Curated Books

Sky-Blue Flower: Songs of the Bride in Modern Russia and Ancient Greece

back Olga Levaniouk Preface This paper has its roots in a nostalgic recollection: being a graduate student in Greg’s seminar. A discussion of age-related hairstyles in ancient Greece and elsewhere and Greg’s inspiring thoughts on the subject prompted me to put together a handout for a class report with a few Greek and Russian texts side by side. The Russian texts came from the wedding songs I had found… Read more

La crise selon l’Iliade

back Pierre Judet de La Combe, EHESS, CNRS Ma dette envers Gregory Nagy est immense. Issue d’une tradition herméneutique littéraire lointainement rattachée à la réflexion théorique de Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, puis refondée par Peter Szondi et surtout par Jean Bollack, la philologie que je pratique est avant tout attentive à la compréhension des œuvres de langage comme individualités historiques et comme événements potentiellement critiques au sein de leur… Read more

VINGT ANS POUR ULYSSE, VINGT ANS POUR HÉLÈNE

back Jean Bollack Au chant XXIV de l’Iliade, devant le corps d’Hector, ramené dans sa maison, Hélène fait l’éloge du mort, parlant en tiers avec deux autres femmes, après Hécube, la mère, et Andromaque, l’épouse (voir l’épisode des vers 718-776). Elle ne parle pas en raison de ses liens de parenté, mais comme hors famille, en tant qu’amante de Pâris, et séductrice, qui a été à l’origine de la… Read more

Did the Helen of the Homeric Odyssey ever go to Troy?

back Guy Smoot It is my contention that the Homeric Odyssey deliberately problematizes the crucial question of whether Helen went to Troy: it neither clearly asserts it, nor clearly denies it, but leaves a contemporary audience with the hermeneutic freedom to imagine either scenario. The Odyssey positions itself between the Homeric Iliad in which Helen appears to be present at Troy and the tradition first attested in Stesichorus, according… Read more

Iliad 6.201: Did Bellerophon Wander Blindly?

back Edward Lowry In a famous and favorite episode in Iliad 6.119–236, Diomedes and Glaucus meet as enemies, interact as storytellers, and depart as guest-friends bonded by an amazing exchange of armor. Yet for all the episode’s appeal and intrigue, scholars writing from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end generally see no particular unity therein; “inorganic” is a frequent descriptor. This study will attempt to delineate… Read more

Orestes in Skopje: The Macedonian Oresteia of Milcho Manchevski

back David F. Elmer Prologue Largely as a result of the support and encouragement of Greg Nagy, I spent about a year, from mid-1998 to mid-1999, in Croatia. The scars from the recent war were still fresh, but by the time of my arrival there was a palpable sense that the new nation was at last leaving behind the turmoil of the early ’90s. Still, there were reminders that… Read more

The Mosque That Wasn’t There: Ethnographic Elaborations on Orthodox Conceptions of Sacrifice

back Dimitris Antoniou From the beginning of the 1990’s thousands of Muslim immigrants started to settle in Athens, at a time when the Greek economy had begun to prosper and the prospect of greater European integration was looming (Antoniou 2003). This was a time of great optimism marked by the beginning of a Greco-Turkish rapprochement, the rise of the stock market and the vision of the Athens 2004 Olympic… Read more

A Letter from Dale Sinos

back Dear Greg, Happy birthday and best wishes as you reach an august age. I am not so far behind you in years and so we can remember a few highlights of a couple of young men in Baltimore in the mid-Seventies. I was lucky enough to have you as my dissertation director at Johns Hopkins during your relatively short time there. It was not every director who would… Read more

From Greek Lyric to Rap Song: A New Swiss Sappho? (An Impertinent Comparison)

back Claude Calame, Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; translation by James Kierstead, Stanford University Comparative analysis has always been one of the foundation stones of cultural and social anthropology, of both historical and synchronic approaches. During the eighteenth century, encounters between missionaries and “savages” in the New World prompted European scholars to embark upon the comparative analysis of the customs of the classical Athenians. Grounding this comparative… Read more