Ancient Epic

This book adopts a broad and multifaceted approach to that most preeminent of classical literature genres: the Epic. Set in the ancient world, from archaic Greece to imperial Rome, the scope of interest here extends, for comparative purposes, to Vedic and Sanskrit poetry, as well as the Medieval epic. This collection of papers by classicists from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, embraces key themes in recent scholarship, such as the character of the hero, defined in terms of the conflict of power central to the epos, the metapoetic function of the bard as a literary reflection of epic style, and the manipulation of epic myth to fulfil new functions, such as retelling contemporary history and conveying mystic symbology. Topics rooted in archaic poetry, such as the reutilisation of the ogre character embodied in the Cyclops and the journey into the Underworld, are also explored in great detail. In all these studies, the intertextual nature of ancient writing is consistently addressed through discussions of the revisiting of Homeric poetry by authors such as the Greek tragedians, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus.

The analysis of the heroic narrative offered in this volume includes both literary phenomena and the language of the epic itself; the reader is thus afforded the widest possible view of current critical perspectives in classical literature and linguistics. Such a comprehensive treatment of the most important genre in the ancient world grants the reader powerful insights into the way in which ancient literature was composed. This collection of studies, while making a substantial contribution to scholarship in this field, will also appeal to a varied academic readership, including researchers in classical literature and linguistics, as well as students of literary theory.