What is a Barbarian ? A Study of Hector in the Homeric Scholia to the Iliad

The Homeric scholia to the Iliad are a corpus of commentaries found in the marginalia of the  manuscripts of the poem, and, for the most part, they are the last remains of the work  elaborated in the library of Alexandria. For my thesis, I am working on the characters of  Achilles and Hector in these scholia and, during my stay in Stanford, I intend to focus on the  question of Hector’s barbarian identity. The scholia convey the idea of a binary world where Greeks are fundamentally different from  non-Greek populations, who are considered barbarians. But this vision is nuanced when it  comes to the study of one character and their complexity. I would like to analyze the tension  between both perspectives: the apprehension of the Trojans as a coherent group of barbarians  and the analysis of Hector as a complex individual character in the scholia. I will organize a workshop on the barbarian identity of the Trojans and its impact on the  portrayal of Hector. This workshop will propose another way to elaborate an original  perspective on Hector, barbary and the perception of difference, by using a rich and original  corpus.