Defining Greek Narrative

Douglas Cairns (FRSE, FBA, MAE) is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (2010) and Sophocles: Antigone (2016). His most recent edited volumes include A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019), Emotions through Time: From Antiquity to Byzantium (with M. Hinterberger, A. Pizzone and M. Zaccarini, 2022), Contempt, Ancient and Modern (2023), and In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece (with C. Virág, 2024). Ruth Scodel is D. R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. She has written Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy (1999), Listening to Homer (2002), Epic Facework (2008), (with Anja Bettenworth) Whither Quo Vadis? Sienkiewicz's Novel in Film and Television, and An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (2010).

• Preface; Notes on Contributors; 1. Introduction, Ruth Scodel; Section 1: Defining the Greek Tradition; 2. Beyond Auerbach: The Poetics of Visualisation in the Gilgamesh Epic and Homer, Johannes Haubold; 3. Homeric Battle Narrative and the Ancient Near East, Adrian Kelly; 4. Narrative Focus and Elusive Thought in Homer, Ruth Scodel; 5. Structure as Interpretation in the Homeric Odyssey, Erwin Cook; Section 2: the Development of the Greek Tradition; 6. Exemplarity and Narrative in the Greek Tradition, Douglas Cairns; 7. ‘Where do I begin?’: An Odyssean Narrative Strategy and its Afterlife, Richard Hunter; 8. Greek Scholia on Plot, René Nünlist; 9. Who, Sappho? Alex Purves; 10. Greek Occasions, Greek Sung Narratives, Lucia Athanassaki; 11. Narrative on the Tragic Stage, P. E. Easterling; 12. Stock Situations, Topoi, and the Greekness of Greek Historiography, Lisa Hau; 13. Helidorus the Hellene; J. R. Morgan; Section 3: Beyond Greece; 14. Livy Reading Polybius: Adapting Greek Narrative to Roman History, Dennis Pausch; 15. Pamela and Plato: Ancient and Modern Epistolary Narratives, A. D. Morrison; 16. The Anonymous Traveller: Greek Heritage or Narrative Universal? Irene de Jong.

This collection is unparalleled, whether as individual essays or as a whole. We could of course isolate this or that article according to personal interest, but the whole book is an exceptional opportunity to cross narrative Greek literature in all its genres, from Homer to Heliodorus, from epic to lyricism, to tragedy, to historiography and the novel, and to extend it towards the ancient Orient (Bible, Mesopotamia) and even Japan until modern times. The authors' reflections and arguments are of consistently high quality, and the bibliographic arsenal (especially Anglophone) is well supplied. (Translated from French)