Posts Tagged by Plato
Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens
| July 3, 2020 | Posted By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2020.07.03 | By Gregory Nagy
The first edition of this book, a printed version, was published in 2002 by the Center for Hellenic Studies; that printed version has been replaced by a corrected online version. And that online version is now replaced here by this new online version, which is in effect a second edition, to be listed as Nagy 2020 in bibliographies. This second edition, launched 2020.07.03 in Classical Inquiries, makes it possible to add annotations to my online text—annotations that can be viewed as a form of open peer review.
[Essay continues here…]Revisiting Plato’s Rhapsody: A contribution to a colloquium about Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato
| June 26, 2020 | Posted By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2020.06.26 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. The text of this essay, as posted here in Classical Inquiries 2020.06.26, is a pre-edited version of my contribution to an online colloquium, Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato, the collected essays for which will reside in a special issue of Classics@; the guest-editor of that issue is the organizer of the colloquium, Gwenda-lin Grewal. My essay here, presented for inclusion in that colloquium, is intended as an informal guide, aimed primarily at readers who are interested in Plato, to a book of mine bearing the relevant title Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. The original printed version of the book appeared in 2002—which is also the dating of a corrected online version. Both versions are listed together as Nagy 2002 in the Bibliography for my essay here. But now there is also a second edition of Plato’s Rhapsody, listed separately in my Bibliography here as Nagy 2020, which is to be a new online version, housed in Classical Inquiries 2020.07.03. The special formatting of this second edition makes it possible to add annotations to my online text—annotations that can be viewed as a kind of open peer review. As I explain in a note that prefaces the second edition, the text of this new online version can be annotated by contributors who are invited to make comments on my argumentation, and I too will participate by occasionally making my own additional annotations with reference to my text. In the essay I present here, which as I said is aimed primarily at readers who are interested in Plato, I preview those of my annotations for Plato’s Rhapsody that have more to do with Plato and less to do with “rhapsody.” But the so-called “rhapsodes” conjured by Plato will still play a role in what my readers will now read, and my choice of an illustration for the cover of this essay will, I promise, have its own relevance. And the relevance extends to the title of the colloquium for which this essay is presented: Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato. As I will argue, Plato is keenly accurate in both his quotations and his misquotations of Homer, rivaling the rhapsodes.
[Essay continues here…]A personal checklist of memorable wordings in Parts I and II of Richard P. Martin’s Mythologizing Performance
| April 12, 2019 | Posted 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 | Posted 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 | Posted 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 | Posted 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.
[Essay continues here…]
