2. Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad [1] This paper was originally prepared for a panel on “Some Contemporary Approaches to the Homeric Poems.” [2] It describes a case in which contemporary critical theory, when combined with our knowledge of formulaic style, helps to interpret a problematic convention of the Iliad, namely, the suspension… Read more
3. Similes and Symbol in Odyssey v [1] Since antiquity, the Odyssey has invited symbolic interpretation. When Eustathius pronounces the poem an ethical allegory, and in that, more indicative than the Iliad of “Homeric power,” he echoes a tradition extending back through early Christian writers to the Allegoriae (Quaestiones Homericae) of Heraclitus. [2] Among modern critics, Charles… Read more
4. Odyssean Temporality: Many (Re)Turns [1] The wisdom of the text is self-destructive (art is true but truth kills itself), but this self-destruction is infinitely displaced in a series of successive rhetorical reversals which, by the endless repetition of the same figure, keep it suspended between truth and the death of truth. [2] … Read more
5. Helen’s “Good Drug” [1] I δύο τὰ πολλὰ τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων. [2] Alcmaeon Were someone to formulate a Foucaultian epistêmê for archaic Greek thought, it might be some version of “polarity.” [3] To begin to study Greek is to learn of its pervasive… Read more
6. Sacred Apostrophe: Re-Presentation and Imitation in Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Homeric Hymn to Hermes [1] I. Genre and History From the beginning, the Homeric hymns mark both beginning and end. They come before the recitation of epic, but after Homeric epic has reached its peak. The evidence is scanty, but so far as we can tell, the works… Read more
7. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Tradition and Rhetoric, Praise and Blame [1] I. Introduction The Homeric hymn is a traditional form of praise poetry. Employing traditional diction, theme, and structure, the hymn presents an epiphany of the god and an aetiology of his or her powers. [2] The traditional rhetoric of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite… Read more
8. The (Re)Marriage of Penelope and Odysseus [1] In the (re)marriage of Odysseus and Penelope, the Odyssey initiates a dialogue with the Western traditions of architecture, gender, and philosophy. [2] Although defined conceptually by discourses “invented” as different from mythology, [3] these three modes function actively in Archaic Greek culture and thought. Read more
9. Architecture Gender Philosophy [1] εἷς, δύο, τρεῖς· One, two, three. Timaeus 17a1 I broach the topic of architecture and gender and philosophy first because of an exchange that took place in the fall of 1987 in Chicago. During the meeting of the Associated Collegiate Schools… Read more
10. Female Fetish Urban Form [1] I. Introduction Female, fetish, and urban form are mutually fashioned in Aristophanes’ comedy Ecclesiazusae, in which the women of Athens, under the leadership of their new στρατηγός “general” Praxagora, disguise themselves as men in order to infiltrate the ἐκκλησία, the male-only “legislative assembly,” where they vote in a new order, one… Read more
V. The Emergence of Pisatis Maurizio Giangiulio Emergence, or Re-emergence? At the end of the nineteenth century probably no ancient historian would have doubted that the Pisatans had been the inhabitants of the Alpheios’ valley, which in the first decades of the sixth century BCE the Eleans subdued and stripped of control of the Olympic Games. Many would have shared the opinion expressed by Georg… Read more
