Awesome Scholarship

This page is devoted to the work of classical scholars that I think are fabulous or interesting. I will link to specific articles and books I like by these authors. As much as is possible, I will link to versions of the articles or pieces that are in the public domain, but some of them will be from jstor and other academic sites that require membership or a university password. Restricted access will primarily be indicted by linking to the cites with the name of the site or organization in parentheses, e.g. (JSTOR) or (CCO). The links on the name of the text itself are free to access. I gained access to the protected articles through my college or through hanging out at the library of my local university. If you're interested in something, look on the computers at your local library (preferably a university library) to see if you can read or download them. Some of these will also be books.

Translations
  • Homer
    • Iliad
      • Audiobook (audible): translated and read by Stanley Lombardo
    • Odyssey
      • Audiobook (audible): translated by Robert Fagles and read by Ian McKellen
  • Plato
    • Republic
      • Allan Bloom (only for translation, I sincerely dislike the notes) 

Texts and Commentaries

Scholarly works (articles and books)
  • Ahl, Frederick
    • "The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome," The American Jounral of Philology, 105, 1984. (JSTOR) This is a truly phenomenal piece on emphasis in ancient writing. I highly recommend it to everyone-- classicists and non-classicists alike. My thanks to Propertius II for directing me to this article.
  • Bakker, Egbert J.
    • "The Making of History: Herodotus' Histories Apodexis" from Brill's Companion to Herodotus. This article literally had the people in my Herodotus class jumping up and down with excitement at 8am. That's hard to do. Bakker does an incredible analysis of Herodotus's Histories 1.1 in order to describe the literary works and themes that Herodotus draws upon. The work unpacks the proem-- focusing on the phrase ἱστορία ἀποδειξίς-- drawing from the rest of the text as well as the literary influences on Herodotus' work (Homer, the Hippocratic Corpus, etc).
    • "Contract and Design: Thucydides' Writing" from Brill's Companion to Thucydides
  • Cartledge, Paul
  • Crane, Gregory
    • "Power, Prestige, and the Corcyrean Affair" from Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. This is a wonderful chapter which discusses the power relations between poleis and their colonies and former colonies. Crane's insight elucidates an affair that may feel convoluted or unrealistic in Thucydides, and provides a religious and cultural foundation for a complex problem.
  • Goldhill, Simon
    • "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology" in Nothing to do with Dionysos?
    • Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Orestia.
  • Griffith, Mark
    • "Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the "Oresteia," Classical Antiquity, Vol 14, 1995 (JSTOR). This is one of my favorite articles of all time. Griffith provides a thoroughly-footnoted and brilliantly written analysis of the aristocratic politics behind the Oresteia.
  • Lloyd-Jones, Hugh
    • The Oresteia (Amazon). This translation of the Oresteia weds the best of both beauty and accuracy together. Lloyd-Jones also provides an incredible amount of insight into the form and context of the Oresteia in his thorough footnotes.
  • Macleod, C.
    • "Politics and the Orestia," Journal of Hellenic Studies 102, 1982. (JSTOR). This is a great article that discusses the political context of the Eumenides, and specifically the relationship between Athens, Argos, and Sparta.
  • Murray, Oswyn
    • Early Greece (Amazon). This is a fabulous and concise history of Mycenean palace culture and archaic Greece. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in basic Greek history who has not had a lot of formal training.
  • Nigtingale, Andrea Wilson
    • Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Amazon). This is a fabulous book that uses literary theory, and specifically Bakhtin, to analyze Plato's use of genre within his dialogues and especially his construction of philosophy as its own genre.
  • Porter, James Ivan
    • "Introduction," Before Subjectivity? Lacan and the Classics (can be found here).
  • O'Connor, David
    • "Rewriting the Poets in Plato's Characters" (CCO). If you cannot access Cambridge Collections Online, then there is an earlier draft of the piece, which fortunately does not require special access, but is not nearly as good.
  • Rose, Peter
    • Books
      • Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece. Cornell University Press, 1992. This book was introduced to me by my thesis adviser, because it is by one of his heroes. Rose has since become one of my heroes and this is not only because of the 30 page bibliography in this volume. His analysis is insightful and written in strong, thoroughly-footnoted prose. This book contains seven essays that deal with class and culture. The first essay, "Marxism and the Classics" provides a theoretical introduction, and each of the following essays analyzes a different great work: Homer' Iliad and Odyssey, Pindar's Pythian 10, Aeschylus' Orestia, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and Plato's Republic.
  • Stehle, Eva. "Prayer and Curse in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes," Classical Philology, vol. 100, No. 2 (April 2005). pp. 101-122. (JSTOR)
  • Szlezak, Thomas
    • Reading Plato (Amazon, PDF). This text, in it's brief 120 pages, provides an entirely new outlook on the Platonic corpus. Truly awesome. If you're really awesome, you can read it in the original German (Amazon).
  • Zeitlin, Froma
  • Zuckert, Catherine
    • Plato's Philosophers
Language Textbooks and Aids


If you know of links to any of these that are in public domain that I did not find, post the links in a comment on the page.

To find public domain versions of the immortal texts about which these scholars speak, check Project Gutenberg.

Scholarship I like:




Original Language Editions I like:


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