The unexpected return of Lucan’s Pompey to civil war as a ghost (9.1–18) leads to newfound success vis-à-vis enemies and allies alike. The language and imagery of this postmortem narrative revisits the portrait of Pompey’s decline in Books 1–2, where it activates a latent theme of victorious return in spite of death. Pompey’s acts of possession…[Read more]

Pelagios is a community-driven initiative that facilitates better linkage between online resources documenting the past, based on the places that they refer to. Our member projects are connected by a shared vision of a world – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article “Digital Geography and Classics” (Elliot and Gillies, 2009) – in which…[Read more]

Pelagios is a community-driven initiative that facilitates better linkage between online resources documenting the past, based on the places that they refer to. Our member projects are connected by a shared vision of a world – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article “Digital Geography and Classics” (Elliot and Gillies, 2009) – in which…[Read more]

Writer-director Terrence Malick makes the character of Pocahontas in The New World (2005) deliver several lines from Sappho as her own thoughts and words. These quotations, in conjunction with allusions to Vergil and other sources, open narrative directions that enable Pocahontas to emerge within a film that begins as an epic of European…[Read more]

Herodotus begins his inquiry (‘historia’) into why Greeks and Persians came into conflict with the figure of Croesus, ‘the first man whom we know enslaved Greeks’ – the archetypal eastern despot. In the subsequent narrative of his reign, Herodotus explores the reasons behind Croesus’s actions, and the consequences following on from them, throu…[Read more]

This paper analyses the new Archilochus fragment (POxy. LXIX 4708), which tells the story of Telephos’ rout of the Achaeans, in terms of its resonance with Homeric epic. Where previous scholarship has read Archilochus’ poetry as indebted to and derivative on Homer, we instead use the idea of ‘traditional referentiality’ – the process by which a w…[Read more]

This paper investigates the importance of context for assessing fragment one of the ‘Cypria’, one of the poems belonging to an ‘Epic Cycle’ that – along with the Iliad and Odyssey – told the story of the war at Troy. With the exception of the Homeric epics, these poems come down to us in pieces, in the form of mutilated quotations, assorted te…[Read more]

In this paper we analyse Oedipus’ appearance during Odysseus’ tale in book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey in order to outline and test a methodology for appreciating the poetic and thematic implications of moments when ‘extraneous’ narratives or traditions appear in the Homeric poems. Our analysis, which draws on oral-formulaic theory, is offered partly as…[Read more]

This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature – the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words – and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, his…[Read more]

In this guide we pick our way through a range of themes and issues that help negotiate the distance between Homer’s time and our own: the question of who, or what, Homer is and how to approach reading his poetry (the Introduction); the epic cosmos that Homer inherits, challenges and changes forever (Ch. 1); the Iliad’s examination of politics thr…[Read more]

This chapter examines lived space in Herodotus’s Histories’ and explores how the picture that emerges differs from abstract depictions of space. Such overly schematic representations we see articulated by the Persians at the very beginning of the Histories, or explicitly challenged by Herodotus when he ‘laughs at’ the maps produced by his Ionian…[Read more]