The Doloneia is the most controversial book of the Iliad, its authenticity being doubted since antiquity. Modern scholars are divided between those who regard it as a major interpolation by a later poet who was trained in the technique of epic composition and those who see it as the earliest manifestation of the very ancient theme of lochos (ambush). However, the first claim assumes the stylistic homogeneity of book 10, while the second sweeps out dictional and thematic difficulties by attributing them to the theme of ambush that is weakly represented in the extant corpus of archaic Greek epic. By applying sophisticated interpretive tools such as reliable author-based criteria (function words, character n-grams, lexical features, and quantitative metrics), intratextual allusion, and oral intertextual neoanalysis, this book maintains that Iliad 10 is not stylistically homogeneous and can hardly have been composed by a single poet, that it is thematically consonant with the rest of the Iliad, and that it has evolved from an earlier Iliadic version after the addition of the Rhesus episode, which did not circulate as an independent composition but formed part of lost oral epic poetry with cyclic features that focused on the events after the death of Achilles.

Book Information
ISBN 9780192870988
Author Christos C. Tsagalis
Format Hardback
Page Count 368
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press