Open Access Journal: Classics@

Classics@, edited by Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, under the general editorship of Gregory Nagy, is designed to bring contemporary classical scholarship to a wide audience on the World Wide Web. Each issue will be dedicated to its own topic, often with guest editors, for an in-depth exploration of important current problems in the field of Classics. We hope that Classics@ will appeal not only to professional classicists, but also to the intellectually curious who are willing to enter the conversation in our discipline. We hope that they find that classical scholarship engages issues of great significance to a wide range of cultural and scholarly concerns and does so in a rigorous and challenging way.

Each issue of Classics@ is meant to be not static but dynamic, continuing to evolve with interaction from its readers as participants. New issues will appear when the editors think there is good material to offer. Often it will emphasize work done in and through the Center for Hellenic Studies, but it will also call attention to fresh and interesting work presented elsewhere on the web. It stresses the importance of research-in-progress, encouraging collegial debate (while discouraging polemics for the sake of polemics) as well as the timely sharing of important new information.

Issue 16

Issue 16: Seven Essays on Sappho, 2017 (ed. Paul G. Johnston). These seven papers are the product of a graduate seminar led by Gregory Nagy at Harvard in the fall of 2016, entitled ‘Sappho and her Songmaking’. The scope of the seminar was wide-ranging, encompassing philological, linguistic, historical, anthropological, comparative, and reception-based approaches to the great female poet of antiquity. The student participants in the seminar likewise came from a variety of different backgrounds: graduates and undergraduates, classicists and not. This diversity is reflected in the papers gathered in this collection.

Issue 15

Issue 15: A Concise Inventory of Greek Etymology, 2017 (ed. Olga Levaniouk). The goal of CIGE is to provide access to etymologies that are important for the study of Greek culture and that are often not yet referenced in conventional dictionaries. CIGE represents an understanding of Greek—and especially Homeric—etymology as part of the formulaic system of early Greek poetry. The main content is organized in the mode of a dictionary: each entry appears under a heading or lēmma that indicates the basic word to be analyzed. Each entry contains a reference to a fuller analysis, if available, and identifies the author who suggested or advocates the etymology in question. The editors of the individual entries are identified by name-stamp and date-stamp at the end of each entry. Each editor is the owner of his or her own entry as edited.

Issue 14

Issue 14: Singers and Tales in the 21st Century; The Legacies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, 2016 (ed. David F. Elmer and Peter McMurray). In December, 2010, a conference was convened at Harvard to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Lord’s seminal book, The Singer of Tales, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Lord’s mentor, Milman Parry. Twenty-nine speakers from around the world presented papers intended to illustrate the wide-ranging impact of the work of Parry and Lord. A collection of these papers will soon appear as a printed volume published by the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. To facilitate the dissemination of these studies, we present here preliminary versions of a number of the contributions.

Issue 13

Issue 13: Greek Poetry and Sport, 2015 (ed. Thomas Scanlon). Many studies on Pindar, Homer, and other poets have discussed the specific uses of sport in each context, and studies on Greek sport have acknowledged the ways in which agonistic values and practices have been reflected in poetic literature, but there has been no single collection of studies devoted specifically to the intersection of Greek poetry and sport. This volume includes a range of contributions that represent a diversity of genres, periods, and approaches, which cut across strict poetic genres, occasionally even mixing poetry and prose in their approach. Poetry's interest in sport survived the rise and fall of genres like epinikia and satyr plays, and the rise and fall of myriad political and cultural changes in the Greek Mediterranean. We can only speculate on the many and complex reasons for the grip of poetry on sport and vice-versa, but they no doubt include Homeric intertextuality, the universal appeal of the topic to the elite and the dêmos, the universal presence of gymnasia and agonistic festivals (both blending poetry and sport), and the agonistic resonances between poetry and sport.

Issue 12

Issue 12: Comparative Approaches to India and Greece, 2015 (ed. Douglas Frame). This issue contains papers by four scholars comparing specific literary and cultural traditions in India and Greece. The papers served as the basis of discussion at an event in February 2015 organized by the Center for Hellenic Studies in association with the Embassy of India. The discussion that took place among the scholars and guests on that occasion, which began with summaries of the four papers, is included as it was recorded. This is intended to be a starting point for further discussion of the topics presented and of other topics suggested by the nature and spirit of the event.

