Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin by Former Pupils

by Michael Clarke (Editor), B.G.F. Currie (Editor), R.O.A.M. Lyne (Editor)

This collection of essays, written by former pupils, celebrates the career of Jasper Griffin, one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The volume surveys the epic tradition from the eighth century BC to the nineteenth century of our era. Individual chapters focus on: Homer and the oral epic tradition; Homer in his religious context; Herodotus and Homer; Hellenistic epic; Virgil in his literary context; Virgil in his political-cultural context; the Augustan poets and the Aeneid; Statius' Thebaid; Old English and Old Irish epic; Renaissance epic: Tasso and Milton; and the Victorians. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts--an enterprise captured in the term "interaction" in the title. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition and together take a bold, holistic look at that tradition.

456 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2006

About the author

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Please see: Michael Clarke


Michael Clarke is Established Professor of Classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His interests lie in the comparative study of classical and medieval literatures, especially ancient Greek and medieval Irish, and especially in the emergence of the Homeric epic out of the Ancient Near East. He is the author of Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: A Study of Words and Myths (2000).
source: Amazon

The following is from his university page at University of Galway:

My research is located in three overlapping fields: (a) linguistic and cultural transfer from Mediterranean Antiquity to the medieval European vernaculars; (b) comparative study of epic and heroic narrative traditions, especially in Greek, Latin, and Babylonian, and of their Celtic and Germanic successors and analogues; (c) semantic reconstruction and lexicography, esp. through the lens of cognitive linguistics. My principal long-term target text is the unpublished third recension of Togail Troi, the Middle Irish account of the Trojan War. Alongside it I am working on the constitution and transformation of mythological and heroic traditions from their ancient Mesopotamian beginnings, via Classical Greek and Latin, to their renewal and reinterpretation in medieval European manuscript culture, with a particular focus on prose and verse in the Middle Irish language.