The purpose of this study is to recover, as far as possible, knowledge of the public monuments of the Persian Wars set up by the Greeks of the fifth century. A survey of the evidence is proposed. It will take the form of a catalogue; the evidence has been collected from inscriptions, scattered literary references, and archaeological research. The classification of monuments as public means that they were put up by a league or city rather than by an individual. By their form, size, and appearance they expressed the corporate feelings of a group for the events they represented. Although discussed generally in several places they have never been completely collected or studied as a group. The catalogue of monuments arranged according to sanctuaries, cities, and battlefields of the Persian Wars is intended partially to fill this need.
Online publication of a dissertation submitted to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1965. Also available from University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan. This online edition was revised in 2013.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_WestWC.Greek_Public_Monuments_of_the_Persian_Wars.1965.
Copyright, William Custis West, III. Published here with permission of the author.
Thursday, March 5, 2026
Greek Public Monuments of the Persian Wars
The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus’ Histories
Readers of Herodotus’s histories are familiar with its reports of bizarre portents, riddling oracles, and striking dreams. But Herodotus draws our attention to other types of signs too, beginning with human speech itself as a coded system that can manipulate and be manipulated. Objects, gifts, artifacts, markings, even the human body, are all capable of being invested with meaning in the Histories and Herodotus shows that conventionally and culturally determined actions, gestures, and ritual all need decoding. This book represents an unprecedented examination of signs and their interpreters, as well as the terminology Herodotus uses to describe sign transmission, reception, and decoding. Through his control and involvement in this process he emerges as a veritable “master of signs.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Hollmann, Alexander. 2011. The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus' Histories. Hellenic Studies Series 48. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Hollmann.The_Master_of_Signs.2011.
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King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad
Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer us some of the most detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. What is the significance of these scenes within the framework of the Iliad? This book explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech. In the Iliad, animal sacrifice is incorporated into the primary narrative to bolster the royal authority of Agamemnon and further emphasize Akhilleus’ isolation. The sacrifices embedded in character speech express frustration with the failure of reciprocity and the inability of sacrifice to influence the course of human events
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press
Hitch, Sarah. 2009. King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies Series 25. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_HitchS.King_of_Sacrifice.2009.
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Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity
Why should classical antiquity matter to Irish migration?Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquityargues that ancient Greece and Rome have shaped Irish migration narratives from the earliest texts to the 21st century.These classical models emerge in response to four key drivers of migration: war, economic need, religious motivation and the pursuit of education. Rather than passive inheritances, Graeco-Roman forms are used both to join and to challenge dominant frameworks, offering tools for cultural participation and strategies of resistance to exclusion.
The book traces classical reception in contexts ranging from early Irish origin legends and medieval Latin learning to 21st-century cultural politics, including Irish-language translation, diaspora literature and gendered experiences. Participation appears in assertions of Irish civilisation, synchronistic histories, literary cosmopolitanism and transnational exchange. Resistance surfaces in critiques of marginalisation, defence of minority languages and challenges to aesthetic or political canons. This book rethinks how Irish identities travel across borders, languages and centuries by showing how the ancient world underwrites both movement and its meanings.
978-1-3504-3042-6 (hardback)
978-1-3504-3043-3 (epdf)
978-1-3504-3044-0 (epub)
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues
The world has long wished for more of Sappho’s poetry, which exists mostly in tantalizing fragments. So the apparent recovery in 2004 of a virtually intact poem by Sappho, only the fourth to have survived almost complete, has generated unprecedented excitement and discussion among scholarly and lay audiences alike. This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of the newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Containing eleven new essays by leading scholars, it addresses a wide range of textual and philological issues connected with the find. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the “New Sappho” can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Greene, Ellen, and Marilyn B. Skinner, eds. 2009. The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues. Hellenic Studies Series 38. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GreeneE_SkinnerM_eds.The_New_Sappho_on_Old_Age.2009.
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The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective
The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft studies Homeric performance from archaic to Roman imperial times. It argues that oracular utterance, dramatic acting, and rhetorical delivery powerfully elucidate the practice of epic rhapsodes. Attention to the ways in which these performance domains informed each other over time reveals a shifting dynamic of competition and emulation among rhapsodes, actors, and orators that shaped their texts and their crafts. A diachronic analysis of this web of influences illuminates fundamental aspects of Homeric poetry: its inspiration and composition, the notional fixity of its poetic tradition, and the performance-driven textual fixation and writing of the Homeric poems. It also shows that rhapsodic practice is best understood as an evolving combination of revelation, interpretation, recitation, and dramatic delivery.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Hellenic Studies Series 47. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GonzalezJ.The_Epic_Rhapsode_and_his_Craft.2013.
