A guest post by Leonard Muellner In October of 2016, I had the pleasure of talking about Homeric poetry to the largest audience I have ever addressed in the many years I’ve spent teaching Classics—over 500 students in a huge new amphitheater at the University of Lille in northeastern France. The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lille is part of an emphatically public system, supported by tax dollars… Read more
Tapestry of the story of Achilles, Ateliers Bruxellois de Jean François et Pierre Van Der Boorcht (around 1740) “Thetis plunging Achilles in the Styx In September, I saw a nice Rembrandt exhibition at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris. This is a wonderful museum, with an amazing collection. The restaurant is decorated with four tapestries. A fifth tapestry is in the hall. The tapestries represent some events from the myths… Read more
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