Peter Green

Peter Green has translated Greek epics including the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Argonautica, and has written books on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic age. He worked as a journalist before becoming a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Letter

Easy Peasy

17 June 2015

Galen Strawson talks about ‘Peter Green’s Homer’, as though my version of the passage he refers to (Iliad 20.273-87, 322-3) differed in some way from the Greek text (Letters, 2 July). It doesn’t. Achilles’ spear does pierce through both layers of Aeneas’ shield. It does then go on far enough to stick in the ground. Aeneas does relinquish the shield to pick up a rock as defence against Achilles’...
Letter
I’m grateful for Mark Engel’s information about the proper way to avoid trichinosis, but it doesn’t convince me that pork wasn’t originally avoided because of its occasional mysterious tendency to make the eater ill (Letters, 3 July). Pythagoreans had some very arcane reasons for banning the broad bean, but that prohibition, similarly, was almost certainly due in the first instance to its ability...

Should a translator try to shine a light through the fog or to replicate it? What makes that question so hard to answer is that fog isn’t all there is in The Odyssey. Wary manoeuvrings through the mists...

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The Empty Bath: ‘The Iliad’

Colin Burrow, 18 June 2015

Bathtubs play a small but significant role in the Iliad.

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I shall be read: Ovid’s Revenge

Denis Feeney, 17 August 2006

In the year 8 AD, at the age of 50, Publius Ovidius Naso stood at the height of poetic ambition. Fêted and continuously successful for almost thirty years, Ovid had been without a rival...

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Badmouthing City: Catullus

William Fitzgerald, 23 February 2006

Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes,...

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Himbo: Apollonios Rhodios

James Davidson, 5 March 1998

The story of Jason sounds like an over-excited pitch to a Hollywood producer, a tale full of sex and violence with a doomed romance at its heart and plenty of opportunity for exotic locations and...

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Old Flames

Peter Parsons, 10 January 1983

Time and philology turn dirt into dust. Housman had to veil Latin obscenity in Latin obscurity; Paul Brandt chose to publish under the speaking pseudonym of ‘Hans Licht’;...

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