Relative Chronology in Early Greek Epic Poetry

We know very little about the authors and cultural context of Greek epic poetry from the Homeric to the Classical period. This book investigates the relative chronology of these texts through linguistic and literary analyses of the internal evidence which they themselves provide.

This book sets out to disentangle the complex chronology of early Greek epic poetry, which includes Homer, Hesiod, hymns and catalogues. The preserved corpus of these texts is characterized by a rather uniform language and many recurring themes, thus making the establishment of chronological priorities a difficult task. The editors have brought together scholars working on these texts from both a linguistic and a literary perspective to address the problem. Some contributions offer statistical analysis of the linguistic material or linguistic analysis of subgenres within epic, others use a neoanalytical approach to the history of epic themes or otherwise seek to track the development and interrelationship of epic contents. All the contributors focus on the implications of their study for the dating of early epic poems relative to each other. Thus the book offers an overview of the current state of discussion.