Issue 11

Issue 11: The Rhetoric of Abuse in Greek Literature, 2013 (ed. Håkan Tell). This volume grew out of the need for a venue in which to engage collaboratively on the topic of abuse. Abuse has of course been widely studied, and in the last few years there has been a renewed interest in abuse as a broader cultural and literary phenomenon, but there are reasonable restrictions as to how it has been addressed. One goal of this volume is to initiate a scholarly discussion that will allow greater heterogeneity in the material covered and in the theoretical models brought to bear on that material. Another is to encourage experimentation and collaborative exchange among scholars working in seemingly unconnected fields. Most importantly, perhaps, we would like to foster a deeper understanding of the role of abuse in all of Greek literature, across genres and time periods, through the kind of cumulative knowledge that comes from collaborative work in different fields.

Issue 10

Issue 10: Historical Poetics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Greece: Essays in Honor of Lily Macrakis, 2012 (ed. Stamatia Dova). History needs art to give it form; art needs history to give it resonance. This relationship of history and art is the theme of the essays by distinguished international scholars collected in this volume. Its publication celebrates the career and work of Professor Lily Macrakis. She is an eminent chronicler of modern Greek history whose seminal work, Venizelos: A Study in Cretan Leadership, remains essential to an understanding of the most influential Greek leader of the 20th century. Among her other accomplishments, Professor Macrakis was president of The Modern Greek Studies Association from 1977 to 1979 and has been an influential figure in the organization since its inception. Equally significant has been her role as a devoted teacher of Greek history and culture to multitudes of students. Professor Macrakis thus truly embodies the spirit and significance of the articles presented in this Festschrift so fittingly dedicated to her.

Issue 9

Issue 9: Defense Mechanisms in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Classical Studies and Beyond, 2011 (ed. Carol Gilligan, Leonard Muellner, and Gregory Nagy). Nowadays people speak of “defense mechanisms” as both negative and positive forms of behavior: examples of negative forms are denial, repression, acting out, projection, rationalization, intellectualization, while one of the few positive forms is assertion, a way of responding that takes the middle ground between aggressive and passive. In the spirit of this positive form of assertion and in both technical and non-technical senses of the expression “defense mechanisms,” the present issue of Classics@ has been given its title. The aim is to publish online research papers and essays in Classics and in other disciplines, related or unrelated, that explore strategies where the primary purpose is to defend assertively rather than attack. The justification is straightforward: discoveries and discovery procedures in research require and deserve a reasoned defense.

Issue 8

Issue 8: A Homer commentary in progress, 2011 (ed. Douglas Frame, Leonard Muellner, and Gregory Nagy). This commentary applies a special methodology of linguistics that stems primarily from the research of Antoine Meillet and his teacher, Ferdinand de Saussure, to the formulaic system of Homeric poetry based squarely on the cumulative research of Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord. The methodology of this research, as inherited by Parry, combines a rigorous study of Indo-European linguistics with two complementary perspectives on language as a system—perspectives that Saussure described as synchronic and diachronic. Our linguistic approach in analyzing both synchronically and diachronically the formulaic system of Homeric poetry provides an empirical foundation for the discoveries and discovery procedures that we assemble and organize in our Homer commentary.

Issue 7

Issue 7: Les femmes, le féminin et le politique après Nicole Loraux, Colloque de Paris (INHA), novembre 2007, 2011 (ed. Nathalie Ernoult and Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet) is the result of a conference held in Paris (INHA, 15–17 November 2007) which was co-organized by the Centre Louis Gernet (CNRS-EHESS), the Équipe Phéacie (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Université Denis-Diderot Paris VII) and the Réseau National Interuniversitaire sur le Genre (RING, Paris). The aim of the conference was to explore Nicole Loraux’s legacy concerning the feminine and the polis both in Hellenic Studies and in feminist scholarship.

Issue 6

Issue 6: Reflecting on the Greek Epic Cycle, 2010 (ed. Efimia D. Karakantza) is the result of a conference held in Ancient Olympia on 9–10 July 2010, which was co-organized by the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University) and the Centre for the Study of Myth and Religion in Greek and Roman Antiquity (University of Patras). The goal of the conference was to explore problems concerning the surviving fragments of the Greek Epic Cycle that have heretofore been neglected. Guest Editor: Efimia D. Karakantza.

Issue 5

Issue 5: Proceedings of the Derveni Papyrus Conference, 2009 (ed. Ioanna Papadopoulou and Leonard Muellner) reflects a three-day symposium on the Derveni Papyrus hosted by the Center for Hellenic Studies in July, 2008, on the occasion of the recent publication of the edition by Theokritos Kouremenos, George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou (Florence, Olschki, 2006; the text of the papyrus from that edition is available on this website here). The symposium was an opportunity to gather scholars who in the course of the past decades have been working on this text to address a set of issues relating to the edition and integration of the papyrus, its translation, and its interpretation.

