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Divine yet Human Epics: Reflections of Poetic Rulers from Ancient Greece and India
Citation: Pathak, Shubha. 2014. Divine Yet Human Epics: Reflections of Poetic Rulers from Ancient Greece and India . Hellenic Studies Series 62. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_PathakS.Divine_Yet_Human_Epics.2014 .
Introduction. Defining Epics through Comparison
The inheritance, influence, and independence of epics, the genesis of the homeric and cyclic epics.
In my own inheritance study, I assume that the Homeric and Cyclic epics came to be called by the same name because they shared features passed down to them from their common poetic predecessors. But this resemblance between the Homeric and Cyclic epics cannot be confirmed, for the Cyclic poems no longer exist. Any information about the Epic Cycle must be gleaned from the criticism composed about it. Thus, as I will discuss in Chapter 1, ancient critics clearly used the same term to classify the Cyclic poems and the Homeric poems, but the common characteristics of these poems no longer can be compared directly. Their “likeness” is accessible only through the assessments of their earlier interpreters, even as “corroborative evidence” of this similarity between the Homeric and Cyclic epics exists in their shared classification. Therefore, my genetic comparison differs from the kind that Freeman has in mind, not only in considering literary works produced by speakers of the same language, but also in being limited by a lack of comparanda themselves rather than by a lack of evidence of how they were classified by their early critics.
The diffusion of the Homeric and Sanskrit epics
The analogy of the homeric and sanskrit epics, defining greek and sanskrit epics via identity, metaphor, and ideals.
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