Andromache Karanika joins me in the Lesche to discuss how we can detect traces of wedding poetics in early Greek literature, especially poetry (hexamter and lyric). Andromache is the author of Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry (OUP 2024).

Primary texts

• Iliad, esp. the Teikhoskopeia (Book 3) and the Deception of Zeus (Book 14)
• Odyssey, esp. the start of Book 6
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter
• Sappho 21 (virginity poem), 44 (Wedding of Hector and Andromache)
• Pollux 9, on the "tortoise game"
• The ballad of the 'bride who suffered misfortune' (της νύφης που κακοτύχησε/κακοπάθησε, Modern Greek folk song)

Also mentioned

• M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield 2002 [1st ed. 1975]).
• A. Lardinois and L. McClure, eds., Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society (Princeton 2001).
• J.H. Oakley and R. Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens (Ann Arbor 1993).
• R. Seaford, 1987. 'The tragic wedding', JHS 107: 106-30.

About our guest
Andromache Karanika is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions (2020). She served as editor of TAPA (2018-2021) and President of CAMWS (2023-2024).

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
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James Diggle joins me in the Lesche to discuss the 2021 Cambridge Greek Lexicon (2 vols.) of which he was editor-and-chief. We discuss why it was time for this sort of thing (and why it took 24 years to complete), how to use it, and why it improves on LSJ ... plus, how the team approached translating some of the naughtier words.

Some links

• 'Liddell and Scott' poem by Thomas Hardy (1843)
• Cambridge Greek Lexicon project page, where you'll also find a video of the Faculty of Classics' publication celebration.
• Alison Flood's review in The Guardian: English dictionary of ancient Greek ‘spares no blushes’ with fresh look at crudity
• Peter Jones' review in The Spectator: The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an eye-opener for classical scholars

About our guest
James Diggle, CBE, FBA, is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Queens' College, where he was Director of Studies in Classics for over forty years. His publications include The Phaethon of Euripides (Cambridge, 1970), Flauii Cresconii Corippi Iohannidos Libri VIII (joint editor, Cambridge, 1970), Euripidis Fabulae (Oxford Classical Text, 3 vols., 1981–1994), Studies on the Text of Euripides (1981), The Textual Tradition of Euripides' Orestes (1991), Euripidea: Collected Essays (1994), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta Selecta (1998), Theophrastus, Characters (Cambridge 'Orange' 2004; 'Green and Yellow' 22). He was University Orator at Cambridge for eleven years and has published a selection of his speeches (Cambridge Orations 1982–1993 (Cambridge, 1994)). He is also joint editor of The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman (Cambridge, 1972), joint author of Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca (Cambridge, 2005), and Editor-in-Chief of The Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge, 2021). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

John Ma joins me in the Lesche to discuss the longue durée of the Greek polis. John is the author of the new, monumental, and much anticipated book Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton 2024).

Happy Holidays!

About our guest
John Ma was born in New York of Chinese parents. He grew up in Geneva, where he studied Greek and Latin at school and outside school. He went on to study Classics, then ancient history at Oxford. He has taught ancient history in Classics Departments at Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia. Ma is deeply interested in studying Greek history, especially in the Hellenistic period, using documentary and material sources.

Ancient texts

• Archaic poetry
• Aristotle, Politics
• Xenophon, Hellenica
• And many more...

Also mentioned
Too many to list! But I'll note:

• Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton 1989).
• Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nelson, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis (Oxford 2004).
• Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State (OUP 2006)
• The Polis Inventory App

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius
Social media: Meg Sanglikar

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form