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Chapter 11 - Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey; or, The Case of the Insoluble Enigma

from IV - The Cinema Imagines Difficult Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

Martin M. Winkler
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
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Summary

In this chapter we find that Homer’s extraordinary vividness (cf. Chapter 4) is completely missing in a crucial scene of the Odyssey: Odysseus’ shot through twelve axes — through, not across, in-between, or anything else. Scholars have proposed several solutions to a textual problem that still resists any conclusive explanation. Screenwriters and film directors, too, have tackled it. The chapter first outlines the problem in the text and examines the major theories that commentators and translators have advanced to solve it, then analyzes all screen versions from the silent era until the age of computer videos. None other than T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), himself a translator of the Odyssey, concluded that “a cinema” (i.e. a film) is required to understand Homer’s scene. Several onscreen arrangements of the axes and the manner of Odysseus’ shot are surprisingly close to scholars’ theories.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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