Kleos in a minor key
Subtitle: the Homeric education of a little prince
By: J.C.B. Petropoulos
Series: Hellenic studies -- 45; Hellenic studies -- 45.
Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies; Distributed by Harvard University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Washington, DC; Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 171
ISBN-13: 9780674055926
Subjects: Princes in literature; Glory in literature; Greek Epic poetry; Telemachus; History and criticism; Fathers and sons in literature; Maturation (Psychology) in literature; Characters; Education of princes in literature; Telemachus (Greek mythology) in literature
Description: As scholars have remarked, the word kleos in the Iliad and the Odyssey alike refers to something more substantive and complex than 'fame' or 'glory'. In the Odyssey, 'glory' may be ascribed to a hero or even a heroine for far more reasons than in the Iliad. Either way, kleos distinctly supposes an oral narrativeûprincipally an 'oral history', a 'life story' or ultimately an 'oral tradition'. When broken down into its twin constituents, 'words' and 'actions' or 'deeds', a hero's kleos serves to define him as a fully gendered social being. This book is a meditation on this concept as expressed and experienced in the adult society Telemachos finds himself in. Kleos is the yardstick by which his psychological change, nowadays acknowledged by most specialists, was appreciated by Homer's audiences. As this book shows through philological and interdisciplinary analysis, Prince Telemachos grows up in the course of the Telemachy and arguably even beyond (in book 24): his education, which is conceived largely as an apprenticeship on land and sea, admits him gradually if unevenly to a Full-fledged adult kleos, a kleos that nonetheless necessarily remains minor in comparison to that of his father and other elders. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Kleos and oral history; title: Kleos and oral news; title: Kleos and social identity; title: The little prince's voyage in a borrowed ship; title: Of beards and boar hunts, or, coming of age in the Odyssey; title: The end of the telemachy: the culmination of extinction?