‘STRANGE’ RHETORIC AND HOMERIC RECEPTION IN AELIUS ARISTIDES’ EMBASSY SPEECH TO ACHILLES (OR. 52)

This article argues that Aelius Aristides adapts the word atopos (‘strange’, ‘out of place’) as figured speech in his Embassy Speech to Achilles, meaning something that is either illogical according to rhetorical topoi or inconsistent with the text of Homer's Iliad. By doing so, he not only expands the semantic range of atopos but also comments on the rhetorical, intertextual, and pedagogical relationship between oratory and the Homeric tradition.

Homer's Daughters

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.

Homer in Love

Chapter 7 considers a second central theme in Ovid’s Homeric reception, desire, and its evocation through repetition. The erotic tradition of Homeric reception that Ovid inherited can be seen in the longest extant fragment of the elegiac poem Leontion, in which the Hellenistic poet Hermesianax offers a catalogue of ancient poets and the women they loved. In Tristia 1.6, Ovid expands upon the central trope of this catalogue, in which poetry is personified as the beloved object of a poet’s desire. The love-poet, suggests Ovid, strives continually to renew his love by recreating the great loves of past poetry, aspiring always to surpass them. Discussions of Ovid’s treatment of Penelope in Heroides 1, Calypso in Ars amatoria Book 2, and Circe in the Remedia amoris explore Ovid’s continuing interest in figuring himself as a second Homer by imagining Homer as an elegiac poet.