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
[[The following text is adapted from a lecture given at the 9th Arthur and Mary Platsis Symposium, which was held on November 7, 2010 at the University of Michigan on the occasion of the retirement of H. Don Cameron. Portions of the text may be quoted without permission provided credit is given. The text is still a work in progress.]] Wars—all wars, I believe—are extreme cases of a much wider… Read more
[[This essay was originally published in Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (eds. D. Heiland and L. J. Rosenthal).]] In memory of Robert F. Goheen The editors of the volume have posed powerful questions, ones that go to the heart of the experience of reading and teaching literature. Are those experiences so “sublime” that they are beyond systematic analysis? Are they “ineffable?” The author of the ancient… Read more
[[This essay was originally published in Classical World 104.4 (2011) 483–493.]] [1] ABSTRACT: What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—“We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life”? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person… Read more
[[This article was first published in 1994 in Mètis: Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens 9–10:11–25. In this online version, the original pagination will be indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{11|12}” indicates where p. 11 of the original article ends and p. 12 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made in previous scholarship to the original printed version of this… Read more
Madness—The Complexity of Morals in the Light of Myth and Cult So far, we have seen how mythical parallels function as a kind of commentary, marking sacrilege as such. Now we will have a look at a group of sacrilegious acts that are connected with madness. They, too, have parallels with mythical paradigms, but are also connected to a ritual phenomenon: cultic ecstasy—a dimension which makes the cases in question… Read more
