The John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics is delighted to announce that Professor Ian Hollenbaugh has published a new open-access article in The Classical Quarterly. The piece, titled “Thought for Food: On Niobe's Eternal Brooding,” is now available online through the journal’s First View platform, with the print issue forthcoming in May. 

Professor Hollenbaugh’s research focuses on Greek literature and language, and this latest contribution offers a fresh analysis of one of the Iliad’s most poignant mythological allusions: the story of Niobe in Book 24 (lines 599–620). In this passage, Homer invokes Niobe—once a proud mother of many children and then a figure of eternal grief—as a parallel to Achilles’ own journey through suffering and emotional transformation.

A New Interpretation of a Familiar Passage

In the article, Professor Hollenbaugh addresses longstanding grammatical, structural, and narratological questions surrounding the Niobe episode. His argument centers on a small but crucial detail: an often-overlooked and widely misunderstood occurrence of the Greek particle τε in line 602. By reexamining this particle’s function, he opens the door to a new interpretation of the entire scene.

His analysis also resolves what some scholars have viewed as a structural inconsistency—specifically, a supposed problem in the passage’s ring composition. Importantly, he demonstrates that the passage’s structure remains coherent without requiring any editorial emendation, preserving the integrity of the transmitted text.

Open Access Publication

The article is freely accessible through The Classical Quarterly’s First View system:

Read it here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/firstview