Category: Homerica

Milman Parry on BBC 4

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Tip o’ the pileus to Ian Spoor for alerting me to this one which is coming up on BBC4:

Episode Six of a thirty-part series made in collaboration with the British Library Sound Archive.

In 1933, a young classics scholar called Milman Parry made a journey through the hill villages of the Balkans to record poets and singers. He captured an oral tradition that has all but died out – peasant performers who recited epic tales over days without any form of prompt.

Professor David Hendy of the University of Sussex explains how ancient tales were remembered and passed down, and travels to the ancient Theatre of Epidaurus in Greece to find out what the audience would have made of it all up in the ‘gods’.

Featuring archive extracts of traditional stories from the Balkans, Kyrgyzstan, West Africa, and India.

Audio for this one will be available “soon” … here’s the Noise: A Human History home page.

An Odyssean Quest of Sorts

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Tip o’ the pileus to Bret Mulligan for alerting us to this one … the incipit of a piece in Newsworks:

“When he had the bow in his hands, the godlike Odysseus,
Easily did stretch the string, and shoot through the axe-heads:
Then he sprang up on the platform, and poured out the arrows before him…”

Thus did the ancient Greek hero Odysseus arrived in Ithaca to reclaim his home and wife. Having revealed himself as the true Odysseus, he laid waste the layabout suitors vying for his Penelope.

“…as heads were stricken, a dreadful
Groaning arose: and the floor ran deep with the blood of the slaughtered.”

That last image was perhaps too gory for N.C. Wyeth, who, in 1929, was commissioned to paint 16 scenes from “The Odyssey” for publication. He instead chose the first part, “The Trial of the Bow,” to illustrate the scene.

“He worked in so much color — it’s quite iridescent,” said Kathleen Foster, curator American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “While he was telling a great story — and “The Odyssey” is a great story — he’s employing all the skills of the artist. He’s a great painter.”

Over the years, that set of 16 “Odyssey” paintings dispersed into the the market; most landed in unknown private collections. Only five could be accounted for, including one at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa. This one, which has just been donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, makes six.

“We’re still looking for the other 10,” said Foster.

Painting missing longer than Odysseus in epic tale

“The Trial of the Bow” was thought missing for 30 years until it was recently discovered in the Philadelphia headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical company, just a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Since the late 1980s, it had been in a hallway just outside an executive office. Few employees had any idea it was something special.

“We knew we had a Wyeth,” said Ray Milora of GlaxoSmithKline. “I think the importance of it was less known.”

Milora does not know how or why the company acquired an original Wyeth canvas. The company became aware that the painting was part of a set of missing Wyeths when GSK prepared to move to new headquarters in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. […]

… the original article has a bit of a slideshow of the one piece mentioned above, of course, and I’m sure some folks will recall seeing one or more of this series. Palmer’s translation of the Odyssey (whence comes the painting) is available at archive.org and various other places, but I can’t find an edition with the paintings in them.

Matters Homeric

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This series is actually OUP hyping a new translation of the Iliad, but there’s a pretty good intro to Homer etc in these segments. The official intro:

Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity introduce their Oxford World’s Classics edition of Homer’s ‘The Iliad’. In this first part, they discuss the text itself.





Jenny Strauss Clay et al, “Mapping the Catalog of Ships”

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The Digital Classicist people are definitely in the forefront of putting conferences online … over the next few days we’ll post their latest efforts (the conference was in December 2012), beginning with this one, which includes the abstract to the talk, a video of the talk, and video of the discussion afterwards:

Video: Was There a Trojan War?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 2 Comments

I seem to have missed this UPenn video last week:

Was there a Trojan War? Assessing the Evidence from Recent Excavations at Troy
In the course of the latest campaign of excavations at Troy, in northwestern Turkey, archaeologists have uncovered a wealth of evidence that enables us to situate the site within the political and military history of the late Bronze Age (14th/13th centuries BCE). Dr. C. Brian Rose, Curator, Mediterranean Section, Penn Museum, speaks at this “Great Battles: Moments in Time that Changed History” series lecture program.