Seminary Professor Appointed Senior Editor of a Prestigious Project in Classical Philology

The Saint Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary is delighted to announce that Dr. John C. B. Petropoulos, Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the Democritean University of Thrace, Director Emeritus of Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplion, Greece, and an Adjunct Professor at the Seminary, has recently been selected as one of the senior editors of a major ongoing project based at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., “A Homer Commentary in Progress.” This project constitutes, according to Gregory Nagy of Harvard University, one of its founding authors, “the first and only such commentary that is based squarely on the cumulative research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who together created a new way of thinking about Homeric poetry,” namely, that it “is a system generated from oral traditions.”

Professor Petropoulos, who earned his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Sir Kenneth Dover, is well known in the world of classical philology as a specialist in Homer. In 2011, his book Kleos in a Minor Key: The Homeric Education of a Little Prince, an important study of a somewhat neglected character in the Odyssey, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, was published by the Center for Hellenic Studies.

The Administration and Faculty of the Seminary congratulate Professor Petropoulos on his appointment to the editorial team of such an important new project in Homeric studies.