Myths of the Ancient Greeks

Also publishes under the pen name - Patrick N. Hunt.


If you were looking for Patrick Hunt as a young boy, you would have often found him high up in a favorite tree with a book. He discovered Bach as a young teenager and taught himself to play Bach's TWO-PART INVENTIONS on a rickety piano because his family could not afford music lessons. Now his love of teaching and creative ventures form a strong signature for his life.

Patrick is indebted and grateful to hundreds of students young and old over the years in many places who have taught him just as much as he has taught them. He realizes how


very lucky he is to be doing what he loves and knows many people have helped him along the way.

Patrick has followed several of his life-long dreams – archaeologist, writer, composer, poet, art historian – while teaching the last fifteen or so years at Stanford University.

Some of the courses he has taught at Stanford accommodate his breadth of interests in the Humanities, the Arts, Ancient History and Ancient Technology as well as Archaeological Science. He has lived in London, Athens and Jerusalem as well as annual time spent in Switzerland, France, Italy every year since 1994, among many other countries, and has also conducted archaeological research in Peru on Inca sites and on Olmec, Maya and Aztec cultures in Central America.

As a musician and composer, among classical music works, he has written piano, choral and chamber music and is a Full Writer member of ASCAP since 1980 when some of his choral songs were published along with a movie score he composed. In 1999, a Duke University musical group performed his SONGS OF EXILE: By the Rivers of Babylon in Washington, DC, Raleigh and at Duke. Three arias from his opera in progress, BYRON IN GREECE, were recently performed in London in March, 2005 and William Blake poems set to choral music were performed at Stanford in February, 2005.

Patrick illustrated Richard Martin's MYTHS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS (New American Library-Penguin, 2003) and has illustrated his newest book of poems, HOUSE OF THE MUSE: Poems from the British Museum, newly published in the summer of 2005. His poetry publications include poems in YOUNG AMERICAN POETS (1978), POET LORE (1978) and CLASSICAL OUTLOOK (1991). He is also translating Greek poets like Sappho and encyclopedists like Theophrastus.

Patrick has directed Stanford's Alpine Archaeology Project since 1994, conducting high altitude research in the Great St. Bernard pass between Switzerland and Italy. In 1996 he found the 9000 ft. high quarry for the Temple of Jupiter in the Fenetre de Ferret pass adjacent to the Great St. Bernard Pass and has directed a team that found a Roman silver coin hoard in the Swiss Alps in 2003. Another of his research interests has been to track Hannibal who crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with an army accompanied by elephants. He has led annual teams across at least ten Alpine passes in search of topographic clues matching the texts of Polybius and Livy who wrote about Hannibal nearly two millennia ago, including multiple Stanford teams between 1996 and 2008.

Patrick has been published on diverse topics such as monuments like the Pantheon, ancient notables such as Gyges and Herodotus, linguistics, biblical studies, the origin of Byzantine Silk, studies in Hebrew poetry and literary wordplay, Roman monuments in operas, calendrical megaliths, Olmec and Maya sculpture, iconography on Greek vases and myth palindromes, nautical exploration, art history, Egyptian stone working and Phoenician lore and geoarchaeology among other topics. His academic publications include journal and encyclopedia entries in peer-reviewed articles such as WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY (1989), BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES (1988), PAPERS OF THE INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY, LONDON (1990), STUDIA PHOENICIA (1991), BEITRAGE FUR ERFORSCHUNG DES ALTE