Stephen Scully
Associate Professor of Classical Studies (CAS)
Teaches KHC HC 301: The Nature of Inquiry
Ever since his undergraduate days, Stephen Scully’s interests have radiated out from Homer and Hesiod. His first publications were on Homeric themes and he always return to the Iliad, in particular. Scully has finished a study of the Theogony which, in addition to a reading of the poem, compares Hesiod’s vision of creation to that in Genesis and the Near Eastern creation myths, and considers his vision of Zeus and communal harmony throughout antiquity from the Archaic period to Lucian, the Christian apologists, and the neoplatonists. He also traces its reception in the Byzantine and medieval periods up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and concludes with a coda on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Scully has also published on Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Vergil, George Chapman (the first English translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey), and Freud, and has translated Plato’s Phaedrus and (with R. Warren) Euripides’ Suppliant Women.
In addition to his delight in studying poetry, rhetoric, and prose style, Scully has an abiding passion in Greek and Roman images and 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.