Chorus of the Old Men of Argos: I still can hear the older warlord saying, ‘Obey, obey, or a heavy doom will crush me – Oh but doom will crush me once I rend my child, the glory of my house – a father’s hands are stained, blood of a young girl streaks the altar. Pain both ways and what is worse? Desert the fleets, fail the alliance? No, but… Read more
For October, we will be reading Andrew Porter’s 2019 book Agamemnon, the Pathetic Despot: Reading Characterization in Homer, available at the Center for Hellenic Studies website. That page provides an overview of his approach to the subject: Agamemnon led a ten-year-long struggle at Troy only to return home and die a pathetic death at his wife’s hands. Yet while Agamemnon’s story exerts an outsize influence—rivaled by few epic personalities—on the… Read more
We were excited to welcome Erika Weiberg of Florida State University for an Open House. The title of the discussion is “Wives of Returning Veterans in Classical Athenian Drama”. The discussion took place on March 19 at 11:00 a.m. EDT; it was live-streamed and recorded. In preparation, you might like to read the PDF handout: Weiberg Kosmos Society Handout You can view the event on our YouTube channel. or in… 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
We were pleased to welcome actor, writer, and educator Paul O’Mahony for an Open House discussion on ‘The Power of Performance: Mythology and Outreach Today’. He introduces the topic as follows: I would like to talk about our reception of classical texts and our approaches to performance—finding new and exciting ways to re-imagine them. I will use my own experience both creating and watching various shows (both tragic and comic).… Read more