Donum natalicium

Philology

back Lizzie Nagy Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of this headline. And do it quickly please, I’m past Lenny’s deadline. With apologies, and without much skill, An ode to my father-in-law, F-I-L, or Phil. I love bumping into him, always hope he’ll… Read more

G-R-E-G-0-R-Y N-A-G-Y

back Maureen N. McLane I first encountered “Gregory Nagy” as an orally-transmitted and recomposed meme, circulating widely at Harvard and beyond. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I would hear of this remarkable professor and his famous Core Course, “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization”—also known,… Read more

Getting to Grips with the Oracles

back P.E. Easterling Oedipus at Colonus is not unique among Greek tragedies in using oracles as both structuring elements in the plot and clues to interpretation, but Sophocles makes especially telling use of them in this play, as many scholars have noted. Even so, I believe there is a… Read more

First in Line

back Victor Bers For many years, in fact many decades, I thought that Doug Frame was the first of Greg Nagy’s Ph.D. students. Only after Greg had settled in at the Center for Hellenic Studies and the three of us were sitting together in the living room did the… Read more