Barry B. Powell

Barry Bruce Powell(born 1942) is an American classical scholar who is the author of the textbookClassical Myth.Trained atBerkeleyandHarvard,he is a specialist inHomerand in the history of writing.Powell is currently the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison.

Works

Powell's studyHomer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabetadvances the controversial thesis that a single man invented theGreek alphabetexpressly in order to record the poems of Homer.HisWriting: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization(Wiley-Blackwell 2009) rejects the standard theories of the origins of bothSumerian cuneiformand thePhoenician alphabetas deriving from pictograms.and attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing.

Powell has also translated a number of works, including theIliad,theOdyssey,theAeneidand the poems ofHesiod.HisGreek Poems to the Godsincludes translation and commentary on Greek hymns from Homer to Proclus.

Books

• Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet,Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature,Cambridge University Press, 2003
• Homer,Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, 2nd ed. 2007
• Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization,Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
• Classical Myth,eighth edition, Pearson, 2014

Translations

• The Iliad,Oxford University Press, 2013
• The Odyssey,Oxford University Press, 2014
• Vergil's Aeneid,Oxford University Press, 2015
• The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Heracles,University of California Press 2017
• Greek Poems to the Gods,University of California Press, 2021

External links

• Personal page at University of Wisconsin–Madison (archived 2012)