The Center for Hellenic Studies

PUBLICATIONS

Donum natalicium

La crise selon l’Iliade

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

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VINGT ANS POUR ULYSSE, VINGT ANS POUR HÉLÈNE

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

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Did the Helen of the Homeric Odyssey ever go to Troy?

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

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Iliad 6.201: Did Bellerophon Wander Blindly?

back Edward Lowry In a famous and favorite episode in Iliad 6.119–236, Diomedes and Glaucus meet as enemies, interact as storytellers, and depart as guest-friends bonded by an amazing exchange of armor. Yet for all the episode’s appeal and intrigue, scholars writing from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end generally see no particular unity therein; “inorganic” is a frequent descriptor. This study will attempt to delineate… Read more

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Orestes in Skopje: The Macedonian Oresteia of Milcho Manchevski

back David F. Elmer Prologue Largely as a result of the support and encouragement of Greg Nagy, I spent about a year, from mid-1998 to mid-1999, in Croatia. The scars from the recent war were still fresh, but by the time of my arrival there was a palpable sense that the new nation was at last leaving behind the turmoil of the early ’90s. Still, there were reminders that… Read more

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The Mosque That Wasn’t There: Ethnographic Elaborations on Orthodox Conceptions of Sacrifice

back Dimitris Antoniou From the beginning of the 1990’s thousands of Muslim immigrants started to settle in Athens, at a time when the Greek economy had begun to prosper and the prospect of greater European integration was looming (Antoniou 2003). This was a time of great optimism marked by the beginning of a Greco-Turkish rapprochement, the rise of the stock market and the vision of the Athens 2004 Olympic… Read more

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A Letter from Dale Sinos

back Dear Greg, Happy birthday and best wishes as you reach an august age. I am not so far behind you in years and so we can remember a few highlights of a couple of young men in Baltimore in the mid-Seventies. I was lucky enough to have you as my dissertation director at Johns Hopkins during your relatively short time there. It was not every director who would… Read more

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From Greek Lyric to Rap Song: A New Swiss Sappho? (An Impertinent Comparison)

back Claude Calame, Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; translation by James Kierstead, Stanford University Comparative analysis has always been one of the foundation stones of cultural and social anthropology, of both historical and synchronic approaches. During the eighteenth century, encounters between missionaries and “savages” in the New World prompted European scholars to embark upon the comparative analysis of the customs of the classical Athenians. Grounding this comparative… Read more

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Speech Genres in the Twelfth-Century Latin Historical Epics of Italy

back Henry Bayerle, Oxford College of Emory University 1. Speech Genres and Rhetorical Analysis The purpose of this paper is to describe the speeches of Medieval Latin historical epic in terms of speech genre. Generic expectations informed the reading and writing of poetry in Antiquity, as Francis Cairns illustrated in 1972 in his Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry. Shared knowledge provided ancient readers a system of logical… Read more

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Can You Take the Hellenic out of the Panhellenic? The Case of Zhou China

back Alexander J. Beecroft, University of South Carolina Like many teaching fellows in “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization” before and after me, I recall discussing with my students one of the key phenomena which Gregory Nagy elucidates for his students, and for his scholarly readers: the phenomenon of Panhellenic culture, where that strange assemblage of democracies and tyrannies, oligarchies and monarchies that is the Archaic and… Read more