Appeitive: The Original Windy City

Propertius II and I finally finished reading Iliad Book 13 this morning, mostly due to my slowness and brief interruptions where each of us were busy. I have to say, I really enjoyed the process of reading Homer in the original. I know I confessed in a previous blogpost that I did not like Homer, but the Iliad has grown on me more and more since we began three months ago (for reference, we have also been reading plato beside the Homer and taking time off). We start Book 14 this coming week after some work on the Crito.

One of the many things that I noticed in our most recent trek through the Iliad, was epithets. When reading 130 lines over two sittings, I became familiar with certain epithets often used: great-hearted (μεγάθυμος), godlike (δῖος), lord (ἄωαξ), etc. The end of Book 13 focuses on the Trojans, so there were many references to Troy (Ilion) which also bore epithets. My favorite was "Ἴλιον ἠωεμόεσσαν" (Iliad 13.724) or "windy Ilion." It amused me that Troy was the original windy city.

Appetitive: Praise with Homeric Terms

Back in the early days of my freshman Mediterranean humanities course, my classmates and I replaced common words for praise (like "kudos") with the Greek word τιμή (esteem, honor) which is so important in the Homeric epics. So instead of saying "awesome job" we would say silly things like "mad τιμή."

As I was reading Homer this morning, I happened upon the word κῦδος. This really surprised me because we all replaced "kudos" with the Greek, but it turns out κῦδος is a similar word to τιμή as it means "glory" or "renown."

Note: I have been working hard on some research on the Laws and I am planning on retelling the argument from my "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" series in a clearer fashion over the next few weeks as I work on editing my thesis. I do not think that I did justice to either the persuasive power of the Zuckert argument or the complexities of dating the Laws. I shall attempt to do a better job this time around.

Reasoning: Thoughts on Vocabularies

I have been reading a lot of Homer lately (although I have been having trouble concentrating so I have been reading it more slowly than I might wish). One of the books Propertius II recommended to aid me was Owen's Homeric Vocabularies and I checked it out from the library. The books lists words in the order of the frequency with which they appear in the Homeric texts. At first I found the book rather useless, but the more I read I realize how often Homer repeats his words and that it is significantly easier to look words up in the little paperback than my Homeric dictionary. I am also trying to add those words which I look up most frequently to my flashcard list.

I have also been recommended a similar vocabulary for Greek prose. I wonder if it will be useful.

Reasoning: The Shield in Homer

I mentioned previously that I was interested in the many different words for shield in Homer. Propertius II found an article which is, in fact, the first thing that pops up on Google when one searches for "Homeric Sheild." The article is from 1913 and is probably out of date, but I found it quite intersting. In the article "Notes on the Homeric Shield" (JSTOR), Tayler argues that there are two main types of shield in Homer: ἀσπίς and σάκος. Almost to a person, the Trojans use ἀσπις, which Tayler posits are large Minoan-style hide covered shields, while the Achians use a combination of ἀσπίς and σάκος all though most of them prefer the smaller metal σάκος. Sometimes, the stronger of the heroes use ἀσπίς with large metal designs (usually circles). Making the large ἀσπίς entirely out of metal would be too heavy.

The "note" was short and intriguing. Tayler mentions that he is not actually an archaeologist and he is basing his evidence primarily on the literary distribution of the two words throughout the text. If anyone has more recent information on this, I would love to read it.

Appeitive: Children's Tales

For the last few months, I have been tutoring a nine year old boy in English (vocabulary, reading comprehension, etc).  Early on, I realized that the boy liked Medieval history, so we read some Arthur mythology. Unfortunately, most of my Medieval books are a little too advanced because I studied the Middle Ages in 6th grade. So the trouble remained: how can you keep the interest of a smart kid who has trouble reading?

I found a picture book on Ancient Greece to read. The boy was only interested in battles, but we talked extensively about the Greek phalanx and the Athenian battle strategy at Salamis. He plays a lot of board games with his brother and cousin which involve military strategy, so he caught on to the intricacies of Greek warfare surprisingly quickly.

