Homer

Texts,  Topic for Discussion

Connections: Poets, Performance, and Reception

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

Visiting Scholars

Open House | From Homer to Virgil, with Gregory Nagy

“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

Book Club

Book Club | November 2015: Albert B. Lord: The Singer of Tales

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

Visiting Scholars

Open House | The Iliad and the Greek Bronze Age, with Casey Dué

We were pleased to welcome Casey Dué for the first in our series of Open House sessions for fall 2015, in which we discussed the Iliad and the Greek Bronze Age. She introduces the topic as follows: How old is the Iliad? The Trojan War has traditionally been dated since antiquity to about 1250 BCE, and the Iliad is usually dated five hundred years or more after that, but there… Read more

Texts

An Interview with Homer

~ A guest post by Laura Ford ~ The ancients seem to have had as many questions about Homer as we moderns do. At the end of the Apology, Plato has Socrates wonder aloud how marvelous it would be if we could anticipate actually meeting and conversing with Homer (along with Orpheus, Musaeus, and Hesiod) in the afterlife: “…if this be true, let me die again and again.” (41a, Sourcebook).… Read more