The position of the polis in the Iliad and the Odyssey is equivocal. Because there is a great span in time between the formal subject material of the poems (ca. 1250 BC) and the time of their composition (ca. 750-700 BC, by convention), the poems present a hybrid world picture with varying and occasionally contradictory systems of social organization. As much as the poems are part of a long epic and formulaic tradition which looks back to an ancestral Mycenaean past, they also have been adapted to the conditions of Homer's lifetime. In political organization, the Iliad and the Odyssey look back through the small tribal groupings and warrior aristocracy of the Dark Ages, to a highly centralized and bureaucratic society governed by divinely ordained kings; but they also look forward to that form of social organization which Homer saw emerging about him — the polis. With this wide disparity in socio-political orientation apparent in the poems, one scholar can say, ‘For Homer and his audience the polis is regarded as the typical form of human community’, whereas another can argue that the significance of the polis is masked and superseded by that of the oikos (the means of social unification preeminent in the Dark Ages). And even if the polis were agreed to be the typical form of human habitation, it is nevertheless argued that the focus in the poems upon the individualistic warrior aristocracy prevents the polis from playing a significant dramatic role in the poems as a higher coercive power: ‘die Stadt habe für die fuhrende Schicht nur an der Peripherie des Daseins gestanden.’ More extensively the same critic writes (p. 164):

Webster's Third International Dictionary defines the ‘pathetic fallacy’ as ‘the ascription of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature.’ While this definition is in substance what John Ruskin meant when he first spoke of the pathetic fallacy more than a century ago, the great critic intended not merely to describe a movement in art, but to denounce that movement:

Ruskin rejected the pathetic fallacy when artists reduced it to a stock attribute of nature which neither they nor their public believed to reflect the truth. When, however, the pathetic fallacy did convey the artist's true feelings about nature — as groundless in reality as that feeling might have been — the artist was somehow less culpable: the truth of the sentiment mitigated the violation of empirical Truth.

An important if limited contribution to the study of space and scenery in classical epic was made in 1976 with the publication of Early Epic Scenery: Homer, Virgil and the Medieval Legacy, by T. M. Andersson. Andersson's deliberate ignoring of the contributions of Hellenistic, Silver Age and late Greek and Latin epic are omissions which sometimes lead to distorted judgments. This article seeks to fill in part one of these gaps by examining spatial representation by three late writers of what might still loosely be termed epic.

Andersson argues that Homer has a relatively poor and primitive concept of organised, rational, visual space, wherein the composer concentrates on his characters' actions and words, rather than giving much of the background against which action occurs; topographical features and spatial relations and distances between objects and persons are often vague, arbitary or downright impossible unless surmounted (as they sometimes are) by divine intervention. Homeric emphasis is on how people feel and respond when they see something rather than on the observed scene, object or behaviour itself. Splendour, for instance, is normally conveyed not so much by elaborate description of the splendid article as by dwelling on the impression made upon the viewer. Wide or carefully sourced perspectives are rare, there being no general design within a clear framework, but a mélange of detail, very narrow, fragmentary viewpoints and insulated scenes. It is a world of kinaesthetic and emotional flux, a world orchestrated into being by sound or suggested by similes rather than painted on a broad canvas for careful scrutiny by the eye, and within which communication occurs, sometimes at impossible ranges, by noises rather than by sight. The sketchiness of Homer's description of Odysseus' house on Ithaca, for example, has caused scholars much difficulty in reconstructing its layout.

Isthmians 3 and 4 have not fared well at the hands of critics. Norwood judged them (taken together) as spurious, Wilamowitz as ‘artistically insignificant.’ Most discussions have focussed on the problem of whether they form one ode or two and on the fortunes of the Cleonymid clan to which the victor, Melissus of Thebes, belonged. Of recent interpreters, Köhnken stresses the significance of the myth of Ajax for the unity of the composition, but, like most scholars, ignores the pyres of the children of Heracles at the end, a passage to which I shall pay particular attention later (as if to confirm the de gustibus of Pindaric criticism, these lines were Norwood's final proof of the inauthenticity of the ode). Thummer's commentary is helpful for the relation of I. 3 to I. 4 and for the topoi of epinician praise, but he attempts no full critical study. McNeal has offered a good analysis of the architecture of I. 4, but in his search for formal unity underestimates the quality of Pindar's poetic language and indeed finds I. 4 not ‘particularly noteworthy for any unique images.’

The ‘unity’ of this work, as of most Pindaric odes, lies not merely in a ‘program’ or a rhetorical structure of encomium (which is not to deny their importance) but in the interaction of the formal elements in that encomiastic armature with imagery, myth, and conventional symbols of success and failure in Pindaric diction (e.g. light, flowers, gold). Repetitions of words or themes, recurrent metaphors, and parallel thought-patterns and image-patterns also help shape and clarify the ode's organic coherence as it proceeds from its beginning to its end. All this is to say that Pindaric poetry, despite the special circumstances of epinician festival and encomiastic convention, is ultimately not different from any other poetry and (subject to obvious limitations and qualifications) is amenable to the same analytical techniques. I should not want to throw out the Bundy with the bath water, only remind us that every bathtub obeys those fundamental laws of hydraulics which make plumbing possible.

The story of Euripides' Cyclops resembles the corresponding episode in the Odyssey, except that in Euripides' version Polyphemus, at the time of Odysseus' landing, is master of Silenus and a band of satyrs who tend his flocks. This circumstance is loosely connected with the tale of Dionysus' abduction by pirates, which is related in one of the Homeric hymns: the satyrs had put to sea in search of the god, and were blown ashore, much like Odysseus, at the Cyclopes' island, which by the time of Euripides had come to be specified as Sicily. A role for the satyrs was, of course, required by the genre of the satyr play — if there were exceptions, they were few — and their captivity in a remote and savage place seems to have been a common theme, especially in Euripides' contributions. Considerations such as these have depressed the interpretation of the Cyclops, which is the only complete specimen of the genre. Homer's narrative looks like the perfect stock upon which to graft the typical satyr-motifs, and criticism may rest content with revealing the few places where structural changes in the narrative are demanded by the working in of the new material. Apart from that, one need remark only upon differences of tone, for the satyr drama was by nature playful, a mood that was carried especially by the chorus and Silenus, no doubt, but which left its mark as well upon the treatment of the myth as a whole.