Welcome to this round-up of highlights from the content, community, and conversation at Kosmos Society over the past year.
This year’s posts, designed to lead to further discussion in the forums, included some written by individual members, and others written collectively by groups. They included posts on subjects as diverse as ships, warfare, law, hair, rhapsodes, servitude, Aegina, Aiakos…. Here is a selection:
- Aegina and its enmity with Athens
- The Classic Ship | Part 3: The Battle of Salamis
- Introducing Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes
- Law and Courts in Ancient Athens: A Brief Overview
- Servitude | Part 2: Male servants in Homer
- Phalanx Warfare Transformed: Innovation in Ancient Greek Warfare 431–331 BCE | Part 2: Leuctra and Gaugamela
- Aiakos: Judge Among the Immortals?
- Performance of epic | Part 2: Rhapsodes
CHS Online Open Houses in 2018
Kosmos Society hosted bi-weekly CHS Online Open House gatherings where the distinguished guests presented variety of titles: from late Bronze Age burials at Mycenae to the Free First Thousand Years of Greek, from Sparta and its continuing myth to Exchanges in the Odyssey’s Underworld.
- Thucydides on Early Greece and the Trojan War, with Jeffrey Rusten
- Xerxes’ desire of Thessalian heights & Tempe gorge, with Maria G. Xanthou
- Love Wishes, with Yiannis Petropoulos
- Metopes at Thermon, Temple C, with Kathryn R. Topper
- Re-Re-Counting Plato: This Time with More Data, with Thomas Köntges
- Pausanias, with Gregory Nagy
- Heroine cult and tragedy, with Richard P. Martin
- Beautiful Bodies or Beautiful Minds: Disability Studies in Homer with, Joel Christensen
- Achilles and Aeneas ‘beyond fate’: An exploration of Iliad 20 and the Multiformity of the Iliad, with Casey Dué
- Exchanges in the Odyssey’s Underworld, with Nancy Felson, Laura Slatkin, and Maša Ćulumović
- Sparta and its continuing myth, with Paul Cartledge
- Chalcidian regionality between Sithonia and Pallene, with Maria G. Xanthou
- Theognis, earwax and the end of the Lelantine War, with Natasha Bershadsky
- Song of Moses, Song of Deuteronomy, with Keith Stone
- The Free First Thousand Years of Greek, with Leonard Muellner
- Pindar’s Poetics of Homecoming, with Maša Ćulumović
- Late Bronze Age burials at Mycenae and what they tell us, with Heleni Palaiologou
Reading Homer
This year, again, we were lucky to have Odyssey readings by Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner and Douglas Frame. The readings covered Odyssey 1.156–193:
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.156–162: rotting bones, neglected rules of reciprocity, and powers of particles
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.163–168: comparatives, the lost homecoming, and Telemachus’ misery
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.169–177, part 1 : Call him keĩnos
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.169–177, part 2: Epiphanies and Athena’s travels
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.178–186: Multiple versions, wine-bright sea, and blazing iron
- Homeric Greek | Odyssey 1.187–193: Rattling around in enjambments
Community activities
The language study groups (some for ancient Greek, Attic Greek and Homeric Greek, including translations and discussions of Homeric poetry, and one for Latin) meet to support each other’s learning and translations. You can find language study resources on the “Learn” page; please post in the forum if you would like to join a group or would like to know more.
The Book Club has been meeting monthly, and readings from primary and secondary sources included selections from Aeschylus, Plato, Muellner, Apollonius of Rhodes, Catullus, Sophocles, Monsacré, Pliny and Lucian…
Looking ahead
The community is welcoming new members who are joining from HeroesX and from elsewhere. Jump in and take part in discussions or activities. Here’s to 2019!