Classics Colloquium with Michele Bianconi

Join us for a presentation by Michele Bianconi, University of Oxford, on "Devine Witnesses in Greece, Anatolia, and Beyond: A Focus on Iliad III."

Tea at 4 p.m. in the Quita Woodward Room, Old Library.

Click here to register for the Zoom meeting.

By looking at possible foreign models for a famous passage in the third book of the Iliad (276-280, Bianconi demonstrates that the field of Graeco-Anatolian studies both lends itself to more fine-grained analyses based on known material, and – thanks to the dramatic advances in Anatolian philology – provides “new wine for old bottles”, allowing us to add fresh new data to ongoing discussions. Specifically, a new piece of evidence, a Luwian inscription from Tell Ahmar (ca. 900 BCE), shows a non-trivial parallel with the Homeric text: the Iliadic passage lists heavenly gods, rivers, earth, and underworld gods, and the Tell Ahmar text contains set of specific gods (some of which also appear in Il. 3.276-280), which include heaven and earth, mountains and riverlands. Bianconi evaluates this parallel taking into account the evidence from other (IE and non-IE) traditions and looks at the issue from the three lenses of contact, variation, and reconstruction. 

Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies