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]

Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in…[Read more]

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from…[Read more]

In this article we explore some of the ways in which our Odyssey engages with other epic homecoming (nostoi) traditions and how they help prepare for and glorify Odysseus’s return home. The process of telling nostoi tales in Ithaca, Pylos and Sparta dramatizes for the audience the selection and presentation of homecoming narratives, whose m…[Read more]

Despite initial expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, “maps matter” today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. Technological advances have brought to the fore an entirely new set of methods for representing and interacting with spatial formations, while the ever-increasing…[Read more]

Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin…[Read more]