Epic is the master-genre of the ancient world. Wherever and whenever one looks, epics had major roles to play in ancient societies, functions that ranged from historical and political to cultural and didactic and beyond. As charters for group identity, ancient epics seem always to have been at the center of things. The mere ubiquity of Gilgamesh fragments from Nineveh, Assur, Nimrod, Uruk, and Babylon argues the widespread and longstanding importance of a gripping saga that some have called the world’s oldest story. Plato’s preoccupation with Homer and the myriad reflections of the Iliad and Odyssey in the plastic art of vase-painting bear witness to a similar depth of concern and awareness through many centuries of Greek culture. Always closely allied with Roman history, real or constructed, Roman epic reached a new stage of political reflexivity in the hands of Virgil, who in his Aeneid forged a powerful ancestral link between his hero Aeneas and his regent Augustus. But as instrumental as epic demonstrably is in the ancient world, it is hardly a monolith. At once both the composite of many other genres and an important influence on nearly all of them, ancient epic presents real challenges to conventional literary history: not only do we discover panegyric and catalogue in the Iliad; we also see the influence of drama on Apollonius, of pastoral on the Aeneid, of rhetoric on Lucan, and of Christian scripture on late Latin epic. From every perspective epic is an integral partner in a manysided synergy.
This Companion to Ancient Epic addresses these and many other complex, engaging realities in what we contributors hope is a comprehensive and useful way: by providing a broadly inclusive reference work on the three traditions of Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman epic. Indeed, there are at least two pressing reasons why we have collectively created this resource aimed at a wide, interdisciplinary audience of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in adjacent fields.
First, the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly its last few decades, have seen major shifts in the ways that we conceive of and explain ancient epic. Modern topics such as the role of women, the history of reception, Indo-European backgrounds, comparative archaeological contexts, epic and myth, epic and history, the media employed to preserve and transmit epic texts, bardic performance, and living analogues from oral epic traditions have come prominently to the fore. Additionally, the traditions we once found it convenient to segregate are starting to reveal interesting genetic relationships. Of course, Greek and Roman epic have long been recognized as intimately connected in fascinating
And important ways, but in recent times the deep influence of Near Eastern traditions on ancient Greek epic has become much clearer. Nor should we forget the riddling practice of translation: since the mid-1980s or so there has been a rash of new translations from ah three ancient areas, renderings on which many students and scholars (whose experience of the epics will often be wholly dependent on such liaisons) could profit from an expert perspective. In fact, enough new and different topics and approaches have emerged that the need for a compendium of contextual information - plainly presented without bias toward any single viewpoint - is more compelling than ever before.
A second and complementary reason for formulating this Companion is simply that at present nothing remotely like it exists. At one end of the spectrum lie author-based collections focused on single major figures; here one finds such volumes as the Cambridge Companion to Homer (ed. R. Fowler, 2004) and Cambridge Companion to Virgil (ed. C. Martindale, 1997), as well as A New Companion to Homer (ed. I. Morris and B. Powell; Brill, 1997) and A Companion to the Study of Virgil (ed. N. Horsfall; Brill, 1995). At the opposite end we find more general books, such as Roman Epic (ed. A. J. Boyle; Rout-ledge, 1993), which treats ancient Roman writers and their Renaissance inheritors; or Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives (ed. P. Toohey; Routledge, 1992), focused on the principal authors of Greek and Roman works. In short, there is no single, comprehensive source that aspires to aid its readership - whether students or scholars in adjacent fields - in navigating the huge and complex territory of all three ancient epic traditions: Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman. This Companion to Ancient Epic attempts to fill that gap.
World History
