Delphi

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

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

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

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

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

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