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Plato’s Severed Lovers: Alkibiades and Sokrates
The Symposium’s tale of Alkibiades and Sokrates and its historical implications—of war and philosophy, of a shattered imperial democracy and a god-like leader driven out for supposed impiety and assassinated in exile, as well as a trial and execution of a philosopher for impiety and dissent—is dramatic in its own right. But its large and continuing public significance is only understandable in the context of some unexpected debates about Plato … For rehearsing modest changes on repeated themes, Plato scholarship often resembles the long patriarchy of curation about Athena.
– From the Introduction
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GilbertA.Platos_Severed_Lovers.2021.
Copyright, Alan Gilbert. Published here with permission of the author.
The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome
As Greek and Trojan forces battled in the shadow of Troy’s wall, Hephaistos created a wondrous, ornately decorated shield for Achilles. At the Shield’s center lay two walled cities, one at war and one at peace, surrounded by fields and pasturelands. Viewed as Homer’s blueprint for an ideal, or utopian, social order, the Shield reveals that restraining and taming Nature would be fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. It is this ideal that Classical Athens, with her utilitarian view of Nature, exemplified. In a city lacking pleasure gardens, it was particularly worthy of note when Epicurus created his garden oasis within the dense urban fabric. The disastrous results of extreme anthropocentrism would promote an essentially nostalgic desire to break down artificial barriers between humanity and Nature. This new ideal, vividly expressed through the domestication of Nature in villas and gardens and also through primitivist and Epicurean tendencies in Latin literature, informed the urban endeavors of Rome.
Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
Giesecke, Annette. 2007. The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome. Hellenic Studies Series 21. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GieseckeA.The_Epic_City_Urbanism_Utopia_and_the_Garden.2007.
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Tuesday, March 3, 2026
TA-U-RO-QO-RO: Studies in Mycenaean Texts, Language and Culture in Honor of José Luis Melena Jiménez
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad
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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Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis
Casey Dué examines the figure of Briseis, the concubine of Achilles in the Iliad, as an example of the traditional artistry enabled by a complex and self-contained oral poetic system. Briseis’ lament for Patroclus in Iliad 19 hints at her role in the larger epic tradition. Dué argues that Briseis’ role in the Iliad is enormously compressed, both in relation to the Iliad and the entire tradition of the epic cycle. Through a close reading of Homeric passages, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis shows how theIliad refers to expanded and alternative traditions about Briseis even while asserting its own version of her story.
It seems likely that there were at least two variations on the story of Briseis, because of the two-fold pattern she fulfills in ancient references. In one variation she is a wife whose husband is killed by Achilles in the sack of his city; in another she is an unmarried girl, the daughter of a king, whose father is killed when Achilles captures her town. Our Iliad alludes to multiple variations on these two basic themes.
Originally published in 2002 by Rowman & Littlefield as a part of the series "Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches." Copyright, Rowman & Littlefield. Available for purchase in print via Rowman & Littlefield.
Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due.Homeric_Variations_on_a_Lament_by_Briseis.2002.
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Saturday, February 28, 2026
Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics
Though Achilles the character is bound by fate and by narrative tradition, Achilles’s poem, the Iliad, was never fixed and monolithic in antiquity—it was multiform. And the wider epic tradition, from which the Iliad emerged, was yet more multiform. In Achilles Unbound, Casey Dué, building on nearly twenty years of work as coeditor of the Homer Multitext, explores both the traditionality and multiformity of the Iliad in a way that gives us a greater appreciation of the epic that has been handed down to us.
Dué argues that the attested multiforms of the Iliad—in ancient quotations, on papyrus, and in the scholia of medieval manuscripts—give us glimpses of the very long history of the text, access to even earlier Iliads, and a greater awareness of the mechanisms by which such a remarkable poem could be composed in performance. Using methodologies grounded in an understanding of Homeric poetry as a system, Achilles Unbound argues for nothing short of a paradigm shift in our approach to the Homeric epics, one that embraces their long evolution and the totality of the world of epic song, in which each performance was newly composed and received by its audience.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 81. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Due.Achilles_Unbound.2018.
