HeroesX | Hour 08 Episode 06: Klea Andron, Relay Performance, and the Name of Patroklos

Professor Gregory Nagy and Claudia Filos return to Iliad Scroll IX, where Achilles sings the klea andron, the glories of men, while Patroklos waits his turn. Nagy reads out of this scene to show that epic performance is structured as a relay: singers pass the song on, like handing over the lyre, so that kleos aphthiton is unwilting not simply because future generations remember, but because the song can be restarted at any point in a cycle that keeps recycling. The name Patro-kleēs itself encodes this dynamic, meaning the kleos of those who came before. The discussion moves from telos as finish line to telos as the start of the next lap, and Nagy brings in Cicero's Latin word con-textus, picking up the thread of weaving after an interruption, as a model for understanding how the klea andron stays ideologically unwilting across performance after performance. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Hour 8 Text E as a recycling of Hour 2 Text D 00:37 Achilles singing klea andron, Patroklos waiting his turn 01:39 Epic performance as a relay: handing over the lyre 02:21 The name Patro-kleēs and the kleos of ancestors 03:08 Kleos aphthiton as a song that can be restarted at any time 03:36 Achilles and Patroklos reenacting the continuum as a circle, not a line 04:03 Telos as finish line and as the start of the next lap 05:17 Unless you crash: the possibility of failure in the relay 05:28 Cicero's con-textus: picking up the thread of weaving after interruption 06:10 Kleos ideologically unwilting through relay and festival performance 07:02 Patroklos picks up where Achilles leaves off, and the master singer's fast forward ABOUT THIS SERIES HeroesX, also known as The Ancient Greek Hero, is an open-access learning project created by Professor Gregory Nagy and first launched in 2013. It grew out of Harvard's longest-running course, "The Ancient Greek Hero," which Nagy has taught for over fifty years. Since the project's launch, more than 172,000 participants from over 170 countries have joined. It invites everyone, with or without prior experience, to read closely from some of the most beautiful works of ancient Greek literature in English translation: the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, songs of Sappho and Pindar, dialogues of Plato, and selections from On Heroes by Philostratus. Throughout the project, Nagy and his team model techniques for reading out of these works inductively, so that learners can begin to see this literature as an exquisite system of communication. It is not a graded course. It is content, community, and conversation that many participants describe as transformative. ABOUT THE NEW ALEXANDRIA FOUNDATION For more than a decade, HeroesX has welcomed learners from around the world, and it now finds a new home at the New Alexandria Foundation, which expands access to the comparative study of civilizations, ancient and modern. Through technology and community, we foster living humanistic dialogues, open to all and enduring across generations. The full HeroesX video library lives on this YouTube channel, and NAF shares the surrounding content, including primary readings, exercises, and resources, to support your reading. 🌐 https://newalexandriafoundation.org/ RESOURCES 🏛️ HeroesX home on Classical Continuum: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/her... 📘 Read Gregory Nagy's book, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, free online with illustrations: https://chs.harvard.edu/book/nagy-gre... 📚 Read or download the Sourcebook online (English translations of all the texts discussed in the book and in HeroesX): https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/the... ✉️ Be the first to hear about HeroesX developments and join an upcoming cohort: https://mailchi.mp/9a41aac39c45/6cnmu... ❤️ Love this work? Help keep HeroesX free and growing with a gift to the New Alexandria Foundation: https://newalexandriafoundation.org/d... #AncientGreek #HeroesX #GregoryNagy #Homer #Iliad #Odyssey #GreekMythology #ClassicalLiterature #Humanities #NewAlexandriaFoundation