Online Publication of The Power of Thetis by Laura Slatkin

The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce that the online edition of Laura Slatkin’s The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays is now available on the CHS website (chs.harvard.edu). This influential and widely admired book explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis’s place in the thematic structure of the Iliad. This second edition also includes six additional essays, which cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic.
Gregory Nagy says, “Laura Slatkin’s book on Thetis, divine mother of the hero Achilles, represents a quantum leap in our understanding of myth as reshaped by Homeric poetry. Professor Slatkin shows that the Iliad, while remaining faithful to the religious underpinnings of the myth, at the same time integrates the narrative seamlessly into the overall structure of the epic.”
The collected essays in this work include “Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey,” “Measuring Authority, Authoritative Measures: Hesiod’s Works and Days,” and “Remembering Nicole Loraux Remembering Athens.”
Overall this volume studies ancient Greek mythology and poetics as a dynamic and interconnected system.  Slatkin’s nuanced readings offer access to this system by highlighting the role of allusion and revealing the ongoing dialogue between poetic traditions. The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays will prove valuable to students and scholars of Homer, Hesiod, mythology, and ancient Greek poetics.
This volume is also available in print via Harvard University Press. Related scholarship on the CHS website includes Douglas Frame’s Hippota Nestor, Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic, and Zeus in the Odyssey by J. Marks.