Image source: The Feast of Acheloüs, ca. 1615, by Peter Paul Rubens & Jan Brueghel the Elder , Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain
A systematic analysis of the social, political, religious, and narrative functions of feasting rituals in the Iliad
This project is a book-length study of the social ritual of feasting in the Iliad, the ancient Greek epic that stands at the beginning of the European literary tradition. It is both a literary and historical study demonstrating that feasting scenes are important in the compositional plan of the epic, in characterization, as literary devices of closure, and as political tools in the power games staged in the story. I place these literary observations in a historical frame that explains why an epic such as the Iliad should have so many (twenty-six) feasting scenes in the first place, and explains how feasting in the Iliad impacts historical Greek practices of diplomacy.
