back Laura Slatkin One of the works most widely circulated in antiquity was an extensive hexameter poem that since then has had few admirers or advocates—and not many critics, either. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, largely because of the fragmentary condition in which it has survived to us, discouraged sustained attention, and certainly interpretive speculation, until recent decades. [1] Nothing about the Catalogue is… Read more
back Thomas E. Jenkins I think it’s commonplace for every teacher of Greek to say that they’ve learned Greek twice: once as a student, then again as the teacher, barely keeping one step ahead of the pupils. When I first accepted the position as Teaching Fellow in Greg’s flagship Core Course at Harvard—The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization—little did I realize that I would not only learn… Read more
back Soo-Young Kim For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. — Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” Philology is that venerable art which demands… Read more
back Roger Travis Parts of this essay have appeared in serialized form on the blog Play the Past. Introduction This essay serves three purposes: first, to review the posts of my Rules of the Text (Travis 2012a-e) series on the blog Play the Past, and to recapitulate their argument and its relation to the two examples that have dominated the series: the fantasy novelfranchise A Song of Ice and… Read more
back Yiannis (J.C.B.) Petropoulos In Greece the cicada fills the air every summer with his piercing, reassuring, significant symphony (not haphazard cacophony; the ancients quite cherished his song, and Hesiod in Works and Days 582 ff. clearly discerned its meaning!). Trusty tettix is a midsummer messenger, an angelos of the harvest and other seasonal drudgery crowned by rich reward— (optimally) a heaping cereal crop and grapes galore. In modern… Read more
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
back Nikos Panou Introduction Early in 1799, the Epirot merchant Alexandros Vasileiou settled in Paris. [1] Already within a few weeks, he found himself engaged not only in a variety of commercial activities but also in an effort to establish a network of connections among the Parisian intelligentsia. [2] Thus, it was shortly after his arrival to the French… Read more
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
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
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
