Empty Nesting: Mother-Bird Similes in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles
By Allison Jodoin, Boston University
Many ancient poems contain bird similes, but very few include a mother-bird losing her chicks. Homer’s Odyssey 16.216-9, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 48-59, and Sophocles’ Antigone 423-5 all have this rare simile. Each simile features characters who are not mothers lamenting their lost chicks. Concerning the Homeric example, scholars such as Merry (1907), Stanford (1948), and Heubeck and Hoekstra (1989) have failed to examine adequately the meaning of the simile. There is a similarly lackluster response in tragic scholarship.
Allusion and Audience in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
By Deborah Beck, University of Texas at Austin
In the parodosof Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the chorus begins by narrating how the Greek expedition to Troy first departed under the leadership of the Atreidae. They compare Agamemnon and Menelaus to vultures grieving for their lost offspring (Ag.48-59). This simile is widely seen as an allusion to a simile likening the reunited Odysseus and Telemachus to bereaved birds of prey whose unfledged young have been captured (Homer Odyssey16.216-18).
The ἀγών of τὸ σοφόν—An analysis of σοφός, σώφρων, and related terms in Euripides’ Bacchae
By Huaiyuan Zhang, Penn State University
Euripides’ Bacchae is οne of Greek drama’s most dedicated meditations on the nature of wisdom. Through staging a debate over the question, “What is σοφία?”, Euripides takes an active part in exploring this concept in the intellectual sphere of the late fifth century. While the question of the meaning of σοφία in philosophical discourse remains open, the term σοφός is pretty much established with various and even ambiguous senses.
Poetic compounds in Aeschylus and Euripides, not poles apart
By Hana Aghababian, Cornell University
Many studies on Greek tragic compounds focus on the constituent parts of compounds (see, for example, Breitenbach (1934) on Euripides and Clay (1960) on all three tragedians); Earp (1948) sorts Aeschylean compounds according to more subjective criteria, such as compounds in which “one or both the elements are unfamiliar” (1948:12); Nuchelmans (1949), in line with historical-linguistic treatments of compounds, sorts Sophoclean compounds in terms of the syntactical relations between the compound constituents, following the Sanskrit grammarian Panini’s classifications.
How Euripides Cyclops 503–10 Revises Odyssey 9
By Jonathan Ready, University of Michigan
Through a close reading of Polyphemus’s song at Cyclops 503–10, this paper (1) adds to the long-running discussion of how Euripides revises Homer’s depiction of the Polyphemus episode, (2) corrects recent interpretations of Polyphemus’s song, and (3) deepens our understanding of how sympotic poetry (melic (monody), elegy, and iambos) depicts the body.