Homer

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

Visiting Scholars

Open House | Monster Menageries of Homer and Hesiod, with Yiannis Petropoulos

We were pleased to welcome Yiannis Petropoulos, Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece, to an Open House discussion on ‘Monster Menageries of Homer and Hesiod’. He introduces the topic: Liberally populating ancient Greek poetry, monsters cannot be taken for granted and should not be treated as preposterous irrelevancies. Their function, ‘meaning’, and the way in which Homer and other poets describe or fail to describe them are… Read more

Word Study

Journey’s End

~A guest post by Jacqui Donlon and the Oinops Study Group~     “Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure… For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.” The Odyssey v  (George Chapman translation)[1] Dear friends, we started out on our journey with this quote (see “The Wine-dark Sea“), and… Read more