We are pleased to share the following publications and resources which highlight or feature the contributions of influential Francophone scholars and scholarship. Image: Andromache mourns Hector (1783), by Jacques-Louis David, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Available via Wikimedia Commons. Read more
We are pleased to share the following in-depth and thoughtful discussion with Norman B. Sandridge, an assistant professor of Classics at Howard University. His forthcoming book, Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored: The Foundations of Leadership in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus will be published in the fall of 2012. He is also one of the editors of “Cyrus’ Paradise,” a collaborative online commentary to the Cyropaedia (www.cyropaedia.org). This busy scholar took the time to share his thoughts about education and risk-taking, his forthcoming book, and his collaborative, digital project on Xenophon. CHS: We recently featured content on the theme of "Rethinking Classical Education." Can you tell us a bit about your own education. Did you take a traditional path to Classical Studies? What person, text or idea has proven most influential? What would you change about your own educational journey? In retrospect my path to Classical Studies feels both direct and indirect. Throughout high school I was a math and science person to a fault. I majored in physics in college (at the University of Alabama-Huntsville) because I wanted to be an astronaut and a cosmologist. For a few semesters I flirted with being a philosophy major because I thought it might tell me something about the origins of the universe. For as long as I can remember I have been interested in the big questions about the “meaning of life”; so, when I realized as a sophomore that you could actually study language (in my case, Latin) as a way of getting at the basics of our understanding of human experience, I was hooked and haven’t regretted the change one bit! The person who without question was most influential in my “conversion” from science to Classics was my college Latin professor, Dick Gerberding. Dr. Gerberding came from Oxford in the mid-eighties to the University of Alabama-Huntsville where he started a Latin program and an ancient languages society, which still turns out many “born again” Classicists every year. He instilled in me a lot of the values of the Classical education that I try to impart to my students: linguistic (and thus mental) precision, a sense of wonder for all that was done in human history so long ago, and the conviction that ancient learning should be central to our democratic discourse in the twenty-first century. Some of the early works in Classics that really had a lasting impact on me were Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plato’s Republic, and the epics of Homer. In graduate school I became forever committed to being a Hellenist when I read Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Now my passion is Xenophon. One could spend a lifetime with any one of these works and never become bored. It is cliché to say that you would not change anything about your life, or in this case your education, but I actually believe it in my case. This is not to say that I always believe it. Like many students of my generation, I came to the study of the ancient world much later in life than previous generations, and so I have certainly had feelings of inadequacy at times studying with professors who were composing elegiac couplets in Latin at the age of fourteen. Many times I have longed to replace the memory of the lyrics of an 80’s sitcom (I pretty much know them all) with a few more poems of Catullus or Sappho. And yet I think by studying Latin and Greek for the first time as a college student I was better able to appreciate the pedagogical side of the experience. I know I understood the political, philosophical, and emotional meaning of a lot of the literature I was reading better than I would have at an earlier age. I think if I had been exposed to Classical Studies earlier in life I might have dismissed them by my late teens. I also think it mattered a lot that Classical Studies was presented to me as something special, even magical and more ideal than anything else going. Since my university did not have a formal Classics major, all of us who studied it felt like we were part of a secret organization of superheroes trying to find the true meaning to life and save the world. We definitely fell prey to what I call the “Atlantis Fantasy,” the idea that somewhere in the ancient world lies a utopia of beauty and truth, which, properly understood, could be used to make our present world perfect. This is still a view about the Greco-Roman world you see being advanced in some places, but I do not subscribe to it anymore, at least not in any formula so simple. But I do think at the time I needed such a narrative to pull me away from my quest to be the first human on Mars. Read more
We are pleased to feature the following publications and resources that use controlled and innovative perspectives to explore the ancient Greek mytho-poetic tradition as a rich, interconnected system. Taken together, these complimentary works offer a rich and proven critical framework for studying the various layers of meaning in Greek poetry. "Moonrise," oil on canvas, by American artist Frederic Edwin Church, 1889. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. Frederic Edwin Church [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Online Publications Leonard Muellner, Classics@ Vol. 3, "Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research" Working from Benveniste's idea that the study of Homeric vocabulary is still in its infancy, Muellner describes a way to do research on Homer and then shows how to work inductively, rebuilding the categories of thought and expression from within the epic world. Milman Parry, L'epithète traditionelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique We are especially pleased to publish a digital edition of Milman Parry's doctoral dissertation published in 1928 by Société d'éditions "Les belles lettres" on the use of traditional epithets in Homeric epic. Richard Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Martin's central conclusion is that the Iliad takes shape as a poetic composition in precisely the same "speaking culture" that we see foregrounded in the stylized words of the poem's heroic speakers, especially those speeches designated as muthos, a word the author redefines as "authoritative speech-act." Read more
