The Center for Hellenic Studies

reception
Curated Books

La isla de los antípodas – Tradición clásica y poetas cubanos contemporáneos: Luis R. Nogueras, Delfín Prats, José Triana y Magali Alabau

RESUMEN Este trabajo explora la tradición clásica en la poesía de los autores cubanos Luis R. Nogueras (1944-1985), Delfín Prats (1945), José Triana (1931-2018) y Magali Alabau (1945). Tras la introducción, se presenta un breve marco teórico donde se señalan los presupuestos de la disciplina que dan lugar al planteamiento utilizado (capítulo1), y una breve historia de la tradición clásica en Cuba, con énfasis en hechos determinantes para la formación de… Read more

Curated Books

Plato’s Severed Lovers: Alkibiades and Sokrates

The Symposium’s tale of Alkibiades and Sokrates and its historical implications—of war and philosophy, of a shattered imperial democracy and a god-like leader driven out for supposed impiety and assassinated in exile, as well as a trial and execution of a philosopher for impiety and dissent—is dramatic in its own right. But its large and continuing public significance is only understandable in the context of some unexpected debates about Plato …… Read more

Curated Articles

A poetics of sisterly affect in the Brothers Song and in other songs of Sappho

[The online version of my essay as published here, dated 2015.09.08, matches a printed version published in The Newest Sappho (P. Obbink and P. GC Inv. 105, frs. 1-5), edited by Anton Bierl and André Lardinois, Leiden: Brill, 2016. I am grateful to the editors of that volume for securing permission from Brill for me to present this online version, which is longer than the printed version. The difference in length… Read more

Curated Articles

The earliest phases in the reception of the Homeric Hymns

This is an electronic version of the printed version published 2011 in The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays (edited by Andrew Faulkner) 280-333, Oxford University Press. The page-numbers of the printed version are embedded within braces in this electronic version: for example, {280|281} marks where p. 280 stops and p. 281 begins. Introduction It has been argued that Hesiodic poetry, like Homeric poetry, contains references to four aspects of oral poetry:… Read more

Curated Articles

Great Expectations: The Expected and the Unexpected in Thucydides and in Liberal Education

[[The following text is adapted from a lecture given at the 9th Arthur and Mary Platsis Symposium, which was held on November 7, 2010 at the University of Michigan on the occasion of the retirement of H. Don Cameron. Portions of the text may be quoted without permission provided credit is given. The text is still a work in progress.]] Wars—all wars, I believe—are extreme cases of a much wider… Read more

Curated Articles

The Pygmies in the Cage: The Function of the Sublime in Longinus

[[This essay was originally published in Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (eds. D. Heiland and L. J. Rosenthal).]] In memory of Robert F. Goheen The editors of the volume have posed powerful questions, ones that go to the heart of the experience of reading and teaching literature. Are those experiences so “sublime” that they are beyond systematic analysis? Are they “ineffable?” The author of the ancient… Read more

Curated Articles

We Must Call the Classics before a Court of Shipwrecked Men

[[This essay was originally published in Classical World 104.4 (2011) 483–493.]] [1] ABSTRACT: What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—“We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life”? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person… Read more

Curated Articles

The ‘New Sappho’ Reconsidered in the Light of the Athenian Reception of Sappho

[[This article was originally published as chapter 13 (= pp. 176-199) in E. Greene and M. Skinner, eds., 2010, The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues (Washington DC and Cambridge MA). It also appears in the online journal Classics@ Volume 4, edited by Ellen Greene and Marilyn Skinner. In this online version, the original page-numbers of the
 printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For… 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

Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism

Late Antiquity has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. As a historical period it has thus far been defined by the transformation of Roman institutions, the emergence of distinct religious cultures (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), and the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval and early modern Europe. Despite all this, the study of late antique literary culture is still in its infancy, especially for the Greek and other… Read more