Hades in Montage

IN the ancient epic, as everyone knows, the author was an adaptor rather than an inventor. Obliged by custom to keep close to the traditions laid down for the literary type he was using, he could not slight or omit standard plot-material or methods of treatment. The margin for originality, at least in the actual story, was small. We have become familiar, through the work of such critics as Sir Maurice Bowra and Professor Rhys Carpenter, with the way in which Homer used the material he had inherited. The relation between 'tradition and design,' between 'saga and fiction,' between what was given him by his predecessors and what he invented, remains a matter of guesswork, since we know so little either of the literary materials of pre-Homeric times or of Homer himself. There is enough internal evidence for us to judge the skill and tact with which, in the Iliad, Homer was able to reconcile incongruous items in the Troy-story: e.g., the somewhat rowdy portrayal of the major Olympians; the sympathetic and serious portrayal of Thetis; the magic, fairy-tale properties that clung to Thetis and to Achilles himself, and that had to be discarded for the present purposes; the solid saga of the campaign before Troy, or wherever it was; some racy tales about Paris, Helen, and Aphrodite; some hard, historical facts, or at any rate what would seem like accurate history to his readers. The problem of the foregoing incongruities may be inferred from the Iliad itself. In the case of Vergil and the Aeneid, we have much fuller data about inherited and original material. Perhaps this is why the relation between them has had less attention in Vergilian than in Homeric studies. For Vergil, there are difficult problems in the adaptation of inherited to invented matter, between tradition and design, between pure literary fancy handed down from remotest times and substantial fact

Classical Antiquity Studies · Computer Science