Homer in Performance

Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters

By: Jonathan Ready (Editor), Christos Tsagalis (Editor)

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Paperback | 2 December 2025

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440 Pages

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15.1 x 22.9 x 2.7

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Before they were written down, the poems attributed to Homer were performed orally, usually by rhapsodes (singers/reciters) who might have traveled from city to city or enjoyed a position in a wealthy household. Even after the Iliad and the Odyssey were committed to writing, rhapsodes performed the poems at festivals, often competing against each other. As they recited the epics, the rhapsodes spoke as both the narrator and the characters. These different acts - performing the poem and narrating and speaking in character within it - are seldom studied in tandem. Homer in Performance breaks new ground by bringing together all of the speakers involved in the performance of Homeric poetry: rhapsodes, narrators, and characters. The first part of the book presents a detailed history of the rhapsodic performance of Homeric epic from the Archaic to the Roman Imperial periods and explores how performers might have shaped the poems. The second part investigates the Homeric narrators and characters as speakers and illuminates their interactions. The contributors include scholars versed in epigraphy, the history of art, linguistics, and performance studies, as well as those capable of working with sources from the ancient Near East and from modern Russia. This interdisciplinary approach makes the volume useful to a spectrum of readers, from undergraduates to veteran professors, in disciplines ranging from classical studies to folklore.

Industry Reviews

"This collective volume seeks new angles from which to appreciate the artistry of Homeric epic by bearing down on its mode of performance, that blend of authoritative narrative and dramatic enactment called rhapsody...This volume shows that it can be profitable to consider epic rhapsody both as a popular mode of institutionalized storytelling and as a medium with unique resources for poetic expressivity."-- "Journal of Hellenic Studies" (12/3/2021 12:00:00 AM) A thought-provoking panoply of approaches to Homeric performance...The essays are for the most part of high quality, and the book is beautifully edited and produced, with a very useful bibliography...this is a fine volume of essays providing a variety of ways in to the interaction of performance and text in the Homeric poems.-- "Classical World" (5/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

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