Appetitive: Ancient Greek Drinking Songs for the Holidays

Music and wine for the holidays [1]! I have always liked the idea of Greek drinking songs, but only actually participated in the singing of them once. At one of the parties at our apartment, Cynthia brought out a Loeb and tried to have us sing one. Really the only adequate singer was Propertius II because my Greek pronunciation is terrible and Cynthia's voice does not quite have the robustness for drinking songs [2].

Anyway, I found some modern Greek musical interpretations of Ancient Greek lyric poetry on one of my searches for Ancient Greek drinking songs. From what Propertius II has told me of Ancient Greek music, this is far too melodious. However, I have only heard a little of it and it might be interesting. I also found an English translation of an Archilochus fragment that is one of the drinking songs at Extraface. I searched through an online archive of Archilochus for a while but I could not match it up to the Greek. I think I just was not looking hard enough because I was rushing. If someone figures out which fragment it is, please comment it or email me.

Perhaps I'll hunt down the Loeb in the library and see if I can find it after the holidays. Happy holidays, everyone!,

Endnotes

1. It is amusing that all of my holiday posts seem to be about booze, because I have almost no alcohol tolerance at all and do not drink very much. However, I like the idea of drinking and being merry, even though I mostly have to be merry without the drinking.
2. Her voice is much more suited to the indie songs that she sings with her ukulele.

Appetitive: You Know You're a Classics Geek When...

I spent last night on Cynthia's couch. it was warm and cozy in the sleeping bag. I was woken up first by some children outside proclaiming loudly to the neighborhood that there was snow on the ground (they were mistaken). A few hours later a friend (one of Cynthia's roommates) came in and said, "Sulpicia, I know this is not what you want to hear first thing in the morning, but can you recite the principle parts of γιγώσκω off the top of your head?" I had to admit, to my dismay, that I did not.

So, first thing when I got up I pulled up my PDF copy of Smyth (which you can download from Textkit) and looked them up. γιγνώσκω, γιγνώσομαι, ἔγνων, ἔγνοσκα, ἐγνώσθην.

Spirited: Sophocles and the Gods

I used to be a Sophocles hater. I know, it's sacrilege. That was, until I read the Ajax in my Greek Tragedy Class. I was hooked at the first scene, where Athena displays an incredible combination of power, maniacal superiority, and cruelty. She demonstrates this complex nature of the gods (in Sophocles' view) who demonstrate a shocking lack of humanity in their dogged pursuit of a foreign ethics. However, much of the ethics is centered around the general Greek principle of "helping friends and harming enemies," but Athena takes this to a sick extreme.

From that point, I re-evaluated all the Sophocles plays. Although Athena in Ajax the most explicit instance of the gods acting in any Sophocles I have read thus far [1], although they act in sly and interesting ways and often compel or propel the action of the plays. For example, in the Electra, Orestes explains that his plans for revenge by stealth come from Phoebus Apollo (Electra lines 33-39). The entire action of not only the play, Oedipus Tyrannos [2], but Oedipus' life stem from and are foretold by the actions of Apollo as well. Teiresias speaks for the gods, as some kind of a human intermediary between the two.

Sophocles' plays are much more interesting, in my opinion, when considered not from the perspective of Aristotilian interpretations of Greek tragedy [3] or the conflict between oikos (home and family) and polis (city and state), but rather because they paint a complex and fascinating picture of the interaction between heroes and gods. I have been told my view of Greek tragedy can be a little divine-centric, and this may be true, but the tragedians each demonstrate vastly different conceptions of the gods in their plays, which I believe not only provides rich theatrical masterpieces, but also sheds a new light on Greek religion [4].

Endnotes

1. I have read Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus (although I read it twice, I didn't understand it very well either time. it needs to go back on my reading list), Antigone, Ajax, Philoctetes, and Electra.
2. The reason that I refer to this play as Oedipus Tyrannos rather than the more traditional Oedipus Rex is because I think that the Oedipus Tyrannos expresses the irony behind the play better. Rex, the Latin for king, is much more equivalent to the classical Greek Basileus (although in Homeric times this word was used for a lord, and wanax was the word for king) which means king. One of the primary distinctions between basileus and tyrannos (tyrant) was the idea that the basileus came from a line of inherited power and excellence-- the conception that the person was king by right of family. The tyrant, on the other hand, was not justified by hereditary right, but was rather someone who had taken power by persuasion or, more likely, by force. Although Oedipus is technically a basileus, because he is the hereditary heir of Thebes, he is ironically a tyrant, because he killed his father (former basileus of Thebes) and married his mother in order to gain power in the city.
3. One of my favorite secondary sources that I read in the class was E.R. Dodd's "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" (click this link to download the Microsoft Word version of the document from NYU. Click this link to read as a HTML file). The document is short-- only about 6-7 pages if my memory serves, but it explains the problems with the traditional viewpoints on Oedipus Tyrannos.
4. I plan on doing another blog post about Aeschylus' views on religion, which show gods with a strict social and political hierarchy, and Euripides' views on religion, which seem to show gods with similar faults and flaws of humans, but many times more powerful.