Larry’s Pretty Good Reading List

Posted by Joel

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/02/28/falling-asleep-after-sex-and-other-cosmic-problems-the-seduction-of-zeus-in-iliad-14/

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/?p=65276

One of the most memorable scenes of the Iliad that does not involve murder, mayhem, or lamentation is Hera’s seduction of Zeus, the so-called Dios apatē, in book 14. It is a fascinating episode for reasons that involve not just the themes and plot of the Iliad, but also possible issues of performance, attitudes towards the divine cosmos inside the epics, and engagement with other narrative traditions.

The length and tone of this episode often prompts readers to recall the song of Demodocus in book 8 of the Odyssey. There, a bard sings a somewhat bawdy tale of when Hephaestus caught Aphrodite and Ares in flagrante. Interpreters have demonstrated how the content of that inset song reflects the singer responding to the action around him (crafting a tale that praises the mysterious guest Odysseus) while also reflecting primary themes of the Odyssey itself. The length and content of the tale, moreover, have led some to see it as, at the very least, a Homeric representation of what epic (or epic-like) singers would do. Like the tale of the tryst of Aphrodite and Ares, the Dios apatē effects a comic tone, providing distraction from ongoing tensions, and exploring the difference between mortal and immortal worlds by showing how frivolous and foolish the gods can appear. We can imagine the Dios apatē as a kind of set piece, a reflection on Zeus’ limitations as a masculine god.

In such a resonance, the scene also engages with the history of the divine cosmos and threats of succession or theomachy. The story of Hesiod’s Theogony is in part about how strong male gods are undone by desire, overcome eventually by a goddess’ guile. These patterns are refracted into the Dios apatē, by which I mean they are represented within it, but not in a one-to-one correspondence. Zeus’ power in the Iliad resides in part in his overwhelming force, but it is made manifest as well in his ability to advance his plan, the Dios boulē. Hera subverts this plan and temporality upends divine political structures by tricking him. She makes it possible for a rival to contest Zeus’ will on the battlefield–as a result, a significant part of the story in book 15 is about Zeus reasserting control and getting his plan back on schedule.

As Lenny Muellner explores in The Anger of Achilles and Laura Slatkin establishes in The Power of Thetis, the cosmic structures and struggles from the Theogony (and similar narrative traditions) shape and inform the structure and reception of the Homeric epics. Zeus’ fallibility, his vulnerability to desire, is a theme from other traditions that is important for the Iliad as well: in just 4 books, Agamemnon will ‘apologize’ to Achilles by claiming that he was blinded (using the word atē, echoed in  Dios apatē) just as Zeus was when he bragged about the birth of Herakles. Such a framework makes Agamemnon guilty for disrupting the political stability of the Achaeans because of the debate over Briseis. In a way, Agamemnon’s fight with Achilles over a girl is an echo of the cause of the whole war, Paris’ conflict with Menelaos, initiated by kidnapping Helen. There may be intratextual commentary supporting this as well. As Ann Bergren suggests, there are also strong echoes between Zeus’ attempt to get Hera to sleep with him and Paris’ entreaties to Helen in book 3 (their closing lines are identical: ὡς σέο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ. ).

The danger of desire and the fallibility of male figures thanks to it connects the  Dios apatē with the overall plot of the Iliad and the larger narrative arc of the Trojan War. Through each case, such longing threatens disorder by upending Zeus’ plans. So, while the  Dios apatē is amusing and provides what some might see as a welcome respite from the battle books, it is thoroughly serious in probing the causes of conflict and the consequences of masculine weakness.

“’Cause I see some ladies tonight that should be havin’ my baby (uh), baby (uh)” from “Big Poppa”, The Notorious B.I.G.

One ‘cause’ of the Trojan War is Zeus’ anxiety about being overthrown by a son. As the story goes, this is the secret knowledge shared with Prometheus: the identity of a sea nymph who would bear a son greater than his father. Zeus’ sex-capades, then, represent a threat to the order of the entire universe and the entire set up for the Trojan War, starting with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis to preserve Zeus or one of his brothers from fathering an unstoppable son. The Iliad is rather tight-lipped about all of this but, again as Laura Slatkin has shown, the themes and implications of such a succession permeate the epic.

