Heroes in Homeric poetry need to make contact with gods and goddesses. They like to be reassured by them or they fear them and beg. In the following passage, Pallas Athena sends an encouraging message to Odysseus before he goes as a spy to the night ambush. She sends a heron and when Odysseus hears its cry, he prays. It’s a moving scene. When the pair [=Diomedes and Odysseus] had… Read more
L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que ta première page quand on n’a vu que son pays. The universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one’s own country. From de Montbron, Le Cosmopolite, quoted by Lord Byron in the “Preface to the First and Second Cantos” of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage When I received… Read more
In this video, Gregory Nagy, Douglas Frame, and Leonard Muellner have an informal discussion about the functioning of Greek dialects in Homer, focusing on the role of multiple parallel grammatical forms in the system. First published March, 6,2018 You can watch the video on the CHS YouTube channel, or in the frame below. Related topics Greek dialects and the poetic super-language Greek dialects in the language of Homer: Mycenaean, and… Read more
We were pleased to welcome Professor James Romm, The James Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, Bard College, when he joined members of the Kosmos Society for the Open House discussion (below) on Plato and the Tyrant: The Tale of the Platonic Letters. Plato made three trips outside Athens during his life, all of them to the Greek city of Syracuse (in Sicily). His relations with two powerful tyrants there, a… Read more
Tommaso Piroli, from John Flaxman: Funeral of Hector Achilles is “The Best of the Achaeans”[1], and Hector is the best of the Trojans. The Iliad starts with the anger of Achilles, but the last words belong to Hector’s funeral: Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.Iliad 24.804[2] Biagio d’Antonio da Firenze: The Siege of Troy – The Death of Hector Achilles will eventually fall in… Read more