Odyssey

Curated Articles

Diachronic Homer and a Cretan Odyssey

2017.06.10 [The online version of this presentation as published here on the website of the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Diachronic_Homer_and_a_Cretan_Odyssey.2017, replicates the contents of another online version as published in Oral Tradition 31/1 (2017) 3–50. The proper URL citation for that version is  http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/31i/nagy. I am most grateful to the Editor of Oral Tradition for giving permission to the CHS to publish a replicated version. The differences… Read more

Curated Articles

Signs of Hero Cult in Homeric Poetry

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

Curated Books

Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems

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

Curated Articles

The Homer Multitext Project

[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

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 Books

El espejo de las Musas: El arte de la descripción en la Ilíada y Odisea

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

Curated Articles

The Plot of Zeus

[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

Curated Books

Homeric Responses

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

Curated Articles

Reading Bakhtin Reading the Classics: An Epic Fate for Conveyors of the Heroic Past

[[Originally published in Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. R. B. Branham (Evanston IL 2002) 71-96. (The page-numbers of the printed version are embedded within brackets in this electronic version: for example, {71|72} marks where p. 71 stops and p. 72 begins.)]] In the title of my essay, there is no punctuation between reading Bakhtin and reading the Classics because there is meant to be no break in the syntax. In… Read more

Curated Books

Homer’s Text and Language

As Homer remains an indispensable figure in the canons of world literature, interpreting the Homeric text is a challenging and high stakes enterprise. There are untold numbers of variations, imitations, alternate translations, and adaptations of the Iliad and Odyssey, making it difficult to establish what, exactly, the epics were. Gregory Nagy’s essays have one central aim: to show how the text and language of Homer derive from an oral poetic system.  In Homeric studies,… Read more