Hunting for Helen: A Lost Storytelling Engine in Greek Epic Poetry.
John C. Franklin
Professor and Chair - UVM Department of Classics I teach Greek and Latin language and literature, especially epic, lyric, and comedy, with occasional escapades into the Ancient Near East and music archaeology.
Much of my research has dealt with early Greek cultural history at the Near Eastern interface(s), focusing especially on the interaction of poetic/musical traditions, always in hopes of elucidating broader issues. My undergraduate background, in music composition and electronic music (B.M. New England Conservatory, 1988), remains an influence: the history of ancient music technology, both physical and conceptual, is crucial to my research.
Talk Description: This paper will present and analyze a collection of storytelling motifs and variants drawn from ancient Greek epic poetry. Sources include key passages of Homer’s Odyssey, and various later authors who preserve plot summaries and story fragments that derive from several lost epic poems. The material derives from, I argue, an early narrative subsystem of the genre that has survived in various vestigial forms. I shall attempt to reduce the variants to a single narrative ‘engine’ that allowed oral formulaic singers to generative wandering adventures, akin to those of Odysseus, but set in the Eastern Mediterranean; it centered especially on the possession of Helen of Sparta/Troy, either an effort by her husband Menelaos to recapture her immediately after her abduction by the Trojan prince Paris; or wandering travels in the same area with Menelaos after being recaptured from Troy.
