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

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Minimally scuffed dust jacket. Otherwise in very good condition. - Content: This collection of essays dedicated to Jasper Griffin aims to investigate the vibrancy of the classical epic tradition. The book as a whole considers the uses made by writers at widely different times and places of a single literary form to explore the author�s place in literary and cultural history. Jasper Griffin retired as Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University in autumn 2004. Six of the chapters (Chs. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11) were presented at a conference on 11 September that year to mark his retirement; all speakers at the conference, and all contributors to this volume, were pupils of Professor Griffin. A volume of essays by former pupils on Homer, Virgil, and their reception seemed a fitting tribute to a scholar distinguished for a teaching career spanning more than forty years and for numerous publications on Greek and Latin literature in which Homer and Virgil consistently occupied pride of place. The range of this volume�whose chronological limits are the eighth century bc and the nineteenth century of our era, encompassing literature written in ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Old Irish, Italian, and modern English�is intended as a tribute to Griffin�s own extraordinary range in teaching and research, while also catering to the interests and expertise of the contributors. The choice of chapter subjects and of contributors is hardly arbitrary, but it necessarily gives only a selective representation of the subject matter and (no less embarrassingly for the editors) only a selection of the professional classicists who have been pupils of Griffin. The volume offers sequential readings of several significant moments in the classical epic tradition. While the chapters can very well be read in isolation, they are meant to bear reading as a meaningful sequence. Unavoidably, significant moments in the tradition have not been included (the Latin historical epic of Ennius, Lucan, and Silius is a notable absence); but there are, we hope, compensatory gains. The book is, predictably enough, more and less than a history of a genre. The book�s tripartite structure will be evident at a glance. It considers �epic interactions� first within ancient Greek literature (Chs. 1-4); second, within Latin literature (Chs. 5-8); and last, in the vernacular literatures of medieval, renaissance, and modern Europe (Chs. 9-11). There are more detailed correspondences between the first and second parts, on epic interactions in the Greek and Roman worlds. The first chapters of each part (Chs. 1 and 5) consider how the foundational epics of Greece and Rome, those of Homer and Virgil respectively, interact with earlier epic tradition. The second chapters (2 and 6) consider the interaction of these foundational epics with a cultural phenomenon: Homer with Greek religion, and Virgil with the monuments of Augustan Rome. The third chapters (3 and 7) explore how non-epic literary genres interacted with the foundational epics: how Herodotus� Histories interact with the Iliad and the Odyssey, and how Horatian lyric and Propertian and Ovidian elegy (and Ovidian epic) interact with the Aeneid. The fourth chapters (4 and 8) explore how epic poems once considered �post-classical�, Hellenistic and �Silver� Latin epic (especially Apollonius� Argonautica and Statius� Thebaid), interact with the foundational epics. Despite its great range, we see the book�and conceived it at the outset�as having a unified subject, conveyed for us in the concept of �epic interactions�. We have tried not to impose the theme heavy-handedly on the individual chapters, but to let it emerge from the contributors� own treatments. A concluding Epilogue explores common ground and differences between the chapters, and considers ways in which they form a continuous or an interlocking sequence. Neither term in the book�s main title, we are aware, is straightforward. We have favoured �interaction� as a non-technical word without any fixed theoretical implications. No dogma is envisaged by it. For us, �interactions� suggests an open-ended set of related questions that can be asked of the texts handled. As used by the writers in this volume, �interaction� has affinities to notions of literary history, reception, intertextuality, and cultural poetics; but it is identical with none of these, and that is the word�s chief recommendation to us. There are well-known problems in defining �epic�, too; and it is well known that these have an ideological as well as a literary aspect. This Preface is not the place to explore these; they will resurface in the chapters that follow. This is the place, however, to pay tribute to another Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University. Oliver Lyne died aged 60 in March 2005 when the editorial process of this book was entering its closing stages. At the time of his death Professor Lyne, who had been a colleague of Professor Griffin�s for over thirty years (but not a pupil), was about to start writing the Epilogue for the book. His input into the book had already been considerable: since the summer of 2002 he had, together with his younger co-editors, determined the book�s conception and shape, and in the months from September 2004 to March 2005 edited several of the chapters. Many of the contributors to the volume were pupils of Lyne as well as Griffin, and this is an intellectual debt too that is recognized in the following pages. Finally, we thank Hilary O�Shea of Oxford University Press for encouraging the project, our copy-editor Heather Watson, and proof-reader Anne Marriott. Katrin Stelter gave us the benefit of her critical acumen throughout. ISBN 9780199276301