Browsing The Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 284
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About a defeat of the Centaurs, and how to imagine such an event in Olympia
(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
(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
(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
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-05-18) -
About Aphrodite’s birds and her magical flowers in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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 ... -
Afterthoughts about Polycrates, Anacreon, and Ibycus
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2017-09-14) -
Analyzing a song to a sparrow: ‘I’m for you the girl, you’re for me the joy’
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019-03-15) -
Andromache and her virtuosity as a singer of laments in the Homeric Iliad, Part I
(Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, 2015-03-06) -
The apotheosis of Hēraklēs on Olympus and the mythological origins of the Olympics
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019-07-12)As I indicated in the previous posting, in Classical Inquiries 2019.07.06 (at II-G5), the aim of the brief follow-up essay that I offer here in the present posting, 2019.07.12, is to connect a myth about the apotheosis of ... -
Are Zeus and Hērā a dysfunctional couple?
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-07-27)A sampling of comments on the Iliad and Odyssey includes an attempt of mine to analyze a scene in Iliad 14 where Hērā has a sexual encounter with Zeus on the heights of Mount Ida. In my comments on the wording of the goddess ... -
Aristotle's Poetics, translation and commentary in progress, Chapter 1
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2015-11-27) -
Aristotle's Poetics, translation and commentary in progress, Chapter 2
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2016-01-21)