances in the northern Egyptian village in which he studied as an apprentice to a master epic-singer. Reynolds explains in detail the narrative structure of the Sirat Bani Hilal as well as the tradition of epic singing. He sees both living epic poets and fictional epic heroes as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audiences concerning such vital issues as ethnicity, religious orientation, codes of behavior, gender roles, and social hierarchies.

In Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes six representative Indian folklore genres from a single regional repertoire to show the influence of their intertextual relations on the composition and interpretation of artistic performance. Placing special emphasis on women's rituals, she looks at the relationship between the framework and organization of indigenous genres and the reception of folklore performance. The regional repertoire under examination presents a strikingly female-centered world. Female performers and characters are active, articulate, and frequently challenge or defy expectations of gender. Men also confound traditional gender roles. Flueckiger includes the translations of two full performance texts of narratives sung by female and male storytellers respectively.

"Menis opens for consideration an immense range of significant poetic possibilities, not the least of which is that of an ethical sense for the term."—Bryn Mawr Classical Review"Henceforth no one will be able to claim that menis merely connotes strong emotion. Muellner has demonstrated that menis is a critical component of the workings of both the human and divine cosmos. And that is no small accomplishment."—American Journal of Philology"It is high praise, and deserved, to say that this study will take its place... as one of the works that have given us insights into truly fundamental issues in Homer."—Classical JournalLeonard Muellner's goal is to restore the Greek word for the anger of Achilles, menis, to its social, mythical, and poetic contexts. His point of departure is the anthropology of emotions. He believes that notions of anger vary between cultures and that the particular meaning of a word such as menis needs to emerge from a close study of Greek epic. Menis means more than an individual's emotional response. On the basis of the epic exemplifications of the word, Muellner defines the term as a cosmic sanction against behavior that violates the most basic rules of human society. To understand the way menis functions, Mueller stresses both the power and the danger that accrue to a person who violates such rules. Transgressive behavior has both a creative and a destructive aspect.

Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poetry of Homer. By situating formulas and other features of oral style within the wider contexts of spoken language and communication, he moves the study of oral poetry beyond the landmark work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord.One of the book's central features, related to the research of the linguist Wallace Chafe, is Bakker's conception of spoken discourse as a sequence of short speech units reflecting the flow of speech through the consciousness of the speaker. Bakker shows that such short speech units are present in Homeric poetry, with significant consequences for Homeric metrics and poetics. Considering Homeric discourse as a speech process rather than as the finished product associated with written discourse, Bakker's book offers a new perspective on Homer as well as on other archaic Greek texts. Here Homeric discourse appears as speech in its own right, and is freed, Bakker suggests, from the bias of modern writing style which too easily views Homeric discourse as archaic, implicitly taking the style of classical period texts as the norm. Bakker's perspective reaches beyond syntax and stylistics into the very heart of Homeric—and, ultimately, oral—poetics, altering the status of key features such as meter and formula, rethinking their relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry, and leading to surprising insights into the relation between "speech" and "text" in the encounter of the Homeric tradition with writing.

With the publication of Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, widely considered a classic in Modern Greek studies and in collateral fields, Margaret Alexiou established herself as a major intellectual innovator on the interconnections among ancient, medieval, and modern Greek cultures. In her new, eagerly awaited book, Alexiou looks at how language defines the contours of myth and metaphor. Drawing on texts from the New Testament to the present day, Alexiou shows the diversity of the Greek language and its impact at crucial stages of its history on people who were not Greek. She then stipulates the relatedness of literary and "folk" genres, and assesses the importance of rituals and metaphors of the life cycle in shaping narrative forms and systems of imagery.Alexiou places special emphasis on Byzantine literary texts of the sixth and twelfth centuries, providing her own translations where necessary; modern poetry and prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and narrative songs and tales in the folk tradition, which she analyzes alongside songs of the life cycle. She devotes particular attention to two genres whose significance she thinks has been much underrated: the tales (paramythia) and the songs of love and marriage.In exploring the relationship between speech and ritual, Alexiou not only takes the Greek language into account but also invokes the neurological disorder of autism, drawing on clinical studies and her own experience as the mother of autistic identical twin sons.

From Cinderella to The Boy Who Cried Wolf to The Dragon Slayer to the Judgment of Solomon, certain legends, myths, and folktales are part of the oral tradition in countries around the world. In addition to their pervasiveness, these stories show an astonishing longevity; many such tales are found in classical antiquity. Ariadne's Thread is an encyclopedia of more than a hundred such international oral tales, all present in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.It takes into account writings, including early Jewish and Christian literature, recorded in or translated into Greek or Latin by writers of any nationality. As a result, it will be invaluable not only to classicists and folklorists but also to a wide range of other readers who are interested in stories and storytelling. William Hansen presents the familiar form of each tale and discusses the similar ancient story or stories, examining how each corresponds with and differs from that form. He then gives principal sources and, where appropriate, comments on the cultural factors affecting the shape and content of the ancient story, the context of transmission, and issues raised in the secondary literature.Finally, he provides a bibliography of scholarly studies and the pertinent reference in the standard folk-narrative index, The Types of the Folktale by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Again and again, Hansen demonstrates how ancient narratives are often best understood in the context of the larger tradition. He forces us to rethink the nature of Greek mythology by encouraging an appreciation of the extent to which Greek myths and legends parallel international stories. By virtue of their durability, he says, these orally transmitted stories rank among the world's most successful artistic creations.

