Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies

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    Victim of The Muses
Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History
Compton, Todd Merlin
This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. It views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression and are necessary, yet dangerous, to society.
Pointing at the Past
From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics
Bakker, Egbert J.
With numerous fresh linguistic observations Bakker shows that the epic narrator makes the epic past come to the present: epic is not only a verbal artifact that points to the past; it also is a performer's act of pointing at a past that has become present in and through language. Building on his earlier work, Egbert Bakker demonstrates the power of discourse analysis as an essential tool for elucidating the poetics of the Homeric tradition.
Homeric Conversation
Beck, Deborah
Homeric Conversation is the first full-length study ofconversation in the Homeric poems. Deborah Beck argues that conversation should be considered a traditional Homeric type scene, alongside recognized types such as arrival, sacrifice, battle, and hospitality. This book is a wide-ranging, closely argued aesthetic analysis of repetition and variation in the Homeric epics.
The Life and Miracles of Thekla
A Literary Study
Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald
The Life and Miracles of Thekla offers a unique view on the reception of classical and early Christian literature in Late Antiquity. This study examines the Life and Miracles as an intricate example of Greek writing and attempts to situate the work amidst a wealth of similar literary forms from the classical world.
 
           
    Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece
Marcel Detienne |
Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Historians and ethnologists can pool a wealth of knowledge about different cultures across space and time. Their joint task is to analyze human societies and to understand cultural products. Comparative analysis involves working together in an experimental and constructive enterprise. Marcel Detienne, alerted by dissonances, tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but also to the questions and concepts that arise from the reaction. What does it mean to found something, or rather to establish a territory, or to have or not have roots? What is a site or a place?