“Is a study of hostageship in the Roman Republic worth the considerable effort? The answer must be an unequivocal yes; the institution is an important part of Rome’s political history. The exaction of hostages occurs in all periods and in all geographical regions of the empire; it is synonymous with Roman victory and Roman expansion. Indeed, the very importance of the practice is responsible for the fragmentary nature of… Read more
Volume three (2014) in a series of online anthologies containing articles written by Gregory Nagy. Read more
Volume four (2016) in a series of online anthologies containing articles written by Gregory Nagy. Read more
Volume two (2012) in a series of online anthologies containing articles written by Gregory Nagy. Read more
Volume one (2012) in a series of online anthologies containing articles written by Gregory Nagy. Read more
Oedipus’s major handicap in life is not knowing who he is–and both parricide and incest result from his ignorance of his identity. With two questions—”Who am I?” and “Who is my father?”—on his mind (and on his lips), the obsessed Oedipus arrives at the oracle of Delphi. Unlike the majority of modern and postmodern readings of Oedipus Tyrannus, Efimia Karakantza’s text focuses on the question of identity. Identity, however,… Read more
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the only early Greek heroic epics to have survived the transition to writing, even though extant evidence indicates that they emerged from a thriving oral culture. Among the missing are the songs of Boeotian Thebes. Homer’s Thebes examines moments in the Iliad and Odyssey where Theban characters and thematic engagements come to the fore. Rather than sifting through these appearances to reconstruct lost poems,… Read more
This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite academic focus on orality and on composition in performance, we have yet to fully appreciate the Iliad and Odyssey as the sophisticated scripts that they are. What is lost in the journey from the stage to the page? Readers may be readily impressed by the vividness of the poems, but they may miss out… Read more
Agamemnon led a ten-year-long struggle at Troy only to return home and die a pathetic death at his wife’s hands. Yet while Agamemnon’s story exerts an outsize influence—rivaled by few epic personalities—on the poetic narratives of the Iliad and Odyssey, scholars have not adequately considered his full portrait. What was Agamemnon like as a character for Homer and his audience? More fundamentally, how should we approach the topic of… Read more
Responding to George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s analysis of metaphor, William Brockliss explores the Homeric poets’ use of concrete concepts drawn from the Greek natural environment to aid their audiences’ understanding of abstract concepts. In particular, he considers Homeric images that associate flowers with the concepts of deception, disorder, and death, and examines the ways in which the poets engage with natural phenomena such as the brief, diverse blooms… Read more
