Posts Tagged by Plato
A personal checklist of memorable wordings in Parts I and II of Richard P. Martin’s Mythologizing Performance
| April 12, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.04.12 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. In an earlier posting, Classical Inquiries 2017.12.09, I have already expressed the intellectual debt I owe to Richard P. Martin’s book, Mythologizing Performance (Cornell University Press 2018). In the present posting, I follow up with a checklist of memorable wordings culled from Parts I and II of Martin’s book, to be followed in a later posting by a complementary checklist for Parts III and IV. My choice of illustration for the cover here is inspired by a central theme that Martin analyzes in Chapters 8 and 9 of Part II in his book. That theme, which shows its influence in the Homeric Odyssey, concerns the mystical descent of Orpheus into the world below in a sadly vain quest to recover his beloved Eurydice.
[Essay continues here…]A scenario for exchanges of comments on a planned monograph about the ancient reception of Sappho
| March 8, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.03.08 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. 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 comments on my own text and by inviting selected colleagues to respond with comments of their own—either on my selected comments or on my actual text in its present form. The formatting for the comments is made possible by a new annotation tool developed by Luke Hollis and his associates. This tool makes it possible to comment on any one paragraph or on groupings of paragraphs.
[Essay continues here…]Musings about a scene pictured by the Achilles Painter
| February 14, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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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. In the posting for today, 2019.02.14, I offer an explanation, which will require a broader view: that is why the facsimile for the cover here is in three parts: the part on our right is the same picture I showed in the earlier post, but the part in the middle “zooms out,” showing the whole scene that is being pictured—not just a part of the scene, as before—and then the part on our left shows a picturing that I have not shown before. Relevant to my explanation of the overall scene, as we will see, is the day on which this posting is being published, Valentine’s Day 2019.02.14. And, I should add on a personal note, the relevance extends further: whether or not I am right in trying to explain the meaning of the overall scene that is being pictured here by the Achilles Painter, I hope that the picture itself, in all its beauty, will be accepted as a loving Valentine’s Day “card” from Greg to Holly.
[Essay continues here…]Homo ludens at play with the songs of Sappho: Experiments in comparative reception theory, Part Two
| January 16, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.01.16 | By Gregory Nagy
This posting for 2019.01.16 is Part Two of a long-term project that I started in the posting for 2019.01.08, which is Part One of that project. In Part One, I was analyzing various examples of ancient texts composed by male authors who playfully imitate Sappho by appropriating aspects of her songs in their own literary creations. Here in Part Two, I analyze further examples, and the numbering of my paragraphs continues from where I left off at the concluding paragraph §33 of Part One. As I already noted in that paragraph, Part Two of my analysis here will center on the erotic novel Daphnis and Chloe, attributed to a man named Longus, who has conventionally been dated to the second century CE. His novel, as I will argue, is a playful exercise in showing how to soften the potential for hard-core pornographic appropriations of female sexuality by ancient male authors in their imitations of Sappho’s songs. In the course of my argumentation, I will at times view this ancient Greek novel through the metaphorical lens of a modern Italian film, Cinema Paradiso.
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Homeric problems and bibliographical challenges, Part 2: More on the performances of rhapsodes at the festival of the Panathenaia
| November 30, 2018 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2018.11.30 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. This post, dated 2018.11.30, picks up from where I left off in Classical Inquiries 2018.11.22. Here again I am dealing with problems I have encountered in figuring out the historical circumstances of Homeric performances by professional reciters called rhapsōidoi ‘rhapsodes’ at the seasonally recurring festival of the Panathenaia in Athens. As before, my starting point centers on what I have already formulated in a set of twin books entitled Homer the Classic (2009|2008) and Homer the Preclassic (2010|2009). And, as also before, I am faced with bibliographical challenges: how to develop further formulations without getting bogged down in secondary bibliography.
[Essay continues here…]Learning to sing, and a dead master of song
| March 14, 2018 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2018.03.14 | By Gregory Nagy
This essay recapitulates a part of a larger project concerning the craft of singing to the accompaniment of song—as the craft was practiced in Athens and its environs around the fifth century BCE (Nagy 2012). The focal point of interest is a red-figure painting, by an artist named Douris, on a drinking-cup produced between 490 and 480 BCE. I show here a line drawing of what is pictured in the painting. We see in this picture two scenes showing boys being educated in the learning and the performance of song and musical accompaniment. I will compare these two scenes with what is known about a dead man, buried in a tomb dated to the fifth century BCE, who must have been a master of such song.
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