Richard P. Martin

Professor Richard P. Martin teaches Greek and Latin literature at Stanford. Martin's research focuses primarily on Homeric poetry and how it functioned as a performance art in ancient Greece. His research has involved fieldwork in modern Crete, interviewing those who still perform traditional oral epics. In addition,he has studied resemblances between ancient oral poetry and modern rap. He has worked on presenting Homer digitally, in a full-scale multimedia version of the Odyssey on CD, in connection with distance learning projects. Martin is also interested in the performance of Greek lyric as represented in myth and art, and the analysis of Greek myth. Prof. Martin is currently working on three books: Homeric Religion; Comic Community (about the social contexts of comic productions in ancient Athens); and Homer Abroad, about Greek epic as compared with other ancient and contemporary epic traditions. Born and raised in Boston, he studied Classics as well as Medieval and Modern Irish language and literature at Harvard University where he received his B.A. in Classics and Celtic Literature and M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Philology. Prior to his position at Stanford, Professor Martin taught Classics for eighteen years at Princeton University. He was the Chair of the Classics department at Stanford from 2002 through 2008. Key Works "Read on Arrival," in The Wandering Poets of Ancient Greece, edit. R. Hunter and I. Rutherford. Cambridge 2009. "Words Alone are Certain Good(s)" TAPA (138.2) 313-49 (2008) "Myth, Performance, Poetics: the Gaze from Classics," pp. 45-52 in Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology, edit. Neni Panourgia and George Marcus. New York: Fordham UP. "Outer Limits, Choral Space," pp.35-62 in Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, edit. Chris Kraus, Simon Goldhill, Helene P. Foley, Jas Elsner. Oxford, 2007. "Homer among the Irish: Synge, Yeats, George Thompson, and Parry," pp 75-91 in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edit. Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood. Oxford. The Birds (Aristophanes). Translated and adapted with Paul Muldoon. Gallery Press, 1999. "The Scythian Accent: Anacharsis and the Cynics" in B. Branham & M.-O. Goulet-Caze eds. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. University of California Press, 1997: 136-55. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Cornell University Press, 1993. "The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom" in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke eds. Cultural Poetics of Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1993: 108-128. "Telemachus and the Last Hero Song" Colby Quarterly 29.3 (1993): 222-40. "Hesiod's Metanastic Poetics" Ramus 21.1 (1992): 11-33. Healing, Sacrifice, and Battle: Amechania and Related Concepts in Early Greek Poetry. Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat Innsbruck, 1983.