Another significant text for understanding this passage is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Let’s review the basic plot of the  Dios apatê first

• Hera comes up with the plan (160) to distract Zeus with sex

• She lies to Aphrodite about it and says she is going to use her charms to get Kronos and Rhea to love each other again, Aphrodite consents, but with the somewhat odd “it would be neither possible nor proper for me to deny your request, since you lay in the embrace of Zeus, the best one”(οὐκ ἔστ’ οὐδὲ ἔοικε τεὸν ἔπος ἀρνήσασθαι·  / Ζηνὸς γὰρ τοῦ ἀρίστου ἐν ἀγκοίνῃσιν ἰαύει, 212-213) [The scholia inform us that Aristophanes and Aristonicus athetized this line)

• Then she goes and bargains with Sleep who recalls another time he made Zeus unconscious and was punished. She ends up offering one of the Graces as a bride

• She appears before Zeus, telling him the same lie she told Aprodite

• Zeus falls for it and they have sex beneath cloud cover on the mountain.

When I teach the Hymn, I joke that it provides an etiology for why men fall asleep after sex; but I can’t imagine that the Iliadic passage doesn’t have a similar impact. Zeus’ speech in the midst of all of these offers somewhat of an odd example for seducing one’s spouse. But the catalogue is worth considering in the larger cosmic context.

Homer Iliad 14.323-328

“Cloud-gathering Zeus answered her
Hera, you can go there at some later time.
For now, let the two of us go to bed and turn to sex.
For never has lust for a goddess or woman
Ever overcome the force in my chest as it does now.
Not when I was lusting after the wife of Ixion
Who bore Peirithoos, a thinker equal to the gods,
Nor when I lusted after fine-ankled Danae Akrisios’ daughter,
Who gave birth to Perseus, the most outstanding of all men,
Nor when I went after the far-famed Phoenician girl,
Who gave me Minos and divine Rhadamanthys
Nor even when I was with Semele or Alkmene in Thebes.
The second one gave birth to my strong-willed son Herakles
And the first gave us Dionysus, that charm for mortals.
Not even when I lusted after the fine-haired lady Demeter
Nor again glorious Leto, or even you yourself!
Never have I longed the way I long for you now, as sweet desire overtakes me.”

Τὴν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς·
῞Ηρη κεῖσε μὲν ἔστι καὶ ὕστερον ὁρμηθῆναι,
νῶϊ δ’ ἄγ’ ἐν φιλότητι τραπείομεν εὐνηθέντε.
οὐ γάρ πώ ποτέ μ’ ὧδε θεᾶς ἔρος οὐδὲ γυναικὸς
θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσι περιπροχυθεὶς ἐδάμασσεν,
οὐδ’ ὁπότ’ ἠρασάμην ᾿Ιξιονίης ἀλόχοιο,
ἣ τέκε Πειρίθοον θεόφιν μήστωρ’ ἀτάλαντον·
οὐδ’ ὅτε περ Δανάης καλλισφύρου ᾿Ακρισιώνης,
ἣ τέκε Περσῆα πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν·
οὐδ’ ὅτε Φοίνικος κούρης τηλεκλειτοῖο,
ἣ τέκε μοι Μίνων τε καὶ ἀντίθεον ῾Ραδάμανθυν·
οὐδ’ ὅτε περ Σεμέλης οὐδ’ ᾿Αλκμήνης ἐνὶ Θήβῃ,
ἥ ῥ’ ῾Ηρακλῆα κρατερόφρονα γείνατο παῖδα·
ἣ δὲ Διώνυσον Σεμέλη τέκε χάρμα βροτοῖσιν·
οὐδ’ ὅτε Δήμητρος καλλιπλοκάμοιο ἀνάσσης,
οὐδ’ ὁπότε Λητοῦς ἐρικυδέος, οὐδὲ σεῦ αὐτῆς,
ὡς σέο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ.

This list provides something of a retrospective timeline: Zeus starts with his more mortal children and goes back until he is talking about the birth of divine figures like Apollo and Artemis. The list is a bit of a classic example of the rhetorical practice of saving the best for last, but it pointedly closes off the possibility of new children or at least of children who may threaten the divine order. In part, this list exists in a concretized Pantheon, one where, for whatever pain it causes, Zeus’ dalliances do not disrupt the stability of the universe. And, for this case, it is certainly true: Zeus’ desire only disrupts the plan of the Iliad–a sex act with his own wife/sister cannot produce an heir to challenge him.

