My research revolves around two questions:
1) How does early Greek epic represent lived experience?
2) How can we model this work?
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Greek Epic
Early Greek poets composed hexameter poetry from traditional language that influenced audience expectations for over a millennium (8th c. BCE to 5th CE). What are these patterns of expectation and how did they affect compositional and interpretative strategies?
My work uses computation and close reading to model patterns of expectancy in Greek epic and how they affect the experience and meaning of the poetry. I am co-developer of the program SEDES that measures the metrical position of words in Greek hexameter. With new data for every word in every line in all of epic, we can discover new systems of style, structure, semantics, rhetoric, and interxtext within and between Greek hexameter poems.
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Aesthetics
How does the materiality of Greek poetry—it’s rhythms, repetitions, style, and affect—produce meaning? And in what way does Greek poetry represent this production?
My work uses the tools of philology—both scrutiny of the text and close reading—to investigate how ancient Greeks made poetry and how poetry shaped their lives. I have articles published or forthcoming on the aesthetics, genre, and intertextuality of Greek epic in American Journal of Philology, Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, Greece & Rome, and Mnemosyne, and a book in preparation tentatively entitled Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles and Early Greek Aesthetics. This methodology also informs my role as archivist and researcher in an ethnopoetic study of modern song cultures of Western Crete.
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Digital Humanities
Modern technology improves our ability to identify patterns, challenge received wisdom, and develop new ideas. How can we use computation to explore the form and meaning of Greek poetry?
I leverage data to enrich close reading, with articles published or forthcoming in TAPA, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and other venues. My second monograph, provisionally titled Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic: Where Words Belong, uses the digital tool SEDES to explore the meanings generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek hexameter poetry. This joins my work building a dynamic map of Greek lyric. Future quantitative work will focus on expanding the analysis of metrical position in hexameter to other linguistic phenomena, such as the combination of lemma and metrical shape and their semantic effects.
Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, c. 540 BC, London, The British Museum 1861,0425,50 (B197; BAPD 320380). Fair Use.
Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles and Early Greek Aesthetics (Monograph in preparation)
Stephen’s monograph project, tentatively titled Hesiod’s Shield and the Technology of Wonder, is the first book-length literary investigation into the archaic Greek poem, the Shield of Heracles, its role in Hesiod’s cosmology, and its intertextual position in early Greek poetry. Building a conceptual framework from media theory, oral poetics, and the anthropology of art, this book reframes the poem’s outstanding poetic features as six “cosmic techniques”—embodiment, conversation, ekphrasis, voice, monologue, and the senses—and argues that the Shield mobilizes these technologies to mediate gods and mortals and manifest the ideological and aesthetic cosmos of Zeus.
“Newton” by William Blake. 1795–c.1805. Color print, ink and watercolor on paper. 460 x 600 mm. Tate Museum, London, UK. NO5058. Creative Commons.
Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic: Where Words Belong (Monograph in preparation)
This monograph uses data science and close reading to investigate the expectations generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek epic (8th c. BCE to 5th c. CE). Greek poets, such as Homer, composed their verses from traditional phrases, rhythms, and themes by reusing the same words in the same metrical positions for ease of composition. But epic poetry, whether orally composed or written, also infused characters and narratives with unexpected style. Poets manipulated audience expectations by shifting words to surprising metrical positions with jolting cadence and attention-grabbing patterns of sound and sense. Today, we can identify these patterns of expectancy and their rupture for the first time by computing the metrical position of words in Greek hexameter. This systematic data allows readers to return to the story with novel information and find new significance to the text and how it may have affected early Greek audiences. Through computation and close reading , we better understand the artistry of Greek epic and how it may have pulled the audience’s awareness towards experiencing old stories in new ways.
“Sedes as Style in Greek Hexameter: A Computational Approach” TAPA 151.2 (2021) 439–467
This article investigates the role of metrical position, or sedes, in the poetics of Greek hexameter through a process of computation and close reading. Previous scholarship treated sedes as either a quantitative or an intertextual phenomenon. This article offers a new model of sedes expectancy that identifies unexpected metrical positions of words and demonstrates its utility in an intervention in intertextual studies and close reading of a passage (Odyssey 1.345–59). In both, the model reveals otherwise invisible patterns of style, structure, semantics, and rhetoric that suggest a poetics of sedes expectancy persists within and between Greek hexameter texts.
“SEDES: Metrical Position in Greek Hexameter” Digital Humanities Quarterly 17.2 (2023) http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/17/2/000675/000675.html
This article outlines the processes of SEDES, a program that automatically identifies, quantifies, and visualizes the metrical position of lemmata in ancient Greek hexameter poetry; and gives examples of its application to investigate the effects of metrical position on poetic features such as formularity, expectancy, and intertextuality.
