Homeric Nēpios
Online edition (2013) of a volume originally published in 1990 in the series Harvard Dissertations in Classics, by Garland Press. Read more
Books
Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter
Reversing the generally accepted notions about formula and meter in epic poetry, Gregory Nagy seeks to show that meter is an outgrowth of formula. To make his point he links the Parry-Lord techniques of formulaic analysis with the researches of Meillet, Jakobson, and Watkins on Indo-European metrics. In the process he evolves… Read more
Vico’s Prescient Evolutionary Model for Homer
This 2016 “born digital” work is an expanded edition of a publication that originally appeared May 11, 2010 on FirstDrafts@Classics@. Read more
The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic
Leonard Muellner’s goal is to restore the Greek word for the anger of Achilles, menis, to its social, mythical, and poetic contexts. His point of departure is the anthropology of emotions. He believes that notions of anger vary between cultures and that the particular meaning of a word such as… Read more
The Singer Resumes the Tale
Edited by Mary Louise Lord after the author’s death, The Singer Resumes the Tale focuses on the performance of stories and poems within settings that range from ancient Greek palaces to Latvian villages. Lord expounds and develops his approach to oral literature in this book, responds systematically for the first… Read more
The Descent of the Goddess: Ritual and Difference in Sappho’s Prayer to Aphrodite
Online edition of a thesis presented to the Department of the Classics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 1990. Read more
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition
Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half… Read more
The meaning of Homeric εὔχομαι through its formulas
Eukhomai had been glossed traditionally as “pray, long for, wish for; vow, promise; boast, brag, vaunt; profess, declare.” Muellner’s approach is to make a systematic analysis of the constraints in which this word is used in Homeric texts—grammatical, stylistic, and contextual—and to compare them, keeping in mind the framework of traditional… Read more
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours
The ancient Greeks’ concept of “the hero” was very different from what we understand by the term today, Gregory Nagy argues—and it is only through analyzing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and Herakles. In Greek tradition, a hero was a human, male or female, of the… Read more
The Singer of Tales
This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord’s classic work includes a unique enhancement: the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs taken during Milman Parry’s collecting… Read more