Chapter 2 : The massive accumulation of new or newly-appreciated comparative evidence about the nature of epic in oral poetry demands application to the ongoing study of individual epic traditions. I propose here to apply some of this evidence, as collected over recent years by a broad variety of experts investigating a wide variety of societies in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, to the study of… Read more
[[Originally published as Nagy, G. 1998. “The Library of Pergamon as a Classical Model.” In Pergamon: Citadel of the Gods (ed. H. Koester) 185–232. Harvard Theological Studies 46. This online edition (2011) contains slight modifications, which do not affect the content. The original page-breaks are indicated within brackets containing the original page-numbers: for example, “the Library {185|186} at the Mouseion” indicates the break between p. 185 and p. 186.]] This… Read more
Online edition of Hellenic Studies 37, originally published in 2009 by the Trustees for Harvard University. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. Also available for purchase in printvia Harvard University Press here. This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. Its results are important because they reveal a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which… Read more
“The main argument of this book is that the connection suggested by Homer between the ‘wiles’ and the ‘wanderings’ of Odysseus in fact rested upon an earlier tradition both significant and deep. The origin of this tradition has to do with the etymology of the Greek word nóos, ‘mind’, which I propose to connect with the Greek verb néomai, ‘return home’. Such an effort requires that nóos be reconstructed as… Read more
Originally published in 1928, both for Société d’éditions “Les belles lettres” (Paris) and as a minor thesis (Doctorat es lettres) for the Université de Paris. Read more
Originally published in 1996 by the University of Texas Press. Copyright, University of Texas Press. Also available for purchase in print here. Read more
Diachrony and the Case of Aesop Gregory Nagy [Also published in print in Diachrony: Diachronic Studies of Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, 2015, ed. José M. González, pp. 233–290. Pagination is herein represented by “{…|…},” indicating where one page ends and another begins. This online version is longer than the printed version due to the fact that, in the printed version, a number of paragraphs have been excised. Such paragraphs are… Read more
The subject of this book, which is an amplified version of the author’s MA thesis, is the art of description in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The art of description, or ekphrasis, is studied initially in general, seen in conjunction with such basic Homeric issues as formulaic language and similes, but via discussions on Homeric descriptions of nature and agriculture, the book ends up studying Homeric descriptions of arts and… Read more
