Dr. Stephen A. Sansom

This article argues that a new stylometry of Hermann’s Bridge identifies unexpected metrical trends in authors, eras and speakers. Using computational and statistical means, it provides the first comprehensive survey of breaks and quasi-breaks of Hermann’s Bridge and analyses them according to corpus, formulaic constructions and the narratology of character speech. This approach both complements previous studies of the Bridge and enables future research into its potential literary effects.

Applying the criterion “expectancy” to the varied distribution of metrical shapes in epic helps to define the style and the tone of a passage, with implications for discerning the reader’s response.

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.

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.

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.

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, that is, 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 divine revelation.

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 inter-textual 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.

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.

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.

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.