Classics Department
Nigel Nicholson
Walter Mintz Professor of Classics
Greek and Latin literature, critical theory.
nigel.nicholson@reed.edu
Education
Courses Taught
Publications and Papers
Outreach Programs
Projects
Present Projects
I am juggling a number of biggish projects right now, but they revolve around three themes: the relationship between victory odes and the legends that developed around star athletes; the treatment of medical issues, such as wounds or pay for doctors, in archaic aristocratic discourse; and laureate poetry.
Legends and Odes. There are a number of colorful legends that survive concerning the great athletes of the late Archaic and early Classical periods, and they present intriguing contrasts with the more formal memorials that athletes commissioned, such as statues and victory odes. It seems likely that athletes actually tried to create their own legends and thus considered them a possible medium for promoting the same goals as the odes and statues, that is, both immediate political goals, and the long-term goal of being remembered. What makes this intriguing is that the rules governing these stories were very different: athletes in legends could be larger than life, heroic figures, defeating demons, not subject to the constraints of morality and moderation promoted by the more formal memorials. It is this relationship that I am studying in a variety of less studied communities around the Greed world, but particularly in Sicily and South Italy. This work was begun under the auspices of a Lankford grant, which supported collaborative work with a Reed undergraduate (now a graduate student at Berkeley), Rachel Preminger, and has so far produced a couple of lectures.
Medicine and Aristocracy. I am engaged in a long-term co-authored project with Dr Nathan Selden of Oregon Health Sciences University to examine medical ethics with the help of the historical study of medicine in the late archaic and early classical period (ie the period prior to Hippocrates, and not coincidentally, my main period). The goal is to use the study of the past to open up ethical questions about the present. Our first piece, on the way in which payment was dealt with in the late archaic period, and the ways in which money is problematic in modern medicine (big Pharma etc), appeared recently in Neurology. More themes are being worked on…
Laureate Poetry. With the aid of a Millicent Mcintosh Fellowship that covered 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 was also part of research team of economists and humanists from three colleges (Lewis and Clark and Whitman as well as Reed) that studied the effect of peer interaction on the success of introductory humanities classes. More on this project can be found at http://www.reed.edu/teagle_grant/. The project is funded by a generous grant from the Teagle Foundation. We hope to extend this work and are at present running various pilots to see how to move forward.
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.
During the academic year 2008-09 I served as the Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (ICCS) program in Catania, Sicily. As someone who works on Pindar, I could not pass up the chance to teach Pindar's odes in the city that Hieron founded for himself in the shadow of Etna! More generally, I hope to play some role in shifting our thinking about Greece westward, that we will think of Sicily as much as the mainland when we talk of Greece.