back Gregory Crane “Its bigger than all of us” – Gregory Nagy (on many occasions) Abstract Greek and Latin are foundational languages in the cultural heritage of humanity as a whole. Students of these languages have an opportunity—and arguably a primary obligation—to make sources in Greek and Latin advance a broader dialogue among civilizations. Such a shift in focus demands a shift in the intellectual culture of Greek and… Read more
back Stella Georgoudi École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Au début du chant XXII de l’Iliade, lorsque le terrible Achille, plein de fureur, impitoyable, se plante devant les portes de Troie, en menaçant la cité et ses habitants, Priam supplie son fils Hector de rentrer dans la ville et de ne pas s’obstiner à se battre avec ce rapide et violent guerrier. Dans sa longue supplication, le vieux… Read more
back Leonard Muellner A reminiscence, to begin with: of a dozen graduate students and Greg, meeting as usual, after a Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin class in “friendly” Lehman Hall, for coffee and talk; a hall the size of a railroad station waiting room, all of us on either side of one of a dozen long, rectangular tables that filled it, apart from a cafeteria line at one… Read more
back Ginan Rauf Introduction The first conversationalist was Socrates, who replaced this war of words by dialogue. Perhaps he did not invent dialogue, which was originally a Sicilian mime or puppet play, but he introduced the idea that individuals couldn’t be intelligent on their own, that they need someone else to stimulate them. Before him, the model of all speech was the monologue: the wise man or the god… Read more
back Alexander Herda, Berlin/Athens/Tübingen Though I know that I am serving here more or less owls on the cosmic plate to Greg, I nevertheless hope he will enjoy it. What I owe to his constant encouragement and help is of a much larger dimension. [*] The story of the wandering soul of Pythagoras In his description of the philosopher Pythagoras (c. 560–480 BCE), Diogenes… Read more
back Danielle Arnold Freedman My being born in a tiny coal-mining village in Warwickshire, England, Harvard may have seemed an unobvious destination. However, I had been primed for it from the start by a favourite Uncle who had escaped in the preceding generation, to Canada. Equally unobviously I did an undergraduate degree in Classics, faking Greek from scratch until I made it. In the University bookstore, “Chapter and Verse,”… Read more
back Laurie Hart Fieldnote, August 1995, Prespa, Macedonia, Greece I wake to the sounds of my landlady, Irini, and her husband Markos talking quietly in the kitchen. She’s boiling maize that Markos will use as bait on his fish hooks and preparing to bake an enormous carp (grivadi) that he fished this morning, for family expected to arrive today—Markos’s sister Anna and her husband Pandelis on their annual summer… Read more
back Catharine P. Roth Ada Adler, whom William Calder calls “incontestably the greatest woman philologist who ever lived,” [1] enjoyed the support of a mentor, Anders Bjørn Drachmann, who believed in what she could accomplish even though she did not have a regular university appointment. Gregory Nagy has been that kind of a mentor to many students, and so it seems appropriate to offer… Read more
back Nancy Sultan The year 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Administration and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ tenure as First Lady. [1] Now, Jacqueline, who died in 1994, is in the news again because a new book of her recorded interviews with the historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, came out in… Read more
back Aida Vidan, Harvard University From the time of the Homeric epics down to the period when Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered “new Homers” such as Avdo Međedović in the Slavic part of the Balkans, the epic tradition has captivated the attention of both scholars and audiences. By contrast, shorter lyric songs and ballads from the same region traditionally performed by women (and sometimes simply called “women’s songs,”… Read more
