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

 

 

     E. F. Beall’s Site

 

I am an unaffiliated classicist (working from a public study desk at the U.S. Library of Congress) who writes both for professional scholars and for educated people generally. This site directly publishes some work of mine of both types; it is a guide to what I have published in conventional print media; and it provides some bibliography on the relevant topics as well as links to matters of general interest.

 

 

 

home

Hesiod

philosophy

 

My principal interests have fallen into two categories: (1) the Hesiodic poems of the archaic period of ancient Greece; and (2) archaic thought, meaning the earliest examples of Presocratic philosophy together with their counterparts in non-Greek ancient societies, each category being defined to include reception of the given subject in later times. The box to the left, which is reproduced throughout the site, accordingly links to: this home page (with links below to associated pages); “Hesiod” pages; and “philosophy” pages.

 

The Hesiod pages deal with work of mine ranging from a 2001 article written for classics professionals on some details of the Greek text of Hesiod, published in a journal available in many libraries and also through an internet document service to which many institutions subscribe, to a 2007 essay on the attitude toward animals in the archaic period, requiring no knowledge of Greek and available on this site, to (new!) a paper on Hesiod’s view of the origin of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, read at an April, 2008 interdisciplinary conference on interpretations and later receptions of the Roman deity Venus (including her background as Aphrodite), also available on this site.  You can learn as well of recent work on Hesiod by other scholars that is more or less accessible to the Greekless person.   The philosophy pages include treatment of what might have been the opinions of the earliest Presocratic thinkers and their contemporaries, in particular a 1988 essay on the early thought of what Karl Jaspers called the “axial” societies of the Euro-Asian land mass, available on this site.   They also consider how these figures have been received in later times, in particular via a translation I recently effected of an Arabic text by the medieval commentator Averroës that deals with the Presocratics, also available on this site.

 

Otherwise, here are some links to resources 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.  As an example, the Spring 2007 issue includes, among other articles, reviews by professional classicists of the recent Hollywood epic 300 and of the dual language (Latin/English) book for children with accompanying audio CD Mater Anserina (“Mother Goose”), as well as a piece by an amateur classicist comparing the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 19th century Krakatoa eruption with an event believed to have occurred in the Aegean Sea around 1600 B.C.E.  (Added 1/4/08:) The Fall 2007 issue, among other things, gives the second part of the latter article, includes an article on a new Sappho poem (only discovered in 2002), and gives an account of how classics figured in the Beatles film Yellow Submarine.

*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.”

 

 

Also as to who I am:

 

I belong to the American Philological Association and to the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. 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 live a few steps from D.C.’s Lincoln Park and its Bethune monument, a pleasant 20-minute walk from my desk. When not engaged in scholarship the activities I enjoy include attending the repertory films shown by the National Gallery of Art and the free concerts which have been sponsored for 120 years now by Washington’s Friday Morning Music Club.  My political organization is the D.C. Statehood-Green Party.  You can read poems and other para-scholarly efforts by me here.  For visual records of me and some others (most recent update 7/12/08), click here.

 

 

 

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 "?".)

 

 

 

This page last updated 4/30/08; Hesiod main page bibliography 5/31/08 (access it here); philosophy main page bibliography 9/14/07 (access it here); post-1996 Pandora’s “box” scholarship bibliography 5/31/08 (access it here).