Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle by Benjamin Sammons

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle. By Benjamin Sammons. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. vii, 263. One hundred and ten years ago T. W. Allen observed that “enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle. Upon scanty quotations and a jejune epitome a tedious literature has been built.”1 His verdict has, however, not intimidated subsequent scholars. Indeed, during the last twenty years we have witnessed a deluge of articles, editions, monographs, and companions on the Epic Cycle,2 to which we may now add the book under review. It goes without saying that the plethora of publications on this subject has proved Allen’s statement wrong; thanks to all these studies current research into archaic epic poetry is in a much better position to properly appreciate the “cyclic epics.” However, up until now scholars have mostly looked at either the relationship between the poems of the Epic Cycle and the Iliad—and to a lesser degree the Odyssey—through the prism of Neoanalysis, or dealt with more specialized issues, such as the chronology and formation of the Epic Cycle. In this study Benjamin Sammons discusses, for the first time in minute detail, the cyclic epics themselves, their structure and composition, the narrative techniques and patterns underlying these poems, and the function of their Götterapparat. His central premise is that “the poets responsible for these works drew from essentially the same ‘bag of tricks’ as Homer and were trained in essentially the same methods of narrative art” (20). In Chapter One (“Narratives,” 25–64) Sammons discusses the “inset narratives”—the short or long digressions of the primary narrator or, more often, of a character of the epic, which transgress the temporal limits of the plot and thus constitute proleptic or analeptic narratives. He rightly concludes (61–62) that the cyclic epics, despite their overall chronographic structure, contain, like the Homeric epics, many “achronic” narratives , prolepses in particular. The latter, however, are obscured by Proclus’ summaries, since their aim is to provide simple (and this means linear), informative reconstructions of the cyclic epics’ plot. Chapter Two (“Catalogue and Catalogic,” 65–99) deals with catalogues (e.g., of the Achaeans in the Wooden Horse in the Ilioupersis or of the Trojan allies once they arrive at the city in the Cypria) and catalogic narrative patterns (used for example for battle descriptions in the Little Iliad and the Ilioupersis), two devices which are equally common in the cyclic and the Homeric epics. Of particular interest is Sammons’s conclusion regarding the Ilioupersis that “the catalogue form was not just a fundamental but a constitutive element in the poem’s composition, making up a very large proportion of its verses” (98). Chapter Three (“Narrative Doublets,” 101–125) is deeply innovative, since here Sammons demonstrates that the so-called narrative doublet (especially in the form of the “anticipatory doublet,” i.e., the subsequent expansion of a first brief rendition of a motif)—a device well known from the Homeric epics, where it is used to thematically link scenes 1 T. W. Allen, “The Epic Cycle”, CQ 2 (1908) 64–74, at 64. 2 Some of the most important: J. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore 2001); M. L. West, Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, MA 2003) and id., The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics (Oxford 2013); M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.), A Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception (Cambridge 2015). PHOENIX, VOL. 72 (2018) 1–2. 166 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 167 and episodes distant from each other—is dominant in the cyclic epics. Thus, the Little Iliad recounts two transportations of heroes to Troy (of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus) and two spying missions of Odysseus in the city under siege (ptocheia, Palladium), whereas the structure of the Aethiopis is based on the narrative doublet of the arrival motif, first of Penthesileia and later of Memnon. Finally, it seems that two sets of doublets of departures by land and sea (Calchas/Phoinix and Menelaos/Agamemnon) are interwoven in the Nostoi. Sammons points out that “[t]he

Art · Composition (language) · EPIC · Epitome · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution