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Variations In Myth: How Manipulations Of Topos Create Morality, Joel Huber

Honors Theses

The Homeric epics have inspired the Western world for three thousand years. The Iliad especially is complex and compelling, while the author himself is enigmatic. Both poem and poet have sparked several libraries worth of scholarship. The poem is traditionally considered to be transmitted orally with numerous extant variations within the text itself. In the 6th century BC, by tradition, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus redacted the poem into a standard performance so that it could be performed in order from A to Omega. The Alexandrian scholars such as Aristarchus and Zenodotus published numerous works in the 2nd and 3rd centuries …