Monday, March 2, 2026

Hippota Nestor

Hippota Nestor
Douglas Frame
  
Hellenic Studies Series 

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.


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Michael Psellos. On Symeon the Metaphrast and On the Miracle at Blachernae: Annotated Translations with Introductions

Michael Psellos. On Symeon the Metaphrast and On the Miracle at Blachernae: Annotated Translations with Introductions
Elizabeth A. Fisher
  
Curated Books

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.


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Homeric Nēpios

Homeric Nēpios
Susan T. Edmunds
 
Curated Books

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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Imagining Illegitimacy in Classical Greek Literature

  
 
In Imagining Illegitimacy, Mary Ebbott investigates metaphors of illegitimacy in classical Greek literature, concentrating in particular on the way in which the illegitimate child (nothos) is imagined in narratives. Employing an approach that maintains that metaphors are a key to understanding abstract ideas, Ebbott connects the many complex metaphors associated with illegitimacy to the ancient Greek conception of illegitimacy. The nothos as imagined in ancient Greek literature is metaphorically connected to concerns about gender, reproduction, marriage, and concepts of polity. By decoding the metaphors of nothos mapped to these concepts, readers gain access into these ideas and their relationship to one another. The complex portrait of nothos portrayed here examines a wide variety of works, from Euripides, Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, and many others. By analyzing the imagery connected to illegitimate persons, Ebbott arrives at deep insights on how legitimacy and illegitimacy in Greek culture were deeply connected to the concepts of family, procreation, and citizenry, and how these connections influenced cultural imperatives of determining and controlling legitimacy.  

Use the following persistent identifier:

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Ebbott.Imagining_Illegitimacy_in_Classical_Greek_Literature.2003.


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Sunday, March 1, 2026

The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy

  

The laments of captive women found in extant Athenian tragedy constitute a fundamentally subversive aspect of Greek drama. In performances supported by and intended for the male citizens of Athens, the songs of the captive women at the Dionysia gave a voice to classes who otherwise would have been marginalized and silenced in Athenian society: women, foreigners, and the enslaved. The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy addresses the possible meanings ancient audiences might have attached to these songs. Casey Dué challenges long-held assumptions about the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in Greek thought by suggesting that, in viewing the plight of the captive women, Athenian audiences extended pity to those least like themselves. Dué asserts that tragic playwrights often used the lament to create an empathetic link that blurred the line between Greek and barbarian.

After a brief overview of the role of lamentation in both modern and classical traditions, Dué focuses on the dramatic portrayal of women captured in the Trojan War, tracing their portrayal through time from the Homeric epics to Euripides’ Athenian stage. The author shows how these laments evolved in their significance with the growth of the Athenian Empire. She concludes that while the Athenian polis may have created a merciless empire outside the theater, inside the theater they found themselves confronted by the essential similarities between themselves and those they sought to conquer.

 

Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due.The_Captive_Womans_Lament_in_Greek_Tragedy.2006.


Copyright, University of Texas Press. Published here with permission.

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Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad

Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad
Casey Dué
  
Hellenic Studies Series

Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century CE. An impressive thousand years old and then some, its historical reach is far greater. The Venetus A preserves in its entirety a text that was composed within an oral tradition that can be shown to go back as far as the second millennium BCE, and the writings in its margins preserve the scholarship of Ptolemaic scholars working in the second century bce and in the centuries following.

Two thousand years later, technology offers a new opportunity to rediscover this scholarship and better understand the epic that is the foundation of Western literature. The high-resolution images of the manuscript that accompany these essays were acquired by a multinational team of scholars and conservators in May 2007.

 

Dué, Casey, ed. 2009. Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 35. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due_ed.Recapturing_a_Homeric_Legacy.2009

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Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary

  
 
This edition, commentary, and accompanying essays focus on the tenth book of the Iliad, which has been doubted, ignored, and even scorned. Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott use approaches based on oral traditional poetics to illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable. The introductory essays explain their textual and interpretive approaches and explicate the ambush theme within the whole Greek epic tradition. The critical texts (presented as a sequence of witnesses, including the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript and select papyri) highlight the individual witnesses and the variations they offer. The commentary demonstrates how the unconventional Iliad 10 shares in the oral traditional nature of the whole epic, even though its poetics are specific to its nocturnal ambush plot.  
 

Dué, Casey, and Mary Ebbott. 2010. Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary. Hellenic Studies Series 39. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due_Ebbott.Iliad_10_and_the_Poetics_of_Ambush.2010.

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