I decided that we should read some Greek myths. Plato reports in the Republic that children are raised on Greek myths and Homeric poetry, so I thought I could use the stories. I remembered my love of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. The problem was that the boy got bogged down in complicated names of all the people and places. He liked the stories, but the names were too hard. One of the stories D'Aulaires sadly lacks is the story of Achilles. So I decided to write one that would not use as many confusing names. We will probably read it next week but I might post it for fun when I am finished.

More serious things to come when I finish my next passage of the Iliad.

Appetitive: Homeric Vocabulary

I have a confession to make: I don't really like Homer. Gasp. Yes, I know, it seems very strange that a classicist is not a fan of Homer, but I just can't get into it. Back when I first read the Odyssey, I really liked it, but in the last few years I have tried to get through both the Iliad and the Odyssey and failed.

However, I finally started reading some of the Iliad in Greek with Propertius II and I am actually enjoying it. Although I know English is a spectacularly rich and wonderful language, there is something more expressive in the Greek-- partially, I think, because this type of epic is better designed for Greek than for English. While reading the short (22 lines) of Greek, I noticed that the richness of the definitions of the words were making me smile. I picked a couple of words that I really liked in context. I provide a basic form of the definitions I found in Richard John Cunliffe's A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect:

αὔω-- This can be either to shout or to cry, but also to make the sound that armor makes when struck by a spear.
εἵλω-- hem up in a coop or drive prey together for slaughter. Homer uses this word to describe the way that Idomeneus covers himself with his shield as Deiphobus comes toward him in an attempt to avenge the death of Asios.

I also found the expression of a particular line that I liked.

"κρύφθη γὰρ ὑπ'ἀσπίδι πάντοσ' ἐΐσῃ" (XIII.405)-- "for he was hidden under his shield [which was] equal all directions" i.e. his shield was a circle. To me there is something both poetic and that reflects the culture in this phrasing. As Propertius II mentioned, Homer's poems show a fascination with geometry. Sadly, Lattimore renders it as "he was hidden beneath his shield's perfect circle" (Lattimore XIII.405)

I am also interested in Homer's many different words for shield. I will post what I find.

Spirited: Homer

I have not read any Homer since my paultry attempt in high school. I am now reading some homer with Propertius II and I am finally using my Cunliffe for the first time. It's actually rather fun, although my translation is slow and plodding. Starting at the middle of Book 13. Wish me luck!

Appetitive: Transactions of the American Philological Society

A few days ago, I received my first Transactions of the American Philological Society. There are a couple of articles on Homer scholarship that look pretty interesting. I will be relaxing and reading it this weekend.

I have also started working on Parmenides with Ovid II. More to come...

Appetitive: Paleography is Sexy Again

"Paleography is sexy again," is one of my favorite of the strange statements by Messalla, my thesis adviser. It came up in a conversation about the works of Bacchylides [1]. But it seems that his assessment, however amusingly worded, is true. In the digital age, archives come up all the time and more and more work is digitized to bring it to a wider audience. AWOL catalogues a number of these digital resources.

One of the digital resouces (still in progress) that Propertius II brought to my attention is the Homer Multitext. The purpose of the Homer Multitext is to compile a digital archive of Homer in which scholars can easily compare and cross-reference materials. A partial facsimile prototype of some of the manuscripts is being released by the project, as they explain in a recent blogpost. The original texts seem amazing and the story of the students who worked on them is worth a read.

Endnotes

1. Bacchylides' works were lost until in 1896 they were discovered in a ransacked tomb in Egypt (or possibly as Messalla originally told us in a trashpit). The Wikipedia article makes the archaeologist sounds a bit like Indiana Jones.

Reasoning: Scholia

For those of you who do not know, "scholia" (singluar scholium) are the marginal commentary notes  on classical texts (and possibly stretched to include some of the ancient scholars works in their own right). Until last weekend, I knew next to nothing about ancient scholarship. Now I know a little bit. Last Saturday, while proctoring an exam, I read the kindle free sample of Eleanor Dickey's Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises: From Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period, which first discusses the scope and format of ancient scholarship in general, and then about the bodies of scholia on texts (such as scholia on the Iliad or Euripides' works). The second half of the book is essentially a textbook on how to read ancient scholarship. It sounds great, but I have so many other things to read that I have not bought the full version yet.

