2020.07.10 | By Gregory Nagy §0. I have run into a problem in trying to come up with an adequate translation of Pausanias when he talks about the Eleusinian Mysteries. Part of the problem, I think, is that Pausanias himself is mystifying in his language about the Mysteries. He seems guarded about giving the impression that he is in any way about to reveal to his readers whatever was periodically… Read more
2019.12.20 | By Gregory Nagy §0. For my brief essay here, TC XIX in Classical Inquiries, I return to an analysis, started at §4 of TC V, 2019.08.22, centering on a myth that tells how the hero Hēraklēs succeeded in clearing the stables of Augeias, king of Elis. These stables had been clogged with vast accumulations of manure produced by the king’s countless cattle. But now the hero single-handedly diverts… Read more
2019.11.27 | By Gregory Nagy §0. For my brief essay here, TC XVIII in Classical Inquiries, I return to a point I made in an earlier essay, TC V §§4–10, where I highlighted a remarkable sequence of events narrated in the Library of “Apollodorus,” dated to the second century CE, in the course of an overall narrative about the life and times of the hero Hēraklēs. According to this narrative… Read more
2019.08.22 | By Gregory Nagy §0. Previously, in “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology IV,” hereafter abbreviated as TC IV, I was reconstructing the mythological persona of the Greek hero Hēraklēs by tracing him backward in time, back to the earliest reconstructable phases of myths that told his story. Here in TC V, I will trace such myths forward in time, and I will start my procedure of “reconstructing forward” by… Read more
2019.08.15 | By Gregory Nagy §0. As I have argued in the posting for 2019.07.26, “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology I” (hereafter TC I), the myths about the Greek hero Hēraklēs and the Scandinavian hero Starkaðr are cognate, verbalized in cognate languages belonging to a language-family known to linguists as "Indo-European." Viewed in this light, the term “Indo-European” can be applied not only with reference to cognate language-groupings like Greek… Read more
2019.07.19 | By Gregory Nagy §0. As I argued in the previous posting, Classical Inquiries 2019.07.12, the name of Olympia as a setting for the myth about the founding of the Olympics by Hēraklēs is linked with the name of Mount Olympus as the setting for the myth about the immortalization of this hero after death. In the present posting here, 2019.07.19, I take the argument further: the various different versions… Read more