Oral epic poetry is still performed by Turkic singers in Central Asia. On trips to the region, Karl Reichl collected heroic poems from the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Karakalpak oral traditions. Through a close analysis of these Turkic works, he shows that they are typologically similar to heroic poetry in Old English, Old High German, and Old French and that they can offer scholars new insights into the oral background of these medieval texts.Reichl draws on his research in Central Asia to discuss questions regarding performance as well as the singers' training, role in society, and repertoire. He asserts that heroic poetry and epic are primarily concerned with the interpretation of the past in song: the courageous deeds of ancestors, the search for tribal and societal roots, and the definition and transmission of cultural values. Reichl finds that in these traditions the heroic epic is part of a generic system that includes historical and eulogistic poetry as well as heroic lays, a view that has diachronic implications for medieval poetry.Singing the Past reminds readers that because much medieval poetry was composed for oral recitation, both the Turkic and the medieval heroic poems must always be appreciated as poetry in performance, as sound listened to, as words spoken or sung.

Exploring a variety of literary texts representing different poetic genres, Claude Calame, an internationally known classicist, draws the lineaments of a real history of the means used by ancient Greek poets to create in their works a fictional authorship. In this collection of essays, he shows that they made of their poems, through various discursive strategies, texts to be performed, with the collective, ritual, and pragmatic values implicit in the ideas of craft and performance. How is it possible to distinguish between the external context and reception of a discursive work and the elaborate poetic effects produced in the text itself by means of language? Clearly, the partly fictional figure of the author "constructed" by the text is not the same as the biographical author. In ancient Greece, moreover, the person of the composer of a poem was often distinct from the person of its performer.Important examples in Masks of Authority include some of the Homeric Hymns, didactic poetry by Hesiod, a bucolic poem of Theocritus, performed poetry by Sappho and mimetic poems by Callimachus, Attic tragedy and comedy in masked performances (Sophocles and Aristophanes), an iconographic inscription, an authoritative scientific discourse by Hippocrates, and an initiatory commentary to an Orphic theogony. The result is a selective history of Greek poetics from the perspective of its authorial devices and social functions, its place between oral and written traditions.

A study in poetic interaction, The Odyssey in Athens explores the ways in which narrative structure and parallels within and between epic poems create or disclose meaning. Erwin F. Cook also broadens the scope of this intertextual approach to include the relationship of Homeric epic to ritual. Specifically he argues that the Odyssey achieved its form as a written text within the context of Athenian civic cults during the reign of Peisistratos. Focusing on the prologue and the Apologoi (Books 9–12), Cook shows how the traditional Greek polarity between force and intelligence informs the Odyssean narrative at all levels of composition. He then uses this polarity to explain instances of Odyssean self-reference, allusions to other epic traditions—in particular the Iliad—and interaction between the poem and its performance context in Athenian civic ritual. This detailed structural analysis, with its insights into the circumstances and meaning of the Odyssey's composition, will lead to a new understanding of the Homeric epics and the tradition they evoked.

Like the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys interpretations of Helen in Greek literature from the Homeric period through later antiquity. He looks most closely at a revisionist myth according to which Helen never sailed to Troy, but remained blameless, while a libertine phantom or ghost impersonated her at Troy. Comparing the functions of contradictory images of Helen, Austin helps to clarify the problematic relations between beauty and honor and between ugliness and shame in ancient Greece.Austin first discusses the canonical account of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Helen as the archetype of woman without shame. He next considers different versions of Helen in the Homeric tradition. Among these, he shows how Sappho presents Helen as an icon of absolute beauty while she defends her own preference of eros over honor and her choice of woman as the object of desire. Austin then turns to three major authors who repudiated the traditional Helen of Troy: the lyric poet Stesichorus and the dramatist Euripides, who embraced the alternative myth of Helen's phantom; and the historian Herodotus, who claimed to have found in Egypt a Helen story that dispenses with both Helen and the phantom. Austin maintains that the conflicting motives that prompted these writers to rehabilitate Helen led to further revisions of her image, though none have endured as a credible substitute for the Helen of epic tradition.

From Cinderella to The Boy Who Cried Wolf to The Dragon Slayer to the Judgment of Solomon, certain legends, myths, and folktales are part of the oral tradition in countries around the world. In addition to their pervasiveness, these stories show an astonishing longevity; many such tales are found in classical antiquity. Ariadne's Thread is an encyclopedia of more than a hundred such international oral tales, all present in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.It takes into account writings, including early Jewish and Christian literature, recorded in or translated into Greek or Latin by writers of any nationality. As a result, it will be invaluable not only to classicists and folklorists but also to a wide range of other readers who are interested in stories and storytelling. William Hansen presents the familiar form of each tale and discusses the similar ancient story or stories, examining how each corresponds with and differs from that form. He then gives principal sources and, where appropriate, comments on the cultural factors affecting the shape and content of the ancient story, the context of transmission, and issues raised in the secondary literature.Finally, he provides a bibliography of scholarly studies and the pertinent reference in the standard folk-narrative index, The Types of the Folktale by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Again and again, Hansen demonstrates how ancient narratives are often best understood in the context of the larger tradition. He forces us to rethink the nature of Greek mythology by encouraging an appreciation of the extent to which Greek myths and legends parallel international stories. By virtue of their durability, he says, these orally transmitted stories rank among the world's most successful artistic creations.