In this framework, the Dios Apate seems to also engage with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Even though the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite exists prior to the Trojan War in our conceptual timeline, its narrative and concerns co-exist with the Homeric poems we know. (See Barbara Graziosi’s and Johannes Haubold’s Homer: The Resonance of Epic for a great overview of the relationship between Homer and Hesiod, including the Homeric Hymns.) Foremost among the concerns of that Hymn is the power Aphrodite has to overwhelm Zeus and other gods, to destabilize the Universe by creating new offspring. Rather than being a hymn that increases or explains Aphrodite’s influence (as in the Hymns to Demeter and Hermes), this Hymn curtails it by showing Zeus turning the tables on her and humiliating her by forcing her to lust after a Trojan mortal (Anchises) on the side of Mount Ida (on the reproach and humiliation of this scene, see Bergren 1989).

Here are some motifs shared by the Hymn and the epic scene:

• A goddess readies for a Romantic tryst near Mt. Ida

• The preparations are elaborate given the context

• The goddess demures, offering a plan different from the covert one

• The man begs/cajoles/convinces

• The male figure falls to sleep

• The seduced figure wakes up unhappy/angry/afraid

• A speaker puts their situation in a mythic framework by telling a story of other examples

Peter Walcot (1991) notes that while both Anchises and Zeus are being seduced, they end up playing the role of seducer themselves, convincing their future lovers to have sex now rather than later. A significant difference, however, is that Aphrodite is disappointed and upset after having sex with Anchises; Hera runs off to fight as soon as Zeus falls asleep.

How we should understand the relationship between these scenes is a tough question to answer. A simple reading might see one narrative as building on or responding to the other, creating fixed allusions or intertexts. But given the other scenes at play (from the Odyssey, the Theogony, and even earlier in the Iliad) I think it is more likely that these kinds of stories were common and audiences had to interpret each one at the time of performance with reference to performances they had experienced before. 

Does this sequence make an effort to undermine or otherwise mock the power of desire? It appropriates the form of genealogical catalogues known elsewhere to illustrate the power of this desire. This partly advances other Homeric strategies, making the Homeric story the biggest and the best, but it also undermines Zeus’ authority at a critical time in the text (perhaps leading up to its re-assertion in book 15, offering a potentially favorable comparison for the Achaeans and human behavior in general).

Questions about the relationship between the Iliad and other narrative traditions ultimately cannot be answered because we don’t know what ancient audiences knew and what they would bring to a performance of Homer. What we can surmise, I think, is that humorous examples of divine sex were part of various song traditions and that they were used to different effects. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite can help us confirm that comic sex scenes can be deadly serious when seen from a cosmic perspective. In a way, the Dios apatê performs and confirms this, refracting, again, desire as a significant theme of the Trojan War narrative that impacts gods as well as men.

A starter bibliography on the deception of Zeus

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Bergren, Ann L. T. “‘The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite’: Tradition and Rhetoric, Praise and Blame.” Classical Antiquity 8, no. 1 (1989): 1–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010894.

Brillet‐Dubois, Pascale, ‘An Erotic Aristeia: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and its Relation to the Iliadic Tradition’, in Andrew Faulkner (ed.), The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays (Oxford, 2011

Cyrino, Monica Silveira. “‘Shame, Danger and Desire’: Aphrodite’s Power in the Fifth Homeric Hymn.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 47, no. 4 (1993): 219–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1348308.

Andrew Faulkner, The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xv, 342. ISBN 9780199238040

Graziosi, B., and J. Haubold, 2005. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London.

Muellner, L. 1996. The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic. Cornell

S. Douglas Olson, The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Related Texts: Text, Translation and Commentary. Texte und Kommentare 39. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012

Parry, Hugh. “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Erotic ‘Ananke.’” Phoenix 40, no. 3 (1986): 253–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1088842.

Podbielski, Le structure de l’hymne homeriqu a la lumiere de la tradition litteraire Wroclaw 1971

Segal, Charles. “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: A Structuralist Approach.” The Classical World 67, no. 4 (1974): 205–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/4348003.

Slatkin, Laura. 2011. The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays. Hellenic Studies Series 16. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. 

C. A. Sowa, Traditional T Homeric Hymns (Chicago 1984)

Walcot, Peter. “The Homeric ‘Hymn’ to Aphrodite’: A Literary Appraisal.” Greece & Rome 38, no. 2 (1991): 137–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/642954.

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Posted by Joel

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/02/25/where-did-homeric-book-divisions-come-from-thinking-about-the-thematic-unity-of-book-14/

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/?p=65253

As I mention in the first post about Iliad 14, the book provides a structure that is built around three basic movements: the crisis of leadership among the Achaeans, resolved by Diomedes; a rallying of the Greeks on the field, led by Poseidon; the Dios apate, or deduction of Zeus, including Hera’s preparations and their Idaean assignation.

