Finding Helen in texts is frustrating. Many contradictory facts may be encountered. Who was Helen? What about her life, her power, her birth, her beauty? Was she hated or was she loved? If we were to write a short biography, it might read like this: Helen was the daughter of Leda and Tyndareus/Zeus, and Clytemnestra, Castor and Polydeuces’ sister. Penelope was her cousin. She married Menelaos king of Sparta,… Read more
A guest post by Sarah Scott I was reading Gregory Nagy’s translation of the Sappho ‘Brothers’ poem, and it made me think of Works and Days, and then I got to wondering about brothers—or sisters for that matter. I do not mean those who form a pair, as in the ‘twin’ myths discussed with us by Douglas Frame for example, where the two are complementary. Rather, I mean those siblings… Read more
Classical Inquiries has published a set of videos and texts featuring the work of Gregory Nagy and Olga M. Davidson on myths relating to the “Lives of Homer” and the “Life of Ferdowsi.” These papers and videos were originally part of an international conference held at Baku, 27–28 November 2015. Together, Nagy and Davidson argue that “the traditional ‘biographies’ about these two poets, as transmitted by a vast variety of communities, can… Read more
“The poetry of Virgil, I take it as a given, rivals that of Homer. Historically, Virgil the Classic even displaced Homer the Classic in the Latin culture of the Roman empire (though not in the Greek) – already in the age of Virgil. But the question is: what is it exactly about the poetry of Virgil that made it rival the poetry of Homer in the first place – not… Read more
Our next Book Club selection features two selections from Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: Chapter 2 ‘Singers: Performance and Training’, and Chapter 5 ‘Songs and the Song’. This book, originally published in 1960, is based on research carried out in the former Yugoslavia by Milman Parry in the 1930s, which focused on how singers who learn songs in an oral tradition compose in performance. This provides valuable evidence for… Read more