Barry B. Powell is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, and author of the widely used textbook Classical Myth (fifth edition, Prentice-Hall, 2006), as well as The Greeks (Prentice-Hall 2005, with Ian Morris) and A Short Introduction to Classical Myth (Prentice-Hall, 2000). His Homer (Blackwells, 2003), a concise discussion of the poet and his poems, is a best selling study of Homer. The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public university located in Madison, Wisconsin. ... In mathematical finance, the Greeks are the quantities representing the market sensitivities of options or other derivatives. ... Ian Morris is a musician, record producer, recording engineer and songwriter from New Zealand. ... The Homère Caetani bust at the Louvre, a 2nd century Roman copy of a 2nd century BC Greek original. ...

A principal contribution to scholarship is Powell's Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge University Press, 1991), which advances the thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer. This thesis is controversial but appears to make the best sense of complex evidence for the invention of the Greek alphabet and the previously unsolved problem of the creation of the Homeric texts. The book was the subject of an international conference in Berlin in 2002 and has been influential outside classical philology, especially in media studies.

Powell's many other books include an illustrated novel Ramses in Nighttown (2005) and an illustrated book of poetry Rooms Containing Falcons (2005) He has also written screenplays, including one on Helen of Troy, and a humorous mock-epic The War at Troy: A True History (2006). Helen was the wife of Menelaus and reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and her abduction by Paris brought about the Trojan War. ...

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