Samos

By Gregory Nagy

I am a scribe who writes letters, and my writing gives me power: variations on a theme in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East

2020.01.24 | By Gregory Nagy §0. There is a story about a scribe who succeeded in seizing political power, at least for a while, precisely because he was a scribe. And this scribe could not have had even such a limited degree of success if he had not been a scribe. His name was Maiandrios son of Maiandrios, and his story is told by Herodotus, so-called father of history. According… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 2: The case of a story about Aesop and a barking dog in the Wasps of Aristophanes

2019.06.07 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In Part 2 here, I pick up from where I left off in Part 1, where I studied the possibilities of convergence as well as divergence between fables that focus primarily on beasts as talking characters and other fables where the only talking characters are humans. Here I extend the study, analyzing a special kind of convergence that we find in a fable retold… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

Polycrates and his patronage of two lyric masters, Anacreon and Ibycus

2017.09.08 | By Gregory Nagy Paper presented at the symposium “Culture and Society in ‘the Lyric age’ of Greece”: A Joint Conference with the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History and the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song, Princeton University, September 8–9, 2017. Read more