Event

Speaker: Andrea Kouklanakis, Classics and Humanities Faculty Member, Bard High School Early College & Hunter College

Title: "Expressions of Shame and Blame: A Comparative Approach to Homeric Poetry"

Abstract: In the Odyssey, especially among Penelope’s suitors, we find socio-poetic expressions intended to shame and blame unfit rulers. These expressions appear to be cognate with early Irish law-tracts, myth, and poetry in their regulatory function for curbing or deposing unsuitable rulers, known as Irish satire. Irish satire had the magical power to physically blemish a ruler’s face, which represented a disqualifying stigma. Considering this regulatory, even demoting, role of Irish satire as comparandum, the talk offers a socio-poetic context for the suitors’ struggle for kingship based on linguistic and comparative evidence. The representation of shaming and blaming as social stigma in the Odyssey ultimately serves to consolidate the praise of the good ruler.