Posts Tagged by Herodotus
About what kinds of things we may learn about mythology by reading about rituals recorded by bureaucratic scribes
| November 22, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.11.22 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. This essay centers on a scribe working in the Mycenaean palace at Pylos who wrote a Greek-language text about protocols involving rituals. The scribe’s text, written on a tablet of clay in a form of writing known as Linear B, was accidentally preserved because this tablet, along with hundreds of other such tablets, was baked solid by a great fire that destroyed the palace at Pylos around 1200 BCE. Mycenologists know the approximate date of the scribe’s writing for a simple reason: they know the dating of the fire. The text of this particular tablet, which is classified by Mycenologists as Tn 316, is about rituals honoring divinities whom the scribe actually mentions by name, and these divinities include Zeus, Hērā, Poseidon, Hermes—names familiar to anyone today who studies Classical Greek mythology as it evolved in the course of the first millennium BCE. But what about these same gods as we see them named in the rituals recorded by our scribe, who is writing in the second millennium BCE? In the brief essay I present here, I argue that such rituals have something to tell us about the myths that went with the rituals. The scribe himself may have been an ordinary person—just as the ancient Egyptian scribe whom we see in my first illustration for this essay seems ordinary enough. Still, what the scribe writes might seem extraordinary even for such an ordinary bureaucratic mortal—if he is put in charge of writing up various protocols for various prescribed ways of caring for divinities and for things that are sacred to those divinities. Even a worldly bureaucrat, if he is to care about protocols for taking care of gods, could then be thinking otherworldly thoughts that are worthy of those gods. Beyond the Greek-speaking world, a model for such otherworldly thinking is the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth, god of all scribes. We get a glimpse of this divinity, pictured with the head of an ibis, in my second illustration. There he is, otherworldly scribe, in the act of writing on his own otherworldly tablet.
[Essay continues here…]Can we think of Centaurs as a species?
| May 3, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.05.03 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. Ιn three previous essays posted in Classical Inquiries, 2019.04.26, 2019.04.19 and 2019.03.22, I analyzed myths about Centaurs. Since they were pictured as half-man and half-horse, we could nowadays think of them as monsters. And, in terms of what we see in pre-classical and classical representations of Centaurs, such monsters were exclusively male, exhibiting the shaggy hormonal characteristics of exaggerated human maleness. Accordingly, Centaurs could hardly be viewed as a species of animals—or, let us say, of half-animals. In post-classical representations, however, as noted by Jan Bremmer (2012:26, 29) in the course of his detailed survey of relevant testimonia about such monsters, we start seeing female Centaurs as well. So, maybe Centaurs were eventually perceived as a species after all? Such a perception persists into modernity, culminating almost absurdly in the image of the “Centaurettes” featured in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). A closer look at the theriomorphism or beastly form of the Centaurs, however, reveals that even in pre-classical times there existed representations of female monsters who were half-woman and half-horse. My favorite example is a Boeotian incised decoration, dated to the seventh century BCE, picturing Medusa the monstrous Gorgon as half-woman and half-horse. But is this female monster really a Centaur? In formulating an answer to this question, I will need to reassess my understanding of the relationship between myth and ritual in Greek traditions.
[Essay continues here…]Notes on Xerxes and His Persian Empire
| August 3, 2017 | By Olga Davidson listed under Guest Post |
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2017.08.03 | By Olga M. Davidson
Adapted from notes written by Olga Davidson and originally published in The Glimmerglass Festival’s 2017 Program Book. The 2017 Glimmerglass production of Handel’s XERXES, directed by Tazewell Thompson, runs through August 18.
[Essay continues here…]Sappho and Aesop, distinctions between diachronic and historical perspectives
| March 23, 2017 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2017.03.23 | By Gregory Nagy
A paper presented on March 11, 2017, at the Stoá tou Vivlíou in Athens as part of a conference hosted by the Society for the Promotion of Education and Learning.
[Essay continues here…]Where it all comes together for me: a sacred space of the goddess Hērā
| March 16, 2016 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2016.03.16 | By Gregory Nagy
Here was the setting for the ordeal endured by Kleobis and Biton as substitutes for the sacrificial oxen that were meant to pull the ceremonial cart carrying the priestess of the goddess Hērā across the length of the plain in a sacred procession that started at the city of Argos and reached its climax at the heights of the sacred space of the goddess, known as the Hēraion.
[Essay continues here…]“Life of Homer” myths as evidence for the reception of Homer
| December 18, 2015 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
2015.12.18 | By Gregory Nagy
This inquiry centers on the surviving texts of ‘Life of Homer’ narrative traditions, to which I refer simply as Lives of Homer. These Lives, I argue, can be read as sources of historical information about the reception of Homeric poetry. The information is varied and layered, requiring diachronic as well as synchronic analysis.
The Lives portray the reception of Homeric poetry by narrating a series of events featuring ‘live’ performances by Homer himself. In the narratives of the Lives, Homeric composition is consistently being situated in contexts of oral performance. In effect, the Lives explore the shaping power of positive and even negative responses by the audiences of Homeric poetry in ad hoc situations of oral performance.
[Essay continues here…]
