Transcript for Interview with Gregory Nagy on the Homeric Question

An interview with Gregory Nagy on the Homeric question

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: I’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey here in Ithaca, where they proudly display a statue of Homer. But what if they got it wrong? What if Homer never wrote the Iliad, or the Odyssey? What if Homer never existed in the first place? This is not some wild conspiracy theory, but the considered conclusion of my guest to Harvard’s Gregory Nagy after a lifetime of research. Professor Nagy is one of the most respected Homerists alive, who’s published over a dozen books on Homer, and his defining contribution is to uncover who, or I really should say what, produced the Homeric epics. If you are at all engaged in creative work, if you’re interested in how to build creative cultures and creative countries, then this is an incredibly important conversation because the Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the most important creative acts in the Western tradition, and learning about how they are made will help you gain a fundamentally new perspective on your own work, as it ha…