Stanford Humanities Center
Richard P. Martin is Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor in Classics at Stanford. He writes on archaic Greek poetry, culture, and myth, with a special focus on Homeric epic. His further interests include Greek religion, comedy, ethnopoetics, medieval Irish literature, and Modern Greek verbal art.
SHC Project
Homer and the World of Song
Martin's project moves the questions surrounding Homeric composition from the realm of philology into sociology. It takes as its guiding principle an observation by the Arabist and folklorist Dwight Reynolds: the “text” of an oral-traditional poem is really only the context for a performative event, whereas what strikes those of us from script-based cultures as “context” is really the text requiring interpretation. Homer and the World of Song tries to re-imagine the contexts of Homeric performance by drawing comparisons from six deep cultural traditions with enduring examples of heroic poetry: Greek and Irish, in both the medieval and modern periods; West African; Indic; Central Asian; and Egyptian.
Other works by Richard Martin include Mythologizing Performance (2020); Healing, Sacrifice and Battle (1983); The Language of Heroes (1989); Myths of the Ancient Greeks (2003), and Classical Mythology: The Basics (2016--2nd edition 2022). In addition, he has edited Bulfinch's Mythology (1991) and provided extensive notes and introductions for translations of the Iliad by Richmond Lattimore (2011) and the Odyssey by Edward McCrorie (2005). His articles cover topics in Greek, Latin, and Irish literature, as well as the history of folklore and myth studies. (A selection can be found here: https://stanford.academia.edu/RichardMartin)