These scenes are connected both in terms of plot and theme around resistance to Zeus’ plan: the Greek captains rally and correct Agamemnon to maintain some unity; Poseidon intervenes to help the Greeks resist (and even wound) Hektor; and Hera, in coordination with Poseidon, distracts Zeus in order to support their resistance. Altogether, these three movements take us from the very serious human challenges of the opening panic, through a somewhat surreal but still ‘epic’ battle scene mixed with the gods, until it terminates in a comic, other-worldly Romantic tryst. There’s a unity and a wholeness to the book that reminds me of the three-movements in book 6.

Such neatness, if it can be called such, invites questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole. Anyone who picks up a translation of either epic today finds them neatly divided into 24 books each (even though the Iliad is 3000 lines longer than the Odyssey. What makes this a little suspicious is that in ancient Greek, the books are named after the 24 available letters of the alphabet. It is highly unlikely, moreover, that the division of books was established in the Archaic and classical period since once the Greeks adopted the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, local dialects often had more than 24 letters (including variations like qoppa, digamma) and would assign received symbols (those we know for psi, ksi, and khi) to different sounds.  Indeed, the standard Ionic alphabet was not adopted in Athens until after the Peloponnesian War (c. 403 BCE).

Pseudo-Plutarch, De Homero 2.4

“Homer has two poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of them is divided into the number of letters in the alphabet, not by the Poet himself, but by the scholars in Aristarchus’ school.”

Εἰσὶ δὲ αὐτοῦ ποιήσεις δύο, ᾿Ιλὰς καὶ ᾿Οδύσσεια, διῃρημένη ἑκατέρα εἰς τὸν ἀριθμὸν τῶν στοιχείων, οὐχ ὑπὸ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ποιητοῦ ἀλλ’ ὑπὸ τῶν γραμματικῶν τῶν περὶ ᾿Αρίσταρχον. 

So just how and where the book divisions of the Homeric epics came from has been something of a hot topic from time to time. The major arguments are:

1. The book divisions were there from the beginning, because the alphabet was adopted to write Homer down

2. The book divisions are features of smaller performance units

3. The book divisions were a product of Hellenistic editing, following the adoption of a regular alphabet and the impetus to present standard, synoptic versions of epic

4. The book divisions were a result of the process of dictating the poems: each one represents a day’s dictation, or something like that.

   

    

    

What people call the ‘books’ of the Iliad often reveal some of their assumptions about their nature. Note, the passage above does not use the word biblion (although it is implied, I think). Other titles such as scrolls or rhapsodies see the performance units as possibly relating to scripts or readily performable episodes. I also worry about to what extent some of these models are divorced from the material reality of (1) the cost of transcription and copying and (2) a reading public accustomed to performance of epic.

There are challenges with each approach: we have no evidence of Alphabetic book distinctions before the Hellenistic period (when earlier authors talk about Homeric passages, they focus on episodes); we don’t have any evidence for book divisions as performance units, since many of the episodes referred to as potential performance pieces occupy parts of books rather than their whole; we have only anecdotal evidence supporting the creation of book divisions by Hellenistic editors, and that evidence is 3-5 centuries after the fact; and we have no direct evidence for the dictation and recording of the poems. Another early testimony about the book-divisions, discussed by Rene Nunlist, shows that early scholars emphasized the unity of the whole poems and saw the book divisions as sometimes artificial interventions.

The details of the arguments are interesting too. But here’s a summary of the issues from Steve Reece (2003):

2) All at once about ten years ago a great amount of attention began to be paid to the book divisions in the Homeric epics; more specifically, to how the twenty-four book divisions in our inherited texts of the Iliad and Odyssey are related to the historical performance units of these songs. The debate remains unresolved. On one end are those who regard the book divisions as reflections of breaks in the historic performance of an eighth- or seventh-century BCE bard. On the other end are those who regard them as Alexandrian—a result of serendipity (the fact that there are 24 letters in the Ionian alphabet) and, to a lesser degree, of the physical features of text-making during the Hellenistic period (the typical length of a papyrus roll). Somewhere in between are those who trace the book divisions to the first writing down of the epics in connection with their performance at one of the Greater Panathenaic Festivals in Athens in the late sixth century. Whenever, and for whatever reason, they occurred, most of the book divisions seem to have been chosen judiciously, coinciding with breaks in the narrative. Yet some clash with scene divisions, cutting right through a narrative segment or even a type-scene (e.g., Il. 5-6, 6-7, 18-19, 20-21; Od. 2-3, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9, 12-13, 13-14, 20-21). Hence there has developed some consensus among Homeric scholars that in performance a division into three or four major “movements” is to be preferred to the twenty-four book units. As a practical matter, I encourage my students to read through the book divisions of Homer, just as I encourage them, in their reading of other oral narratives, to disregard the artificial divisions imposed by textualization (verse, section, chapter, book divisions)—in the New Testament Gospels, for example. Not only does this practice better replicate the original performance units, but it also allows the modern reader to detect patterns and themes in the epic that are obfuscated by overadherence to book divisions. A recent and excellent summary of the debate on book divisions, with full appreciation of its implications for oral poetics, is Jensen 1999.

