2020.09.25 | By Gregory Nagy §0. Back in the year 2013, which was the original publication date for my book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (hereafter H24H), I took the risk of drastically expanding one of the 24 “Hours,” making it twice as long as the other 23 “Hours”. What made that one hour—Hour 5—really more like two hours in length is that I added to the part… Read more
2016.10.08 | By Gregory Nagy The starting point here is Song 44 of Sappho, “The Wedding of Hector and Andromache.” My focus, this time, is on Aeolian myths about Thēbē, an old walled city in northwest Asia Minor, to be located southeast of Mount Ida and northeast of the Gulf of Adramytteion. Read more
2016.08.31 | By Gregory Nagy This song, attributed to Sappho, shows the same kind of formulaic structure that we see at work in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. Such a structure, in the case of Homeric poetry, indicates that this poetry originated from oral traditions. So also in the case of the songmaking exemplified by Song 44 of Sappho, the formulaic structure of this song indicates a parallel origin from… Read more
2016.01.18 | By Claude Calame As the words that Sappho puts into the mouth of Aphrodite indicate, the goddess of love intervenes in this melic poem in a performative fashion. The deixis that accompanies her poetic intervention corresponds to the pragmatic form of the whole song. Read more
2016.01.07 | By Gregory Nagy Epigram 55 of Posidippus, a poet who flourished in the third century BCE, refers to the songs of Sappho. That is what I argued already in my postings for 2015.11.19 and 2015.12.03. This epigram, as we can see from those postings, is about a girl named Nikomakhe whose happy young life was sadly interrupted by a premature death. Nostalgically, the words of the epigram recall… Read more
2015.12.31 | By Gregory Nagy Horace’s imitations of Sappho in Ode 4.1 and of Pindar in Ode 4.2 show his deep understanding of archaic Greek lyric poetry. Particularly striking is his visualization of Icarus in Ode 4.2 as a negative model for such poetry. The artificial wings of Icarus are seen as a foil for the natural wings of the swan, the sacred bird of Apollo, who is god of… Read more
