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Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment

Hellenic Studies Series

Responding to George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s analysis of metaphor, William Brockliss explores the Homeric poets’ use of concrete concepts drawn from the Greek natural environment to aid their audiences’ understanding of abstract concepts. In particular, he considers Homeric images that associate flowers with the concepts of deception, disorder, and death, and examines the ways in which the poets engage with natural phenomena such as the brief, diverse blooms of the Greek spring. Taken together, such Homeric images present a more pessimistic depiction of the human condition than we find in the vegetal imagery of other archaic Greek genres. While lyric poets drew on floral imagery to emphasize the beauty of the beloved, the Homeric poets used images of flowers to explore the potentially deceptive qualities of bodies adorned for seduction. Where the Hesiodic poets employed vegetal images to depict the stable structure of the cosmos, the Homeric poets set arboreal imagery of good order against floral images suggestive of challenges or changes to orderliness. And while the elegiac poets celebrated the brief “flower of youth,” the Homeric poets created floral images reminiscent of Hesiodic monsters, and thereby helped audiences to imagine the monstrous otherness of death.

2019. Hellenic Studies Series 82. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_BrocklissW.Homeric_Imagery_and_the_Natural_Environment.2019.

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Homer’s Versicolored Fabric: The Evocative Power of Ancient Greek Epic Word-Making

Anna Bonifazi

Hellenic Studies Series

Anna Bonifazi suggests that the Homeric text we have now would have enabled ancient audiences to enjoy the evocative power of even minimal linguistic elements. The multiple functions served by these elements are associated not only with the variety of narrative contexts in which they occur but also with overarching poetic strategies.

The findings relate to two strategies in particular: unfolding the narrative by signaling the upcoming content with αύ- adverbs and particles, and letting the complexity of Odysseus’s identity resonate through the ambiguous use of third-person pronouns. The words’ evocative power springs from the deliberate merging of distinct meanings, which prompts multifaceted interpretations. The text allows the incorporation of different viewpoints, just as an iridescent fabric allows the simultaneous perception of different colors.

2012. Hellenic Studies Series 50. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Bonifazi.Homers_Versicolored_Fabric.2012.
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The Art of Reading: From Homer to Paul Celan

Jean Bollack

Hellenic Studies Series

Trans. C. Porter and S. Tarrow with B. King. Edited by C. Koenig, L. Muellner, G. Nagy, and S. Pollock. Hellenic Studies Series 73. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_BollackJ.The_Art_of_Reading.2016.

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he Art of Reading is the first—long overdue—collection of essays by the French classical philologist and humanist Jean Bollack to be published in English. As the scope of the collection demonstrates, Bollack felt at home thinking in depth about two things that seem starkly different to most other thinkers. We see on the one hand the classics of Greek poetry and philosophy, including the relatively obscure but in his hands illuminating re-readings of Greek philosophy by the doxographers. Then, on the other hand, there is modern, including contemporary, poetry. The author of monumental commentaries on the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles and on the fragments of Empedocles, Bollack cultivated in himself and in a generation of students (academics and others) a way to read both sets of texts closely that is as uncompromising and demanding of the interpreter as it is of the reader of the interpretation. The results, which this wide-ranging but compact collection brings to mind, are designed to get beyond flat and clichéd approaches to familiar works and to awaken the reader anew to the aesthetics, the complexity, and the intelligence that careful reconstruction of the text can bring to light.

Rhythm without Beat: Prosodically Motivated Grammarisation in Homer

Ronald Blankenborg

In this study, the author argues that syntactical development beyond the autonomy of single words or word groups was facilitated by an aspect of Homeric prosody that differs from the metrical surface structure, though it is realized together with meter. The focus will be on the strength of metrical boundaries as phonetically realized pauses. This work will deal, in other words, with the combination of metrics and phonetics. The hypothesis will be that phonetically realized pauses demarcate phonological phrases, and that they do so because of the non-demarcative value of the remaining metrical boundaries.

– modified from the Introduction

First online edition of a 2014 preliminary study to the thesis Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_BlankenborgR.Rhythm_without_Beat.2014.

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Copyright, Ronald Blankenborg. Published here with permission of the author.

Monday, February 23, 2026

Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody

Ronald Blankenborg

Hellenic Studies Series

Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different options for performative pause—a phonetic phenomenon evidenced by phonology.

From the ubiquitous compositional pauses in sense and metrical surface structure, Audible Punctuation selects the pauses that, under specific phonetic circumstances, double as rests of some duration during a performance. In this way, Blankenborg identifies those places in the verses that a performer of Homeric poetry was most likely to have used as opportunities to pause. The distribution of pauses over Homer’s hexameters proves to be irregular and unpredictable because phonological phrases and grammatical clauses differ considerably in the way they terminate. The mismatch of prosodic and other levels of phrasing draws attention to the need to reassess stylistic issues, notably enjambment.
2022. Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody. Hellenic Studies Series 87. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:BlankenborgR.Audible_Punctuation.2022.
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Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: The Witness of the Ptolemaic Papyri

Graeme D. Bird

Hellenic Studies Series

Graeme D. Bird examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad, known as the Ptolemaic papyri, which, although fragmentary, are the oldest surviving physical evidence of the text of the Iliad, dating from the third to the first centuries BCE.

These papyri have been described as “eccentric” or even “wild” by some scholars. They differ significantly from the usual text of the Iliad, sometimes showing lines with different wording, at other times including so-called “interpolated” lines that are completely absent from our more familiar version.

Whereas some scholars denigrate these papyri because of their “eccentricity,” this book analyzes their unusual readings and shows that in fact they present authentic variations on the Homeric text, based on the variability characteristic of oral performance.

Hellenic Studies Series 43. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Bird.The_Witness_of_Ptolemaic_Papyri.2010.

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