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FROM ΚΕΙΝΟΣ TO ΟΔΕ: DEIXIS AND IDENTITY IN THE ODYSSEY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2018

Oliver Passmore
Oliver Passmore*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University, UK
*
*oliver.passmore@newcastle.ac.uk
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Abstract

Scholarship on Homer's Odyssey has long recognised the importance of naming and reference in the poem, particularly in the way speakers refer to Odysseus. Here I consider one term regularly used for the protagonist, but largely overlooked in these studies: κεῖνος, ‘that man’. I argue that it acquires a specific and rich association with Odysseus in the epic, one that depends on the deictic properties of the pronoun as marking its object as distant in space and uncertainly located. This is contrasted with Odysseus’ use of the proximal deictic ὅδε, ‘this man’, to reveal his identity at the poem's climax.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 64 , December 2018 , pp. 139 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

Thanks to the anonymous readers and Oliver Thomas for their generous feedback and helpful comments. This article started out life as an essay submitted for the Cambridge Classics MPhil in 2012. I am grateful to Renaud Gagné for his guidance at that early stage, and for his inspirational mentorship over many years. A subsequent version was delivered at Newcastle University in 2017, and I thank all those who gave feedback on that occasion. All errors are my own.

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