Join us on October 16th, 2025, for a presentation by Prof. Daniel Turkeltaub on Homer’s Slippery Songs: Odysseus’s Mighty Hand and the Fall of Glorious Ajax. 

The Iliad and Odyssey contain phrases that just don’t fit their contexts. Scholars used to say Homer nodded off when composing such passages, but the discovery that the Homeric epics are oral compositions offers more productive possibilities than the poet’s somnolence. Like phrases in a natural language, formulaic phrases in Homeric poetry can convey idiomatic meanings that we lose when we read the poems as written texts. In this talk, we will examine two passages containing ludicrously inappropriate formulas: an instance of “glorious Ajax” (φαίδιμος Αἴας) in the Iliad and “with a stout hand” (χειρὶ παχείῃ) in the Odyssey. Viewing the two passages in light of each formula’s idiomatic significance will reveal how Homer’s songs create meaning that we often miss today and how the two epics use humor differently to reverberate their deeper thematic concerns.   All are welcome!

Daniel Turkeltaub is an Associate Professor of Classics at Santa Clara University. He is a classical philologist whose teaching and research focus on Greek epic, comedy, and tragedy. He has published articles about Euripides’ Hecuba, humor in the Odyssey, and how formulaic composition contributes to thematic development in Homeric poetry. Select publications include “Perceiving Iliadic Gods,” “Penelope’s ‘Stout Hand’ and Odyssean Humor,” and “Reading the Epic Past: The Iliad on Heroic Epic.” He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University a few years after earning his A.B. from Princeton University.