After the Epic's End

Next Stages for Painful Signs

Apr 11, 2024

At some point last year, Sophia Efthimiatou reached out and started a conversation with me about moving my work at sententiaeantiquae.com to substack. I was interested in exploring the platform, partly because wordpress has changed some of their infrastructure in annoying ways, but also because I am an itinerant tinkerer, happier with starting things, perhaps, than imagining how to finish them.

I came up with the idea of working through the Iliad again for a few reasons. First, Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad brought the epic more into public focus. Second, I found the discussion around the translation sadly divorced from Homeric scholarship and I wanted to create some sort of a resource for new readers interested in engaging in the epic more. And, third, I wanted a project to get back into the Iliad with a depth I had lost in my years away from the epic.

So working on this substack has allowed me to continue a few things I care about in a different context: sharing more of the depth of the past and scholarship about it to a broader community and using the practice of doing so to help me continue learning and expanding my own work. (I have long used blogging as a process for practice and continued learning and for developing projects.)

So the invitation to try out substack also came at time when I was finishing up a book project (more in a few weeks!) and was thinking about next projects. I had spent more than a decade working almost exclusively on the Iliad and then turned quite quickly to a project on the Odyssey that culminated in a book on that epic and modern psychology. I have worked on many Homer related projects, but not writing a book on the Iliad would always gnaw at met.

The breadth and depth of Homeric scholarship is pretty much unrivalled in the humanities. Not only are there numerous modern languages that continue to produce important and critical material about the poems, but the history of Homeric scholarship goes back to the original performance of the texts. To add to this, interdisciplinarity and the continued popularity of heroic myth has produced a staggeringly impressive variegation of commentary on Homer. The task of mere familiarity with scholarly trends is simultaneously Herculean and Sisyphean—so much so that my advisor in graduate school repeatedly told me to find something ‘new’ to write on because the bibliography is just too big.

Alas, I have rarely been one to take good advice. So I somehow made myself into a Homerist. But I spent the first part of my career writing articles to make up for my ignorance and weak spots. Once I spent nearly a decade away from reading all of the new and wonderful scholarship about the Iliad, I had to find a way to get back into it, all while doing the rest of my job.

Achilles tending Patroclus wounded by an arrow, identified by inscriptions on the upper part of the vase. Tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, ca. 500 BC. From Vulci. — Sosias (potter, signed). Painting attributed to the Sosias Painter (name piece for Beazley, overriding attribution) or the Kleophrades Painter (Robertson) or Euthymides (Ohly-Dumm)

So, moving forward, I am going to continue posting on the Iliad almost exclusively, focusing on three general areas: (1) highlighting and discussing new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) pursuing a series of themes as I re-read the Iliad in Greek (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; notions of agency and determinism; hints about performance and reception; ways of thinking about the reception of Homer by diverse audiences); (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me.

Areas 2 and 3 are those that have long motivated my online work, but 1 (promoting other people’s scholarship) is something that I came to while working through the substack posts. One of my fundamental frustrations with scholarship is the lack of correlation between the intensity of the labor and the impact our work has. So much Classical scholarship is only read by people who are writing on the same topic in order to publish an article only a handful of people will really read. So much of our work is really good and can enrich the way people understand the past—but it just doesn’t reach a larger audience. So what I hope to do is to discuss an article or book every week to show why it matters and what benefit it offers. (And not in a book review kind of way: I have no intention of criticizing scholarship and will avoid negative comments—I have thrown enough scholarly shade in my day and need to make some amends).

Painful Signs, Or, Joel's Substack

After the Epic's End

Next Stages for Painful Signs

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