Omero e Nerone sul New Yorker

Il nuovo numero del New Yorker si occupa di Nerone, che forse non era poi così terribile, "Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years.[...] All of this, according to some recent scholars, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a fabrication: a narrative derived from biased histories, written decades after Nero died, that relied on dubious sources". Rebecca Mead, New Yorker

E si occupa di Omero, che forse non è mai esistito, "We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all". Adam Kirsch, New Yorker

E ancora: What happened to Jan Kerouac, Jack’s forgotten daughter, David Barnett, The Guardian