The Center for Hellenic Studies

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Curated Articles

Achilles and Patroclus as Indo-European Twins: Homer’s Take

[Forthcoming in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, edited by Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).] There are two forms of the Indo-European twin myth relevant to the story of Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad. In one the twins remain together, in the other they separate. The Greek Dioscuri remain together, and the dynamic between them is the following: Castor, who is mortal,… Read more

Curated Articles

Gli horoi rupestri dell’attica

CHS/DAI Joint Fellow La vexata quaestio dei confini demici Un interessante ed alquanto nutrito dibattito si è svolto ed è tuttora in corso nel tentativo di definire con maggior precisione quale fosse l’effettiva natura dei demi clistenici. L’opinione predominante è che, nel compiere la sua riorganizzazione politica dell’Attica, Clistene immaginò essenzialmente una divisione di tipo territoriale e di conseguenza creò i demi frazionando la regione in tante unità separate e… Read more

Donum natalicium

Tribute to Our Bátyánk

back Blaise, Michael, and Joseph Nagy Older brothers are usually cast as inconsequential foils or second-tier villains in the world of folktales. They fail where the youngest brother succeeds, and in their resentment of the latter’s success they may even go so far as to try to prevent that brother from reaching his “happily ever after.” The relationship between brothers in the realm of epic, on the other hand,… Read more

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New Content

Odysseus Traditions and the τέλος of the Odyssey 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… Read more

Curated Articles

Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri

[This essay was originally published in 2000 in Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 64:7–28. The page numbers of the original publication have been placed within braces ‘{ }’, so that {7|8} indicates the page break between p. 7 and p. 8.] Ancient scholarship on the songs of Bacchylides, as revealed by the visual formatting of these songs in papyri, reveals much that has been neglected by modern Classical scholars. Most… Read more