The Ages of Homer
A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule
The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer have fascinated listeners and readers for over twenty-five centuries. In this volume of original essays, collected to honor the distinguished teaching and research career of Emily T. Vermeule, thirty leading experts in Homeric studies and related fields provide up-to-date, multidisciplinary accounts of the most current issues in and approaches to the study of Homer. The book is divided into three sections, covering the three "ages, " or historical periods, of Homer. The first section treats the Bronze Age setting of the poems (around 1200 B.C.), using archaeological evidence to reveal the operation of poetic memory in preserving, distorting, and inventing the past. The second section explores the early Iron Age in which the poems were written (ca. 800-500 B.C.), using the strategies of comparative philology and mythology, literary theory, historical linguistics, anthropology, and iconography to determine how the Homeric poems took shape. The final section traces the use of Homer for literary and artistic inspiration by classical antiquity (Greece and Rome). From these essays emerge new answers to old questions such as the date of the Trojan War, the origins of the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 of the Iliad, the historicity of early Aegean contacts with Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant, and Anatolia, and the relations between literary narrative and contemporary visual representation. In addition, several essays introduce new material relevant to Homeric studies in the form of previously unpublished works of art and new results of excavations.
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What Reviewers Are Saying
by any standard an outstanding Festschrift, and among its 31 articles are nearly a dozen that will be appreciated as real advances in the discussion of one Homeric problema or another--perhaps an unprecedented percentage. . . . The University of Texas Press has produced a volume worthy of its ceremonial function in the career of a tremendously influential scholar and educator. It is lavish, and very attractive. Perhaps most remarkable of all, its modest price is a clear indication that it has been kept deliberately within the range of a wide readership, one that it richly deserves.