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On a new book by Richard P. Martin, draft of a Foreword written by an admiring editor
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2017-12-09)
An Iliadic Odyssey as a song of the Sirens
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-09-18)
This short essay about the Odyssey of “Homer” is a playful experiment. But it is based on an even shorter essay that is quite serious in intent. That essay (Nagy 2020) appears in World Epics, an on-line site edited by Jo ...
Mages and Ionians
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2017-06-25)
From the heavenly to the earthy and back, variations on a theme of love-on-wings in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-12-18)
In this essay, I start by considering the word strouthoi, conventionally translated as ‘sparrows’, in Song 1 of Sappho. At line 10, these birds are seen at the moment when they take wing and fly off. They are pulling behind ...
Some variations on the theme of a recomposed performer in ancient Greek prose and poetry
(Harvard University. Center for Hellenic Studies., 2021-02-27)
This essay is inspired by a most admirable comment made in an article by Johanna Hanink (2015) about nostalgic attempts, in the early fourth century BCE, at recovering the charisma associated with the former glory days, ...
Imagining a Courtesan in the Songs of Sappho
(2021-01-22)
In an octopus' garden: a story from Lesbos
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2015-12-12)
In Plutarch’s Banquet of the Seven Sages, the author imagines a remote time when conversations took placein the city of Corinth at a dinner party hosted by the tyrant of that city, Periandros, a historical figure whoselifetime ...
Pausanias as novelist: a micro-sample
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018-07-20)
In this post, dated 2018.07.20, I have put together a working retranslation of the sad story of Komaithο, priestess in love, as retold by Pausanias at 7.18.8–7.20.2. Some essential parts of this story have already been ...
Death of an Amazon
(Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020-08-14)
The picture I show for the lead illustration of this essay is a close-up of the face of a dying Amazon. She is Penthesileia, daughter of the war-god Ares. The close-up comes from an ancient Athenian vase painting that ...
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 ...