Browsing by Author "Nagy, Gregory"
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About a defeat of the Centaurs, and how to imagine such an event in Olympia
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019-04-19)This posting, written 2019.04.19, picks up from where I left off in Classical Inquiries 2019.03.22, rewritten 2019.04.17. In the last paragraph of that posting, I focused on a myth that told about a defeat of the Centaurs, ... -
About a perfect start for a world-wide web of song
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-08-07)Homeric poetry, at a pivotal moment where it represents the making of Homeric poetry itself, pictures a blind singer of tales in the act of starting his song. The singer is shown in the act of ‘starting from a thread [oimē] ... -
About a scene pictured on the Bronze Doors of the Supreme Court, already pictured once upon a time on the Shield of Achilles
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-07-24)At the very beginning of my Introduction to The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, at 00§1, where I talk about the “great books” of Greek literature that I will be analyzing, I say that I will also be showing pictures, taken ... -
About Ann Bergren
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-05-18) -
About Aphrodite’s birds and her magical flowers in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-12-31)The goddess Aphrodite is linked with a variety of birds and flowers. In this essay, I ask myself: what is it that links her with her birds and her flowers in Song 1 of Sappho? I can answer with one word, magic. I mean, the ... -
About Euripides the anthropologist, and how he reads the troubled thoughts of female initiands
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University. Center for Hellenic Studies., 2021-02-20)I have long admired what I would call the anthropological insights of Euripides into aetiologies, that is, into myths referring directly to rituals that frame these myths. Of course the very idea of linking anthropology ... -
About Greek alētheia ‘truth’: Marcel Detienne challenges Martin Heidegger
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-10-11)In the book Sein und Zeit (1927) and in other works by Martin Heidegger, the etymology of the Greek word alētheia ‘truth’ is explained as a negativizing of the element lēth-, attested as the verb lanthanein, which is used ... -
About Greek Goddesses as Mothers or Would-Be Mothers
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-04-10)My essay here concentrates on myths about two Greek goddesses and on their roles as mothers or would-be mothers: (A) The first goddess is Hērā in her role as mother or would-be mother of a serpentine Titan by the name of ... -
About re-learning ideas I once learned from Roman Jakobson
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2017-02-09) -
About some kind of an epiphany as pictured in Minoan glyptic art, and about its relevance to a myth as retold by Pausanias
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-05-29)In this posting, I start by showing a sketch of a picture carved into a gold signet ring originating from the palace at Knossos in Crete and dating from the Late Minoan era. The sketch, in line with conventions followed ... -
About the Green Ray of Jules Verne and Eric Rohmer
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-10-28)It is summer. A young woman and a young man are sitting side by side at a beachfront, looking out toward the vast sea that is facing them. They aim their gaze westward, viewing what seems like an infinite stretch of water ... -
About three fair-haired Egyptian queens
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2015-08-19)In this posting for 2015.08.14, I return to an earlier posting, for 2015.07.15, where I concentrated on Poem 66 of Catullus. This poem, as we saw, is a remaking or even a “translation” of a poem of Callimachus known as the ... -
About what kinds of things we may learn about mythology by reading about rituals recorded by bureaucratic scribes
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019-11-22)This essay centers on a scribe working in the Mycenaean palace at Pylos who wrote a Greek-language text about protocols involving rituals. The scribe’s text, written on a tablet of clay in a form of writing known as Linear ... -
The Aeolic Component of Homeric Diction
Nagy, Gregory (Ute Hempen Verlag, 2011) -
Afterthoughts about Polycrates, Anacreon, and Ibycus
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2017-09-14) -
Alcaeus in Sacred Space
Nagy, Gregory (Gruppo editoriale internazionale, 1993) -
Analyzing a song to a sparrow: ‘I’m for you the girl, you’re for me the joy’
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019-03-15) -
Ancient Greek Elegy
Nagy, Gregory (Oxford University Press, 2009) -
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours
Nagy, Gregory (Belknap Press, 2013)The ancient Greeks’ concept of “the hero” was very different from what we understand by the term today, Gregory Nagy argues—and it is only through analyzing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, ... -
Andromache and her virtuosity as a singer of laments in the Homeric Iliad, Part I
Nagy, Gregory (Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, 2015-03-06)