myth

Curated Books

Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey

Beginning with a diagnosis of the current state of American classical philology, John Peradotto proceeds to concentrate on textual practices of naming and narrating in the Odyssey from a perspective that blends traditional philological with semiotic and narratological techniques. What emerges from this reading is a view of the poem as a tense opposition between “myth” and “folktale,” recognized as vehicles for contrasting ideological opinions on the world. With terms… Read more

Curated Articles

A ritualized rethinking of what it meant to be ‘European’ for ancient Greeks of the post-heroic age: evidence from the Heroikos of Philostratus

[[This essay was originally published in 2019 as chapter 12 of Thinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honour of James M. Redfield, eds. Bruce M. King and Lillian Doherty, 173–187. It has been made available by permission of Routledge Publishers. In this online version, the original page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{173|174}” indicates where p. 173 of the printed version ends… Read more

Curated Articles

Review of Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer (London: Allen Lane, 2008)

[This article is a draft of a review later published in Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011) 166–169 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426911000127). Page numbers for that publication have been added in curly brackets. For instance, {166|167} indicates the break between pages 166 and 167.] For the author (hereafter LF), the ‘epic age of Homer’ is the 8th c. (here and hereafter, all dates are BCE). The word ‘travelling’ refers to… Read more

Curated Books

The Origins of the Goddess Ariadne

Second, online edition of a thesis presented to the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors, Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 27 March 1970. Read more

Curated Articles

Grieving Achilles

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

Curated Articles

Foreword to Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, by Nicole Loraux. Trans. Selina Stewart. Cornell University Press, 2000.

[In this online version, the original page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{vii|viii}” indicates where p. vii of the printed version ends and p. viii begins.] This new book by Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth : Myth and Politics in Athens, [1] is a sequel to The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the… Read more

Curated Articles

Asopos and his multiple daughters: Traces of preclassical epic in the Aeginetan Odes of Pindar

This is an electronic version of Chapter 1 of Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry. Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC (ed. David Fearn; Oxford 2011) 41–78. The original pagination of the chapter will be indicated in this electronic version by way of braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{41|42}” indicates where p. 41 of the printed chapter ends and p. 42 begins. Introduction The Aeginetan odes… Read more

Curated Books

Mythical Structures in Herodotus’ Histories

Abridged translation of Mythische Erzählstrukturen in Herodots “Historien”, published in 2011 by De Gruyter. Herodotus is often criticised for his mythical representation of historical events. However, this offers an important key to the understanding of the text. Starting with the reconstruction of a contemporary mythical-ritual framework, in her reading of the Histories Katharina Wesselmann uses the associative content of the traditional themes of iniquity, madness, trickery and transition which underpin the Histories. In… Read more

Curated Books

The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic

“The main argument of this book is that the connection suggested by Homer between the ‘wiles’ and the ‘wanderings’ of Odysseus in fact rested upon an earlier tradition both significant and deep. The origin of this tradition has to do with the etymology of the Greek word nóos, ‘mind’, which I propose to connect with the Greek verb néomai, ‘return home’. Such an effort requires that nóos be reconstructed as… Read more

Curated Articles

A Structural Analysis of the Meleagros Myth

[[This paper, published here for the first time, is based on a report for a seminar directed by Gregory Nagy and held at the Johns Hopkins University in the fall semester of 1973.]] Claude Lévi-Strauss, in works like The Raw and the Cooked (1970), has shown that attempts to analyze the structure of a given myth using the themes of only one or even of a few versions is unlikely… Read more