Dioscorides

A scenario for exchanges of comments on a planned monograph about the ancient reception of Sappho

2019.03.08 | By Gregory Nagy As the title of this posting for 2019.03.08 indicates, I am planning to produce a monograph about the ancient reception of Sappho, and part of the plan is to organize a system for exchanging comments about this monograph, the text of which is I think not yet ready for publication in print. In this posting, I attempt to get the conversation started by making selected… Read more

Musings about a scene pictured by the Achilles Painter

2019.02.14 | By Gregory Nagy §0. On the cover of an earlier posting of mine for Classical Inquiries, Nagy 2019.01.31, we see a facsimile of a picture painted on an Attic white-ground lekythos, dated somewhere around 440–430 BCE, by an artist who is known to art historians as the Achilles Painter. In that posting, which was all about Sappho, I never explained why I chose that picture for the cover.… Read more

Erotic desecration and sacralization in Greek myth and ritual

2018.07.06 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The brief remarks in this post, dated 2018.07.06, pick up from where I left off in the post that is dated 2018.06.30. In my more lengthy remarks there, at §10, I started to argue that the erotic activity as narrated by the first-person speaker in the so-called First Cologne Epode of Archilochus, F 196a W, is ultimately not an act of desecration but rather… Read more