Posts Tagged by Homer
Picturing Homer as a cult hero
| March 3, 2016 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
This posting for 2016.03.03 in Classical Inquiries centers on the head of a bronze statue, dated somewhere between 227 and 221 BCE. The bronze head, on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC until 2016.03.20, is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and a photograph of this head has been featured as the cover illustrations for two other postings in Classical Inquiries, 2016.02.22 and 2016.02.29. As Claudia Filos and Keith Stone report in the second of these two consecutive postings, there was a panel discussion concerning this bronze head at a public event held at the National Gallery of Art, 2016.02.25. In the context of that discussion, Gloria Ferrari Pinney argued that the Houston head is a representation of Homer. Taking my lead from that argument, I argue here in this posting for 2016.03.03 that Homer is in this case imagined not only as the greatest of all poets but also as a cult hero.
Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the National Gallery of Art Collaborate to Shine Light on Ancient Greek Bronzes, Part 2
| February 29, 2016 | By Claudia Filos and Keith Stone listed under News |
The editors of Classical Inquires are pleased to highlight a public event held at the National Gallery of Art on February 25, 2016 titled “A poet or a god: The iconography of certain bearded male bronzes.”
A variation on the idea of a gleam that blinded Homer
| February 25, 2016 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
In the posting for 2016.02.18, I quoted the text of a story told in a set of ancient myths about the life of Homer. In that story, Homer was blinded by a gleam of light that emanated from the shining bronze armor of Achilles. The telling of the story as I quoted it in that posting is immediately followed in the same text by the telling of another version, according to which Homer was blinded not because he saw a vision of Achilles wearing his shining bronze armor but because he saw a vision of Helen. I will argue here in my posting for 2016.02.25 that such a variation on the theme of the blinding of Homer fits an overall pattern of mythmaking about the power of poetry to picture what really happens in myth.
Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the National Gallery of Art Collaborate to Shine Light on Ancient Greek Bronzes, Part 1
| February 23, 2016 | By Claudia Filos and Keith Stone listed under News |
The editors of Classical Inquires are pleased to announce a public event held at the National Gallery of Art on February 18, 2016 titled “A priestess or a goddess: The problem of identity in some female hellenistic sculptures.”
Just to look at all the shining bronze here, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven: Seeing bronze in the ancient Greek world
| February 18, 2016 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
In Odyssey 4, as soon as the young hero Telemachus arrives as a visitor to Sparta, home of king Menelaos and his queen Helen, he feasts his eyes on all the shining splendor of their royal palace. As he takes it all in, he cannot resist saying out loud that he has never before seen anything quite so dazzling. My essay here is about the visual power of bronze as it works its way into the imagination of ancient Greek verbal as well as visual art.
What is on Homer’s mind?
| February 11, 2016 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
!["The Argo," by Konstantinos Volanakis (1837–1907), Konstantinos Volanakis [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Constantine_Volanakis_Argo-96x125.jpg)
In the verbal art of Homeric poetry, we find two passages where Homer actually says that he has something on his mind. The first something is the good ship Argo in Odyssey 12.70 and the second something is the hero Odysseus himself in Odyssey 9.10.
