Barry B. Powell


Barry Bruce Powell is an American classical scholar. He is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of the widely used textbook Classical Myth and many other books. Trained at Berkeley and Harvard, he is a specialist in Homer and in the history of writing. He has also taught Egyptian philology for many years and courses in Egyptian civilization.

Work

His Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing, and was described in Science as "stimulating and impressive" and "a worthy successor to the pioneering book by Semitic specialist I. J. Gelb." This book has been translated into Arabic and modern Greek.
Powell's study Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet advances the thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer. This thesis is controversial. The book was the subject of an international conference in Berlin in 2002 and has been influential outside classical philology, especially in media studies. Powell's Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature follows up themes broached by the thesis.
Powell's textbook, Classical Myth is widely used for classical myth courses in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan, as his text The Greeks: History, Culture, Society is widely used in ancient history classes. His text World Myth is popular in such courses.
Powell's critical study Homer is widely read as an introduction for philologists, historians, and students of literature. In this study, Powell suggested that Homer may have hailed from Euboea instead of Ionia.
A New Companion to Homer, also translated into modern Greek and Chinese, is a comprehensive review of modern scholarship on Homer.
His literary works include poetry, an autobiography, a mock-epic, an academic novel, a novel about Berkeley, a novel about Jazz, and a collection of short fiction. He has published a memoir: Ramses Reborn. In Tales of the Trojan War he retells in a droll, sometimes ribald style, the stories attached to the Trojan cycle, based on ancient sources.
He has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. The introduction to these poems discusses Powell's thesis about the Greek alphabet and the recording of Homer and is an influential review of modern Homeric criticism. He has also translated the Aeneid and the poems of Hesiod.

Works

Books