Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/ abstract_S0009838800023715How to cite this article: M. M. Willcock (1964).

No abstract

The Funeral Games take up 660 lines in the twenty-third book of the Iliad. well over half are devoted to the first event, the chariot race, and the various incidents that arise in it and from it. There are in all eight events; and in the descriptions there i s some falling off, so that the first foul (chariot race, boxing, wrestling, foot race) have seemed in the past to be perhaps the only authentic ones, with lesser descriptions added by that shadowy but industrious figure, the interpolator.Of these,

There is s o much to b e said about the gods in Homer -factual information, archaeology and anthropology, hints of religion and the beginnings of moral standards, comedy and light relief on Olympos, that books and articles about the gods often stop short of considering the meaning of divine activity. h a s nothing to say about the implications of this subject, and confines itself to the external f a c t s about the gods a s they appear in the Iliad. J u s t as the decipherment of the Mycenaean tablets, and the discussion of Aias' great shield or the boar's tusk helmet, seem to me proper subjects for research, but of minor importance to the understanding of the Iliad: so the antiquarian features of the gods, their cult names and so on, are of l e s s significance in my e y e s than the way Homer u s e s the gods in h i s story.am I here concerned with the Odyssey; there is of course a divine machinery there, with Athene and Poseidon, and for a while Helios, interfering and to some extent directing the plot. the Odyssey in this r e s p e c t is not very different from the Aeneid (in which Juno and Venus respectively oppose and a s s i s t the Trojans in their quest), except perhaps that the gods are more convincing in the more primitive poem.2 vities of the gods which is greater than what happens in the Odyssey; and far greater than what happens in the Aeneid.

No abstract