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Stahl Lecture Looks at Honor in Homer Nov. 15

Story posted November 11, 2006

Ruth Scodel, D.R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan, will give a lecture about her research on Homeric heroes at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 15, 2006, in Massachusetts Hall, Faculty Room.

Scodel's talk, titled "Boundless Ransoms," will cover her current research on the topic of honor in Homer. The lecture is open to the public, and admission is free.

In Scodel's view, Homeric heroes' concerns for their honor are not very different from those of most professors, and the politics of the army at Troy differ from those of an academic department mainly because one group wins honor by doing research, the other by killing enemies. Her talk is about the issues involved in trading things for people — ransoms for captives or corpses, compensation for murder.

Ruth Scodel is the incoming president of the American Philological Association, the major professional organization for Classics in the United States.

She is the author of four books, including two recent books on Homer: Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy (Stuttgart 1999), and Listening to Homer (Ann Arbor 2002). She has also written numerous articles on Homer, Greek tragedy, and other Greek and Roman literature.

Scodel teaches courses on Greek literature and culture, and classics and cinema, and has served as the director of the Honors Program for the College of Literature, Science and Arts at Michigan.

She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She taught at Harvard before joining the Michigan faculty in 1984.

Scodel's Bowdoin lecture is supported by the Jasper Jacob Stahl Lectureship in the Humanities and by the Department of Classics. The Stahl Fund, established in 1970 by the bequest of Jasper Jacob Stahl '09, Litt.D. '60, supports lectures by distinguished scholars and gifted interpreters of the art, life, letters, philosophy or culture of the ancient world.

For more information call 725-3782.

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