[MGSA-L] TODAY: Harvard, Weatherhead Center of International Affairs, Graduate-Student Papers in Cultural Politics: On a 16th-century Greek "version" of the Iliad

[Roilos, Panagiotis]

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Dear all,


I would like to invite you to the following event,


Sincerely,

Panagiotis Roilos


Panagiotis Roilos
George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature
Faculty Associate, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Faculty Associate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies
Harvard University
Member of the Governing Board, European Cultural Center of Delphi

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Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Graduate-Student Papers in Cultural Politics
Date:
Tuesday, November 14, 2017, 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Location:
CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Room K354
"Evangelizing Zeus: The Iliad According to Loukanes"
Speaker:

Calliope Dourou, PhD Candidate, Department of the Classics; Preceptor in Modern Greek, Harvard University.

Contact:

Ilana Freedman
ifreedman at g.harvard.edu<mailto:ifreedman at g.harvard.edu>

Chair:

Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

Abstract:

As early as the fourth century A.D., and despite the unflagging efforts of the emperor Julian, known by the sobriquet “the Apostate,” to thwart the Christians from forging an abiding bond with classical literature, the process of amalgamation of the Greek literary heritage with the emerging Christian culture was already underway, spawned primarily by the writings of the Cappadocian Church Fathers, for whom Homer continued to hold the highly esteemed position of the educator of the Greeks (e.g. Basil the Great, Πρὸς τοὺς νέους ὅπως ἂν ἐξ ἑλληνικῶν ὠφελοῖντο λόγων). Before long, the Homeric tradition, purged of any association with classical religion, thanks mainly to the allegorical method of interpretation that would remain so popular throughout the history of the Byzantine Empire (e.g. Tzetzes, Allegories of the Iliad), was refracted into a new genre, that of the Homerocentones, which boldly appropriated to the Christian cause the works of the Poet, by recounting the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ using exclusively Homeric verses -lifted verbatim, or slightly altered- from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Against this rich backdrop of Christian détournement of the Homeric legacy, the present paper seeks to explore the Christian resonances in Nikolaos Loukanes’ 1526 Iliad, the first printed rendition of the Iliad in a modern language. Rather than banishing the Olympian gods from his Iliad, as his Byzantine predecessor Constantine Hermoniakos had done in the fourteenth century cleaving to his faith, Loukanes opts to depict the gods, albeit through the lens of contemporary Christian beliefs. His is a cosmos of the patently pro-Greek, παντοκράτωρ Zeus, where the suppliants tend to bear the unmistakable marks of the humble δοῦλοι Θεοῦ.



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