Poetizing the borders: Homer

Abstract

Homeric Poems, which since Classical Antiquity have been unrivaled cultural referents, concentrate their expressive force on the theme of transgression of borders: in the Iliad, once they have abandoned their homeland, the Greeks camp for a long time in front of a foreign nation’s impregnable walls, imposing their determination of revenge; in the Odyssey, from this disastrous threshold of barbarism Ulysses will err on the ends of the earth, until, armed, he imposes peace on the threshold of his own house. By adding up lexical, narrative and mythical references, a dense web of symbolic meanings translates the metaphorization of conflicting wandering and of frontiers.