By Gregory Nagy

Variations on the idea of a gleam that blinded Homer

2023.09.29 | By Gregory Nagy This pre-edited standalone essay is dedicated to my dear colleague and friend  Pierre Judet de La Combe, on the occasion of a happy celebration, in Paris, of his radiant life and times. I start with a story told in a set of ancient myths about the life of Homer. In that story, Homer was blinded by a gleam of light that emanated from the shining bronze armor of… Read more

Text and reperformance: do you really need a text for your reperformance?

posted 2021.06.24, to be reperformed 2021.06.30 | By Gregory Nagy §0. This presentation offers friendly criticism of the views of classicists who use such terms as "text" and "reperformance" without fully taking into account various comparative perspectives that have for some time been made available by way of typological descriptions of "live" performance as observed and analyzed in a wide variety of ethnographical studies. Read more

Ancient Greek heroes, athletes, poetry Part I: Twelve Olympian Essays – Essay 6: Reconstructing Indo-European mythological traditions that shaped the role of Hēraklēs as athlete

2022.07.25 | By Gregory Nagy §0. Applying methods of reconstruction as I outlined them in the Excursus of Essay 5, I will now start to reconstruct what I have described as Indo-European mythological traditions that shaped the role of Hēraklēs as an athlete, or, to say it better, the role… Read more

A sampling of comments on the Herakles of Euripides: ready for annotation

2022.03.28, replacing the version in C.I. 2018.04.20 | By Gregory Nagy The comments in this posting about the Herakles of Euripides derive from a set of compressed notes I had started writing in 1999. These notes were meant as a companion to the Herakles as translated by Robert Potter—his translations of Euripides first appeared in two volumes, 1781 and 1783—and as adapted by Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott in 1999. Read more