Customer Reviews

The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anyone who has an interest in the Homeric epics, the Trojan War, ancient Greek mythology and culture, should read this book. It's an academic product, so the argument is detailed and sometimes complicated. But Burgess writes very clearly and presents his case in a masterfully logical process that builds on an enormous amount of textual, scholarly, critical, and artistic evidence. The notes are a treasure trove of previous scholarship. I wanted to learn more about the literary and mythological context of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I came away with a much greater understanding of the composition of the Homeric poems as well as the other (now lost) works of the ancient Greek oral tradition. Rarely have I read a book that answered so many of the questions that I brought to it, and left me so confident in the fairness of the author's scholarship.

Truly, here is a very exciting book. The author clearly, in three long chapters (with appendices) discusses the Trojan War in the evidence of the Epic Cycle and its relation to the Homeric poems. The author has brought together philology, history, archaeology and good sense here. He shares bright arguments and suggestions in these pages that provoke thought for those interested specifically in the poems of Homer or in epic generally. Far from stealing the sparkle of the Homeric poems, this book provides the best discussion I have read of the variant threads of the stories of the Trojan War current in the age of the oral composition of the Iliad and Odyssey. It seemed so improbable that such magnificent, encyclopedic poems would stridently bound from the dark, poetic silence of the early Greek Mediterranean. Burgess shows that they didn't and that already at the time of the composition of the Homeric poems there existed a bounty of versions of the Trojan War that bore no direct relation to the poems of Homer as we know them. I recommend this timely book (timely, for it seems there is enough research to be thoroughly convincing, to me,) to teachers of Homer, early Greek culture and epic.

This book was everything I was looking for when I first saw it. As someone who is very interested in mythology, I have been interested for some time in the now lost Epic Cycle. This book looks at the connection between the cycle, and the deeper, oral tradition that the author believes Homer used for his masterpieces. Unlike other books on the subject, this book is not obsessed with comparing the cycle to Homer, and treats it with respect in its own right. Definately an interesting read.