G-R-E-G-0-R-Y N-A-G-Y

Maureen N. McLane

I first encountered “Gregory Nagy” as an orally-transmitted and recomposed meme, circulating widely at Harvard and beyond. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I would hear of this remarkable professor and his famous Core Course, “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization”—also known, fondly and incorrectly, as “Heroes for Zeros.” I never took Greg’s course, but I entered Currier House at Harvard just as he and Holly Davidson became Co-Masters of that House, and thus began a long friendship marked by Greg’s extraordinary intellectual and personal generosity. His conversation and his articles and books, as I read them in coming years, transformed my thinking about poetry and poetics—in areas seemingly far from archaic Greece or classical antiquity. But there is nothing Greg’s thinking does not touch: over the years I have found his work cited in musicological articles, ballad scholarship, historical anthropology, and books on contemporary poetry and the performed word (see Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening, 1998). Greg is the maven of meter, the raja of rhythm, the master of the marked and unmarked, the singer of the synchronic, the doyen of the diachronic, the king of kleos; he is also an excellent a capella singer and a badass at aerobics, as anyone who lived at Currier House can attest. He, with Holly, made Currier the “great good place” Harvard wishes to be; at the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and at The Center for Hellenic Studies, he has transformed communities through his vision, energy, and generosity. Though he is obviously incomparable, he consorts with us lesser mortals as if he were one of us. For me, as for so many others, he has made the journey of and in thought so much more companionable and so much more brilliantly lit. He has both (re)made and moved the song, and will continue to.

(after John Cage’s Mesostics for Merce)

(after John Cage’s Writing Through the Cantos)

for Gregory Nagy, a provisional tyranny of the letter

§1. GREek poetry. More Generally, Non-ClAssicists as well as Classicists (that is, those who study Greek and Roman antiquitY).

§2. GREek poetry in the archaic period, most notably the Hesiodic Theo G ony

§2. aNd Works A nd Days and the Homeric Hymns, especially the Apollo, the Demeter, and the Aphrodite. Other related poetic forms include the praise poetry of Pindar and the blame poetry of Archilochus. The readinGs are infused with references to non-canonical traditions as well, especiallY

§3. readiNgs is to understAnd simultaneously the form as well as the content of a wide variety of traditional media conveying various basic concepts of the ancient Greek hero. The most basic of all these concepts is a single all-pervasive historical fact of the archaic period and beYond:

§3. sonG, poetRy, and prose with the ancEstral practices of a wide variety of hero-cults (Introduction§16–19). More Generally,

§3. geNerAlly, it explores the heroic tradition within the cultural context of Panhellenism, to be defined as an early form of Hellenism that eventually became the nucleus of Classicism (Introduction§13–15).

§4. The Best of the Achaeans wIntroduction§16–19as completed in 1978 and first published in 1979. Now, twenty years later, I have a chance to revisit. The present foreword highlights the specifics of what has chanGed and what remains stable.

§5. I start with the main points of consistencY.

§5. “archaeoloGical,” adding to the geneRal argumEntation only the essentials for supplementinG

§5. kNew twenty years AGo. I have preserved the original text and page-numbering of the 1979 edition for the introduction and for all the chapters as well as the appendix. The BibliographY

§5. “archaeoloGical” stance, concentRating on rEsearch that directly follows up on the arGuments

§1. GREek poetry is based on two major workinG

§1. assumptioNs. One, the mechAnics and artistry of a Given poem are traditional not onlY

§2. understandinG of GREek poetic diction is the work of Milman Parry on Homeric phraseoloGy,

§2. caN be summed up in his concise definition of the formulA: “a Group of words which is regularlY

§2. Given essential idea.”[1] The mechanical natuRe of the formula is rEflected by what Parry called the principle of economy. [2] Denys PaGe

§1. Not only to define the hero but to Articulate this very power. In my search for evidence in support of such a claim–and this search will extend throuGhout mY

§1. preseNtation—I will of course hAve to struGgle with the overwhelming dimensions of the Iliad and the Od Y ssey

§1. aN Appropriate place to beGin. How to approach two such monumental compositions, representing as theY

§1. vantaGe point from which we aRe allowEd an instant Glimpse

§2. dialoGue oR dialoguE-within-dialoGue

§2. seeminGly neveR–EndinG

§2. GREek epic delivers the narrative directly in the persona of the poet. The invokinG of the Muses at the start of a Greek epic is the tag of the poet’s owN performAnce. The immediacy of performance, however, is counterbalanced by an attitude of remoteness from composition. The performer feels himself distant enough to intimate that the message of his composition comes not from him but from tradition. As the poet tells the Muses before he launches into the Catalo G ue of Ships:

You

(after John Cage’s Writing Through the Cantos)

for Gregory Nagy, more tyranny