The Center for Hellenic Studies

Odyssey
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

Live Stream, Online Event

Kyklos 2023

23 June 2023, 8:00 am ET

Kyklos is a program that represents an ever-regenerated discourse on the Greek Epic Cycle (Greek Kyklos) and it is devoted to new and developing scholarship on the subject. 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

Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics

This text first considers the character of Penelope from the Odyssey as the object of male gazes and as a subject acting from her own desire, and then it develops the notion of “possible plots” as structures in the poem that co-exist with the plots Penelope actually plays out. “This book explores Homer’s construction of the character of Penelope, and his more general theory of poetic production and reception. Read more

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

Athena among the Phaeacians

Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC [This lecture was presented on April 29, 2015 at the Conference Room of the Athens Archaeological Society. It was sponsored by Center for Odyssean Studies and is made available here by their permission. Click here to download a PDF of the handout that was distributed at the lecture.] In Book 13 of the Odyssey the Phaeacians bring a sleeping Odysseus to the shores… Read more

Curated Articles

Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship

[Originally published in The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion, ed. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis, 59-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. In this online version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within curly brackets (“{“ and “}”). For example, {69|70} indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look… Read more

Curated Articles

Nourriture(s) dans l’Odyssée: fruits, légumes et les oies de Pénélope

FALE-UFMG [This article was originally published 2009 in Nuntius antiquus, vol. 4, 162-180. The page-numbers of the printed version are embedded within curly brackets in this version: for example, {162|163} marks where p. 162 stops and p. 163 begins. The article appears here by courtesy of the author.] RESUMO: Este artigo apresenta e comenta três tipos de comida possível (as frutas, os legumes e os gansos de Penélope) que na… Read more