Issue 4

Issue 4: The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues, 2007 (ed. Ellen Greene and Marilyn Skinner) is the online edition of a print volume published by the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2009 (available through Harvard University Press, here). This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of the newly-recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Containing eleven new essays by leading scholars, it addresses a wide range of textual and philological issues connected with the find. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the "New Sappho" can be appreciated as a gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.

Issue 3

Issue 3: The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies, 2005 (ed. Richard Armstrong and Casey Dué) is the result of a colloquium held at the Center. The colloquium had as its goals the serious interrogation of cherished assumptions about Homeric “culture” and “texuality”; and the exploration of the wider cultural significance of the perennial Homeric Question(s).

Issue 2

Issue 2: Ancient Mediterranean Cultural Informatics, 2004 (ed. Christopher Blackwell and Ross Scaife). The second issue of Classics@ is the first edition of an ongoing project of publication aimed at documenting this emerging sub-discipline of our field, the scholarship of creating, analyzing, and disseminating humanist learning electronically. This issue features articles describing these projects and others like them — new work of high quality that is expanding the depth and breadth of our field. It also looks back at the history of this sub-discipline, and forward toward emerging standards, tools, and potentials.

Issue 1

Issue 1: New Epigrams Attributed to Posidippus of Pella, 2003 (ed. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Elizabeth Kosmetatou, Martine Cuypers, and Francesca Angiò). The focus of this first issue of Classics@ is the new Posidippus papyrus of some 112 epigrams, first published in 2001 as Posidippo di Pella: Epigrammi (P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309), Papiri dell' Univeristà degli Studi di Milano - VIII, by LED - Edizioni Univeritarie di Lettere Economia Diritto (ed. Guido Bastianini and Claudio Gallazzi, with Colin Austin). The guest editors have constructed an in-progress working document of the Posidippus text based ultimately on this editio princeps. From the cumulative evidence of ongoing restorations, it becomes ever more evident that the real challenge in this case is not to distinguish between better and worse poetry, corresponding to the real and the would-be Posidippus, but between better and worse restorations. The better the restorations, the more one can see the consistency of quality in the poetry. Without the ongoing re-examination of the text by way of electronic documentation, the scholarly verdict on the value of the Posidippus papyrus may harden too early into set views that inhibit the kind of rethinking needed as important new evidence and interpretations continue to be brought to light.

Proposals Welcome

The CHS welcomes proposals for future Issues of Classics@. proposals should be sent by e-mail to the CHS Executive Editors Casey Dué (casey@chs.harvard.edu) and Mary Ebbott (ebbott@chs.harvard.edu). Please see the CHS Publications page for guidelines and details.

Firstdrafts@Classics@

Firstdrafts@Classics@ is intended to give early exposure to creative scholarship before its formal publication. Please check regularly for new contributions and updates on ways to provide feedback to authors.

The First Drafts are listed in order of publication, with the most recent first.

