On Homer the Classic

Nagy, Gregory,

Homer the Classic.
This 2008 "born digital" text is an online edition of a 2009 work published by the Trustees for Harvard University. Copyright, Center for Hellenic Studies. The 2009 print edition is available for purchase here.

The print version of this born-digital Publication of the Center for Hellenic Studies, has now been reviewed in BMCR

Gregory Nagy, Homer the Classic. Hellenic Studies 36. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2009. Pp. vii, 641. ISBN 9780674033269. $15.95 (pb). 
Reviewed by John B. Van Sickle, Brooklyn College and the Graduate School; City University of New York (jvsickle@brooklyn.cuny.edu)
Version at BMCR home site

'No review, certainly not in such brief compass, can do more than point toward the skeleton of a work so densely documented and closely woven. Anyone interested in poetics and indeed in the interplay between poetics and cognitive process, with the concomitant issues of epistemology, will find much to ponder here in the focus on the metaphors of poetics, the flow, the weave, and the recurrent testing of relationships between narrative and spectacle, tragedy and epos. In particular, the typology of hymnic structure and thematic deferral could prompt detailed and fruitful revision of the structural dynamics of Virgil's eclogue book (e.g., Van Sickle, Virgil's Book of Bucolics. Johns Hopkins 2011). Focus on typology, however, does preclude attention to unity in the individual works of 'Homer' as limned by Bruce Heiden, Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the "Iliad" Oxford, 2008; reviewed by M. S. Jensen (BMCR 2009.06.36), or by Suzanne Saïd, Homer and the Odyssey praised by Christos Tsagalis (BMCR 2012.02.03) for "her ability to show the process of cross-fertilization of each and every bit of the plot by certain themes that give to the Odyssey cohesion and unity." '