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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
گرگوری ناژ برگردان فارسی: فرنوش شمسیان1 What follows is a Persian translation of Gregory Nagy’s “Poetics of Repetition in Homer” by Farnoosh Shamsian. The article was first published in Greek Ritual Poetics (ed. D. Yatromanolakis and P. Roilos; Cambridge, MA and… Read more
2022.04.25 | By Gregory Nagy [For the Greek text and for my working translation, see Part I.] §0. Here in Part II of my two-part essay on Sibyls as we see them described by Pausanias, I analyze some salient divergences in the details reported by our traveler about various… Read more