Which will probably devolve soon enough into a discussion of the recent Hollywood mini-revival of Happened A Really Long Time Ago movies, but, hey, I tried.
18 thoughts on “liberal japonicus Memorial Classical Literature Thread”
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The Apologia, by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett, seems to be horribly appropriate for these times:
We talked about how stories make heroes: the story which Plato created in the dialogues that make up the The Last Days of Socrates is that of a man speaking truth to power.
My degree was in Classics, and although I didn’t really go in for the Philosophy option, and consequently studied little of Plato’s work, I did read the Apology and the Crito (and a few others I can’t be bothered to recall).
I suspect having to translate them from ancient Greek, which I was by then beginning to dislike, didn’t help my opinion of Socrates. I remember thinking that to die for a principle, in this case, seemed a bad idea; he refused to allow friends to spirit him away because that would be breaking the law of Athens, even though the law had let him down. He said even if the law was bad in this case, are we to destroy it? Actually he put it a lot better than that.
Anyway, I remember thinking at the time that if the state of play in Athens was such that he could be convicted of corrupting the young etc. etc. then ignoring the law didn’t seem like a mistake to me at all. But should one always accept the rule of law, even when that rule is manifestly wrong?
The Presidency is John Kerry’s Moby Dick. First encountered off the Isle of Mocha on New Year’s Eve long ago, the memory was seared – seared into his soul. After a lifetime of sailing the sea of politics, espousing the philosophy of blubber, the great whale is now in his grasp. Alas the battle will be short and tragic. They call me blogbudsman.
Well, bearing in mind that the Socrates we know is the Socrates as presented by Plato, and may or may not have been like this:
I think Socrates was motivated, at least in part, by what concerns Achilles: the honor of his name in time to come. He chose to die with dignity, believing that he had thus effectively triumphed over his accusers, rather than become an exile.
The Threadjack Memorial Open Thread is three doors down the way, Blogbuds.
I always wonder if Socrates would have reached that same conclusion if he were a younger man, with a few less corns and a happier wife. Bannishment was a harder row to hoe way back then so courage was needed on each side of the decision. If you have just a few painful years left and are faced with difficulties if you live but can strengthen you reputation and confirm your life’s work if you stay and take your medicine (as it were) then what Socrates did is alot more logical.
Wow, I’m honored. I’ll stop before I start channeling Sally Fields.
I took both my copy of Logue and my Fagles to work, so I won’t type out any more excerpts, at least tonite, but I would encourage a look at this site about recent excavations at Troy. Unfortunately, a lot of the pages are in German, and some of the English pages are a little Deutsche-ish, but tons of interesting information.
Archaeology’s more my brother’s gig (Indiana Casey, they call him), but I did a bit o’that. Remember studying Ilion. Seem to recall there were some destruction levels of the main hill (the ‘citadel’) that corresponded with the timescale of the historical basis for the Homeric poem.
One of the coolest moments of my degree was when my director of studies broke off from our supervision to take a call announcing the discovery of the sunken Pharos tower.
jesurgislac, didn’t Moby Dick tork you off when you read it in High School. Page after page of whale minutia sprinkled with the goofy tales of his enabling crew. Then after all that tedium, the whale kicks his butt in two paragraphs. This was a life altering experience for me. It’s cruel of you to write my pain off so easily. Plain cruel.
This is the Classical Literature Thread, Blogbuds. If you want to share your pain about 19th Century Literature, join the threadjacking thread.
Moving from Greek to Latin, here’s a particularly cool poem by Catullus:
Loose translation:
“I hate and love her. Why do that, perhaps you ask?
I don’t know; but I feel it happening, and it’s agony.”
Fine, fine, I’ve set up another thread. Sheesh…
My classics education was a bit different. My Greek teacher was from North Carolina and was raised in a very strict Baptist family, so he learned biblical Greek when he was around 12. Ended up, as often happens, thinking that strict religion was a load of horsefeathers and ended up doing his PhD in classics at Indiana. He used to take us squirrel hunting as well.
Latin was an afterthought, and I never got into it as much as Greek. I’m also indebted to him because after the first year of Greek, I was going to chuck it all and do Classics. He said, firmly but gently, don’t even think about it, there’s absolutely no way you could catch up with where you would need to be.
I would also recommend the graphic novel (i.e. comic book) version of the Trojan war entitled ‘Age of Bronze’ by Eric Shanower. Truly a labor of love.
I also picked up a book called _Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths_ by Coats and Lewis, which is short retellings of various Greek myths embedded in a journey of a storyteller travelling to Mount Ida for a competition. I read it to my 5 year old daughter, she loves it, especially following the map of his travels.
Se Vende
“It sells itself”, a translation of the sort
my Latin teacher favored. “Not literary,
literal.” He had us render Caeser
into English as if no idioms (or “idiots”)
existed in either tongue, as if the many
false friends were true. A big bluff man,
we called him – Mr. Maxwell – “Mr. Max.”
His ties (no other teacher at our public
high school bothered) were the stuff of legend,
e.g. Washington Crossing the Delaware
by, as it were, Giacometti.
He’d worn a collar (and stole) in his previous job,
had met and (so the story went) unveiled
his wife, who taught me math my sophomore year;
that’s how he’d ended up in Tennessee,
with its conservative pretensions, why
he had an odd, medieval accent –
“egg-shell” instead of Cicero’s “eks-kel” –
and why the fourth-year students knew a lot
more grammar than he did. I guess he’d had
one marketable skill, that the board had read
his resume and bought his story, taken
on faith his expertise – he was a gift
horse in fact, a teacher who his students
liked and learned from. He had a way of glancing
at you sideways past his glasses and
you’d settle down. He would often say
“I got it” (Washington, that is) “off of
a dead Korean soldier in the war.
Not the Trojan War – I’m not that old.”
(I made up that last bit – at least I think.)
Our senior year we did some Virgil – several
hundred lines from Book II of the Aeneid,
and as a jokey present the class split up
the maybe five-six hundred lines remaining
(including the famous one about Greek gifts)
and hurriedly transcripted them into
a pile of papers that on the final day
of class we bore up to his desk and left.
I don’t what we said. I wish he’d said,
“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
– Philip Hart
Aeneid, now you’re talking.
roughly
James, there are two levels to the Hisarlik mound that might correspond roughly to Homer’s Troy: Troy II and Troy VI. (There are, as I recall, twelve distinct sets of ruins, built atop one another, at Hisarlik, where Heinrich Schliemann decided Troy had been (which may actually be the case). The ruins are numbered by depth; Troy II is the second-lowest level, and Troy VI is right in the middle.) I don’t remember which is which off the top of my head, but as I recall, one is about the “right age” but much smaller than Homer described it, and one is a few hundred years off but closer to the right size.
It’s worth noting, though, that Schliemann was prone to making grandiose declarations about his discoveries, so it’s possible that the Hisarlik location is mostly momentum – and that Schliemann, while a gifted linguist, classicist, and literature lover, wasn’t exactly up on the techniques of modern archaeology. He dug straight down through the mound rather than carefully unearthing one layer at a time, thereby irrevocably destroying quite a bit of the preserved material.
Have to admit I never much appreciated the Aeneid as poetry – the going was just too hard – and Horace didn’t do much for me, but I just loved Catullus. Unfortunately I can’t read him in the original any more – and never will again, since any language-learning time I find will have to go to modern tongues.
Chris Anthony – certainly chimes with what I recall. And yeah, Schliemann with a salt production factory.
Rilkefan – I never got massively into Horace either, though studied him a fair amount. Think my favourites will remain Catullus and Ovid.