Andrew Wein

I am a philologist and cultural historian interested primarily in early Greek poetry and philosophy. Much of my recent research has focused on the ideological work of cosmology: the way in which competing accounts of reality serve to ground and contest systems of social and political value.

I am currently at work on my first monograph, tentatively titled Kosmos: The Epic Image of Reality, which challenges the traditional story of when and how the world came to be called a kosmos. The consensus holds that this usage emerged in the 6th century BCE, when one of the early philosophers, breaking with mythic accounts and articulating the novel notion of a natural world, decided to call it an “arrangement.” Against this view, I argue in the book’s first half that the cosmological use of this word goes back to the epic tradition of Homer and Hesiod and its fundamentally political account of reality: the kosmos for these poets is the particular “arrangement” which Zeus, as the patriarch of gods and men, has made of his world-constituting household by distributing places and roles to all its members. Then, in the second half of the book, I argue that kosmos does not thereafter become a neutral term for the world; it is instead one which later poets and philosophers continue to use in close engagement with the world of epic and its host of ideological commitments.

Other recent and ongoing projects include, for instance, a study of the notorious and long misunderstood simile at Iliad 4.141-47, wherein blood from a wound at the waist of Menelaus is said to coat his legs like purple dye staining the ivory cheekpiece of a king’s horse harness, and a comparative study of the nature and literary significance of the ugliness of Aesop and Socrates.