Components of the epic

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Components of the epic

• memory and recollection temporality
• the monument (including the writingof epic
  itself)
• contexts of profound cultural change

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located bodies onethe heroic body
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Hades

• how are the shades of the dead described in this
  place?
• family
• where they came from
• what they did or what happened to them
• Achilles rejoices in the deeds of his son
• (the epic itself announces its topic of the deeds
  of men and gods 1.338)
• real death is silence, obscurity, amnesia

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Phaeacia

• Odysseus confronts his own fame
• his glorious deeds immortalized in song
• in an aristocratic household where he reveals his
  family and lineage
• proves himself in the games
• and receives the goods appropriate to his rank
• to enable his return home

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the monsters

• the Cyclops - wholly asocial
• the Sirens the duplicity of language (and
  women)
• Scylla and Charybdis wholly other, consuming
  the self without grace or burial
• Calypso divine but holding only the promise of
  being alone and forgotten
• Proteos (Book 4)
• these are the means also by which the hero
  becomes himself

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the hero

• agathos head of the household/oikos
• a man of arete position, wealth, excellence,
  the privilege of leisure
• a man of time honor and the wealth owing to
  position, the goods possessed
• a man of philoi those people and things held
  dear

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the agon

• good intentions are irrelevant to the loser or
  the dead
• the compensation for the agathos fighting in the
  front rank is kudos success and its renown
• and kleos fame
• the culture of the agathos is a public one of
  results and fame or shame hero and actions are
  identical

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the heroic bodywhat is its location?

• outside itself
• to be found in what others say
• confronting otherness and death
• in a beautiful death excellence no longer has to
  be measured indefinitely against others and keep
  proving itself in confrontation it is realized
  at one stroke and forever in the exploit that
  puts an end to the life of the hero Vernant

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