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I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world
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E.
F. Beall’s Site
I
am gratified to have been able to participate in the field of classical studies, and to
write (I’m told acceptably) both for authorities on the ancients and for educated people
generally. This
site directly publishes some work of both types, apart from offering an index to
what I’ve published elsewhere. The site also
provides
some bibliography on the relevant topics, as well as links to other
sites of
interest.
In the menu bar above, which is 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 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 treatment of the poem called “Works and Days” ascribed to “Hesiod,”
which is a commentary with
discussion
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, ranging from a
background essay for a 1988 conference paper comparing Hesiod and the
early Presocratics to contemporaries in Israel, Iran
and India, to a paper on the importance of wine to Homer and
Hesiod, read at an April, 2009 interdisciplinary conference
of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies on the history of wine from
ancient times through the 18th century. (More recently, to be sure,
the list includes an October, 2009 conference paper on the archaic Greek figure Parmenides
which might suggest that the standard division into thought and poetry that the site follows is after all artificial.
And then most recently, there are an October, 2011 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 an October, 2011 discussion of an important new philological commentary on that poem.)
Next is a list of my publications on ancient studies in conventional media (from 1985
to 2010).
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
I am a longtime resident of the
Otherwise, here
are some links to sites of general interest:
*
*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.
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*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 12/9/11; archaic poetry pages 10/18/11; archaic thought
pages 10/13/09; Hesiod bibliography
10/18/11; philosophy bibliography 9/9/10; Pandora bibliography 4/16/12.
