We were excited to welcome Kevin McGrath for an Open House entitled “The Narrative Form of the Odyssey.” The event took place on Friday, August 14 at 11:00 a.m. EDT and was recorded. To get ready for the event you can read the passages below from the Homeric Odyssey which are also included in the first of the two handouts, “Moral Odysseus”: Handouts: Moral Odysseus (PDF) Homeric Odysseus (PDF) You… Read more
In this post we are going to examine some aspects of marriage, and its music which come traditionally with singing and dancing. In today’s marriages music, singing and dancing play an essential role in rituals and traditions. Music is played at the beginning of the ceremony, carefully chosen songs are sung during the ceremony, and people dance and sing during the feast. Were rituals and traditions related to music in… Read more
The city of Thebes has always been of interest to scholars working within mythographical and literary traditions, precisely because its presence looms large in our corpus of extant textual and especially non-textual sources. Looming even larger is the absence of a monumental epic to encapsulate its story in the manner that the Iliad and Odyssey do for the Troy story. Myths set in Thebes or involving Theban characters occupy a… Read more
We were excited to welcome Joel Christensen for an Open House. The title of the discussion is “Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts,” based on his research and collaboration with Elton T. E. Barker. The event took place on Friday, March 6 at 11:00 a.m. EST. It was live-streamed and recorded. In preparation, you might like to read Iliad 4.1–421 and Odyssey 11.225–332, as well as… Read more
Recent Book Club discussion prompted me to think about how human emotions were depicted in some of the readings from Greek antiquity. In the Trojan Women, Andromache’s reaction to her son’s fate—death by being thrown out of the battlements—is not physical, a loud, wailing lament, but a subdued, courageous reaction. To get a proper burial for her son, she does not fight back vehemently when the child is taken. The… Read more