Death of an Amazon
2020.08.14 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. The picture I show for the lead illustration of this essay is a close-up of the face of a dying Amazon. She is Penthesileia, daughter of the war-god Ares. The close-up comes from an ancient Athenian vase painting that pictures this Amazon at the moment of her death, killed by the hero Achilles, with whom she is engaged in mortal combat, one-on-one. And, at this precise moment of death, the Amazon looks up at her killer, Achilles, while he, in turn, is looking down at her. As their eyes meet, Achilles falls in love with Penthesileia, but now it is too late: his sword has already been plunged into the beautiful body of the Amazon. In my book about ancient Greek heroes, I comment on this fatal erotic moment in some detail, arguing that Achilles and Penthesileia are heroic body-doubles of each other—one male and one female. In my essay here, however, I extend my understanding of the description I just gave,“heroic,” since I will argue that Achilles and Penthesileia are not only epic heroes. The parallelism between them is deeper, since they are also, both of them, cult heroes.
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About a perfect start for a world-wide web of song
2020.08.07 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. Homeric poetry, at a pivotal moment where it represents the making of Homeric poetry itself, pictures a blind singer of tales in the act of starting his song. The singer is shown in the act of ‘starting from a thread [oimē] that had at that time a fame [kleos] reaching all the way up to the wide sky’. That is how I translate line 74 in Rhapsody 8 of the Homeric Odyssey: οἴμης, τῆς τότ’ ἄρα κλέος οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἵκανε. The song that the singer of tales is singing here is pictured as a world-wide web of song, reaching all the way up to an unlimited celestial expanse. And the threading or oimē that becomes the song is being made by a master weaver who starts weaving his web with a heading band, as weavers call it. Ancient Greek weavers called it the exastis (ἔξαστις), and we see it pictured in the drawing that I show as the illustration for the cover of this essay. The drawing originates from Elizabeth Barber, who is not only a renowned expert in ancient textiles but also a deft weaver in her own right. And such a heading band, as pictured in this drawing, makes for a perfect start of Homeric song as sung by the singer of tales. There is a primal metaphor at work here. If a weaver makes a perfect start, then the web that is woven by the weaver can lead to a perfect finish. Comparably, a perfect start for Homeric singing leads to a perfect song, that is, to a marvel of unified poetry.
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MASt @ CHS – Friday, June 26, 2020: Summaries of Presentations and Discussion
2020.08.07 | By Rachele Pierini and Tom Palaima
Notes from the June 2020 meeting of the MASt @ CHS seminar.
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Ongoing comments on a Pausanias reader in progress
The comments collected here represent Gregory Nagy’s ongoing commentary on Pausanias and will be continually updated with further comments. These comments are also to be found in A Pausanias Commentary in Progress = APCIP, co-authored by Gregory Nagy together with Greta Hawes and Carolyn Higbie. Each comment by each of these three co-authors has its own author-stamp and date-stamp. This project, APCIP, is coordinated with a separate project, A Pausanias Reader in Progress = APRIP, authored by Gregory Nagy, which is edited by Angelia Hanhardt and Keith DeStone (the Web Producer is Noel Spencer and the consultant for images is Jill Curry Robbins). Nagy’s APRIP is an ongoing project, with the ultimate aim of retranslating Pausanias where updating is needed for the original translation by W. H. S. Jones, 1918 (Scroll 2 with H.A. Ormerod).
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We’ll die in crystalline Petropolis, by Osip Mandelshtam
Translated by Carol Rumens We’ll die in crystalline Petropolis Whose ruling deity is Proserpina. We swallow deadly air with every breath, And every hour becomes a year of death. Goddess of oceans, terrible Afina, Resign your helmet’s stone magnificence. We’ll die in crystalline Petropolis Which is not ruled by you, but Proserpina. From
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Death of a ram, death of Patroklos
2020.07.31 | By Gregory Nagy
A picture is worth a thousand words. That popular adage fits, to my mind, the picture I have chosen for the cover of my essay here—the word-count for which even exceeds a thousand, though not by much. The picture is a line drawing of an ancient vase-painting. The camera of the mind’s eye is zooming in—on a sheep’s head. It is the head of a ram, a dead ram. His throat has been slit, with blood flowing from the gaping wedge where the cut had been made, evidently by way of a sacrificial knife. The blood is not visible in the black-and-white line drawing, but it is clearly there in the original painting, which also shows—as we see even in the line drawing—how the left eye of the ram is looking directly into the eye of the viewer. It is the look of the dead, with eyeballs rolled up, as it were, in a death-stare. This sacrificial ram, as we will see, stands for Patroklos, who dies as a sacrificial body-double of Achilles in the Homeric Iliad.
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