Donum natalicium
The Aiakidai, the Herald-less War, and Salamis
back Thomas Figueira It is tempting to justify this contribution in honor of Greg Nagy by invoking his interest in the Aiakidai, to whose appearance in several important literary contexts he has adverted in various works [1] and to whose Urvater, Aiakos, he has… 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
Women’s Lamentations and the Ethics of War
back Olga M. Davidson The two texts that I compare in this presentation are epics. One of them is Persian and the other one is Greek. The Persian epic is the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi, composed in the 10th century CE. The Greek epic is the Homeric Iliad, compositionally shaped… Read more
New Light on the Homeric Question: The Phaeacians Unmasked
back Douglas Frame §1. If the Homeric Question is a matter of identifying the circumstances in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed on a monumental scale, that question, to the minds of most, has not yet been satisfactorily answered. In a book published in 2009 about the… 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
Refusing an Odyssean Destiny: The End of the Iliad and the κλέος of Achilles
back Giuseppe Lentini Who is the best of the Achaeans? As Greg has shown in his much-admired book, this question dominates as well as unites the Homeric poetic tradition. While it is an “overall Iliadic theme that Achilles is the best of the Achaeans”, “in contrast to the Iliad,… Read more
Traumatic Dreams: Lacanian Love, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the Ancient Greek Novel, or, Gliding in Phantasmagoric Chains of Metonymy
back Anton Bierl, University of Basel I. Introduction During Greg Nagy’s last visit to Basel, we had an intense discussion about adolescence and the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan, who has made great strides toward giving a voice to young women. [1] On this… Read more