Vedic Sanskrit literature contains a wealth of material concerning the mythology and religious practices of India between 1500 and 500 B.C.E.—a crucial period in the formation of traditional Indian culture. Stephanie W. Jamison here addresses the conditions that have limited our understanding of Vedic myth and ritual, such as the profusion and obscurity of the texts and the tendency on the part of scholars to approach mythology and ritual independently. Tracing two key myths through a variety of texts, Jamison provides insight into the relationship between early Indic myth and ritual as well as offering a new methodology for their study.After a brief survey of Vedic literature and religion, Jamison examines the recurrences of the myths "Indra fed the Yatis to the hyenas" and "Svarbhanu pierced the sun with darkness." Focusing on their verbal form and ritual setting, she essays a general interpretation of the myths and their ritual purpose. Her book sheds new light on some central figures in Vedic mythology and on the evolution of Vedic mythological narrative, and it points to parallels in other cultures as well.

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an. While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and evaluate the qasidah. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych here offers the first aesthetics appropriate for this orally composed Arabic verse, an aesthetics that is built on—and tested on—close readings of a number of the poems.Drawing on the insights of contemporary literary theory, anthropology, and the history of religions, Stetkevych maintains that the poetry of the qasidah is ritualized in both form and function. She brings to bear an extensive body of lore, legend, and myth as she interprets individual themes and images with references to rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice. Her English translations of the poems under discussion convey the power and beauty of the originals, as well as a sense of their complex intertextuality and distinctive lexicon.The Mute Immortals Speak will be important for students and scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures, Islamic studies, folklore, oral literature, and literary theory, and by anthropologists, comparatists, historians of religion, and medievalists.

Gregory Nagy here provides a far-reaching assessment of the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society. Nagy illuminates in particular the forces of interaction and change that transformed the Indo-European linguistic and cultural heritage into distinctly Greek social institutions between the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C. Included in the volume are thirteen of Nagy's major essays—all extensively revised for book publication—on various aspects of the Hellenization of Indo-European poetics, myth and ritual, and social ideology.The primary aim of this book is to examine the Greek language as a reflection of society, with special attention to its function as a vehicle for transmitting mythology and poetics. Nagy's emphasis on the language of the Greeks, and on its comparison with the testimony of related Indo-European languages such as Latin, Indic, and Hittite, reflects his long-standing interest in Indo-European linguistics. The individual chapters examine the development of Hellenic poetics in the traditions of Homer and Hesiod; the Hellenization of Indo-European myths and rituals, including myths of the afterlife, rituals of fire, and symbols in the Greek lyric; and the Hellenization of Indo-European social ideology, with reference to such cultural institutions as the concept of the city-state.A path-breaking application of the principles of social anthropology, comparative mythology, historical linguistics, and oral poetry theory to the study of classics, Greek Mythology and Poetics will be an invaluable resource for classicists and other scholars of linguistics and literary theory.

"Nicole Loraux brilliantly elucidates how Athenian politics were 'gendered' in the Classical period. She investigates the Athenian state's interdiction of ritualized mourning by women, in a city where public mourning constituted a vital act of civic self-definition and solidarity. "As Loraux shows, the silencing and exclusion of female—especially maternal—claims to a crucial relationship with the city's fallen war heroes served, and was reinforced by, the ideologically charged, distinctively Athenian notion of the polis as mother of its citizens. But, Loraux points out, the voice and audience that were denied the bereaved women in the political arena were made available to them in the Athenian theater. She focuses on the representation of mothers in mourning in the myths that are the substance of epic poetry and, principally, in Athenian drama, where the dire, menacing implications of their relentless grief are exposed and played out."Using evidence from sources as diverse as legal inscriptions, forensic oratory, ancient historiography, and early religious treatises, Loraux once again illuminates the culture of democracy, specifically the institutional suppression of women as a political and social force in the most flourishing period of Athenian history."—Laura M. Slatkin, University of ChicagoThis volume includes translations of the book "Les meres en deuil" and the essay "De l'amnistie et de son contraire."

One of the special charms of the Odyssey, according to Charles Segal, is the way it transports readers to fascinating places. Yet despite the appeal of its narrative, the Odyssey is fully understood only when its style, design, and mythical patterns are taken into account as well. Bringing a new richness to interpretation of this epic, Segal looks closely at key forms of social and personal organization which Odysseus encounters in his voyages. Segal also considers such topics as the relationship between bard and audience, the implications of the Odyssey's self-consciousness about its own poetics, and Homer's treatment of the nature of poetry.