Scholars like Bruce Heiden (following others) argue with some efficacy for the structure of each book. Heiden argues (1998, 69)

“ The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.

The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes  a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.”

I think that close readings of many of the books bears out some of Heiden’s argumentation here, but the problem is what the cause of this is, by which I mean is this a feature of our efforts as interpreters and the impact that the Iliad’s contents have had on the history of literature in its wake shaping our expectations or is this a matter of intentional design.

Steve Reece, in a later piece, emphasizes that approaches like this in general double down on ignoring the performance origins of the poems  (2011, 300-301):

“We may acknowledge the orality of Homeric epic, we may refer to it as performance, we may pay obeisance to the study of comparative oral traditions, but we remain addicted to our printed texts, our book divisions and line numbers, our apparatus critici, our concordances and lexica. We rarely try to reconstruct or even imagine a production of an epic performance.”

A combination of the work of Minna Skafte Jensen, Jonathan Ready, and Reece’s own fine essay ventures to imagine the performance context, but the first two tie it to the formation of the texts we have as well. (It is Jensen in her seminal debate from 1999 who suggests the book units are the product of a day’s transcription.) 

Simonides, fr. 6.3

“Simonides said that Hesiod is a gardener while Homer is a garland-weaver—the first planted the legends of the heroes and gods and then the second braided them together into the garland of the Iliad and the Odyssey.”

Σιμωνίδης τὸν ῾Ησίοδον κηπουρὸν ἔλεγε, τὸν δὲ ῞Ομηρον στεφανηπλόκον, τὸν μὲν ὡς φυτεύσαντα τὰς περὶ θεῶν καὶ ἡρώων μυθολογίας, τὸν δὲ ὡς ἐξ αὐτῶν συμπλέξαντα τὸν᾿Ιλιάδος καὶ Οδυσσείας στέφανον.

My take on the major issues presented here is that the final three approaches are reconcilable from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary model for the creation of the Homeric epics (on which, see Nagy 2004 and Dué 2018), posits a movement from greater flexibility to greater fixity over time. If we imagine Homeric epic already existing notionally between episodic performances and monumental events involving multiple singers, we can see these episodes more or less coalescing around smaller performance units that could be stitched together in grander performance contexts. Any process of textualization would necessarily include stages of dictation and transcription providing performance units that were largely coherent as a whole and which would present different levels of internal coherency based in the individual performance. As the whole cultural phenomenon was transferred from performance contexts around the Greek speaking world to the libraries of the Hellenistic cities, they would achieve a textual fixity and polish that would harden, where possible, the joins between books.

Just as in my metaphor for the cultivation of crops or trees, Homeric poetry would have been adapted and shaped over time by the performance context, the intervention of transcription and textualization, and the actions of editors imposing regularity and uniformity typical of literary traditions.

Other explanations require a textual culture for the poems at a much earlier period. This model, as well, helps to explain the unified, yet still organic and largely asymmetric shape of a book like Iliad 14.

A starter bibliography on Homeric Book Divisions

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Campbell, Malcolm. “Apollonian and Homeric Book Division.” Mnemosyne 36, no. 1/2 (1983): 154–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4431214.

Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.

G. P. Goold. “Homer and the Alphabet.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 91:272-91.

Graziosi, Barbara. 2002. Inventing Homer. Cambridge.

Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 118:68-81.

Minna Skafte Jensen. “Dividing Homer: When and How Were the Iliad and the Odyssey Divided into Songs?” Symbolae Osloenses, 74:5-91.

Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Nünlist, René. “A Neglected Testimonium on the Homeric Book-Division.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 157 (2006): 47–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20191105.

Barry B. Powell. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss

Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. 2019.

Reece, Steve. “Homeric Studies.” Oral Tradition, vol. 18 no. 1, 2003, p. 76-78. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2004.0035.

Reece, Steve. 2011. “Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey.” Oral Tradition, 26/2 (2011): 299-326. 

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