SEDES: A Program for Identifying and Quantifying Metrical Position in Greek Hexameter. Created with D. Fifield.
SEDES: Metrical Position in Greek Hexameter
SEDES is a program, co-created with David Fifield, that automatically identifies, quantifies, and visualizes the metrical position of lemmata in ancient Greek hexameter poetry.
“Achilles and the Resources of Genre: Epitaph, Hymnos, and Paean in Iliad 22.386–94” Classical Philology 119.1 (2024) 1–28
This article argues that the Iliad embeds an epitaph and hymnos within Achilles’ speech above Hektor’s corpse (Il. 22.386–90) before the paean of 22.391–94. It first analyzes the linguistic, thematic, and functional features of epitaph and hymnos in the speech, such as the κεῖται … νέκυς formula, epitaphic memory, hymnic-segue construction, topos of remembering and forgetting, and segue function. It then explores how the text exploits the generic expectations generated by these features before reflecting on the structuring role of embedded genre at the beginning and end of the Iliad.
“Divine Resonance in Early Greek Epic: Space, Knowledge, Affect” American Journal of Philology 142.2 (2021), 535–69
This article reframes the cultic prohibition of sound in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 478-9 as an emic model for understanding sonic encounter with the divine in early Greek epic. It argues that these lines represent divine resonance, i.e. the experience of divine sound, according to the themes of space, knowledge, and affect. This framework guides three close readings: Penelope and the eidôlon (Od. 4.830-4), Talthybios and the boar (Il. 19.249-68), and Agamemnon and the false dream (Il. 2.35-41). In these readings, the model not only enriches interpretation but also reveals that passages of varying lengths can operate as nonlinear resonant circuits in which divine resonance anticipates revelation.
“‘Strange’ Rhetoric and Homeric Reception in Aelius Aristides’ Embassy Speech to Achilles (Or. 52)” Greece & Rome (Forthcoming Fall 2021)
This article argues that Aelius Aristides adapts the word atopos (‘strange’, ‘out of place’) as figured speech in his Embassy Speech to Achilles, meaning something that is either illogical according to rhetorical topoi or inconsistent with the text of Homer’s Iliad. By doing so, he not only expands the semantic range of atopos but also comments on the rhetorical, intertextual, and pedagogical relationship between oratory and the Homeric tradition.
“Typhonic Voices: Sounds of Hesiod and Cosmic War in Lucan’s Bellum civile 6.685-694” Mnemosyne 73.4 (2019) 609–632
This article argues that Lucan references Hesiod’s Typhonomachy in the voice of Erictho (Luc. 6.685-694). The intertext is significant in two respects. It casts Erictho as a nonpartisan proponent of Gigantomachy and cosmic war itself, a portrayal that informs aspects of her character as a theomachos and vates. Likewise, it presents an innovative use of Hesiod’s Theogony: instead of a poem of peace, Lucan adapts it as a paradigm of civil war.
“Pompey, Venus and the Politics of Hesiod in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 8.456–9” Classical Quarterly 70.2 (2020) 784–791
This paper argues that Lucan references Hesiod's Birth of Aphrodite when Pompey reaches Cyprus at Bellum Civile 8.456-59. The reference not only includes a double calque of the title to Hesiod's epic (numina nasci...coepisse deorum) but also prefigures theogonic imagery in the description of Pompey's decapitated corpse (8.705-11). By doing so, Lucan develops themes of intra-familial violence and Caesar's dignitas generis within a mythological, Hesiodic frame.
Travel map from Mapping Greek Lyric: Places, Travel, Geographical Imaginary
Mapping Greek Lyric: Places, Travel, Geographical Imaginary
This project is the first-ever attempt to illustrate on an interactive map key geocultural aspects of the rich lyric production that grew and spread throughout the Greek world from the 8th to the beginning of the 4th century BC. We report and display data based on the ancient sources, without judging whether they are all historically accurate. It is the users’ responsibility to explore further.
Created by David Driscoll, Israel McMullin, Stephen Sansom, headed by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
Active Learning Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology
Stephen A. Sansom, Todd Clary, and Carolyn Aslan
Students in large-enrollment humanities courses need each other and frequent instructor feedback to learn complex concepts. This article details active learning techniques and assessments that we used to increase student communication, engagement, and learning in a large-enrollment, university-level Greek mythology course. We first inventory these techniques, including polling, structured-analysis activities, and two-stage exams, before demonstrating them at work with a concept central to our course, the oral palimpsest. We then assess their effect on student learning and show how expanded opportunities for communication and practice increased student comprehension of a difficult mythological concept.