“The Homeric poems provide some of the easiest reading in Greek literature, as well as some of the most rewarding, and so we are introduced to them at an early stage in our study of the language. But when we learn more, we discover that Homeric Greek is not so simple after all. Some of its phenomena remain unexplained after two millennia of scholarship. For instance, we come across imperatives… Read more
Online edition of Hellenic Studies 44, originally published in 2011 by the Trustees for Harvard University. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. Also available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press here. Read more
Introduction Testing our Tools : Open Questions on the Derveni Papyrus Ioanna Papadopoulou The Derveni Papyrus (DP from now on) should have never reached us. The oldest European “book” in our possession was meant to accompany forever the cremated body buried in Derveni Tomb A. It is our great luck that this papyrus roll containing an extraordinary text did not burn thoroughly. It awaited its accidental discovery during a public… Read more
The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are among the world’s foremost epics. Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer—a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems composed—at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it. Read more
Most modern treatments of the sophists assert that there existed in fifth- and fourth-century Greece a distinct group of individuals called sophists (σοφισταί). [1] Such studies often mention in passing that the term had an earlier, less pejorative undertone, but that by the end of the fifth century a new class of people had emerged who appropriated the term for their practices. [2]… Read more
The Many and Conflicting Meanings of Σοφιστής Most modern treatments of the sophists assert that there existed in fifth- and fourth-century Greece a distinct group of individuals called sophists (σοφισταί). [1] Such studies often mention in passing that the term had an earlier, less pejorative undertone, but that by the end of the fifth century a new class of people had emerged who appropriated the term for their practices. [… Read more
Online edition of Hellenic Studies 46, originally published in 2011 by the Trustees for Harvard University. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. Also available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press here. Read more
New and revised edition, translated by Derek Collins and Janice Orion In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted… Read more
[[Originally published in Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. R. B. Branham (Evanston IL 2002) 71-96. (The page-numbers of the printed version are embedded within brackets in this electronic version: for example, {71|72} marks where p. 71 stops and p. 72 begins.)]] In the title of my essay, there is no punctuation between reading Bakhtin and reading the Classics because there is meant to be no break in the syntax. In… Read more
