Laura Slatkin’s influential and widely admired book, here published in a second edition together with six additional essays, explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Highly charged allusions reverberate through the narrative and establish a constellation of themes that link the poem to other traditions. Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis’s place in the thematic structure of the Iliad. The six additional essays included in this volume—some of them classics, some never before published—cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic: the workings of genre in Hesiod and Homer; the poetics of exchange; and the nature of enmity and friendship. The volume also includes a study of the Hesiodic Catalog of Women and reflections on particular heroes, such as Diomedes and Odysseus.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Slatkin, Laura. 2011. The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays. Hellenic Studies Series 16. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Slatkin.The_Power_of_Thetis_and_Selected_Essays.2011.
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Wednesday, April 8, 2026
The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays
The Purpled World: Marketing Haute Couture in the Aegean Bronze Age
During the Aegean Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1500 BCE), the spread of woolen textiles triggered an increased demand for color. The dyes included those made from the labor-intensive processing of crocus stamens for saffron dye and even more costly dyes made from certain sea snails (the Muricidae/Murex). Minoan and Mycenaean textile producers (the palaces) operated mainly in the Black Sea region, rich in gold. “Purpled world” is Morris Silver’s term for this emergent ideology.
In Part I of The Purpled World, Silver demonstrates how the palaces embedded commercial motivation into traditional rituals, played out in purpose-built textile exhibition spaces, including labyrinths. In Part II, he mines textual, archaeological, and iconographic evidence to reveal the international textile trade. In Parts III and IV, Homer’s Trojan War is seen as a trade war, and Homeric heroes have roles as traders and/or agents for Poseidon. In Part V, Silver considers the before-and-after of this “purpled world”: Jason and the Argonauts, and the so-called collapse of the Mycenaean Palaces as a manifestation of vertical disintegration in the Aegean textile industry.
The Purpled World integrates all these forms of evidence with interpretative insights from Maslovian psychology, as well as the disciplines of fashion studies, marketing, and economics.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Silver, Morris. 2023. The Purpled World: Marketing Haute Couture in the Aegean Bronze Age. Hellenic Studies Series 92. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_SilverM.The_Purpled_World.2023.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumāta to Wahnām
Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran focuses on the content of one of the most important inscriptions of the Ancient Near East: the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century BCE), which in essence reports on a suspicious fratricide and subsequent coup d’état. Moreover, the study shows how the inscription’s narrative would decisively influence the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions well into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.
Intriguingly, our assessment of the impact of the Bisotun narrative on later literary traditions—in particular, the inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli (3rd–4th centuries CE)—necessarily relies on the reception of the oral rendition of the Bisotun story captured by Greek historians. As Rahim Shayegan argues, this oral tradition had an immeasurable impact upon the historiographical writings and epic compositions of later Iranian empires. It would have otherwise remained unknown to modern scholars, had it not been partially preserved and recorded by Hellanicus of Lesbos, Herodotus, Ctesias, and other Greek authors. The elucidation of Bisotun’s thematic composition therefore not only allows us to solve an ancient murder but also to reevaluate pre-Thucydidean Greek historiography as one of the most important repositories of Iranian epic themes.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Shayegan, M. Rahim. 2012. Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumāta to Wahnām. Hellenic Studies Series 52. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ShayeganM.Aspects_of_History_and_Epic_in_Ancient_Iran.2012.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Open Access Monograph Series: Ugaritica
[First posted in AWOL 1 March 2012, updated (corrected URLs) 8 April 2026]
Ugaritica in AMAR
One of a series of AWOL pages seeking to pull together publication series digitized and served through AMAR: Archive of Mesopotamian Archaeological Site Report
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia
Paideia and Cult explores the role of Christian education and worship in the complex process of conversion and Christianization. It analyzes the Catechetical Homilies of Theodore of Mopsuestia as a curriculum designed to train those seeking initiation into the Christian mysteries. Although Theodore gave considerable attention to teaching creedal theology, he sought to go beyond simply communicating information. His catechetical preaching set the teaching of Christian ideas within the context of religious community and ritual participation. In doing so he sought to produce a Christianized view of the world and of the convert’s place in a community of worship. Theodore’s attention to the communal, cognitive, and ritual components of initiation suggest a substantive understanding of religious conversion, yet one that avoids an overemphasis on intellectual and psychological transformation. Throughout this study catechesis emerges as invaluable for comprehending the ability of clergy to initiate new members as Christianity gained increasing prominence within the late Roman world.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Schwartz, Daniel L. 2013. Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia. Hellenic Studies Series 57. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_SchwartzD.Paideia_and_Cult.2013.
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Plato’s Wayward Path: Literary Form and the Republic
Since Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work in the 1800s, scholars interested in the literary dimension of Plato’s writings have sought to reconcile the dialogue form with the expository imperative of philosophical argument. It is now common for mainstream classicists and philosophers to attribute vital importance to literary form in Plato, which they often explain in terms of rhetorical devices serving didactic goals. This study brings the disciplines of literary and classical studies into methodological debate, questioning modern views of Plato’s dialogue form.
In the first part of this book, David Schur argues that the literary features of Plato’s dialogues—when treated as literary—cannot be limited to a single argumentative agenda. In the second part, he demonstrates the validity of this point by considering a rhetorical pattern of self-reflection that is prominent in the Republic. He emphasizes that Plato’s book consistently undermines the goal-driven conversation that it portrays. Offering a thought-provoking blend of methodological investigation and methodical close reading, Schur suggests that the Republic qualifies the authority of its conclusions by displaying a strong countercurrent of ongoing movement.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Schur, David. 2015. Plato's Wayward Path: Literary Form and the Republic. Hellenic Studies Series 66. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_SchurD.Platos_Wayward_Path.2015.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Concordia discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature
Writing to a friend, Horace describes the man as fascinated by “the discordant harmony of the cosmos, its purpose and power.” Andrew Scholtz takes this notion of “discordant harmony” and argues for it as an aesthetic principle where classical Athenian literature addresses politics in the idiom of sexual desire. His approach is an untried one for this kind of topic. Drawing on theorists of the sociality of language, Scholtz shows how eros, consuming, destabilizing desire, became a vehicle for exploring and exploiting dissonance within the songs Athenians sang about themselves. Thus he shows how societal tension and instability could register as an ideologically charged polyphony in works like the Periclean Funeral Oration, Aristophanes’s Knights, and Xenophon’s Symposium.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Scholtz, Andrew. 2007. Concordia discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature. Hellenic Studies Series 24. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ScholtzA.Concordia_Discors.2007.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
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