We are pleased to share the following interview with Scott Fitzgerald Johnson. Johnson is the author or coauthor of several works on late antiquity and the cult of saints including the newly released Miracle Tales from Byzantium. This volume, which is part of the recently launched Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, includes Johnson’s English translation of the fifth-century Miracles of Saint Thekla (alongside two Byzantine miracle collections translated by Dr. Alice-Mary Talbot). He is also the author of The Life and Miracles of Thekla, A Literary Study published by CHS and available in print via HUP. This busy scholar recently took the time to speak with us about his research, the relationship between ancient Greek hero cult and the early Christian cult of saints, and the “less acknowledged trends in Late Antiquity.” CHS: You've now published two works dealing with Thekla. Who is this saint and what drew you to study and translate the literature associated with her cult? SFJ: Thekla is a legendary female companion of St. Paul during his travels in Asia Minor (50s CE). I say legendary because there is no contemporary historical evidence for her life. Her fame arose during the late second century, as shown by a famous piece of Christian apocrypha called the Acts of Paul and Thekla (c.180 CE). The fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla rewrites this original Acts of Paul and Thekla into a high Greek style and adds a new text of forty-six miracles contemporary to the fifth-century that Thekla worked posthumously. I was attracted to this work because it encapsulates to me what was happening to literature in eastern Late Antiquity: Greek writers were looking back for inspiration to classical and early Christian models, but were also engaging new forms of literature like the saint's life and the miracle collection. It was for me the best of both worlds, classical/early Christian and late antique/Byzantine. My translation of the Miracles half of this text is available in the new Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series (the "medieval Loeb"). I worked with Alice-Mary Talbot, former director of Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks, who translated two later miracle collections (Pege and Gregory Palamas). All three translations (with accompanying Greek text) appear together in Miracle Tales from Byzantium. Read more
We are pleased to highlight the following publications and resources which offer fresh perspectives on the theme of classical education in all its multiforms. To access these resources and more, visit CHS online at chs.harvard.edu. Image: detail from The School of Athens, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City, by Raphael [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Online Publications Leonard Muellner, Classics@ Vol. 3, "Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research" Working from Benveniste's idea that the study of Homeric vocabulary is still in its infancy, Muellner describes a way to do research on Homer and then shows how to work inductively, rebuilding the categories of thought and expression from within the epic world. Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece Calame's ground-breaking work 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. Read more
New in Online Publications Gregory Nagy is a renowned authority in the field of Homeric and related Greek studies and has written almost one hundred articles and reviews. In Short Writings, Volumes 1 and 2, we have collected together in digital form almost thirty of his most influential works. Many of these articles have been expanded or updated since their original publication. See below for contents and details. The links provided lead directly to the full text on the CHS website. Short Writings, Volume 1 "The Aeolic Component in Homeric Diction." Expanded online edition of an article originally published in 2011 in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference (ed. S. W. Jamison, H.C. Melchert, B. Vine) 133–179. Bremen: Ute Hempen Verlag. Copyright, Ute Hempen Verlag. "'Dream of a Shade': Refractions of Epic Vision in Pindar’s Pythian 8 and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes." 2012 online version of an article that originally appeared in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000) 97–118. Published here by permission of Harvard University Press. Copyright, Harvard University Press. "Epic." 2010 online version of an essay that originally appeared as Chapter 1 of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (ed. R. Eldridge; Oxford 2009) 19-44. Copyright, Oxford University Press. Read more
We recently had a chance to talk with Anna Bonifazi about her research, Homeric diction, and her new book, Homer's Verisicolored Fabric: The Evocative Power of Ancient Greek Epic Wordmaking. CHS: Your book examines two main subjects: 1) the pronominalization of Odysseus as ἐκεῖνος and as αὐτός 2) the treatment of particles and adverbs deriving from αὐ- and from αὐτός with a focus on the notion of discourse markers. Why was it important to consider these two subjects together? Bonifazi: There is a specific and a general reason. The specific one is that the au- adverbs I discuss and autos share some discourse functions (which supports the hypothesis that autos derives from *au-, by the way); sometimes grammatical distinctions do not help identifying cognate significances. The general reason is that both groups of words are particularly sensitive to the context of their utterance; far from having a stable (univocal) meaning, they contribute, together with their verbal environs, to signal different communicative intentions, a situation which prompts purposive rather than mechanical usages. Read more
