back Maureen N. McLane I first encountered “Gregory Nagy” as an orally-transmitted and recomposed meme, circulating widely at Harvard and beyond. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I would hear of this remarkable professor and his famous Core Course, “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization”—also known, fondly and incorrectly, as “Heroes for Zeros.” I never took Greg’s course, but I entered Currier House at Harvard just… Read more
Online edition of Hellenic Studies 16, originally published in 2011 by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. Also available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press here. Read more
back Olga M. Davidson The two texts that I compare in this presentation are epics. One of them is Persian and the other one is Greek. The Persian epic is the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi, composed in the 10th century CE. The Greek epic is the Homeric Iliad, compositionally shaped in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE and textually solidified in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Each of these… Read more
back Douglas Frame §1. If the Homeric Question is a matter of identifying the circumstances in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed on a monumental scale, that question, to the minds of most, has not yet been satisfactorily answered. In a book published in 2009 about the Homeric figure Nestor I proposed an answer to this long-standing question which I wish to present in more concentrated form… Read more
back P.E. Easterling Oedipus at Colonus is not unique among Greek tragedies in using oracles as both structuring elements in the plot and clues to interpretation, but Sophocles makes especially telling use of them in this play, as many scholars have noted. Even so, I believe there is a little more to be said, and I hope the topic is one that may appeal to our honorand, whose observations… Read more
back Victor Bers For many years, in fact many decades, I thought that Doug Frame was the first of Greg Nagy’s Ph.D. students. Only after Greg had settled in at the Center for Hellenic Studies and the three of us were sitting together in the living room did the matter of priority between the two of us finally get thrashed out. Doug’s recollection seemed to establish that I stand… Read more
Part I. Introduction The Homeric poems, as I hope to show, constitute acts of interpretation as well as acts of creation. The elucidation of their oral nature has taught us to look at Homeric composition not as a matter of rigidly prescribed transmission of inviolate requirements, but as a choice among alternative arrangements of fundamental compositional elements—formulas, diction, “themes,” type-scenes—that allow for modification within established contours. [1]… Read more
Online edition of Hellenic Studies 20, originally published in 2009 by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. A print version is available for purchase via Harvard University Press here. Read more
