Spirited: Μήδεια and the "Royal We"

In English, there is a phenomenon known as the "royal we" where a speaker used first person plural as a stand-in for first person singular. Generally, this phenomenon associates itself with arrogant and schizophrenic-type personalities. In Greek or Latin, poets often employ the first person plural so it is essentially the "poetic we" rather than the "royal we."

Herodotus II and I have recently doubled our number of lines per week in order for us to finish before summer vacation. Although this certainly requires more time, it also provides me with a greater sample size in which to notice patterns. One of the things that stood out to me as I read our most recent section was the use of the "poetic we." Μήδεια employs this tactic quite frequently, although she also uses the first person singular within 2-3 lines of her first person plural. I did not notice, although I might have missed it, Kreon using the poetic plural, nor any of the other characters (I am happy to be corrected if someone notices an instance). So, I wondered why Medea, specifically, might use this rhetorical device.

Euripides, as I remember reading in my Bacchae class freshman year, likes to use "halved" characters, i.e. two main characters who each represent one set opposing characteristics usually housed in a single person. Unlike his half characters, Medea seems to be a duel (or possibly more) character. She switches from courageous and fearsome at one moment, to helpless and despairing the next, to conniving and persuasive, sometimes within a single speech. Like Hekate (Μήδεια line 397), the goddess she worships, to whom each of the three main Gods (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) gave a small segment of their domain, she functions as a polymorphic character. Each of the characters around her serve a single function. Even the chorus of women acts essentially as a single entity; they represent a moderate buffer to the extreme arguments put forward by any side. But Medea demonstrates so many different personality traits and skills that she becomes awesome and terrifying.

Update 03/24/11: Jason also uses the "poetic we" at least once. I ran across this in line 451 where he refers to himself as κἀμοὶ which is a crasis of και + αμοι (from αμος, "our"). However, this is the first time it is mentioned by another character. Also, interestingly enough, Jason is being deceptive here and saying things he only half means in a typical Μήδεια style. I will have to investigate further.

Appetitive: Bread in Anicent Greece

As I abandoned my work on reading Μήδεια this morning to bake some bread, I thought I should investigate bread in the ancient world. Amusingly, most what I know about Ancient Greek cooking comes from Plato and Xenephon. In the Republic, Plato describes the healthy city, the minimalist city with which he and his interlocutors begin their discussion, as being essentially vegetarian. The feverish or unhealthy city that follows it in the discussion not only lets in actors and prostitutes but also brings in meat alongside the bread, vegetables, and porridge of the more primitive version. In Xenephon's account of the Symposium, Socrates questions a young man who takes too much "savory," which I presume is a chunky stew or stirfry of some kind, with his bread. This method of eating appears to make the eater immoderate, pleasure seeking, and troublesome in Xenephon's eyes [1].

There is actually a concise, but sadly rather short, description of the varieties of Greek bread on Wikipedia. Apparently, according to the article, Solon ordained that leavened bread should be reserved for special occasion, and bread was leavened with a yeast coming from wine fermentation.

Another random factoid from my memory is that in Ancient Greece: A Political, Social and Cultural History, the authors alledge that the ancient Greeks did not like the taste of butter. My first question was, "how would you know?"

Endnotes

1. I apologize for my lack of citation but I am doing this from memory. I will hopefully come back and add the section numbers at some point.

Appetitive: Cuniform

One of my early fascinations with classics other than Hellenic studies was with Cuniform. In ninth grade my Ancient History class read The Epic of Gilgamesh, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My first Greek tutor actually took classes in Cuniform, which sounded incredible.

According to AWOL, Harvard, in connection with some other groups, have put up a digitized library of Cuniform texts and artifacts. It's quite impressive. Maybe I'll learn Cuniform at some point...

Appetitive: Ancient Medicine

I was never particularly interested in ancient medicine. I thought it was gory and it was not really my style. However, my childhood best friend ended up deciding to get a history of science degree and she has sparked my interesting in the science of the ancient world. Interestingly enough, one of Herodotus II's major fields of interest is also the Hippocratic Corpus and she has a vast knowledge of ancient medicine.

I realized, usually because my professors or scholarship I read indicated such, that other authors beside the ancient doctors and scientists employed medical terminology. Plato certainly writes his Socrates as spouting medical metaphors and Herodotus and Thucydides both employ some of this terminology [1]. However, I had no idea the amount of medical terminology that Euripides uses in the Μήδεια until I began reading the Μήδεια with Herodotus II. As emotions, and especially the emotions of women, are tied to anatomical parts for the ancient authors, those describing Medea constantly employ this terminology. It's quite fascinating and it is a real pleasure reading the text with someone who is knowledgeable on the subject.

Speaking of ancient medicine, a recent AWOL post on the digitizing and internet access to ancient medial texts. The papyri are beautiful.

Endnotes

1. Herotodus II's thesis discussed in part medical rhetoric in Plato and Thucydides.

Reasoning: The Politics of Helen

Helen was one of the most discussed characters in the Greek world. However, no ancient author seems to agree on Helen's nature, and even the portrayal of Helen in the Iliad and the Odyssey are different. I have been reading Gorgias' Encomium of Helen with Propertius II (although more slowly than I intended) and noticed that one of the defenses that he uses is that if she were seized, specifically under the will of the gods, then it is not her fault but the fault of the person who seized her (and the gods).

This immediately struck me as interesting. I remembered reading the beginning of the Histories in my fabulous Herodotus class. Herodotus introduces his tale of the Persian wars with an incredible prologue [1] and then launches into a discussion of the causes of the war: specifically a long train of young women captured by the opposing side starting with Io and moving on through Helen and finally to Medea. In each case, he blames the woman, rather than the sailors who seize her, for her capture. Gorgias makes the opposite argument. As the two wrote relatively close together, I was wondering which argument about captured women might have been more persuasive to an audience. Food for thought.

Endnotes

1. There is an amazing article by Egbert Bakker on Herodotus' prologue called "The Making of History: Herodotus' Histories Apodexis" from Brill's Companion to Herodotus.

Appetitive: Parthenon Frieze

Someone at Columbia is totally awesome. A friend posted on Twitter that Columbia had created a digital model of the Parthenon Friezes. It is fabulous.

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.