• Maria Chriti, "Aristotle as a Name-giver: The Cognitive Aspect of his Theory and Practice," January 25, 2018.
• Vassilis Liotsakis, "Narrative Suspense in Arrian’s Indikē: The Exotic Episodes in the Digression of ch. 29.9-31.9," January 25, 2018.
• Androniki Oikonomaki, "Ἀχαιοί, Ἀργεῖοι, Δαναοί: Revisiting the system of denomination of the Greeks in the Homeric epics," January 25, 2018.
• Antonios Thodis, "On the Corinthian Column at the Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae," December 6, 2017.
• Aldo Paolo Bottino, "Space, Time and Remembering in the Orchard of Laertes: A Cognitive Approach," October 25, 2017.
• David A. Beardsley, "The Journey Back To Where You Are: Homer’s Odyssey as Spiritual Quest," April 17, 2017. 
• Marco Fantuzzi, "How to Divinize a Mortal and (Try) Not to Offend the Gods: Pseudo-Euripides, Rhesus 342–387," December 26, 2016. 
• Balim Barutcu, "On Poetry: A Capsule of Consciousness, Reality and History," November 20, 2016.
• Nina Beguš, "A Tale from the Silk Road: A Philological Account of The Painter and the Mechanical Maiden," August 11, 2016.
• Jackie Modesett, "The Transformation and Transmission of the Immediate," August 8, 2016.
• Cecily Cai, "The Fall of a Family: Tracing the Aristotelian Model of Catastrophe in Dream of the Red Chamber and Buddenbrooks," July 25, 2016.
• Ilana Freedman, "Re-Narrativizing the Visual: Poetic Ekphrasis in Modernist Distortion of Myth," May 11, 2016.
• Aldo Paolo Bottino, "The Adverb ΑΝΔΡΑΚΑΣ and the Composition of the Odyssey," March 16, 2016.
• Aldo Paolo Bottino, "The Phȃros of Laertes: Weaving the Fabric of Epic," October 7, 2015.
• Vincent T. Ciaramella, "Message of Fire: An examination of the distances between the signal fires lit to announce the fall of Troy and determining if the relay system could work as found in the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus," June 15, 2015.
• Vincent T. Ciaramella, "The Persistent Myth of the Existence of Homer in Mainstream History," May 7, 2015.    
• Aldo Paolo Bottino, "The Trees of Laertes: an Epic Environment of Nóstos," October 28, 2014.
• Tyler Flatt, "Grief and Counterfactual Parallels in Homeric Narrative," August 30, 2011.
• A. S. W. Forte, "Speech from Tree and Rock: Recovery of a Bronze Age Metaphor," August 22, 2011.
• Amy Koenig, "Homeric Accentuation: A Comparative Study of the Bankes Papyrus and Other Roman Papyri," August 18, 2011.
• Emily Schurr, "Recreating the Creation: Reading between the Lines in the Proem of the Iliad," July 25, 2011.
• Christos Strubakos, "Iliadic Lion Similies: Rethinking Heroic Greatness," July 25, 2011.
• Alexis Pinchard, "Du hieros logos à la raison: vertus d'un détour par l'Inde," third edition, March 28, 2011 (second edition published October 27, 2009; first edition April 14, 2009).
• Smaro Nikolaidou-Arabatzi, "Time and Space in Euripides’ Choral Odes.?The Technique of Choral Projections," September 9, 2010.
• Egidia Occhipinti, "Aristotele, Teopompo e la politica macedone," June 17, 2010.
• Steven M. Berry, "Vico's Homer and the "Oral Versus Written" Dilemma," May 11, 2010.
• Sean Signore, "Andromache as Maenadic Warrior," April 5, 2010.
• Claire Jacqmin, "Woman between the Tyrant and the Polis: the Role of Women in Tyrannical Regimes," April 5, 2010.
• Sarah Lannom, "Isthmian 8: Binding, Exchange, and Politics," March 22, 2010.
• Sergios Paschalis, "The Dioscuri in Pindar’s Nemean 10, Theocritus’ Idyll 22 and Ovid’s Fasti 5.693-720: Cattle, Brides, and Strife," February 18, 2010.
• Guy Smoot, "A Commentary on Pindar’s Olympian Ode II," February 17, 2010.
• Dan Bertoni, "Τύχη in Pindar," February 4, 2010.
• Emrys Bell-Schlatter, "Pythian 1: A Brief Commentary," January 27, 2010.
• Daniele Iozzia, "Ragioni e fortuna della metafora dello scolpire?in Plotino, Enn. I 6 (1) 9, 6-15," January 6, 2010.
• Alexander Loney, "Victims of the Gods’ Vengeance," excerpted from Homeric Tisis: Narrative Revenge and the Poetics of Justice in the Odyssey (Ph. D. Dissertation, Duke University), September 28, 2009.
• Pascale Brillet-Dubois, "Astyanax and the Athenian War Orphans. Challenging war Ideology in Euripides'Trojan Women," August 12, 2009.
• Stephen Quinlan, "Running from Olympia to the Isles of the Blessed. Sacrifice, Athleticism and Cosmology in a Panhellenic Cult," August 12, 2009.
• David Mirhady, "Odyssey 18.130-42: The Poem's Programmic Passage?" April 3, 2009.
• Guy Smoot. "The Mitoses of Achilles." February 1, 2008.
• The initial publication of images of three Homeric Manuscripts from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is now online. Introduction by Christopher Blackwell, Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, and Neel Smith. October 26, 2007.
• Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, "Oral Poetics and the Homeric Doloneia,"  July 11, 2007.
• Yannick Durbec, "Callimaque Aitia Fr. 26 (Pfeiffer) et la tradition rhapsodique," August 28, 2006.
• Benjamin Woodring, "Trajectories of Things: Spears, Arrows, and Agency in Ancient Greek Epic Poetry," August 28, 2006.
• Sarah Shelton Hitch, King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Authority in the Iliad, Chapter 4, June 22, 2006.