This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character's perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of the character, and root for the character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.

The contributions of this volume discuss the interfaces between memory and emotions in ancient literature, social life, and philosophy. They explore the ways in which memories intersect with emotions in the epics of Homer and Virgil, the importance of memory for the emotions scripts employed by public speakers to enhance the persuasiveness of their arguments, and ‘cultural memory’ in Philostratus’ Heroicus. Contributions that focus on aspects of ancient societies and politics investigate memory and emotions in the Bacchic-Orphic gold leaves, the importance of memories on inscriptions commemorating private and public emotions, and the ways in which emotive memories enhanced the monumentalizing project of Herodes Atticus in Greece. The essays emphasizing philosophical approaches to memory and emotions discuss Aristotle’s biological treatises and Augustine’s deployment of nostalgia and autobiographical narrative in the wider frame of his didactic programme. Modern approaches to embodied cognition are also employed to shed light on how memories attached to our bodily experiences can enhance the interpretation of Roman literature.

"Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey" is a Victorian-era edition of the classic works of the great Greek poet with extensive commentary of William Lucas Collins. In the book, the author explains the classic poems, making them easier to understand and follow for the average reader.

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an "oral poem," since very near the time of its composition the great epic has circulated as a text stabilized in writing. Thus whether or not it is in some sense "oral poetry," the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it quite satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for modern Homeric scholarship even to frame, much less address, within the research paradigm of "oral poetics." In Homer's Cosmic Fabrication Bruce Heiden delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers that makes it comprehensible and engaging. His program conceptualizes the act of reading as a flexible repertoire of cognitive functions that a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, Heiden's experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable "reading material" the poem provides. These analyses reveal that the trajectory of events in the Iliad manifests the central agency of one character, Zeus, and that the transmitted articulation of the epic into chapter-like "books" conforms to distinct narrative subtrajectories. The analyses also show, however, that the fixed sequence of "books" functions suitably as a design that cues attention to the major crises in the story, as well as to themes that develop its significance. The transmitted arrangement therefore furnishes an implicit cognitive map that both eases comprehension of the storyline and indicates previously unexplored pathways of interpretation. Through Homer's Cosmic Fabrication enthusiasts of the Iliad will gain enhanced understanding of the epic's poetic design and the philosophical rewards it offers to thoughtful study.

"Get your "A" in gear! They're today's most popular study guides-with everything you need to succeed in school. Written by Harvard students for students, since its inception "SparkNotes(TM) has developed a loyal community of dedicated users and become a major education brand. Consumer demand has been so strong that the guides have expanded to over 150 titles. "SparkNotes'(TM) motto is "Smarter, Better, Faster because: - They feature the most current ideas and themes, written by experts. - They're easier to understand, because the same people who use them have also written them. - The clear writing style and edited content enables students to read through the material quickly, saving valuable time. And with everything covered--context; plot overview; character lists; themes, motifs, and symbols; summary and analysis, key facts; study questions and essay topics; and reviews and resources--you don't have to go anywhere else!

This book presents a detailed anthropology of compensation in the Iliad, with reference to the wider Homeric society.

"When Homeric heroes think about the meaning of their actions, they expect this to take the form of kleos, 'fame', in a future song. This volume explores the consequences of this mode of thinking in the Iliad in particular, and argues that the form of kleos and the interposition of a gap of time between event and meaning produces widespread effects, not only for the thought and psyche of the heroes, but also for the nature of poetry and scholarship in the Homeric tradition. The epics are read as machines for perpetuating the fame of the heroes, as well as their own cultural authority. In contrast, Yukai Li suggests that instead of guaranteeing the continuity of the heroes' fame and the self-identity of the epic poem, the fact that fame is projected into a future song produces in the Homeric poems an essential preoccupation with the impossibility of continuity, memorial and self-identity. What appears is a specific form of time in which the present is divided by its future meaning, and the tensions that result connect the Homeric heroes to the poets who sing of them, and to the scholars who write about those songs"--

A new, illustrated study of the Iliac tablets, a group of objects inscribed in miniature with epic episodes. Like the tablets themselves, Michael Squire tackles major themes through small ones, by relating their production to macroscopic problems of signification in Graeco-Roman antiquity.

War and the Iliad is a perfect introduction to the range of Homer's art as well as a provocative and rewarding demonstration of the links between literature, philosophy, and questions of life and death. Simone Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works--an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost. First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil's whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II--calling it "her method of facing the war"--and, as Christopher Benfey argues in his introduction, the essay was very probably written in response to Weil. Bespaloff's account of the Iliad brings out Homer's novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters' choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war. This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time, accompanied by Benfey's scholarly introduction and an afterword by the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch.

Extending his distinctive analysis of Homeric epic to the Iliad, Bruce Louden, author of The "Odyssey": Structure, Narration, and Meaning, again presents new approaches to understanding the themes and story of the poem. In this thought-provoking study, he demonstrates how repeated narrative motifs argue for an expanded understanding of the structure of epic poetry. First identifying the "subgenres" of myth within the poem, he then reads these against related mythologies of the Near East, developing a context in which the poem can be more accurately interpreted. Louden begins by focusing on the ways in which the Iliad's three movements correspond with and comment on each other. He offers original interpretations of many episodes, notably in books 3 and 7, and makes new arguments about some well-known controversies (e.g., the duals in book 9), the Iliad's use of parody, the function of theomachy, and the prefiguring of Hektor as a sacrificial victim in books 3 and 6. The second part of the book compares fourteen subgenres of myth in the Iliad to contemporaneous Near Eastern traditions such as those of the Old Testament and of Ugaritic mythology. Louden concludes with an extended comparison of the Homeric Athena and Anat, a West Semitic goddess worshipped by the Phoenicians and Egyptians. Louden's innovative method yields striking new insights into the formation and early literary contexts of Greek epic poetry.