Hippota Nestor and Beyond

In Hippota Nestor and Beyond: Selected Essays, Douglas Frame revisits the Homeric figure of Nestor, who he argues derives from twin figures in Indo-European myth, and dates the composition and performance of the Iliad and Odyssey to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE at a festival of twelve Ionian cities in Asia Minor. Frame takes up subjects such as the evidence for Nestor’s Indo-European origins; the related origins of the Greek word noos, “mind”; the Phaeacians in the Odyssey as the key to the circumstances in which the Homeric poems were created; Nestor’s role connecting the two poems into a one whole. Other essays in the collect break new ground with respect to the circumstances of the poems’ performance; the purpose of the poems in their historical setting; the relation of the poems to other poetic monuments of the time; the reception of the poems in the Greek mainland after their origin in Ionia; and a closer tracking of the Indo-European origins of the figure hippota Nestor, “the horseman Nestor,” in light of the invention of the chariot in the Russian steppes c. 2000 BCE.