Editors: Elizabeth Gipson, Angelia Hanhardt (2016–2021), and Keith DeStone Web producer: Noel Spencer Consultant for images: Jill Curry Robbins Jump to: Iliad Rhapsody 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,… Read more
Brandeis University [This work was originally published in Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, eds. Franco Montanari, Antonios Rengakos, Christos Tsagalis, pp.197-220. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2012.] My point of departure is the scholarly work of my late friend and colleague, Steven Lowenstam. His book, As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art, which was published posthumously by Johns… Read more
Originally published in Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry (ed. F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, and C. Tsagalis) 27–71. Trends in Classics Supplementary Volume 12. Berlin and Boston 2012. The page-numbers of the printed version are embedded within brackets in this electronic version: for example, {27|28} marks where p. 27 stops and p. 28 begins. Introduction to the main argument This essay centers on the ancient Greek practice… Read more
Anger is central to the Homeric epic, but few scholarly interventions have probed Homer’s language beyond the study of the Iliad’s first word: menis. Yet Homer uses over a dozen words for anger. Fighting Words and Feuding Words engages the powerful tools of Homeric poetic analysis and the anthropological study of emotion in an analysis of two anger terms highlighted in the Iliad by the Achaean prophet Calchas. Walsh argues that kotos and kholos locate two focal points for the study… Read more
[Forthcoming in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, edited by Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).] Twinning in myth is a way to think about identity. As Douglas Frame shows in his essay, which is a twin to this one, mythical twins share one identity, but this identity is differentatiated. [1] That is, the fused identity of mythical twins… Read more
[Forthcoming in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, edited by Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).] There are two forms of the Indo-European twin myth relevant to the story of Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad. In one the twins remain together, in the other they separate. The Greek Dioscuri remain together, and the dynamic between them is the following: Castor, who is mortal,… Read more
[This paper was originally published in Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come. Proceedings of the Mellon Foundation Online Humanities Conference at the University of Virginia March 26-28, 2010, edited by Jerome McGann with Andrew Stauffer, Dana Wheeles, and Michael Pickard, pp. 87-112. Rice University Press 2010.] Introduction The Homer Multitext project is published by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer_multitext, and see especially the link project components). Read more
The subject of this book, which is an amplified version of the author’s MA thesis, is the art of description in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The art of description, or ekphrasis, is studied initially in general, seen in conjunction with such basic Homeric issues as formulaic language and similes, but via discussions on Homeric descriptions of nature and agriculture, the book ends up studying Homeric descriptions of arts and… Read more
[This article first appeared in French as “L’intrigue de Zeus,” in Europe 79 (no. 865, May 2001), 120-158. In this online version, the original page-numbers will be indicated within brackets (“{“ and “}”). For example, “{51 | 52}” indicates where p. 51 of the original article ends and p. 52 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made in previous scholarship to the… Read more
The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are among the world’s foremost epics. Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer—a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems composed—at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it. Read more
