Instructor

Instructor for Spring 2019: Stephen Scully

Ever since his undergraduate days, Professor Scully’s interests have radiated out from Homer and Hesiod. His first publications were on Homeric themes and he always returns to Homer, the Iliad, in particular. His book, Hesiod’s Theogony, from Near Eastern creation stories to Paradise Lost, was published in 2015. It compares Hesiod’s vision of creation to that in Genesis and the Near Eastern creation myths, and considers his vision of Zeus’ Olympus to writers from the Archaic period to Lucian, the Christian apologists and the neoplatonists. It also traces the Theogony’s reception in the Byzantine and medieval periods up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and compares it to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. He has also published on Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Vergil, George Chapman (the first English translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey), and Freud, and he has translated Plato’s Phaedrus and (with R. Warren) Euripides’ Suppliant Women. In addition to his delight in studying poetry, rhetoric, and prose style, he has an abiding passion for Greek and Roman understandings of polity as rendered especially in poetry and philosophy. This stems from his college days in New York City when he wanted to become a city planner. These days he also manages a tree farm, linked to his cabin off the grid on a mountain in Vermont.