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

     E. F. Beall’s Site

I am an unaffiliated classicist who writes both for professional scholars and for educated people generally. This site directly publishes some work of both types and offers guides to what I have published in conventional print media.  The site also provides some bibliography on the relevant topics, as well as links to other sites of interest.

home

archaic poetry

archaic thought

Works&Days commentary

Averroës translation

writings here

other writings

Hesiod bibliography

philosophy bibliography

Pandora bibliography

The first entry of the menu bar above, which is reproduced throughout this site, 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 the 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” (with discussion largely in terms of the poem’s English translation in order to make the commentary as accessible to the viewer as possible), 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, ranging from a background essay for a paper comparing Hesiod and the early Presocratics to contemporaries in Israel, Iran and India, read at a 1988 interdisciplinary conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, to a paper on the importance of wine to Homer and Hesiod, read at a 2009 interdisciplinary conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies on the history of wine from ancient times through the 18^th century.  Next is a list of my publications on ancient studies in conventional media (from 1985 to 2009).

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 relevant recent work, originally attached to a paper reviewing scholarly opinions of what was really in Pandora’s “Box,” presented to the Classical Association of the Atlantic States in October, 2006, 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 how we know 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 permit access by qualfied scholars.   I am a member of the American Philological Association and of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States.

I live In Washington, D.C., a few steps from Lincoln Park and its Bethune monument.  When not engaged in scholarship the activities I enjoy include attending repertory films at the National Gallery of Art, and attending and assisting the free concerts and other activities sponsored by Washington’s Friday Morning Music Club (now in its 122^nd season).  My political organization is the D.C. Statehood-Green Party.  You can read poems and other para-scholarly efforts by me here, while photographs of me and some others (most recent update 4/30/09) 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.

*Classics in the news compiled by the American Philological Association, with items ranging from news of unusual projects in high school Latin classes to newspaper reviews of modern plays satirizing ancient Greek tragedy.

*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.

*Discover Languages, a campaign by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages “to raise public awareness about the importance of learning languages and understanding cultures in the lives of all Americans.”

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 6/18/09; archaic poetry pages 7/2/09; archaic thought pages 5/18/09; Hesiod bibliography 3/28/09; philosophy bibliography 5/18/09; Pandora bibliography 5/15/09.