ABSTRACT
The author likes to advance the idea that the traditional epic narrative models itself on the structure of prophecies and that narrative beginnings have the dynamics of prophetic time. The function of beginnings is clearly seen in the proems of the Homeric epics. The need to continue Homer, to open the gates between the boundaries of the epic panorama and the wide world of history, to proclaim a kind of primordial unity in the domain of poetry and the narrative is central to literary imagination. It is this necessity that modulates the initiatives of Euripides, Virgil, Racine, Baudelaire, Tate, and Pound among others, to retell the stories of Aeneas, Andromache, Odysseus, and other heroes and heroines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric scene is the beginning of Andromache's legend, and Virgil and later Racine and Baudelaire, each in his own way, add to it and enhance it by their accounts of her captivity and her life in Epirus.