Recently, the Homer Multitext ran a post about a particular book with scholia on the Iliad. The post discussed an individual text of the Iliad (and a specific folio within that text) and the unique summery in the scholia of the particular manuscript. It then compared this text with other texts of various time periods. The article was very interesting and I recommend it.

Reasoning: The Gela Krater and Corrections

My apologies for not posting the notes from Oliver Taplin's talk yet. They are taking longer than I expected due to the need to decipher my notes and having various other chores to which I must attend. It will be up within the next 36 hours (and probably fairly soon).

The Gela Krater [1]

Today was the last day that the Gela Krater was housed at the Getty Villa and my mom and I ventured out to see it, as well as to wander around the other exhibits. The Gela Krater was featured in an exhibit that showed vases with depictions of scenes from the Trojan War, and primarily scenes from Homer's Iliad.

The Gela Krater is an Athenian-made krater which archaeologists discovered in Gela, a city in South Sicily. According to the Getty Website, it is "attributed to the Niobid Painter (Greek, active about 470–445 B.C.), [and] this monumental red-figured volute krater was produced in Athens between 475 and 450 B.C." (Getty's Press Release).

One of the great things about the Getty having immense amounts of money is that they can create mechanisms for conservation and protection and give them away to places that need them. For example, the Gela Krater now has a new display case that will help protect it in the case of an earthquake:

"Before installing the Gela Krater at the Getty Villa, the Museum's conservation team collaborated with conservators from Agrigento's Museo Archeologico Regionale to construct a custom seismic isolation base and pedestal.When the krater returns to Sicily, it will be accompanied by its new pedestal and earthquake-resistant mount for display in its home museum" (Getty's Press Release).

A similar and even more impressive project is MEGA, a computer network to catagorize and mark artifacts and systematize their protection which I discussed in an earlier blogpost.

Correction

So when I was listening to the lectures at Artists and Actors Conference, I heard a lot of talk about volute kraters (a particular shape of large vase, demonstrated by the Pronomos Vase). I misheard this as a "volume" krater, but it is actually volute krater. My apologies.

Endnotes

1. © 2010. The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.

Reasoning/Spirited: Greek History Review #4

I am still in the process of writing up the remaining lectures given at the Artists and Actors symposium, but life, it seems, keeps getting in the way. I hope that I shall manage to get Barbara Kowalzig's talk up by the end of tonight. In the intervening period, I have decided to revise my original plan of only rereading the secondary sources from my Greek History syllabus, but also rereading the primary sources assigned to each day. This will make the process take longer, but ultimately I think it will provide a clearer and fuller sense of the kind of information that scholars use to glean their insights and interpret Greek history.

In terms of more general textbook sources, I finished reading Oswyn Murray's Early Greece, and I have recently begun (and am about 100 pages into) Pomeroy et al's Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Sadly, this larger and more comprehensive volume lacks the charm and energy of Murray's work, but it still sheds some light on the history providing a more comprehensive background, upon which I can stitch together the secondary and primary sources from my syllabus.

The first sections are on the way to read Greek sources and how to interpret the information. Specifically focusing on the way in which the Greeks interpreted their own past and the Dark Age. So far I've read The Landmark Herodotus (1.56, 2.53) and The Landmark Thucydides (1.1-8, 12) and I am working reading The Odyssey of Homer(Books 1-4) and Oresteia (lines 1-907). and fjls

 

After this, this, there is a lot more Homer to read. I am going to try to read the entirety of the Odyssey, because I have not read the whole thing since 9th grade and I probably need a refresher.

I am also going to try to supplement the history syllabus by increasing my knowledge of Greek art. I'm planning on using The Art and Culture of Early Greece and Archaic and Classical Greek Art, but I would be happy for suggestions if anyone has particular favorites.