All 42 Uses
epic
in
The Iliad
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- The first and more familiar is The Iliad as the "Song of Troy" (the meaning of "Iliad"), a classic, text that stands at the beginning of a Western epic tradition more than twenty-five centuries old.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- When Greece fell under the sway of Rome in the third and second centuries, The Iliad began its metamorphosis from great national epic into the first poem of Europe.†
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- The philhellenic elites of the Roman Empire, for whom Greek was virtually a second language, used Homer's texts as a staple of higher education and ranked the heroic epic as the noblest of poetic genres.†
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- Virgil's achievement quickly became canonical itself and ensured that the European epic tradition would ground itself on the authority and practice of Homer.†
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- Even when Greek culture receded in the Western Empire, Homer's matter proliferated in Latin translations, digests, and reworkings, which nurtured an ideal of heroism for medieval epics and Troy romances.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- Milton's Paradise Lost and Pope's Iliad represent the Homeric apogee of the classical epic tradition; the Romantic preference for personal lyric over heroic epic did not extinguish Homer's influence, and the twentieth century found powerful new ways to use the old poem, from Joyce's Ulysses to Derek Walcott's Omeros.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- Milton's Paradise Lost and Pope's Iliad represent the Homeric apogee of the classical epic tradition; the Romantic preference for personal lyric over heroic epic did not extinguish Homer's influence, and the twentieth century found powerful new ways to use the old poem, from Joyce's Ulysses to Derek Walcott's Omeros.†
Book Intr.
- Tracing literary traditions to individual inventors not only oversimplifies—The Iliad is far from being the oldest epic in the world—but obscures the amazingly rich and complex traditions that lie behind the work.†
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- Locating the epic in its place and time, then, can prepare readers for Homer's expansive and sometimes allusive mode of storytelling, and for the special flavor of his traditional language.†
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- In fact, the two perspectives are finally inseparable: serving as a repository of the past in an unlettered culture, the singer of epic aspired to be traditional, to retell the oldest stories without obvious novelty or idiosyncrasy; yet these same traditions were so profuse and so many-sided in their meanings that only the strongest poetic vision could have wrought from them the definitive shaping that is The Iliad.†
Book Intr.
- Epics Before Homer On most estimates, The Iliad as we know it first came into shape sometime between 750 and 650 B.C. The traditional nature of the epic language makes it hard to date precisely, and some scholars are pushing it toward the sixth century.2 Because of its undeniable overall design, it is convenient to follow Greek tradition and call the person who gave it final form Homer, with the qualification that this name only crops up about a century later than the poem and is enshrouded from the first in folktale and fancy.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- Epics Before Homer On most estimates, The Iliad as we know it first came into shape sometime between 750 and 650 B.C. The traditional nature of the epic language makes it hard to date precisely, and some scholars are pushing it toward the sixth century.2 Because of its undeniable overall design, it is convenient to follow Greek tradition and call the person who gave it final form Homer, with the qualification that this name only crops up about a century later than the poem and is enshrouded from the first in folktale and fancy.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- Scholars who can compare early Greek poetry with the epic traditions of ancient India have found affinities in theme and phraseology with the stories of noble warriors, wife-stealing, and dynastic struggle with the gods that are told in the Ramayana and Mahabharata.†
Book Intr.
- Homer's notional position as the first of epic poets owes much to the fact that Assurbanipal's library in Nineveh, where the so-called standard version of Gilgamesh we read today was edited, was destroyed at the end of the seventh century B.C. The poem thus began to retreat from sight until it was rediscovered, accidentally, in 1872.6 The mothers of Homer are, by contrast, quite easy to name: these are the Muses invoked by all Greek epic poets at the beginning of their songs.†
Book Intr.
- Homer's notional position as the first of epic poets owes much to the fact that Assurbanipal's library in Nineveh, where the so-called standard version of Gilgamesh we read today was edited, was destroyed at the end of the seventh century B.C. The poem thus began to retreat from sight until it was rediscovered, accidentally, in 1872.6 The mothers of Homer are, by contrast, quite easy to name: these are the Muses invoked by all Greek epic poets at the beginning of their songs.†
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- At the same time, Homeric epic attests to a sudden rise in cultural ambition that is so rapid and widespread that the eighth century is sometimes called the Greek Renaissance.†
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- Hence when Homer chose to sing the "Anger of Achilles," his theme had a symbolic resonance that songs of Thebes or Herakles did not: the first Greek epic written down told a story of a great and ultimately successful collective effort to vindicate the honor of Greece against a powerful eastern foe.†
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- 6 A fine scholarly introduction and translation is The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated with an introduction by Andrew George (London, 1999).†
Book Intr.
- Greek Epic in the Eighth Century B.C. We can glimpse the traditions behind The Iliad only indirectly, for it is the oldest Greek poem we have; linguists place it earlier than The Odyssey by about a generation (though our tools are not sharp enough to exclude the possibility that both poems were composed by a single, long-lived singer).†
Book Intr.
