Description

Homer's Odyssey is one of the most fascinating and popular texts of all time, inspiring not only artists and poets but also generating a massive amount of research. This book focuses for the first time on the Odyssey's reception in late antiquity, the period that witnesses the transformation of classical culture into the world of the middle ages. The epic's late antique pictorial reception was a selective one. Artists represented but a small canon of topics: Odysseus' encounter with the terrifying one-eyed Cyclops, with the dangerous sorceress Circe, with the bewitching song of the Sirens, and with Scylla the man-eater; a handful of iconographically diverse depictions can be related to the hero's return to Ithaca that never attracted as much attention as Odysseus' adventures in the course of the wandering. In all cases, the book stresses the close relation between viewer, or context of reception, and specific form of artistic rendering. Depending on context and intended viewer, Odysseus e.g. can be characterized as a person with whom the man in the street can identify, as a problematic and ridiculous figure, or as an example of virtue. Almost all late antique depictions of Odysseus' wanderings have been found - and produced - in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire. In the course of Roman antiquity, the Greek hero and his wanderings had become what they are still: a part of Western cultural identity. The Odyssey's late antique literary reception was much more multifaceted than the artistic one, as regards topics and geography. In this book, though, the focus will be on those topics that were dealt with in the visual arts, too. Contrasting the late antique pictorial reception with the literary one, and contrasting both with the Homeric epic, reveals the originality of late antiquity's artists and writers. Both employ the classical heritage with means and ends of their own (or of their patrons), and both are nevertheless deeply embedded in and influenced by late antique discourse, be it on religion, philosophy, slavery, heroism, or gender relations.