"Inspired by and in dialogue with Olga Levaniouk’s groundbreaking paper Penelope in the Aśoka Grove, I will suggest that marriage is as much at the heart of archaic Sanskrit and Greek epics as warfare and that, considered together, the poems sketch a full range of marriage types – and their consequences. With all due caution these anecdotal accounts can be evaluated against the structured typologies of marriage found in the Sanskrit legal texts."
Stephanie Jamison is the Distinguished Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures and of Indo-European Studies, and the Chair of the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA. She works on Indo-Iranian, especially Vedic Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, as well as literature and poetics, religion and law, mythology and ritual, and gender studies in these languages. She is the author of multiple monographs, including: The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India (Cornell 1991), Sacrificed Wife / Sacrificer’s Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India (Oxford 1996), The Rig Veda between Two Worlds: Four Lectures at the Collège de France (2007), and, with J. Brereton, The Rigveda: the earliest religious poetry of India (Oxford 2014), the first complete scholarly translation of the Rigveda into English in over a century. Jamison’s research also involves comparative mythology and poetics, especially with Greek materials. Her publications in the latter area include, among others, “Draupadī on the Walls of Troy: Iliad 3 from an Indic Perspective” (Classical Antiquity 13, 1994) and “Penelope and the Pigs: Indic Perspectives on the Odyssey” (Classical Antiquity 18, 1999).
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