- Their shared patterns of phrasing and storytelling point to a common tradition behind them, as do the songs of Hesiod, who lived around 700 B.C.: Hesiod uses the same meter as the Homeric poems, he shares much of their artificial poetic diction, and the stories he tells of early gods and heroes dovetail in many cases with the personnel of Trojan epics.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- One can get a further glimpse of the range of earlier songs by consulting the collection of so-called Homeric Hymns, early, epic-style songs to divinities, and the fragmentary remains of what is called the Epic Cycle, a series of epics that fleshed out the whole story of Troy from the origins of the war to the return of the last hero to Greece.8 These poems began to be written down in the seventh century, in the wake of Homer's popularity; but it is clear that in many cases they retell stories that were already circulating when Homer began to sing.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- One can get a further glimpse of the range of earlier songs by consulting the collection of so-called Homeric Hymns, early, epic-style songs to divinities, and the fragmentary remains of what is called the Epic Cycle, a series of epics that fleshed out the whole story of Troy from the origins of the war to the return of the last hero to Greece.8 These poems began to be written down in the seventh century, in the wake of Homer's popularity; but it is clear that in many cases they retell stories that were already circulating when Homer began to sing.†
Book Intr.
- One can get a further glimpse of the range of earlier songs by consulting the collection of so-called Homeric Hymns, early, epic-style songs to divinities, and the fragmentary remains of what is called the Epic Cycle, a series of epics that fleshed out the whole story of Troy from the origins of the war to the return of the last hero to Greece.8 These poems began to be written down in the seventh century, in the wake of Homer's popularity; but it is clear that in many cases they retell stories that were already circulating when Homer began to sing.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- , 2003) and Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries B.C. (Cambridge, Mass.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- Homer's use of this story is striking for his reticence, for it only emerges briefly in the epic's final book.†
Book Intr.
- The grotesque image suggests that Homer does not dwell on the Judgment because of the disproportion between Hera's epic hatred and its fairy-tale motivation.†
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- So much for the core action, which could have easily been accommodated in one of the shorter Cyclic Epics.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- It is clear from the above that a main part of Homer's design has been to tell a massive tale, to expand his main theme, throwing up unexpected diversions, obstacles, and side-stories until his account of the "Anger of Achilles" takes on all the weight and scope and dense detail that the word "epic" connotes.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- This is unusual in archaic literature, and suggests one final aspect of epic poetry that seems fundamental to the work.†
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- Epic song, the final and immortal form of glory, is a great thing; but at root its power comes from sheer naming, as Homer gives out again the name the warrior's mother once gave him.22 19 Extensive parallels in the structure of The Iliad are highlighted in Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.†
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- Something like a third of Homer's diction is formulaic in this sense, and the proportion might well be higher if we had more examples of early oral epic to compare.†
Book Intr.
- Much oral poetry, as indeed much popular literature, is formulaic, but the language of early Greek epic is so to a unique degree.23 The ways this language works were greatly clarified by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who explained that the traditional phrases Elided epic singers in performing long songs orally.24 The most striking illustration of how Homeric diction worked was Parry's study of the use of fixed, or "ornamental," epithets.†
Book Intr.
- Much oral poetry, as indeed much popular literature, is formulaic, but the language of early Greek epic is so to a unique degree.23 The ways this language works were greatly clarified by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who explained that the traditional phrases Elided epic singers in performing long songs orally.24 The most striking illustration of how Homeric diction worked was Parry's study of the use of fixed, or "ornamental," epithets.†
Book Intr.
- Homer's audience, too, with much experience of epic song, would have followed along with the rapid narrative, focusing on the scene vividly before them.†
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- The Greek hexameter had a long run as the only verse in which to compose epic.†
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- Latin epic kept the hexameter right through the Renaissance.†
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- This stichic verse, a single unit repeated row on row, corresponds better to epic hexameters than the rhymed stanzas of lyrics or ballads that were first tried in vernacular epics.†
Book Intr.
- This stichic verse, a single unit repeated row on row, corresponds better to epic hexameters than the rhymed stanzas of lyrics or ballads that were first tried in vernacular epics.†
Book Intr.epics = outstanding works of literature or film
- English blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, was developed from Italian models in the sixteenth century and used for epic in Henry Howard's translations from The Aeneid of 1539-46.†
Book Intr.epic = an outstanding work of literature or film
- Shakespeare above all made it available for serious dramatic poetry, and Milton canonized unrhymed iambic pentameter for epic in Paradise Lost.†
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- The convention recapitulates the career of the poems themselves, which passed into later European literature via Latin epic traditions.†
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- The cumulative effect is to convey, indeed to reenact, one of the well-springs of epic poetry, the urge to preserve glory by making the names of heroes of old sound again on earth.†
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Definitions:
-
(1)
(epic) something that is outstanding -- especially a literary work that is long and heroic
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)