HeroesX | Hour 08 Episode 07: Thetis Laments Achilles, Demeter and Dēmophōn, the Smoldering Log

Professor Gregory Nagy and Claudia Filos return to the lament of Thetis over Achilles in the Iliad, a moment so formally perfect that, as Nagy notes, every detail of its wording matches living lament traditions in rural Greece today. Thetis cradles the head of her son, who is not yet dead but grieving his body double Patroklos so intensely that he is already going through the motions of death. Nagy reads out of the vegetal image at the heart of the lament: Achilles as a tender young plant cut down in the bloom of his youth, the eternal bridegroom who will never become what he could have been. The discussion then moves to Hour 8 Text G, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 233 to 241, where baby Dēmophōn shoots up like a beautiful flower, the same vegetal word used for Achilles. Nagy draws the parallel between Demeter trying and failing to galvanize Dēmophōn and Thetis trying and failing to galvanize Achilles, the origin of the myth of the Achilles heel. He closes with the image of the hero as a smoldering log, tenuous life that goes up in smoke if thrown into the fire, and a cross-reference to the myth of Meleager. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Returning to the lament of Thetis over Achilles 01:01 Thetis cradling his head: a morphologically perfect lament 01:47 Margaret Alexiou and the living lament tradition in Greece 02:15 Achilles as a tender young plant cut down in the bloom of his youth 02:48 The correspondence with Dēmophōn in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 03:06 The eternal bridegroom: sorrow built into the name Achilles 03:46 Hour 8 Text G: Dēmophōn shoots up like a beautiful flower 04:12 The hero compared to a daimōn at the moment of death 04:35 Demeter trying to galvanize Dēmophōn, Thetis trying to galvanize Achilles 05:03 The myth of the Achilles heel 05:08 The hero as a smoldering log and the cross-reference to Meleager 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