The Iliad starts with the anger of Achilles, but the last words belong to Hector’s funeral. Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. Sourcebook Iliad 24.802-803[1] However, Casey Dué in Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics[2] shows that an alternative ending line existed. The medieval manuscripts and all modern editions, such as that of Munro and Allen’s 1920 Oxford Classical Text, end… Read more
I became intrigued in the subject of androgyny after some of our Book Club readings. Plato, in the Symposium, reveals a myth on the origin of mankind through the speech of Aristophanes (starting at 189d). The Symposium is a series of amusing speeches on the subject of love, supposedly composed during a meal given by the young poet Agathon. Aristophanes decides to demonstrate the origin of love. In the beginning, he says,… Read more
Even by the look of him it was plain that he was a son of Zeus; for his body measured four cubits, and he flashed a gleam of fire from his eyes; and he did not miss, neither with the bow nor with the javelin.[1] Apollodorus, among others, provides a number of stories about Hēraklēs in The Library (Book 2, chapters 4 and 5), and such stories provided inspiration for… Read more
This video recording was originally shown at an international conference held at Baku, November 27–28, 2015. In this video Professor Gregory Nagy explores the myths relating to The Lives of Homer. “This inquiry centers on the surviving texts of ‘Life of Homerʼ narrative traditions, to which I refer simply as Lives of Homer. These Lives, I argue, can be read as sources of historical information about the reception of Homeric poetry.… Read more
~A guest post by Jacqui Donlon and the Oinops Study Group~ You may remember that at the end of our last post “Oinops, Sacrifice and Ritual,” we, the Oinops Study Group, decided to reach out to our Hour 25 Community for a mentor. We had discovered much, but fitting the pieces together to establish the system of oinops needed some help. We wanted to understand the use of oinops in… Read more