Our Book Club readings for this month are selections from the poetry of Catullus. We will start the discussion in the Forum, and there will be a Google Hangout on Tuesday, June 26 at 11 a.m. EDT—the link will be posted in the Forum at that time. Gaius Valerius Catullus was a renowned Roman poet. He had a short life: he was born around 84 BCE or 87 BCE, and he… Read more
The Kerameikos kratēr The Athenian Kerameikos was the potters’ quarter of the city, from which the English word “ceramic” is derived. Kerameikos was named after Keramos, son of Dionysos and Ariadne, hero of potters[1]. A particularly notable pedestalled kratēr of this area is kept at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, where it is soberly referred to as the New York MMA 34.11.2 vase[2]. The vase is dated to the… Read more
This time the Core Vocab word, taken from terms in H24H[1] and the associated Sourcebook,[2] is ekhthros [ἐχθρός], glossed by Gregory Nagy as ‘enemy [within the community], non-philos.’ The plural form is ekhthroi; and the associated noun is ekhthra or ekhthos ‘hatred, enmity’. There is a difference between an ekhthros who is a personal enemy, and a polemos or polemoi in the plural, a collective enemy, an opposing force in… Read more
Following the heroic age of the Myceneans is the silence of the Greek Dark Ages. In the proto-Geometric period (c1150–c950 BCE), the pre-Greek tribes make war, then consolidate and start forming city states. The Doric tribes mix with the Attics of Athens, and art focuses on motifs that express “order”: concentration and intensity. There is no expression that refers to myth or religion. The Minoan and Mycenaean palaces and civilization… Read more
In the previous posts, we considered descriptions of male and female hair, and rituals associated with hair. In this post we consider epithets related to hair. We referred to Milman Parry Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. “Homer and Homeric Style” for a definition and description of epithets: In my study of the traditional epithet in Homer, I dealt with those formulas in the Iliad and in the Odyssey which… Read more