Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition

Barbara Pavlock here illuminates the significance of the erotic in the epic tradition from Alexandrian Greece to the late Renaissance by examining the transformations of two Homeric episodes, Odysseus' encounter with Nausikaa and the night-raid of Odysseus and Diomedes. In close readings of epics by Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, Ariosto, and Milton, Pavlock shows how these poets maintain the appearance of thematic continuity as they actually differentiate their own views on heroic values from those of their predecessors. Asserting that the erotic serves in the epic as a locus of criticism of social values, she traces adaptations in rhetorical devices, in larger structural patterns, and in major generic forms, as in the combination of tragic with epic models.