Delphi

Guest Post

The Circle of Fame: Apollo, the Corps de Ballet, and the Song of the Muses at Delphi

2020.06.11 | By Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi §0. The Pythian movement of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo opens with a great scene of song-and-dance on Olympus (verses 182–206), where certain deities perform together. I will argue that choral melic poetry plays a prime role in this section of the Hymn: in fact, these verses share many features in diction and imagery with melic poetry, and in addition they describe a choral… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 3: A dog’s craving for meat as a signal foretelling the death of Aesop

2019.06.11 | By Gregory Nagy §0. It is a commonplace in storytelling to picture the stealing of meat by a hungry dog, as we see in the illustration for this posting. After all, dogs have a natural craving for meat—also for other rich sources of protein, such as cheese. In Part 3 here, I pick up from where I left off in Part 2, where I was analyzing the fable… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 2: The case of a story about Aesop and a barking dog in the Wasps of Aristophanes

2019.06.07 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In Part 2 here, I pick up from where I left off in Part 1, where I studied the possibilities of convergence as well as divergence between fables that focus primarily on beasts as talking characters and other fables where the only talking characters are humans. Here I extend the study, analyzing a special kind of convergence that we find in a fable retold… Read more

By Gregory Nagy, Pausanias reader, travel-study

A plane tree in Nafplio: decorating a reader for travel-study in Greece, March 2018

2018.03.22 | By Gregory Nagy This new reader, posted 2018.03.22, “decorates” an earlier reader posted 2018.03.07. As I once tried to explain by way of simile, the earlier reader was like a Christmas tree waiting to be decorated with ornaments. But now I adjust the simile by comparing the new reader to that famous plane tree so loved by Xerxes, mighty ruler of the Persian Empire, which he honored as… Read more

By Gregory Nagy, Pausanias reader

A reader for travel-study in Greece

2018.03.07 | By Gregory Nagy The essays in this reader are designed to supplement visits by travel-study groups to sites and museums in Greece. Each essay focuses on things to see-or at least to note if they cannot be seen-at sites to be visited. In cases where a museum adjoins a site, I offer a separate inventory of things to see. Wherever possible, I use as my primary ancient source… Read more

travel-study

Things noted during eight days of travel-study in Greece, 2016.06.10–18

2016.06.24 | By Gregory Nagy During the eight full days of contact time for myself and the participants of a Harvard travel-study program, 2016.06.10–18, I tried each day to focus on things to see at each ancient site we visited. Wherever it was possible, I used as my primary ancient source the reportage of the ancient traveler Pausanias, who flourished in the second century CE and whose Greek text is… Read more