José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents.
This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation markers and numbers in the Linear B tablets and the values of specific signs, to personal names and place names reflecting the ethnic composition of Mycenaean society and the dialects spoken during the proto-Homeric period of the late Bronze Age. New insights are offered into Mycenaean furniture, war chariots, pictorial vases, land cultivation, arboriculture, and shrine areas. Other papers discuss wealth finance, prestige goods, the ideology of obligatory payment, long-puzzling tax impositions, and the inevitable collapse of the palatial economic and political systems.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Méndez Dosuna, Julián, Thomas G. Palaima, and Carlos Varias García, eds. 2022. TA-U-RO-QO-RO: Studies in Mycenaean Texts, Language and Culture in Honor of José Luis Melena Jiménez. Hellenic Studies Series 94. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_MendezDosunaJ_PalaimaT_VariasGarciaC_eds.TA-U-RO-QO-RO.2022.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
TA-U-RO-QO-RO: Studies in Mycenaean Texts, Language and Culture in Honor of José Luis Melena Jiménez
Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad
The Iliad defines its poetic goal as preserving the kleos aphthiton, “fame unwithered,” (IX.413) of its hero, Achilles. But how are we to understand the status of the “unwithered” in the Iliad?
In Homeric Durability, Lorenzo F. Garcia, Jr., investigates the concept of time and temporality in Homeric epic by studying the semantics of “durability” and “decay”: namely, the ability of an entity to withstand the effects of time, and its eventual disintegration. Such objects—the ships of the Achaeans, the bodies of the dead, the walls of the Greeks and Trojans, and the tombs of the dead—all exist within time and possess a demonstrable “durability.” Even the gods themselves are temporal beings. Through a framework informed by phenomenology, psychology, and psychopathology, Garcia examines the temporal experience of Homer’s gods and argues that in moments of pain, sorrow, and shame, Homeric gods come to experience human temporality. If the gods themselves are defined by human temporal experience, Garcia argues, the epic tradition cannot but imagine its own temporal durability as limited: hence, one should understand kleos aphthiton as fame which has not yet decayed, rather than fame which will not decay.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Garcia, Lorenzo F., Jr. 2013. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 58. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GarciaL.Homeric_Durability_Telling_Time_in_the_Iliad.2013.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Open Access Journal: Rosetta: Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham
Rosetta: Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham
ISSN 1752-1580
The Rosetta journal is aimed at postgraduates and professionals from a variety of historical and archaeological disciplines.
Within Rosetta you will find articles covering a wide scope of archaeology, history and classics subjects, book reviews, museum and conference reports. There are also links to other sites of interest and forthcoming seminars and conferences.
This journal is an online, electronic journal and is free to view; we welcome submissions from any related area.
Current issue – Issue 30
Current Issue – Issue 30 (2025)Previous issues
Special issue: From the Breast
The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic
“The main argument of this book is that the connection suggested by Homer between the ‘wiles’ and the ‘wanderings’ of Odysseus in fact rested upon an earlier tradition both significant and deep. The origin of this tradition has to do with the etymology of the Greek word nóos, ‘mind’, which I propose to connect with the Greek verb néomai, ‘return home’. Such an effort requires that nóos be reconstructed as nos-os, a derivative from the verbal root nes– . The significance of this proposal for the tradition underlying the Odyssey is clear. It implies that the connection still felt by Homer between the ‘wiliness’ and the ‘wandering’ of Odysseus goes back to a fundamental connection between ‘mind’ and ‘returning home’, and that the relation between what Odysseus ‘is’ and what he ‘does’ has a solid basis in the history of the Greek language.” —from the Introduction
Originally published in 1978 by Yale University Press.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Frame.The_Myth_of_Return_in_Early_Greek_Epic.1978.
Copyright, Douglas Frame. Published here by permission of the author.
Monday, March 2, 2026
Hippota Nestor
This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. This study is important because it reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which is built on this irony, is a key to the circumstances of the poems’ composition.
Nestor’s stories about the past, especially his own youth, often lack purpose on the surface of the poems, but with a slight shift of focus they provide a deep commentary on the present action of both poems. Nestor’s Homeric epithet, hippota, “the horseman,” permits the necessary refocus. The combination of epithet and name, hippota Nestor, has Indo-European roots, as a comparison with Vedic Sanskrit shows. Interpreted in the context of the Indo-European twin myth, Nestor’s role clearly points beyond itself to the key question in Homeric studies: the circumstances of the poems’ composition.
Nestor has a special relation to Ionia, where the Homeric poems were composed, and through Ionia to early Athens. The relationship between the Ionian city of Miletus and early Athens is particularly important. In addition to the role of these cities, the location of Nestor’s city Pylos, an ancient conundrum, is sharply illuminated by this new interpretation of Nestor’s Homeric role.
Frame, Douglas. 2009. Hippota Nestor. Hellenic Studies Series 37. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Frame.Hippota_Nestor.2009.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Michael Psellos. On Symeon the Metaphrast and On the Miracle at Blachernae: Annotated Translations with Introductions
The reader of this slender volume will encounter a figure of immense intellectual stature. Michael Psellos (1018–after 1077) combined the roles of scholar and court dignitary in Byzantium at the time of the Byzantine empire’s greatest territorial extent and political influence in the eastern Mediterranean world. The two essays presented here in translation have each attracted close scholarly attention because of their relevance to particular topics. The Discourse on the Miracle That Occurred in the Blachernae Church contains a description of an “ensouled” icon of the Virgin that is the object of vigorous and continuing discussion among art historians investigating Byzantine perceptions of icons. Similarly, the Encomion of His Excellency Symeon the Metaphrast (392 lines of Greek text) contains a vignette of nineteen lines detailing Symeon’s working methods as coordinator of a massive scholarly project (330–349). Although this passage is unique and deserves close examination, the essay as a whole provides a context for it within Psellos’ broader theoretical view of literature and contemporary scholarly activity. In the case of each of these essays, an annotated translation of the whole work such as those provided here will benefit the appreciation of Psellos’ methods and intentions as an author.
A 2014 "born digital" publication produced by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Published here under a Creative Commons License 3.0.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_FisherEA.Michael_Psellos_on_Symeon_the_Metaphrast.2014.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Homeric Nēpios
Online edition (2013) of a volume originally published in 1990 in the series Harvard Dissertations in Classics, by Garland Press.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_EdmundsS.Homeric_Nepios.1990.
Copyright, Susan T. Edmunds. Published here with permission of the author.
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