Bill Beck

Bill Beck

Assistant Professor, Classical Studies

Education

  • B.A., Swarthmore College, 2011
  • Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2019

Research areas

  • Ancient Greek literature and culture
  • Homeric epic
  • Homeric scholia
  • Ancient Greek literary criticism

About Bill Beck

I am a classical philologist whose research explores the interactions between narrators and audiences in ancient Greek, and especially Homeric, literature. I am interested in the ways in which narrators condition audiences’ experiences of the stories they tell, in the ways that audiences interpret narratives, and in the reciprocal relationship between literary criticism and literature. While my interest in these questions has inspired articles on Roman authors, such as Vergil and Apuleius, I am particularly focused on Homeric epic and its reception in later antiquity. I recently co-edited (with Adrian Kelly (Oxford), and Tom Phillips (Manchester)) The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (BICS), which considers ancient Homeric scholarship both in its own contexts and through its refractions in intellectual history. In addition, I am currently completing a translation of the ancient scholia to the first two books of the Iliad, the first installment of a four-volume series under contract with Cambridge University Press, which I am co-editing with Adrian Kelly (Oxford), Oliver Thomas (Nottingham), and Tom Phillips (Manchester). My current book project, The Narrative of the Iliad: Time, Space, and Story, explores the narrator’s representation of the Iliad’s story in time and space, and argues that the audience’s partial and piecemeal experience of the Iliad’s story belies the narrator’s synoptic sense of both the story and the narrative that represents it. My writing has appeared in American Journal of Philology, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, The Classical Journal, Classical Philology, Eidolon, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Transactions of the American Philological Association, Tellus, Unravel, Vergilius, Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, and the blog of the Society for Classical Studies. Links to several of my articles can be found here

Courses Taught

  • Classical Mythology 
  • Classical Drama 
  • Greek Literature in Translation (The Trojan War) 
  • Ancient Greek Culture 
  • Intermediate Greek 
  • Survey of Greek Literature (Poetry) 
  • Homer/Readings in Greek Epic 
  • Classical Epics 

Selected Publications

Books 

The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation, BICS. 2021. Co-edited with Adrian Kelly and Tom Phillips.

Articles and Book Chapters 

“Harshing Zeus’ μέλω: Reassessing the Sympathy of Zeus at Iliad 20.21.” AJP (2022). 

“Doorways and Diegesis: Spatial and Narrative Boundaries in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.” CP (2022): 706–19. 

“Reading for Achilles in the bT-Scholia to the Iliad,” in B. Beck, A. Kelly, and T. Phillips (eds) The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (2021): 48–58.  

“Reassessing the Scholiastic Evidence for the Cretan Odyssey Theory.” TAPA (2020): 357–78.  

“Lost in the Middle: Story Time and Discourse Time in the Iliad.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (2017): 46–64.  

Causas Memora: Epic Etiology and Vergil’s Aeneid.” Vergilius 62 (2016): 57–78.  

“Lost in the Middle: Story Time and Discourse Time in the Iliad.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (2017): 46-64. 

Causas Memora: Epic Etiology and Vergil’s Aeneid.” Vergilius 62 (2016): 57-78.