Epic Interactions Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin by Former Pupils

This collection of essays by former pupils of Jasper Griffin is conceived as a tribute to one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The volume surveys the epic tradition from the eighth-seventh centuries BC to the nineteenth century of our era, with individual chapters focusing on specific stages of the tradition. These include: Homer and the oral epic tradition; the Homeric transformation of Indo-European and Near Eastern religious ideas; Herodotus' Histories and Homer; reactions to Homer by the ancient literary critics and the Hellenistic poets; Virgil's Aeneid in its literary and political-cultural contexts; the Augustan poets' engagement with the Aeneid; the response to Virgil in Statius' Thebaid; Old English and early Irish heroic literature; Tasso, Milton, and the Renaissance renewal of epic; and the complex attitude of the Victorians to epic. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts; the perspectives offered are synchronic and diachronic. The individual contributions, all written by established scholars, fix in each case on a single, seminal moment in the epic tradition. None the less the book invites reading in chronological sequence, for the epic tradition is seen as one in which earlier and later stages may illuminate each other reciprocally. The concept of interaction at the heart of this book is taken in different directions by the various contributors. It encompasses intertextual relationships between literary works, cross-cultural borrowings, the interrelationship of literature and criticism, construction of literary hierarchies and representations of literary dependence, and the complex interpenetration of literature and society. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition, and together take an integrated view of that tradition as a whole. Book jacket.

M. J. Clarke is Lecturer in Classics, The National University of Ireland, Maynooth. B. G. F. Currie is Fellow and Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature, Oriel College, and Lecturer, Oxford University. The late R. O. A. M. Lyne was formerly Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.