Pierre Judet de La Combe in his book Homère (2017) evokes the gifts of the gods which are ambiguous and double-edged. One example he mentions is Demodokos: 62 The herald came near, bringing with him a singer, very trusted, 63 whom the Muse loved exceedingly. She gave him both a good thing and a bad thing. 64 For she took away from him his eyes but gave him the sweetness… Read more
We were pleased to welcome Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, who joined members of the Kosmos Society on November 21 for an Open House discussion on “Looking Backward: Through the Lens of Odyssey 24.” You can view the recording on the Kosmos Society YouTube channel, or in the frame below. Odyssey 24 is the final “book” of… Read more
This time the Core Vocab term—taken from terms listed in H24H[1] and tracked in the associated Sourcebook[2]— is kamatos [κάματος] which Gregory Nagy glosses as ‘ordeal, labor, pain’. This seems to convey a similar range of meanings to another Core Vocab term, ponos [πόνος], also glossed as ‘ordeal, labor, pain’ which was the subject of a previous blog article. So I looked initially at the dictionary entries to see what… Read more
We were pleased to welcome Patricia Hatcher, CUNY Graduate Center, to join members of the Kosmos Society for an Open House discussion on Rites of Passage and the Making of Achilles in Statius’ Achilleid. This talk applies anthropological ritual theory to Statius’ Achilleid to reinterpret Achilles’ early life as a series of rites of passage. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite model and Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, the discussion… Read more
In the last days of September of the year 480 BCE, King Xerxes proceeded to Athens, after having had his victory at Thermopylae. Also his naval forces moved southward for the final stroke. Among the Persian naval contingent were 120 triremes from Thrace, 100 ships from Ionia, 60 ships from Aeolia including Lesbos and Samos, and an unspecified number of ships from the Greek islands, including the Cyclades, and lastly,… Read more