During the Aegean Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1500 BCE), the spread of woolen textiles triggered an increased demand for color. The dyes included those made from the labor-intensive processing of crocus stamens for saffron dye and even more costly dyes made from certain sea snails (the Muricidae/Murex). Minoan and Mycenaean textile… Read more
Formulaic phraseology presents the epitome of words worn and weathered by trial and the tests of time. Scholarship on weathered words is exceptionally diverse and interdisciplinary. This volume focuses on verbal art, which makes Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) a major point of reference. Yet weathered words are but a part of… Read more
Most critics agree that Euripidean tragedy addresses a wealth of political questions, and that it successfully incorporates and engages with a variety of ancient Greek poetic traditions. Nevertheless, these topics and questions have generally been treated separately. In this book, Jonah Radding contends that the political issues addressed in Euripides’s tragedies are… Read more
Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different… Read more
José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents. This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation… Read more
This text first considers the character of Penelope from the Odyssey as the object of male gazes and as a subject acting from her own desire, and then it develops the notion of “possible plots” as structures in the poem that co-exist with the plots Penelope actually plays out. Read more
Nostos, Nestor: a theme, a character. What connects them? The concept of return, underlying the etymology of the oldest Homeric hero’s name, which will be further explored throughout this volume. In the trajectory of Douglas Frame as a researcher, νόστος, νόος, and Nestor summarize more than thirty years of walking… Read more
Ancient scholarship had many faces, but most have faded away over time. Demetrios of Scepsis is one of the more shadowy of these lost figures, best known for his commentary on the Trojan Catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad. Alexandra Trachsel’s work represents the first treatment dedicated to Demetrios of Scepsis… Read more
In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time. Nicola… Read more
Gregory Nagy Translated into Persian by Farnoosh Shamsian [[This article was first published in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (ed. T. O. Sloane; Oxford 2001) 532-538. It is currently available in English here: https://www-dev.chs.harvard.edu/curated-article/gregory-nagy-orality-and-literacy/.]] شفاهیّت و کتبیّت گرگوری ناژ برگردان فارسی: فرنوش شمسیان مفهوم شفاهیّت [1]… Read more
