1 - Closure and continuation

Summary

The epic strives for totality and completion, yet is at the same time driven obsessively to repetition and reworking. From this contradiction arise the specific dynamics of the epic tradition within the general mechanisms of imitation and tradition in ancient literature; it is a contradiction that is present in a particularly acute form in Virgil's Aeneid, yielding a tension that energizes the epics of the first century A.D. and continues to inform such Renaissance works as Vida's Christiad and Milton's Paradise Lost.

In the case of the Homeric epics the totalizing impulse is perhaps perceived more clearly in the later Greek interpretation of the poems than in the texts as they might present themselves to an ‘unbiased’ modern eye. The Iliad and the Odyssey become the central cultural and educational documents of Hellenism, and interpreters both naturalistic and allegorical work hard to make of them universal poems adequate to their pre-imposed function as cultural and scientific blueprints. For the committed Homerist, which is almost to say, for the committed adherent to Hellenic values, there is a text for everything in Homer if you only know how to read him. But it is already significant that two poems, rather than one, were selected as the pre-eminent monuments of the beginning of the tradition; the Odyssey is the successor to the Iliad in ways that still absorb critical debate.