Gregory Nagy

• 1. Introduction

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  Gregory Nagy was born Nagy Gergely, in the Hungarian order of family name first, on the 22nd of October 1942, in Budapest. He grew into an American professor of classics at Harvard University, where his focus settled on Homer and archaic Greek poetry. What carried a scholar from Budapest into a decades-long argument over how the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually composed? What happens when one professor's campus course reaches tens of thousands of students who never set foot in Cambridge? That surname, Nagy, reappears twice more in departments of classics, carried by two of his brothers.

• 2. Extending an Oral Theory

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  Indiana University granted Nagy a bachelor's degree in 1962, majoring in classics and linguistics together. Four years later, in 1966, Harvard University awarded him a doctorate in classical philology, and he joined its faculty that same year. His scholarly identity centered on a single argument. He extended the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. They had argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally, during live performance, not written down at a single sitting. That theory about spoken, performed epic still anchors his teaching. Today he continues to teach half of his course load on Harvard's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• 3. Chairs and Committees

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  Since 2000, Nagy has directed the Center for Hellenic Studies, a Harvard-affiliated research institution based in Washington, D.C. The university also named him the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature. Between 1994 and 2000, he chaired Harvard's Classics Department, and from 1989 to 1994 he had already chaired the undergraduate Literature Concentration. In the 1990-1991 academic year, he served as president of the American Philological Association. From 2015 to 2021, he also kept a research blog, Classical Inquiries, posting about his work on a frequent basis. Those same years overlapped with a course, unrelated to any office, that would carry his name to a very different kind of audience.

• 4. Twenty-Seven Thousand Students

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  In 2013, Harvard turned Nagy's long-running course, The Ancient Greek Hero, into a massive open online course delivered through edX. Thousands of Harvard students had already taken the class on campus over the last few decades before it ever went online. To help manage the online audience, Harvard called on alumni to volunteer as mentors and discussion group managers. About ten former teaching fellows answered that call, tasked with keeping online discussion focused on the course material. By the time enrollment closed, 27,000 students had registered for the course. That scale of enrollment briefly made a single professor's seminar into one of Harvard's largest classrooms, on campus or off it.

• 5. A Household of Scholars

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  Olga Davidson, Nagy's wife, holds a research fellowship at Boston University's Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations. She also chairs the Ilex Foundation. From 1986 to 1990, the couple served together as Faculty Deans of Currier House at Harvard, a role once called co-masters. Nagy has two brothers working in related fields. Blaise Nagy is professor emeritus of classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Joseph F. Nagy holds the Henry L. Shattuck professorship in Irish Studies, within Harvard's Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. That academic household would eventually produce more than a dozen books under Nagy's name alone.

• 6. A Life in Print

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  In 1970, Harvard University Press published Nagy's first book, Greek Dialects and the Transformation of an Indo-European Process. Four years later the same press followed with Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter. His best-known title, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, first appeared in 1979. Johns Hopkins University Press reissued a revised edition in 1998. In 1990 alone, he published two more books. Greek Mythology and Poetics came out with Cornell University Press, while Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past appeared through Johns Hopkins. Two more volumes followed in 1996: Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond from Cambridge University Press, and Homeric Questions from the University of Texas Press. Harvard University Press returned in 2002 with Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. The University of Texas Press followed with Homeric Responses in 2003, and the University of Illinois Press published Homer's Text and Language in 2004. Harvard University Press published Homer the Classic in 2009, and the University of California Press followed with Homer: The Preclassic in 2010. In 2013, Harvard University Press released The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. The following year, Lulu Press published The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, illustrated by Glynnis Fawkes. Lulu released a second illustrated volume with Fawkes, The Homeric Hymn to Dionysos, in 2015. Nagy also co-edited two collections beyond his own books. With Victor Bers, he produced The Classics In East Europe: From the End of World War II to the Present in 1996. With Nicole Loraux and L. Slatkin, he co-edited Postwar French Thought, volume three, Antiquities, in 2001. He also edited a nine-volume series called Greek Literature, published by Taylor and Francis in London in 2001 and reissued by Routledge in 2002. His articles include The Professional Muse and Models of Prestige in Ancient Greece, published in Cultural Critique in 1989. A second article, The Name of Achilles: Questions of Etymology and 'Folk-Etymology', appeared in Illinois Classical Studies in 1994. By his own account, Nagy did not ensure that permission had been secured for every article reprinted in the Greek Literature series. He has said he will not accept responsibility for the ones he missed. That leaves the exact scope of what the nine-volume set reused an open question.