“Unmasking the Maxim: An Ancient Genre and Why it Matters Now” is forthcoming in Arion Winter 2020/21…
Several projects are underway: Reading Thucydides In a Time of Plague I am drafting an essay on how reading Thucydides’ during the Covid-19 pandemic affects our understanding of his work, especially his treatment of the pandemic that afflicted Athens beginning in 430 BCE. (Don’t worry, this is not an attempt to identify this “plague” with the coronavirus.
“The Cluster” While working on my Arion article “Unmasking the Maxim” I became convinced that Greeks of the sixth century BCE (and to some extent later as well) relied on a cluster of modes of speech and thought that included maxims, riddles, proverbs and others, such as definitions (horoi), blessings (and curses). These, I suspect, had a central role in Greek thought before the development of expository prose and its counterpart “discursive reasoning.” I want to examine each of these patterns of speech and their interactions.
Greeks From the Shadows I keep encountering Greeks overlooked in many standard works. I have already written about Anyte and several other women poets, and Aristonice and Phemonoe the prophetesses in “Women Poets and the Origins of the Hexameter,” and some often-forgotten male maxim coiners. But I am drafting brief essays on figures such as Acron of Acragas the physician, Cleobouline and Gnaetha the riddlers, and Menecrates, a.k.a. Zeus, to name just a few. Their individual stories add a dimension to conventional wisdom about the Greeks, but perhaps there’s more to it than that. We’ll see. Whatever Happened To Hybris? Hybris once had a central place in the interpretation of Greek culture, but of late has been relegated to a more peripheral role. Is it time for a comeback? April 2021