[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 Odysseus among the Philologists* The Controversy An outdated practice Classical philology, the dominant discipline in higher education until the early twentieth century, has an ambiguous status; a definition of that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
6. Purifications* God on Earth A subversive action Purifications (Katharmoi) marks a complete break with the cultural tradition, one that could equally well be called literary or religious. The poem [1] invents a myth, a new story that purports to replace all the other stories that have ever been told, from Homer and Hesiod to the… Read more
7. An Anthropological Fiction* Freud used the word “historical” on several occasions to characterize what he set out to describe in Moses and Monotheism; [1] the word implies that he was referring to events that had actually happened, that were not arbitrarily constructed. He could rely on psychoanalysis to assure him that this was the case. On the… Read more
8. Reading Drama* During an earlier phase in my career my great passion was Epicureanism, but over the last twenty years I have devoted most of my scholarly work to the field of Greek tragedy, often in collaboration with Pierre Judet de La Combe. Perhaps I should try to explain how this shift occurred. The path from the pre-Socratic thinkers to the tragedians… Read more
9. An Act of Cultural Restoration: The Status Accorded to the Classical Tragedians by the Decree of Lycurgus* The measures concerning drama have pride of place among the laws promulgated by Lycurgus, according to the Lives of the Ten Orators (included in Plutarch’s Moralia, 841F): these measures include the institution of competitions for the selection of dramatic actors and public honors awarded the… Read more
