2022.06.27 | By Gregory Nagy §0. As I started to argue in Essay 1, the name of Mount Olympus as the setting for a myth about the immortalization of the hero Hēraklēs after death—his apotheosis—is linked with the name of Olympia as a setting for myths about the founding of… Read more
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
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
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