The suitors in the Odyssey strikingly resemble a very specific audience of iambic poets such as Archilochus or Semonides. Justifying these young men's deaths, the Odyssey engages in a polemic intertext with Archilochus' attacks against the threatening epic discourse. This study is concerned with reading both the traces of this often hidden quarrel in the Odyssey and the answers we can find within the iambic texts. Although iambus and epos have been connected in earlier studies, the direct portrait of the iambic audience within the Odyssey has not been examined. This book allows the reader to see these issues in the larger social context.

Autorentext

The Author: Martin Steinrück attended the University of Basle and received his doctorate from the University of Lausanne. He has also obtained a habilitation in classical philology from the University of Fribourg where he currently teaches as a Private-docent and holds the position of lecturer in classical languages. Dr. Steinrück has published numerous articles and books in the fields of archaic Greek literature, Roman and late antiquity, and narratology and metrics. Some of his works include: Kranz und Wirbel: Ringkompositionen in den Büchern 6-8 der Odyssee (1997), Iambos: Studien zum Publikum einer Gattung in der frühgriechischen Literatur (2000), Haltung und rhetorische Form, Tropen, Figuren und Rhythmus in der Prosa des Eunap von Sardes (2004), and A Quoi Sert La Métrique : Interprétation Littéraire Et Analyse Des Formes Métriques Grecques. Une Introduction (2007).