Dr%20Bruno%20Currie: List of publications

This paper offers a reappraisal of the role of intertextuality in fifth-century BCE epinician poetry by means of a comparison with the role of intertextuality in all of early Greek hexameter poetry, ‘lyric epic’, and fifth-century BCE tragedy and comedy. By considering the ways in which performance culture as well as the production of written texts affects the prospects for intertextuality, it challenges a scholarly view that would straightforwardly correlate intertextuality in early Greek poetry with an increasing use and dissemination of written texts. Rather, ‘performance rivalry’ (a term understood to encompass both intra- and intergeneric competition between poetic works that were performed either on the same occasion or on closely related occasions) is identified as a plausible catalyst of intertextuality in all of the poetic genres considered, from the eighth or seventh century to the fifth century BCE. It is argued that fifth-century epinician poetry displays frequent, fine-grained, and allusive intertextuality with a range of early hexameter poetry: the Iliad, the poems of the Epic Cycle, and various ‘Hesiodic’ poems – poetry that in all probability featured in the sixth-fifth century BCE rhapsodic repertoire. It is also argued that, contrary to what is maintained in some recent Pindaric scholarship, there is no comparable case to be made for a frequent, significant, and allusive intrageneric intertextuality between epinician poems: in this respect, the case of epinician makes a very striking contrast with epic, tragedy, and comedy – poetic genres to which intrageneric intertextuality was absolutely fundamental. It is suggested that the presence or absence of intrageneric intertextuality in the genres in question is likely to be associated with the presence or absence of performance rivalry. A further factor identified as having the potential to inhibit intrageneric intertextuality in epinician is the undesirability of having one poem appear to be ‘bettered’ by another in a genre were all poems were commissioned to exalt individual patrons. This, again, is a situation that did not arise for epic, tragedy, or comedy, where a kind of competitive or ‘zero-sum’ intertextuality could be (and was) unproblematically embraced. Intertextuality in epinician thus appears to present a special case vis-à-vis the other major poetic genres of early Greece, whose workings can both be illuminated by consideration of the workings of intertextuality in epic, tragedy, and comedy, and can in turn illuminate something of the workings of intertextuality in those genres.

This paper discusses the text and interpretation of Hesiod Theogony 860, proposing the emendation οὔρεος ἐν βήσσῃς, ἰν Αἴτνῃ παιπαλοέσσῃ. The interpretative consequences of this emendation, introducing a reference to Mt Etna, are explored. The following passage, Theogony 861-7, is reinterpreted in the light of an immediately preceding reference to the Sicilian volcano. Not only Hesiod, but also Homer is argued to have knowledge of volcanism. Hesiod’s simple, unelaborated reference to Typhoeus’ defeat at Mt Etna implies that the association of Typhoeus with Mt Etna was made by Greeks before Hesiod; it presumably dates to Greek colonizing or proto-colonizing activities in the eighth century BCE. It is consistent with this that the Typhoeus-Etna is one of several mythological episodes in early Greek hexameter poetry that are localized in the West. Finally, the presence of the Typhoeus-Etna link in Hesiod’s Theogony significantly increases the probability that the closely similar descriptions of Typhoeus / Typhon in poems of Pindar (Pythian 1, Pythian 8, Olympian 4, frr. 92-3 Maehler) and in the (Pseudo-)Aeschylean Prometheus Bound depend not on each other, but on an early hexameter account of the Typhonomachy that had attained canonical status by the fifth century BCE. One popular argument for a late dating of the Prometheus Bound, and for its non-Aeschylean authorship, would then need to be discarded.

The article reviews the arguments for seeing ‘Temese’ (Od. 1.184) and ‘Alybas’ (24.304) as Italian place names, and considers the significance of the Odyssey’s being bookended by putative references to fictitious voyages to and from Italy by ‘Mentes’ and ‘Eperitos’ respectively. Sicilians, moreover, cut intriguingly different figures in the poem. On the one hand, the Suitors think of Sicilians as ruthless slave-dealers (20.383). On the other, Laertes relies on a devoted Sicilian woman (24.211-12), and Odysseus pretends to a fervent guest-friendship with a man from Sicania (24.303-14). The positive attitude of Odysseus and Laertes (and, by implication, of the poem’s narrator and narratee) towards Sicilians contrasts very suggestively with the negative attitude of the Suitors. It is, finally, suggested that Odysseus’ encounters with monsters and man-eaters (the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, Skylla and Charbdis, Kirke) may already have been situated in Sicily and Italy prior to the Odyssey, and that the poet of the Odyssey purposely refrained from situating his monsters there. Thus the Odyssey-poet himself may have pointedly adopted a positive attitude to the heroic-age inhabitants of Sicily that contrasted with the negative attitude prevailing in his tradition. This putative decision not to demonize the inhabitants of Sicily may be the natural concomitant of a desire to show the home-grown Suitors of Ithaca as the real “monsters” of the Odyssey.

This paper discusses four distinctive Homeric narrative features where an intertextual relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey can be discerned: (1) the narrator's choice to begin the narration mid-fabula, pitching the narratee in medias res; (2) the narrator's initial declaration of a theme in the proem and the subsequent duplication of that theme in the course of the narrative; (3) the creation of a sense of narrative closure through scenes involving fathers, and a related use of fathers as unseen characters in the narrative; and (4) the use of interlaced storylines and of a related continuity of time principle. The poet of the Odyssey must be understood on several occasions to recur not to any quasi-transcendental repertory of narratological techniques, but to the narratological techniques that were specifically deployed in the Iliad.

This chapter seeks to establish what kind of interaction was possible between the Homeric poems and other early Greek epics. The question is crucially affected by the recognition that the early Greek epic tradition is oral-derived traditional poetry. It seems obvious that we must judge the interaction of the early Greek epic poems by different standards from the interaction of, say, Virgil's Aeneid with the epics that preceded it; but just how different will be a theme of the chapter. The question cannot be addressed without considering the relationship between the Homeric epics and the poems of the Epic Cycle, and the difference between an oral poetics and the literary criticism of a written poem: two themes with which Jasper Griffin is particularly associated.