tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post5206894470552435130..comments2022-09-06T16:11:52.809-07:00Comments on Oral Poetry: Archaeology and the Homeric Question, Part 1Casey Duéhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13700595288275390350noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-69533454407305975862015-10-02T10:40:28.091-07:002015-10-02T10:40:28.091-07:00(link doesn't show: for instance at his piece ...(link doesn't show: for instance at his piece at Classics@3 online at CHS.Jonathan Burgesshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16890987063071939546noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-12017021863491544052015-10-02T10:39:29.660-07:002015-10-02T10:39:29.660-07:00Also: As Casey knows, Johannes Haubold has well tr...Also: As Casey knows, Johannes Haubold has well tracked the historicity of Troy issue, for instance at: Jonathan Burgesshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16890987063071939546noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8106207365275174634.post-33558327654171254462015-10-02T10:37:39.274-07:002015-10-02T10:37:39.274-07:00And Casey's whole blog seems absolutely right ...And Casey's whole blog seems absolutely right to me. This is very helpful, with an informed yet readable survey of the evidence and the bibliography. The thing I've realized over the years is that the historicity question will keep rebounding back to us. Our colleagues in more positivistic fields (like archaeology), our students, the general public, our mother-in-laws and holiday party uncles, et alii, will usually come at us with the general assumptions, imbibed with mother's milk and inhaled from the general cultural cloud floating over our lives, that ancient history is more valuable than myth/poetry. Or perhaps it is the excitement of "solving the riddle" that motivates the constant pressure to push the historicist conspiracy theory. One of many others: I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody pulled me aside and started yammering along excitedly about how the Golden Fleece derives from using fleece to catch gold flecks in a river. Of course we do want to know historical and cultural contexts of poetry and myth, and we want to explore how our poems including the Homeric epics articulate such issues, but this is different from the 19th century ideas about reality corrupting in to myth. That is perhaps what we are really dealing with: the vestigial endurance of older discourses, whether naive ethnology or Jungian psycho-myth interpretation, which we need to push back, challenged, advance to present work. That's why we also have to educate the public about the value of humanities research: it's not like once can just translate Greek and Latin poetry once and for all, or solve the "riddles" and then be done: the process has to be recreated again and again in each generation.Jonathan Burgesshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16890987063071939546noreply@blogger.com