Program in Early Cultures

Jay Reed is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture, and has worked especially on Hellenistic and Augustan poetry. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1987, and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1991 and 1993. He previously taught Classics at the Ohio State University, Cornell, and the University of Michigan. He has published a detailed scholarly commentary on the surviving poetry of Bion of Smyrna (c. 100 B.C.E.) and a critical study of Virgil's *Aeneid*, exploring the tentative, evolving sense of a Roman nationality that the national epic offers. His interests lie mainly in the poetic representation of cultural identity; he has also published papers on the myth and cult of Adonis, especially their syncretistic aspects and social uses.