Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was born of the severed genitals of the primordial sky-god Uranus when his son Cronus tossed them into the barren sea. Foam-born Aphrodite came to life among the gentle sea deities of the Aegean. Being born without a mother is not such an odd occurrence in Greek mythology. Athena sprang forth from Zeus’ brow fully-grown and fully-armed. Dionysus was born of his father… Read more
The video of this Open House discussion features a return visit with actor Paul O’Mahony, focusing on the experience of crossing the sea as depicted in classical texts. To prepare for watching it, you might like to read some or all of these passages from the Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women. You can read any translation, or those in the PDF below: Crossing the Sea: Selection of passages Odyssey… Read more
~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
~ A guest post by Sarah Scott and the Oinops Study Group ~ In our initial discussions we concentrated on the Homeric epics and identified some of the themes that appear in our focus passages. When we viewed together the main subjects surrounding the words appearing with oinops, pontos, ‘sea’, and bous, ‘ox’, we started to see a connection with seasonality (see ‘Oinops and Oxen’), so we decided to look in… Read more
~ A guest blog by Sarah Scott & Janet Ozsolak and the Oinops Study Group ~ Zeus struck my ship with his thunderbolts, and broke it up in the middle of the wine-faced [oinops] sea [pontos] (Odyssey vii, 249–252) Although we had searched on the Greek word oinops, once we had the list of passages we had been reading them in translation. The word ‘sea’ had been prominent in the… Read more