The direct speech of heroes and gods comprises more than half of Homer's Iliad. Richard Martin makes use of recent studies in ethnography and sociolinguistics to set forth a poetics of Homeric speeches, which he sees not merely as poetic creations but as the representation of an actual form of speaking in a traditional culture. He develops a hermeneutic model that accounts for the sheer size of the Homeric poems and explains the stylistic and even grammatical uniqueness of the language of Achilles. The Language of Heroes emphasizes two aspects of the important speeches of the Iliad. First, Martin shows us, the speeches are public performances and so open to audience criticism on the grounds of both content and style. Second, they are tied to social poetic "genres of discourse," the genres of commanding, of abusing and blaming, and of memorializing. Through analysis of comparative material from oral literature studies and folklore, Martin demonstrates how Homeric poetry reuses these "smaller" traditional genres in the representation of heroic speech. He next evaluates various heroes of the Iliad on the basis of their authoritative speeches. Achilles is seen to be the best performer of verbal art as well as martial art, "a speaker of works and a doer of deeds." A close reading of his speech reveals characteristics that occur elsewhere only in the narrative voice of the poet. Martin uses this close association between poetic narrator and poetic creation to explain why the Iliad takes the particular shape it does, showing it to be the result of a vast effort to outdo and suppress earlier epics. Buy Now!
