Research Catalog

Title

Kleos in a minor key : the Homeric education of a little prince / J. C. B. Petropoulos.

Author

Petropoulos, J. C. B.

Publication

Washington, D.C. : Center for Hellenic Studies ; Cambridge, Mass : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2011.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiv, 171 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

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.

Series Statement

Hellenic studies ; 45

Uniform Title

Hellenic studies ; 45.

Subject

• Education of princes in literature
• Epic poetry, Greek > History and criticism
• Fathers and sons in literature
• Glory in literature
• Homer > Telemachus
• Homer
• Maturation (Psychology) in literature
• Princes in literature
• Telemachus (Mythological character) > In literature

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Kleos and oral history -- Kleos and oral news -- Kleos and social identity -- The little prince's voyage in a borrowed ship -- Of beards and boar hunts, or, coming of age in the Odyssey -- The end of the telemachy: the culmination of extinction?

ISBN

• 9780674055926 (alk. paper)
• 0674055926 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2010045796

OCLC

587209823

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library