Professor Beye highlights the social assumptions within, and possible performance arena of, the epics-aristocratic and male-though he rightly sees a greater part played by strong females in the Odyssey. Yet the epics retain a certain “temporal limbo” (48), since artifacts retained within the poems, including places and items, reminded the audience of a former time (“imagine the chill running through the archaic-age audience who knew that Mycenae stood in their time as a magnificent hill of ruins” (49)). It is a world described by Beye as retaining a residue of earlier influence-Mycenaean and eastern-but more reflective of the migrations and developing culture of the Greeks in the archaic age. This chapter is centered upon the world assumed within the Homeric epics. Nor does he gloss over such problems as the difficulties involved in defining exactly what a formula is. Beye reviews examples of what he considers the “deep” structures that lie beneath an oral telling, listing elements such as repeated similes, folkloric turns from three to four, ring composition, and the repetition of elements within speeches, to name only the most prominent. He rightly emphasizes the metonymic nature of traditional performance in his comments on Iliad 2-7, when he notes (38) that the audience is “familiar with details of the foreground and background” (thus making the story’s chronology tradition-dependent). He constructs the different perspective that an oral-traditional, rather than literary, audience would have-the former does not possess the time to “read over” the “text,” nor can the hearer “stop the performance” to review a scene (21). He is clear that dogmatism about the exact origins of the poems should be avoided, yet comes down clearly in favor of traditional oral performance as the best explanation for what he finds in the poems’ complex and deep narrative structures. Beye’s work is divided into eight chapters, with the first three chapters providing an introduction to what follows.īeye opens this chapter with a profusion of questions that readers of Homer might have. The annotated bibliography alone makes Ancient Epic Poetry very suitable as a text for graduate students, though it will require supplementation in accordance with particular course objectives. The two (1993/2006) annotated Further Reading sections and the annotated bibliography found at the end of chapter eight are expansive and well chosen, serving to continue most of the conversations found in the individual chapters.
The investment he has made in each of these fields as a teaching scholar is immediately apparent. Throughout, Beye is erudite and in control of his subject, while his engagement with the reader is lively. This 2006 expansion contains the same text as the 1993 edition, but adds a chapter on the Gilgamesh stories, a brief preface, and updated bibliography. The book represents an excellent resource for undergraduates, graduates new to the field, or scholars of any field who want a readable and applied initiation into scholarly views of five epic traditions central to the western cultural experience. This second augmented edition to Charles Rowan Beye’s 1993 analysis of epic traditions is most welcome.
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