Platonic Psychology: Isocrates

Showing posts with label Isocrates. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Spirited/Reasoning: Reflections on Gorgias

Gorgias' prose is very troubling. It looks simple, but it is deceptively frustrating. The text is corrupt, to be sure, but his actual way of writing is more problematic than that. Most of his sentences require the reader to work backward to understand the meaning and even then are often quite confusing. His prose is often so repetitive that editors make emendations to try to make it less so.

Plato's prose often plays with words, repeats words for a particular effect, but there is something less confusing than Gorgias' prose which seems meant almost to move the audience into such a befuddled state as to trick them into following his lead. Plato's prose, to be sure, manipulates his readership, but he does it in one of two ways. Either he uses the elentic argument where the questions that Socrates asks and his interlocutor answers cudgel the reader into a particular thought pattern or, when Socrates provide answers the audience is carried through various flights of rhetoric and myth which leave the audience questioning many things and possibly wondering about the logic, but, at least for many, not in such a way that they simply agree like the interlocutors do. Maybe I am assuming every reader follows Plato the same way that I do. I now think I understand why the sophists appeared as such a threat to Plato.

Encomium of Helen (BCP Greek Texts) (English and Greek Edition)

Propertius II and I are finished up the Encomium of Helen tomorrow. I am hoping that the Greek starts to get easier with Isocrates' Helen, but maybe I just have lost the logic of Greek prose.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Appetitive/Reasoning: Encomia (?) of Helen

Propertius II and I are almost done with Horace! It's been a long journey. We are reading the last of the 24 poems in our set (Epode 17) this week. Although the plan is to read Iliad Book 14, Propertius II is not done with Book 13 yet (he has been reading through the entire Iliad in Greek of the last two years (although he was interrupted by classes and having to write a thesis). So, in the meantime, we are planning to read Gorgias' "Encomium of Helen." We may also read Isocrates' "Encomium of Helen."

I have had a very busy week. Back to regular posting soon.

Why Platonic Psychology?

Entry types into this blog are divided into three categories: appetitive, spirited, and reasoning to correspond with the three parts of the Platonic conception of the soul. The appetitive portion will most often be humorous content with a classical bent. However, Plato's understanding of appetitive is much broader than that, encompassing the general pleasures of spectacle-- such as theater, both comedy and tragedy-- as well as emotions and bodily pains and pleasures. Sometimes I will stray into one of the more Platonic uses of appetitive. If I can manage it, I will post a weekly translation of a joke or funny phrase into Latin or Greek. The spirited portion (literally timophillic i.e. honor loving) will be my own ideas about Greek and Roman ideas. This section attempts to put me on the map as a classicist with a point of view. The reasoning part will be commentary and reviews on classical texts. I will also try to post a passage for Latin or Greek prose composition, as well as translations of prose passages or poetry in Latin or Greek. I will offer my take on the passage, and if anyone would like to offer their own attempt at the passage, or corrections or criticisms of mine, they will be welcome to do so in a comment on the blogpost or email me at sulpicia3@hotmail.com.

Bread, Roman Poetry, and Other Frivolity

If you're interested in me as well as my commentary about classical texts, visit my personal blog Fragments of Sulpicia (III), in which I discuss my general day-to-day existence, alongside bread recipes, pedagogy, and Roman Love Elegy.

The Roman love elegists, writing at the end of the Roman Republic wrote beautiful poems about their experiences in love, creating the persona or changing the name of a real person on whom to center their poetry. The only extant female poet calls herself Sulpicia, daughter of Servius and constructs her poems around her lover, Cerninthus. In order to write freely, I have taken up her name, Sulpicia, and the names of her characters and the characters of her contemporary love elegists, to refer to people in my own life. A reference list of characters can be found on the righthand side of Fragments of Sulpicia (III).