Parry Anne Amory. Blameless Aegisthus. A study of αμύμων and other Homeric epithets

Brill, 1973. — x, 292 p. — (Mnemosyne, Supplements 26).Most of the recent work done on Homeric vocabulary has concerned itself with words of philosophical import, words which illuminate for us early Greek conceptions of body, soul, mind, thought, choice, and so on. Bruno Snell and others have investigated such nouns, and the related verbs of seeing, knowing, etc., in order to understand the development of Greek thought. These studies tend to use Homer as a foil, as the primitive backdrop against which the sophistication of later Greek philosophical thinking may be better appreciated.1 Such work, valuable as it is, offers only limited benefits to those who wish to understand the Homeric poems as literature, for there remain many words among Homer's vast store which are imperfectly understood. Even if we leave aside the special problem of the notoriously obscure Homeric glosses, a number of obstacles can hinder our comprehension of Homer's poetry. For example, since most of us start from a vantage point of classical Greek, it is all too easy to read back into Homer connotations which words did not yet possess.