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Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry Part I: Twelve Olympian Essays – Essay 1: Hēraklēs, Mount Olympus, and the Olympia of the Olympics

2022.06.20 | By Gregory Nagy 0. I proceed to Essay 1, even though the Introduction to this book has been left hanging. I stopped short after I commented on that haunting image of an Amazon rounding the arc of her bounding leap, between life and death—an image that evokes thoughts… Read more

Glimpses of Aeolian traditions in two different myths about two different visits by Philoctetes to the sacred island of the goddess Chryse

  ed. 2, 2022.06.19; ed. 1, 2021.08.09 | By Gregory Nagy   §0. The featured image for this essay is a drawing, made in the early nineteenth century of our era, which copies with some clarity and flair a picture painted on a vase manufactured in Athens in the fifth… Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry – An introduction, Phase 5:  Death of an Amazon

2022.06.13 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The featured image for Phase 5 is a close-up of the face of a dying Amazon. She is Penthesileia, daughter of the war-god Ares. The close-up comes from an ancient Athenian vase painting that pictures this female hero, an Amazon, at the moment of… Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry – An introduction, Phase 4:  Phaedra the hero as a would-be hunter

2022.06.06 | By Gregory Nagy   §0. In Phase 3, I have been arguing that the athleticism of Amazons as hunters is connected, by way of myth, to the corresponding athleticism of the hero Hippolytus as a hunter. Earlier, in Phase 2, I had argued that the athleticism of Amazons… Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry – An introduction, Phase 3: Hippolytus the hero as a hunter

2022.05.30 | By Gregory Nagy   Detail of the Amazon Melanippe (named). From a Late Antique mosaic depicting Amazons hunting, ca. 5th–6th centuries CE, found in a villa in Urfa/Şanliurfa (ancient Edessa). Image via Wikimedia Commons. §0. Up to now, I have focused on the role of the hero Hippolytus… Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry – An introduction, Phase 2: Hippolytus the hero as son of an Amazon

2022.05.23 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The role of the hero Hippolytus as an athlete—specifically, as a charioteer—is relevant to the role of his mother as an Amazon, since Amazons too could be charioteers. For example, in the picture I have chosen to introduce Phase 2 here, we see Amazons in… Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry – An introduction, Phase 1: Hippolytus the hero as a charioteer

2022.05.16 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The picture that introduces Phase 1 of my Introduction helps me concentrate on heroes, athletes, poetry. What we see pictured here is a hero, Hippolytus, at the moment of his death. It was said in the myth of Hippolytus that he had lost… Read more

Homeric Vocabulary, Heaps’ Law and the open-ended nature of epic tradition

This paper makes a simple, but significant, observation. Vocabulary keeps growing in any corpus — there is no final, fixed set of words. That phenomenon appears with any natural language corpus. Here I emphasize the significance for students of Homeric epic. The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey contain about 200,000 running… Read more

Pausanias 9.22.3, on Corinna and Pindar

2022.05.09 | By Gregory Nagy §0. What Pausanias says here about the status of Corinna as a lyric poet helps explain the non-canonical status of this poetic figure in contrast to the canonical status of Pindar. The contrast has to do with the dialects of Corinna and of Pindar as… Read more

Pausanias 9.23.2–4, on the tomb of Pindar

2022.05.02 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The three paragraphs of Pausanias that I quote and translate here are relevant to my ongoing research on the hero cults of poets. In that research, I took note of a traditional idea that is typical of such hero cults. The idea is this: poets as… Read more