The main purpose of this book on the Odyssey is to discuss how the characters of the poem talk about the past, particularly of a past that is quite meaningful to many of them, the Trojan War. To talk about the past in a Homeric poem implies some key concepts explored in this book: tradition, memory, fame (kleos) and speech genres. The main aspect linked to all these notions is the discursive performance of a speaker that builds the past to his interlocutor: the here and now implied in the performance diminishes the distance between past and present in a way that is arguably homologous to the performance of the rhapsode that presented the Homeric poems to an audience in Archaic and Classical Greece.
