The Faculty of Languages

A fraction of all the songs that embellished festivals and banquets in Ancient Greece (776–480 BCE) were preserved thanks to the gradual establishment of the art of writing in the region. The Iliad and The Odyssey, attributed to the mythical poet Homer, depict decisive events during the Trojan War and its aftermath. The two poems were the main source of cultural nourishment during the great periods of prosperity in ancient Athens, Alexandria and Rome, and have been imitated, edited, commented on and translated more or less continuously for nearly 2,600 years.

My doctoral thesis analysed the handwriting tradition and the background to the most important medieval commentary on The Odyssey. Over the next five years, I took a broader approach to the Homeric tradition. In a whole series of studies, I approached it as an encyclopaedia of human experience, the main value of this (for a humanities researcher) being that individuals from different periods and places, and with widely diverging languages, norms and values, have documented their encounters with the same scenes, the same poetic devices, and the same questions. For example, I examined how interpreters have debated about the extravagant description of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of The Iliad, the famous objective (yet poignant) accounts of the deaths of insignificant heroes on the battlefield, and the heroes’ tears. My focus then shifted to the fundamental questions raised by these debates. In recent years, I have contributed to the research in the fields of aesthetics and psychology on emotional states that manifest themselves as a desire to cry, especially the phenomenon we refer to when we say we are ‘touched’.