HeroesX | Hour 09 Episode 10: Phemios, lugros, and the Disastrous Song

Gregory Nagy and Natasha Bershadsky read out of Text D, the scene where the internal singer Phemios performs an epic about the nostos of the Achaeans while Penelope listens from upstairs. Nagy examines how the passage works through indexing rather than retelling: a single epithet, lugros (disastrous), placed at the head of a line, cues the performance group that the story they are about to hear has a catastrophic plot-line, just as oulomenē cues the Iliad's opening. He traces the verb epi-tellesthai, Athena bringing the story to fulfillment, as a form of telos, capturing the sense of a project accomplished rather than merely concluded. Bershadsky asks why Athena is the one bringing this disastrous epic to fulfillment when she herself was violated by the fall of her temple at Troy, and Nagy opens the complicated pre-story: Athena has reasons to be angry at the Achaeans, and those unresolved tensions in the backstory are precisely what make her control over the Phemios performance so charged. The episode closes with the reminder that nostos does not guarantee a safe homecoming: it can just as well be a story of a homecoming thwarted by the gods, which is why Odysseus's outcome remains in the balance even as everyone else's has already been decided. TIMESTAMPS 00:58 Performance within a performance: Phemios sings but the story is not retold 01:20 Indexing: how a real performer cues the listening group 01:38 nostos as song about safe homecoming, not just the event itself 02:03 lugros: the epithet that cues a disastrous plot-line 02:18 Parallel with the Iliad: oulomenē cueing disaster at the opening 02:49 epi-tellesthai: Athena bringing the story to fulfillment, not conclusion 03:50 Every Achaean's nostos has already ended except Odysseus's 04:18 Penelope comes downstairs and tells Phemios to stop 04:44 Bershadsky: why does Athena bring this particular disastrous epic to fulfillment? 05:02 Athena's complicated role: she was violated when Troy fell 05:31 Athena angry at the Achaeans for what happened in Troy's final hours 06:17 lugros used by the narrator; lugrē echoed by Penelope at line 341 06:36 Debating the translation of lugros: disastrous vs. catastrophic 07:22 nostos is not always safe: it can be a homecoming thwarted by the gods 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