The Center for Hellenic Studies

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Hellenic Studies Series

Blemished Kings: Suitors in the Odyssey, Blame Poetics, and Irish Satire

Each of the suitors in the Odyssey is eager to become the king of Ithaca by marrying Penelope and disqualifying Telemachus from his rightful royal inheritance. Their words are contentious, censorious, and intent on marking Odysseus’ son as unfit for kingship. However, in keeping with other reversals in the Odyssey, it is the suitors who are shown to be unfit to rule. In Blemished Kings, Andrea Kouklanakis interprets the language of the suitors—their fighting words—as Homeric… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody

Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different options for performative pause—a phonetic phenomenon evidenced by phonology. From the ubiquitous compositional pauses in sense and metrical surface structure, Audible… Read more

Curated Books

ὀπάων and ὀπάζω: A Study in the Epic Treatment of Heroic Relationships

“In the Iliad, the relationship of Mērionēs and Idomeneus plays a peripheral role as compared to the central relationship of Akhilleus and Patroklos. As we shall see, the behavior of Mērionēs and Idomeneus towards one another is a variation on the theme of the heroic relationship of Akhilleus and Patroklos. The Iliad also describes the relations of gods and men. The antagonism of Akhilleus and Apollo is set against the backdrop of gods… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Greek Language, Italian Landscape: Griko and the Re-storying of a Linguistic Minority

This book is about Salentine Greek—or simply Griko—a language of Greek origins transmitted orally from generation to generation in Salento, in the Apulian province of Lecce, the ‘heel’ of the boot of Italy. Its pool of speakers started shrinking after the contact that had once existed with Greece receded in the fifteenth century; interestingly, ever since the Italian linguist Giuseppe Morosi ‘discovered’ Griko in the middle of the nineteenth century, the… Read more

Curated Books

Phraseologie und indogermanische Dichtersprache in der Sprache der griechischen Chorlyrik: Pindar und Bakchylides

The subject of this work is the phraseology and poetic language that are documented in Pindar (518-446 BC) and Bakchylides (516-452 BC), have parallels in other poetic traditions, and can in part prove to be inherited. Phraseology is the way in which phraseological units (individual words or groups of words) are combined in the oral or written language. In any study of phraseology, the first thing to consider is how… Read more

Curated Articles

Observations on Greek dialects in the late second millennium BCE

[This text is the English-language version of a lecture I delivered 2011.04.06 on the occasion of my induction as a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens. The lecture was then published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Athens in 2011, Volume 86 Second Issue (2011) pages 81–96. It is republished here with the permission of the Academy. The original pagination of the article will be indicated in this… Read more

Curated Books

The meaning of Homeric εὔχομαι through its formulas

Eukhomai had been glossed traditionally as “pray, long for, wish for; vow, promise; boast, brag, vaunt; profess, declare.” Muellner’s approach is to make a systematic analysis of the constraints in which this word is used in Homeric texts—grammatical, stylistic, and contextual—and to compare them, keeping in mind the framework of traditional diction, in which “a traditional poet uses a repertoire of formulas and themes to express his meaning.” Second online edition… Read more

Curated Articles

Language and Meter

[This essay is an online second edition of an original printed version that appeared as Chapter 25 in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (ed. E. J. Bakker; Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World 2010) 370-387. In this online second edition, the original page-numbers of the first edition will be indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{371|372}” indicates where p. 371 of the first edition ends and… Read more

Curated Books

Indo-European Language and Society

Translated from the French by Elizabeth Palmer, this online edition has been revised and updated by Jeremy Lin, Jacqueline Lewandowski, and Vergil Parson. “This work belongs in a bountiful tradition. Less than a decade after Devoto’s Origini indeuropee, Benveniste, leaving aside most apparatus but ever so supremely in control of the data, has produced a classic. We may see it as a collection of monographs or as the systematic work… Read more