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A Reading of The Sacrifice of Abraham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Rachel Hadas
Rachel Hadas*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

In his famous chapter on Odysseus’ scar at the beginning of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach summarizes the stylistic contrast between the lavish detail and leisurely expansiveness of Homeric narrative on the one hand and the austerity of the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac on the other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 6 , 1980 , pp. 43 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1980

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References

1. Auerbach, E., Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1974), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

2. There are disagreements on the date. See Valsa’s edition and that of Bouboulidou, cited below.

3. In his Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1937), p. 7.

4. Auerbach, p. 11.

5. Le Sacrifice d’Abraham, mistère grec du XVIième siecle, tr. M. Valsa (Paris, 1924), p. xv.

6. Ibid., p. xiii.

7. See W. F. Bakker, ‘Structural ‘Differences between Grotto’s “Lo Isach” and “The Sacrifice of Abraham”‘, Folia Neohellenica, I (1975), 1–26, and the same author’s The Sacrifice of Abraham, The Cretan Biblical Drama ‘ and Western European and Greek Tradition (Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1978).

8. All quotations from the Greek text of The Sacrifice of Abraham are taken from the edition by Ph. K. Bouboulidou in (Athens, 1955), pp. 244–61. Translations into English are my own.

9. Compare Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus.

10. Le Sacrifice d’Abraham, p. xv.

11. Ibid.