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12-2-2016 12:00 AM
Homeric Kinship on the Margins of the Oikos
Tim Wright The University of Western Ontario
Supervisor Dr. Christopher Brown The University of Western Ontario
Graduate Program in Classics A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Tim Wright 2016
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Recommended Citation Wright, Tim, "Homeric Kinship on the Margins of the Oikos" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4281. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4281
This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract ! Homeric scholarship has a long history dating back to the 19th century of elucidating Homeric poetry through examining its kinship structures and how kinship is performed. Of particular note has been the focus on the father-child dynamic both per se and with respect to its widespread use as a prototype for a diverse range of relationships. Agamemnon, for example, can be profitably viewed as a kind of dysfunctional father to the Achaeans, and many of the Odyssey’s characters are implicitly judged based on the extent to which they fill the role of the gentle father (ēpios patēr) in various ways. Central to all of this scholarship, however, has been the essentially structural assumption that kinship is a binary concept. Some people are related; others are not. However, recent anthropology has exploded this idea of ‘pseudo-kinship’, concluding that ‘relatedness’, the belief that someone even outside of one’s genetic or marital family is kin, is a more accurate measure of how kinship actually works than more prescriptive approaches have been. In light of these conclusions, I attempt to expand upon our understanding of how kinship is portrayed in the Homeric poems by taking claims of relatedness more seriously. In a series of studies, I examine how more marginal relationships, those potentially outside of the patrilocal joint family, namely those involving bastards, slaves, and fugitives, function nonetheless as kinship relations. My model for this approach will be the oikos, with the father at its centre. Homeric kinship is portrayed as centripetal, with its various members jockeying for position relative to the patriarch. With this in mind, I focus especially on how my marginal subjects negotiate their position and how their role is portrayed with respect to the patriarch of their oikos. ! ! Keywords ! Homer, Epic, Kinship, Family, Bastardy, Slavery, Exile, Relatedness, Teucer, Heracles, Eumaeus, Odysseus, Phoenix, Achilles, Archaic Greece.