Apollo, Golden Bronze, (200CE) Louvre A guest post by Kevin McGrath Greetings everyone and welcome to Hour 25. What I would like to do today is to view briefly the first sixty-seven lines of Scroll 1 of the Homeric Iliad and then, prompted by you, to reread some of those lines and images more closely. As you well know the first word of the poem, mēnis, indicates ‘anger’, as both… Read more
Mixing bowl (volute krater)Museum of Fine Arts of BostonAccession Number 03.804 He is one of those bit players in Homer who are so unforgettable. Caustic, repulsive, and comedic all at the same time, Thersites has always been the source of controversy. Who was he? And was he intended to be dangerously insurrectionist or only entertaining? It is an often overlooked aspect of the Thersites story that he was said by post-Homeric… Read more
We were pleased to welcome Douglas Frame, for an Open House discussion on ‘Echoes of the Indo-European Twin Gods in Sanskrit and Greek Epic: Arjuna and Achilles’. You can watch the recording of the broadcast via the frame below, or on our YouTube channel. To prepare for this conversation, participants might like to read the following paper by Douglas Frame: Echoes of the Indo-European Twin Gods in Sanskrit and Greek… Read more
Hoplite and his Charioteer (540–530BCE) National Library Paris In Hour 25, we have had many wonderful discussions about clothes and weapons. Here are two words from the Forum discussion about clothes and armor: κυνέη [kuneē], ‘greaves’ θώραξ [thōrax], ‘breastplate’. In the Gallery below, there is a picture of Pericles with a helmet. It is said that he always wore a helmet because his head had a strange shape. On a picture… Read more
~ A guest post by Brian Prescott-Decie ~ In the course of searching for simple texts for a student of Latin who has been making rather heavy weather of Agricola, and needed some light relief, I recently came across the History of Apollonius, King of Tyre, a Latin romantic novel of perhaps the third century CE. By the purest serendipity, I then found myself reading the following lines of the… Read more