back Jennifer Kellogg In his 1963 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, poet George Seferis commented upon a multi-faceted sense of connection that Homeric Greek offers to modern speakers of the language, saying: When I read in Homer the simple words “φάος ἠελίοιο” – today I would say “φως του ηλίου” (the sunlight) – I experience a familiarity that stems from a collective soul rather than from an intellectual… Read more
back Marianne Hopman, Northwestern University Gregory Nagy is well known for his path-breaking work on the performative dimension of archaic Greek poetry. Several of his books, including The Best of the Achaeans, Pindar’s Homer, and most explicitly Poetry as Performance, unravel the rich implications of a fundamental intuition rooted in the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord—namely, that the cultural products transmitted to us as the texts of… Read more
back Gloria Ferrari Explaining the subtitle to his Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Gregory Nagy wrote: [1] I chose the word possession because the preoccupation of Greek poetry with the application of the past to the here and now is in itself an exercise of political power. This arresting programmatic statement looks forward in the chapters that follow to the… Read more
back Lowell Edmunds When this paper was composed, in 2005, and delivered, on a September day, in Molyvos (ancient Methymna), I could not have guessed its ultimate destination—this Festschrift—and its dedicatee—my friend Gregory Nagy. The many references to Greg’s work to be found here did not begin, then, as honorific. They reflected a habit of thinking about archaic Greek poetry in ways learned from him. This habit goes back… Read more
back Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott We have worked closely with Greg Nagy since we were graduate students at Harvard, and each of us wrote her dissertation under his direction. Already at that time we also worked closely with each other; we worked together as Teaching Fellows for Greg’s large Core Curriculum course entitled The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization, and we team taught a junior tutorial… Read more
back Stamatia Dova To a true mentor Both psychology and common experience consider mentorship a process pivotal for the development and character formation of a young person. [1] Mentor and mentee are supposed to gravitate towards each other based on compatibility and social convention, forging a bond that resembles the one between parent and child. [2] In many ways,… Read more
back Matthew Clark for Gregory Nagy Hyrnetho is the heroine of rival local traditions of Argos and Epidauros. Pausanias has recorded a fairly full account of the story of Hynetho, and she is mentioned briefly by several other ancient authors, but she is certainly not one of the major figures of Greek tradition. Her story, however, is interesting in itself, and it leads to a number of questions with… Read more
back Anna Bonifazi, University of Heidelberg ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ Sure, the best is water Pindar Olympian I 1 Nagy (2009) identifies one of the esthetic values associated with the reflections of Homeric poetry in later authoritative voices of Greek and Latin literature as the “esthetics of fluidity.” The flow of narration/poetry is often depicted as the flow of tears or drops of water, whose source produces impermanent and… Read more
back Ellen Bradshaw Aitken Introduction [1] In the Greek and Roman worlds, the veneration of those called “heroes” and specifically of dead heroes was a highly localized religious phenomenon. Centered on tombs or other burial sites, the cult practices of devotion to a hero draw our attention to the highly localized character of much traditional religious practice around the ancient Mediterranean. In this way,… Read more
back Richard Sacks, Columbia University Deep in the underworld of Odyssey 11, the poem pauses at lines 119-137 to tell its audience of Odysseus telling his Phaiakian audience of Teiresias telling our hero that even after the conclusion of all his efforts, he will still be faced with the post-νόστος necessity of coming to terms with Poseidon, and of doing so in a place defined by “sea-lessness,” a feature… Read more
