We were pleased to welcome Stamatia Dova, Hellenic College Holy Cross, for an Open House on Odysseus and the Poetics of katábasis.
You can watch the video in the frame below or on our YouTube channel.
The psūkhē of the fleet descendant of Aiakos knew me and spoke piteously, saying, ‘Resourceful Odysseus, noble son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, what deed of daring will you undertake next, that you venture down to the house of Hādēs among us inept dead, who are but the spirits of them that can labor no more?’
(Odyssey 11.472–473)
You may like to read following passages referred to during the event.
Mentioned during the discussion: the latest article by Stamatia Dova:
“Theseus, Peirithoos, and the Poetics of a Failed Katábasis.” In Les Etudes Classiques. Vol. 83, No 1–4 (2015).
Members can start and continue discussion here in the forum.
For further videos please visit the Watch page.
Stamatia Dova
Stamatia Dova (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2001) is Professor of Classics and Modern Greek Studies at Hellenic College Holy Cross in Brookline Massachusetts and the CHS Associate in Hellenic Literature and Language. She is the author of Greek Heroes in and out of Hades, published in 2012 by Rowman and Littlefield, and the editor of Historical Poetics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Greece: Essays in Honor of Lily Macrakis, published in 2012 by CHS in the Classics@ series (Issue 10). Her research interests include epic traditions of descents to the underworld, Euripidean drama, the relationship between historiography and poetry, and reception studies. She is currently working on a book entitled The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece, a study of societal attitudes towards failure, loss, and inadequacy as they appear in Greek literature from the eighth to the fourth century BCE.
Image credit
Featured image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odysseus_Tiresias_Cdm_Paris_422.jpg
Jastrow: Odysseus consulting the shade of Tiresias, Dolon Painter. Wikimedia Commons, public domain