We were excited to welcome back Gregory Nagy of Harvard University, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC.
The topic of the discussion was “Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory.” The event was streamed live on Thursday, March 14, 2019, and was recorded.
In preparation, you might like to read the primary texts that appear within these posts at Classical Inquiries:
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part one
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part two
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part three
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part four
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part five
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part six
- Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: experiments in comparative reception theory, Part seven
This PDF handout incorporates the poems discussed during the session:
Open House texts – Homo ludens – Catullus and Sappho
You can watch the event on our YouTube channel, or in the frame below:
Mentioned in this video: Calame, Claude. 2001. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions, available online:
https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Calame.Choruses_of_Young_Women_in_Ancient_Greece.2001
Gregory Nagy
Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and is the Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC. In his publications, he has pioneered an approach to Greek literature that integrates diachronic and synchronic perspectives. His books include The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press), which won the Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association, in 1982; also Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), Homeric Responses (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), Homer’s Text and Language (University of Illinois Press 2004), Homer the Classic (Harvard University Press, online 2008, print 2009), and Homer the Preclassic (University of California Press 2010). His latest work, Masterpieces of Metonymy, is now available online. He co-edited with Stephen A. Mitchell the 40th anniversary second edition of Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature vol. 24; Harvard University Press, 2000), co-authoring with Mitchell the new Introduction, pp. vii–xxix. Professor Nagy has taught versions of this course to Harvard College undergraduates and Harvard Extension School students for over thirty-five years. Throughout his career Nagy has been a consistently strong advocate for the use of information technology in both teaching and research. He is currently writing articles for Classical Inquiries, including commentaries on Iliad.