Guest Post

By Gregory Nagy, Guest Post

A preview of Mages and Ionians revisited

2018.12.21 | By Gregory Nagy In Classical Inquiries 2017.06.26, I published an online essay entitled “Mages and Ionians.” This piece drew on the same research that I presented, in part, for the panel “Ethnicity and Multiculturalism in Herodotus: Through Others’ Eyes,” at the Ninth Celtic Conference in Classics, University College Dublin, June 2016. The proceedings of the discussions linked to that panel are to be published in a forthcoming volume… Read more

Guest Post

Fourteen poems by Agathí Dimitroúka

2018.12.12 | Introduced by Gregory Nagy It is such an honor for me to be given the opportunity of introducing a set of poems by Agathí Dimitroúka (Αγαθή Δημητρούκα), presented here in Modern Greek. The editor of Classical Inquiries, Keith Stone, tells me of plans to commission translations of these exquisite poems into other languages, including English, but for now the pristine charm of the poetry can already be savored… Read more

By Gregory Nagy, Guest Post

Two librettists, unsung heroes of Puccini’s La Bohème

2018.11.16 | By Gregory Nagy and Martha Cowan §0. This essay is a kind of dialogue between Martha Cowan and me. Paragraph §2, subdivided into §2a §2b §2c... all the way through §2k, is by MC, while paragraphs §0 §1 §3 are by me, GN. Our dialogue centers on the two writers credited with the libretto for the music of Giacomo Puccini in his opera La Bohème, first performed in… Read more

Guest Post, H24H

Homeric Ainoi in Latin Literature, Part II: Quintilian

2018.10.19 | By Miriam Kamil §1. In the first part of this essay, I examined a passage from the Odyssey referred to in the text as an ainos. This was the improvised story told by Odysseus to the swineherd Eumaios in Odyssey 14, wherein Odysseus’ fictitious persona forgets and then obtains a cloak while out on ambush during the Trojan War. Eumaios intuits that he is hearing an ainos and correctly interprets its… Read more

Guest Post, H24H

Homeric Ainoi in Latin Literature, Part I: Homer

2018.10.19 | By Miriam Kamil §1. I was a Teaching Fellow in the 2017 run of Greg Nagy’s annual course at Harvard, The Ancient Greek Hero. In this class, we examined the use of riddles in Homeric epic. The students learned about a sort of riddle called αἶνος, transliterated as ainos. Related to the verb αἰνέω (aineō) ‘to praise’, the word means, ‘praising speech’, or more basically, ‘speech act’.[1] But… Read more

Guest Post

Chariots on the Lelantine plain and the art of taunting the losers, Part 3: Winning the Lelantine War

2018.05.29 | By Natasha Bershadsky §0. After their victory over the Chalcidians and the Boeotians in 506 BCE, the Athenians dedicated to Athena a bronze chariot drawn by four horses. The sculpture was accompanied by an epigram. This study argues that the chariot portrayed the Athenians as victors in the age-old Lelantine War, while the epigram was constructed to taunt the defeated enemies of Athens by parodying their local traditions… Read more