Conclusion To appreciate any literary subject it is best to know what came before. The scholar of Hellenistic poetry, for example, brings to bear on the subject a knowledge of Classical Greek literature and culture. Yet in the case of the earliest phases of Greek poetry we rarely have access to comparable information, so we are forced to approach the subject in a very different way. The… Read more
Appendix. Centaurs It is difficult to discuss horses and hippomorphism in Greece without mentioning the figure of the centaur, so I will not conclude this work without doing so. There is no real reason to suspect that the figure is of IE origin, and its treatment is different from that of horses themselves, yet some traces of the IE equine ideology outlined above may still be observable… Read more
Bibliography Adrados, F. R. 2007. “The Panorama of Indo-European Linguistics since the Middle of the Twentieth Century: Advances and Immobilism.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 35:129–153. Albêrûnî. 2002. Albêrûnî’s India. Trans. E. C. Sachau. New Delhi. Allan, J. 1914. Catalogue of the Coins of the Gupta Dynasties and of Śaśāṅka, King of Gauda. London. Amory,… Read more
Translators’ Preface Catherine Porter and Susan Tarrow The challenges of translating Jean Bollack’s work are well known to his fellow classicists. His work, published primarily in French, has also appeared in German, either in the author’s own text or in translation, but very little was available in English when we agreed to take on this collection. Each of us had translated one of Bollack’s essays for… Read more
[In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] Foreword Gregory Nagy Introduction [1]… Read more
1. Learning to Read* When I started out, I found it hard to distinguish writing projects from re-elaborations of subject matter, and I failed to pay sufficient attention to the breaks, large or very small, that produce the meaning of a text. I gradually came to understand that these breaks allow for freedom in the act of reading, without establishing the potentialities of… Read more
2. Reading the Philologists?* By opting for philologische Wissenschaft, “philological science,” with texts at the center, and not for Altertumswissenschaft, or “archaeological science,” within the field of criticism—in a sense, against criticism and against a form of “essayism,” [1] as a way of acquiring the means for understanding—I was referring to a practice. At the same time I… Read more
3. Odysseus among the Philologists* The Controversy An outdated practice Classical philology, the dominant discipline in higher education until the early twentieth century, has an ambiguous status; a definition of that status could explain why the field has never produced a theory of meaning, although it has produced numerous methodological works on which the other literary disciplines are based. On the… Read more
4. Reflections on the Practice of Philology* I To edit a page of Aeschylus or Plato, to separate these authors’ sentences or their lines of verse—to understand, in a word—is to discover that, to a considerable degree, the composition obtained by a lengthy and coherent tradition, but also by modern science, heir to that tradition, is different from the text that has… Read more
5. Reading Myths* Research on the cycle of becoming had to be linked with cosmology. Speculation on ordered movement and the birth of time occupied a central place. The refutation of the thesis that there were two parallel and opposite cycles in Empedocles, under the headings of Love and Hatred (or Strife), was a decisive preliminary condition for the reconstitution of Empedocles’ system. Read more
