I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world -- Walt Whitman

     E. F. Beall’s Site

I am gratified to have been able to participate in the field of classical studies, and to write both for other participants in the field and for educated people generally.  This site is primarily for the purpose of publishing some work of both types.   The site also provides bibliography on the relevant topics, links to other classical studies sites of interest, and some autobiographical material.

contact me here

home

archaic poetry

archaic thought

Works&Days commentary

Averroës translation

writings here

other writings

Hesiod bibliography

philosophy bibliography

Pandora bibliography

In the menu bar above, reproduced throughout the site, the first entry is a link to this home page with its associated links below.   The second and third entries link respectively to groups of pages that deal with my two principal interests: (1) archaic poetry, meaning poetic works from the archaic period of ancient Greece, especially those composed in epic meter; and (2) archaic thought, meaning the mental representations of the earliest of the so-called Presocratic philosophers and their parallels in non-Greek ancient societies, together with the reception of this subject in later times.

The next two links are to the respective contents pages of two book-length works published on the site.  The first of these is to a 2003 commentary on the poem called “Works and Days” ascribed to “Hesiod,” where the discussion is largely in terms of the poem’s English translation in order to make the piece as accessible to the viewer as possible, and which is given here with a 2006 preface and a list of recent modern language translations of the poem through 2007.  The second link is to my 2007 translation of the medieval Arabic commentator Averroës’s “long” commentary on the portion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book A that deals with the Presocratics.

Then there is a list including other writings that are available on this site, from a 1988 background essay for a conference paper comparing Hesiod and the early Presocratics to contemporaries in Israel, Iran and India, to two works dating from 2011: a conference paper which suggests that the first 105 lines of Works and Days constitute an attention-getting device that is not meant to be part of the poem proper; and a discussion of an important new philological commentary on that poem by the Italian scholar Andrea Ercolani, together with his response.   Next is a list of my publications on ancient studies in conventional media from 1985 to 2012.

Finally, there are links to three bibliographies: one of works by others on Hesiod that are scholarly but more or less accessible to the educated person; another of scholarly works on the earliest of the Presocratics; and a bibliography of recent work reviewing scholarly opinions of what was really in “Pandora’s Box,” originally attached to a 2006 presentation on the subject but now kept up to date.

Also as to who I am:

My formal education took place at the University of California at Berkeley, where I received a BA with a major in physics in 1958 and a PhD in physics in 1962.  (My first published article as a physicist concerned a device for detecting elementary particles, and my last argued why we can be assured that the more exotic of such particles have a normal interaction with gravity.  If you wish you can read a summary of the earlier piece here, and one of the later here, as well as the reasons that I am no longer a physicist here.)   I have not had an official academic affiliation for the humanities work discussed here, but have been able to pursue it at various research libraries that offer their facilities to qualified scholars.  (Currently I primarily use the libraries at Georgetown University, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Library of Congress.)   I am a member of the American Philological Association, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

I am a longtime resident of the Washington, D.C. area.   Politically, I vote with the Greens, and the blog site I currently visit most often is Firedoglake.   I support MHz Networks, which provides the Washington area with international TV channels such as Al-Jazeera English.  I volunteer with the Friday Morning Music Club, currently in its 126^th season of supporting free concerts and musical competitions in the area.  You can read poetry and other para-scholarly efforts I wrote some tine ago here.

Photographs of me and some others taken on various occasions between 2004 and 2011 may be viewed here.

Otherwise, here are some links to sites of general interest:

*Tufts University’s Perseus Project, whose resources include English translation of the prominent works of classical antiquity.

*Amphora, a semi-annual publication of the American Philological Association covering classical matters of general interest, accessible to the non-classicist and available to non-members through subscription.

*National Committee for Latin and Greek, which promotes the cause of classics in lively fashion.

*American Classical League, a traditional membership and advocacy organization.

*American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, an advocacy organization for foreign language teaching at all levels.

Services:

*I will carefully consider comments on the site or on my work published elsewhere; send them here.

 *If you want to learn whether or not some concept or scholar’s name is included within the site and don’t mind a modicum of commercial advertising on the results page, FreeFind will conduct the search indicated on the right. (Use "+" or "AND" for a combination, quotation marks for a phrase. Type a diacritical directly if your keyboard allows it or else enter "?".)

These pages last updated 1/13/13; archaic poetry pages 12/15/12; archaic thought pages 10/13/09; Hesiod bibliography 10/18/11; philosophy bibliography 12/20/12; Pandora bibliography 1/9/13.