8 - A Brief History of Epic Time

Summary

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.