Classics Department
Nigel Nicholson
Walter Mintz Associate Professor of Classics
Greek and Latin literature, critical theory.
nigel.nicholson@reed.edu
Education
Courses Taught
Publications and Papers
Outreach Programs
Projects
Present Projects
With the aid of a Millicent Mcintosh Fellowship that covers the summers of 2006 and 2007, I am presently working on a book that seeks to popularize both the poetry that Pindar wrote for victorious athletes and the poetry that Ted Hughes wrote as British Poet Laureate for the British royal family. My goal is to write a book that gives educated (but not primarily academic) readers a way in to these two bodies of laureate poetry, a way to understand and enjoy them, and to do so by bringing the two into close contact.
On the one hand, Hughes’ laureate poetry bears the unmistakable stamp of Pindar, yet Hughes did, of course, operate in a very different situation: his patrons, British royalty, were more secure in their social position than Pindar’s, yet at the same time their position was more constrained, and their political power less; they had more power to influence social forces such as taste and style, but were perhaps taken less seriously. But it is these differences that allow the comparison to open up the two poets’ work.
Pindar’s odes, and the scholarly approaches recently developed to address them, can, I think, be used to explain the beauty and interest of Hughes’ laureate poetry, while, conversely, Hughes’ laureate poetry, and the rich records that detail the relationship between Hughes’ life and his work as a laureate poet, can be used to make comprehensible the difficult aspects of Pindar’s writing. I hope thus to rescue two bodies of work from an unfair obscurity by using each to illuminate the other.
I am excited about writing for a wider audience, and expect to finish this project by the end of 2007.
I am also part of research team of economists and humanists from three colleges (Lewis and Clark and Whitman as well as Reed) that is studying the effect of peer interaction on the success of introductory humanities classes. More on this project can be found at http://web.reed.edu/teagle_grant/. The project is funded by a generous grant from the Teagle Foundation.
Finally, this work has interrupted an on-going project examining the way less prominent communities articulated their identity through their star athletes, especially through the anecdotal traditions that grew up around them. So far the project has focused on Western Locri and its star boxer Euthymus, who is said to have defeated the hero of Temesa who demanded the tribute of Temesa's fairest maiden every year. This work was begun under the auspices of a Lankford grant, which supported collaborative work with a Reed undergraduate (now graduate), RAchel Preminger, and has so far produced a couple of lectures.
Recent Projects
My last project was a book focusing on the commemoration of athletic victories in the late archaic period, and their representation of certain figures who are crucial to these victories, but are paid wages, a problematic relationship for the archaic Greek aristocracy. These figures are the charioteers, mule-cart drivers and perhaps jockeys (the prizes actually went to the owners of the horses, which themselves were for sale), the trainers (who trained young men in the combat sports, boxing, wrestling and pancration, as well as the running and the pentathlon). The book is published by Cambridge University, and is entitled, Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece.
A primary source is Pindar's odes, poems written to celebrate athletic victories in the 5th century, but there are various other types of monument: dedications of objects or statues at the site of competition or in the victor's hometown; specially commissioned commemorative vases; coin issues; odes by other poets (Simonides, Bacchylides, Ibycus); and even funeral monuments.
For a preview of part of the book, see my recently published piece, “Aristocratic Victory Memorials and the Absent Charioteer,” which appears in The Cultures within Greek Culture, a wonderful volume (with very nice pictures), edited by. Leslie Kurke of Berkeley and Carol Dougherty of Wellesley, and published by Cambridge in 2003.
