Dr Adrian Kelly: List of publications

This chapter looks at the use to which Sappho put the epic inheritance ¬– not just Homer, but the stories and performances of heroic narrative which have been largely lost to us – in order to see the significance of war and the martial life both to her poetry and its audiences.

A fresh and wide-ranging exploration across the whole of early Greek hexameter poetry, focusing on issues of poetics and metapoetics.

© Cambridge University Press 2015. Stesichorus’ poems were read and appreciated for at least three quarters of a millennium after their composition in perhaps the first half of the sixth century BC. In the late second or early third century AD, Athenaeus cites numerous poems by Stesichorus in away that suggests first-hand knowledge of a substantial corpus. But Athenaeus is the last person who can be confidently stated to have had a direct encounter with Stesichorus’ works, which ceased to be copied at some point during the Imperial period, perhaps in the third or fourth century ad. As a result, once the manuscripts already in existence had crumbledaway, or had been cast into rubbish heaps, the sole available evidence for Stesichorus’ poetry lay embedded, as quotations or paraphrases, in the manuscripts of other, more fortunate, ancient authors whose works did survive antiquity. Collections of these fragments, however, were not made until after the invention of the printing press, and indeed not for some time after that; they first appear in the second half of the sixteenth century, after the authors whose works provide those fragments had themselves received their earliest printededitions. Michael Neander edited four fragments as part of his collection of maxims providedbydifferent lyric poets; a few more were published by Henricus Stephanus, before a substantialcollection, including both testimonia and fragments, was gathered by Fulvius Ursinus; a muchshorter selection later appeared in a work by Jacobus Lectius. All these editions themselvesformed part of editions of a range of lyric poets; Stesichorus’ remains were too meagre to deserve a dedicated treatment, at least at this point in the story of their transmission. For that they had to wait until the edition of 1771 by Johann Suchfort, a pupil ofChristian Gottlob Heyne. Th is book was the first to provide a translation of and commentaryon th fragments; the first, too, to arrange them under the names of the various poems whichwe haveattested for Stesichorus, although many of the attributions were rather bold.

The relationship between composition and performance lies at the heart of Homeric poetics, for scholars have long understood that the moment of performance is crucial for the generation, indeed realisation, of early Greek oral traditional epic. This paper proposes to analyse the recognition sequence(s) between Odysseus and Penelope in Odyssey 23 from this perspective, arguing that the episode can only fully be understood by recapturing the narratives performative strategies: that is, those strategies designed to engage the attention of an audience specifically at the moment of performance. I propose to elucidate this dynamism, for want of a better term, by setting out the structural grammar' underlying the construction of the scene, and then showing how the poet manipulates his audiences familiarity with that grammar in order to create uncertainty, excitement and meaning, to direct, misdirect and control their response, and on the smallest scales of narrative. When we appreciate the presence and pervasiveness of this interaction, not only can we feel the poetry's immediacy and vividness in a manner like that enjoyed by an Archaic Greek audience, but we can also apply a more nuanced understanding of Homeric technique to textual and scholarly zetemata, as with the famous (and so-called) 'interruption to the recognition sequence (111-163) in the current example. Aside from these two advantages, the demonstration of such a specifically 'orally-derived' strategy can only help further to illustrate the origin of Homer's aesthetic within a tradition of recomposition in performance, and so the interdependence of the conference's twin themes.