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Donum natalicium

The Nature of the “Noble Man”(γενναῖος ἀνήρ) for Alexander the Great, the “Man Who Loved Homer” (φιλόμηρος)

back Thomas R. Martin The greatest crisis in Alexander the Great’s military career came in late 326 BC on the western bank of the Hyphasis (Beas) River in northwestern India. Several months earlier, Alexander had won a great victory over the Indian king Porus. Recognizing his foe’s great valor and dignity even in defeat, Alexander made Porus his ally to support his plan to push his expedition on into… Read more

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George Seferis and Homer’s Light

back Jennifer Kellogg In his 1963 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, poet George Seferis commented upon a multi-faceted sense of connection that Homeric Greek offers to modern speakers of the language, saying: When I read in Homer the simple words “φάος ἠελίοιο” – today I would say “φως του ηλίου” (the sunlight) – I experience a familiarity that stems from a collective soul rather than from an intellectual… Read more

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Monsters in Performance

back Marianne Hopman, Northwestern University Gregory Nagy is well known for his path-breaking work on the performative dimension of archaic Greek poetry. Several of his books, including The Best of the Achaeans, Pindar’s Homer, and most explicitly Poetry as Performance, unravel the rich implications of a fundamental intuition rooted in the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord—namely, that the cultural products transmitted to us as the texts of… Read more

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The Tyranny of Eros in Thucydides’ History

back Gloria Ferrari Explaining the subtitle to his Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Gregory Nagy wrote: [1] I chose the word possession because the preoccupation of Greek poetry with the application of the past to the here and now is in itself an exercise of political power. This arresting programmatic statement looks forward in the chapters that follow to the… Read more

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Deixis and Everyday Expressions in Alcaeus frs. 129 V and 130b V

back Lowell Edmunds When this paper was composed, in 2005, and delivered, on a September day, in Molyvos (ancient Methymna), I could not have guessed its ultimate destination—this Festschrift—and its dedicatee—my friend Gregory Nagy. The many references to Greg’s work to be found here did not begin, then, as honorific. They reflected a habit of thinking about archaic Greek poetry in ways learned from him. This habit goes back… Read more

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Homeric Scholia and the Multitextuality of the Iliad

back Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott We have worked closely with Greg Nagy since we were graduate students at Harvard, and each of us wrote her dissertation under his direction. Already at that time we also worked closely with each other; we worked together as Teaching Fellows for Greg’s large Core Curriculum course entitled The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization, and we team taught a junior tutorial… Read more

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“Kind Like a Father”: On Mentors and Kings in the Odyssey

back Stamatia Dova To a true mentor Both psychology and common experience consider mentorship a process pivotal for the development and character formation of a young person. [1] Mentor and mentee are supposed to gravitate towards each other based on compatibility and social convention, forging a bond that resembles the one between parent and child. [2] In many ways,… Read more

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Hyrnetho and the Dark Age of Greek Myth

back Matthew Clark for Gregory Nagy Hyrnetho is the heroine of rival local traditions of Argos and Epidauros. Pausanias has recorded a fairly full account of the story of Hynetho, and she is mentioned briefly by several other ancient authors, but she is certainly not one of the major figures of Greek tradition. Her story, however, is interesting in itself, and it leads to a number of questions with… Read more

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Drops of Poetry, Drops of Music: Performing as Weeping

back Anna Bonifazi, University of Heidelberg ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ Sure, the best is water Pindar Olympian I 1 Nagy (2009) identifies one of the esthetic values associated with the reflections of Homeric poetry in later authoritative voices of Greek and Latin literature as the “esthetics of fluidity.” The flow of narration/poetry is often depicted as the flow of tears or drops of water, whose source produces impermanent and… Read more

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To Encounter a Hero: Localization and Travel in Hellenistic Hero Cults

back Ellen Bradshaw Aitken Introduction [1] In the Greek and Roman worlds, the veneration of those called “heroes” and specifically of dead heroes was a highly localized religious phenomenon. Centered on tombs or other burial sites, the cult practices of devotion to a hero draw our attention to the highly localized character of much traditional religious practice around the ancient Mediterranean. In this way,… Read more