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Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus
“What is a Greek priest?” This volume, which has its origins in a symposium held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., focuses on the question through a variety of lenses: the visual representation of cult personnel, priests as ritual experts, variations of priesthood, ideal concepts and their transformation, and the role of manteis. Each chapter looks at how priests and religious officials used a potential authority to promote themselves and their posts, how they played a role in conserving, shaping and reviving cult activity, how they acted behind the curtain of polis institutions, and how they performed as mediators between men and gods. It becomes clear that Greek priests had many faces, and that the factors that determined their roles and activities are political as well as historical, religious as well as economic, idealistic as well as pragmatic, personal as well as communal.
Dignas, Beate, and Kai Trampedach, eds. 2008. Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Figures from Homer to Heliodorus. Hellenic Studies Series 30. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_DignasB_and_TrampedachK_eds.Practitioners_of_the_Divine.2008.
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Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece
Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Historians and ethnologists can pool a wealth of knowledge about different cultures across space and time. Their joint task is to analyze human societies and to understand cultural products. Comparative analysis involves working together in an experimental and constructive enterprise. Marcel Detienne, alerted by dissonances, tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but also to the questions and concepts that arise from the reaction. What does it mean to found something, or rather to establish a territory, or to have or not have roots? What is a site or a place?
Detienne, Marcel. 2009. Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Hellenic Studies Series 17. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Detienne.Comparative_Anthropology_of_Ancient_Greece.2009.
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The Theban Epics
In antiquity, the story of the failed assault of the Seven against Thebes ranked second only to the Trojan War. But whereas the latter was immortalized by Homer’s Iliad, the account of the former in the epic Thebais survives only in fragments preserved in later authors. The same is true of the Oedipodeia and Epigoni, which dealt respectively with events leading up to the Seven’s campaign and with the successful assault on the city in the next generation. The Thebais was probably the most important of the three—certainly more and longer fragments of it have survived—and it has been alleged that its recovery would tell us more about Homer than any comparable discovery.
Paradoxically, these fragments suggest very un-Homeric content and style (in particular its detail of the hero Tydeus forfeiting immortality by gnawing on the head of a dying enemy). The same is true of the epic Alcmaeonis, named after one of the Epigoni, whose few surviving fragments pullulate with un-Homeric features. Malcolm Davies provides the first full commentary on all four epics’ fragments. He attempts to set them in context and examines whether artistic depictions of the relevant myths can help reconstruct the lost epics’ contents.
Davies, Malcolm. 2015. The Theban Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 69. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_DaviesM.The_Theban_Epics.2015.
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Friday, February 27, 2026
The Cypria
The Cypria, so named because its poet supposedly came from the island of Cyprus, was an early Greek epic that is known to us primarily through quotations and references to passages by later authors, as well as through a prose summary of its plot and contents. Malcolm Davies uses linguistic evidence from the available verbatim fragments, along with other considerations, to suggest that the Cypria was written after Homer and was intended as a sort of prequel to the plot of the Iliad. In light of this evidence, it is noteworthy that many of the incidents described in the Cypria seem markedly un-Homeric; to give just one example, the Judgment of Paris, a popular subject in later Greek literature and art, most likely received its first detailed treatment in the Cypria, whereas the Iliad mentions it only fleetingly. Here Davies collects and translates the extant fragments of the Cypria and provides a commentary that anchors it in the Homeric context as well as in the broader world of ancient Greek art and literature
Davies, Malcolm. 2019. The Cypria. Hellenic Studies Series 83. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_DaviesM.The_Cypria.2019.
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The Aethiopis: Neo-Neoanalysis Reanalyzed
It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic’s contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may supply justification: Neoanalysis.
This once influential theory held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis, called thus after an Ethiopian prince who allied with Troy against the Greeks, only to be killed by the Greeks’ greatest hero, Achilles. The death of that hero himself, at the hands of Paris, was then described, followed by the suicide of Ajax and preparations for the sack of Troy. The prose summary thus suggests a sequel to Homer’s poem, rather than its source, and for various reasons, especially the theory’s apparent failure to allow for the concept of oral composition, Neoanalysis fell into disfavor. Its recent revival in subtler form, given its vast potential implications for the Iliad’s origins, has inspired this volume’s critical reappraisal of that theory’s more sophisticated reincarnation. In addition, even more than with other lost early epics, the possibility that Greek vase paintings may reflect episodes of the poem must be examined.
Davies, Malcolm. 2016. The Aethiopis: Neo-Neoanalysis Reanalyzed. Hellenic Studies Series 71. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_DaviesM.The_Aethiopis.2016.
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