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This chapter undertakes a defamiliarizing reading of the dominant Archaic genre, the Homeric epic. Taking his cue from Bakhtin’s theorization of the novel as a hybrid genre, Faraone points out that the Homeric poems analogously draw on and incorporate preexistent genres. In the case of the Iliad, a text that is to a great extent constituted within an oral tradition, the recognition of its multi-genred nature reveals divergent intents that a holistic reading (in the Neo-Unitarian paradigm of Homeric criticism) would seek to downplay or explain away. Faraone applies this approach to what is one of the best-known texts in European literature, the first book of the Iliad. Pointing to inconsistencies in characterization of Achilles and Agamemnon, as well as to a number of other textual clues, he proposes to regard a substantial segment of the book—the Chryses episode—as a cult hymn originally performed in a ritual context and then incorporated into the Panhellenic text of Homer.

Simone Weil wrote her powerful essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, in 1939–40, during the fall of France, her native country, to the Nazis. The most compelling thing she sees in Homer’s poem of war is the idea of force. This chapter falls into three closely interrelated parts. It first discusses Weil’s personal background, then focuses on her reaction to/interpretation of the Iliad, and how her analysis of Homer’s poem must be read as gendered. Third, it details the ways in which (mostly) male critics of and commentators on the Iliad have reacted to Weil’s essay on Homer, and the ways in which male critics and translators have approached the Iliad. Weil gives us an inspiring example of how an ancient text can be put to the service of explaining one’s own life and culture.

This chapter analyzes Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad of Homer. Pope’s version distinguished itself from all that had preceded it by offering the reader detailed help in determining both the general physical layout of Homer’s Trojan plain, and the precise location within that terrain of each of the battles which comprise the bulk of the poem’s action. Pope’s map of the Trojan plain, together with the ‘Essay on Homer’s Battels’ and the ‘Arguments’ prefixed to each Book make it possible to reconstruct with some precision his sense of the location of Homer’s action in both time and place.

My title is deliberately chosen to reflect that of the comic account of British history 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman 1930), for the same reason that I entitled a previous paper ‘The Catalogue of Ships and All That’ (Dickinson 1999a). In both cases I used it to indicate how an idea has become so embedded in the general consciousness of the educated as to be readily accepted as ‘what everyone thinks’ – or rather ‘remembers’, since, as the authors of 1066 and All That point out in their Compulsory Preface, ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember’ (Sellar and Yeatman 1930: vii).