During these first three months of my fellowship, I have been working on an interpretation of the description of Achilles’ Shield in Iliad XVIII. My intention is to link this famous passage with other demiurgical motives found in mythological and philosophical texts, namely Hesiod’s Theogony, Parmenides’ poem, Empedocles’ cosmogony, and… Read more
I should start by noting that my post title refers to Ctesias’ work (at least in Plutarch’s estimation, Artaxerxes 1.4), not what I’m about to write. I’m only a “two-weeker” (and not until March) with regard to physical presence at the CHS. I note with great interest the variety of… Read more
This is my first post, so let me introduce my research project. I am working on a book-length study provisionally called “‘Harvesting Homer’: the voice of epic in Plato’s dialogues”. Here is my general premise: Plato’s dialogues are often seen as an all-encompassing blend of all previous literary genres, “the… Read more
Early Greek cosmologies and learned myths that account for the origin of the universe and its present state tend to bring up the question of representation in language. If we were to formulate this question nowadays it would probably be in these terms: how can the whole natural process of… Read more
Since I won't have time to talk about this in detail during my ten minute bit for our Future of Classics discussions, I thought that the blog might be the appropriate forum to pre-emptively follow-up (if such time travel is in fact possible) on a point which I will make tomorrow about what can be done in with relative speed and ease using data and tools that are already available… Read more
