iussus abire domum ferebar incerto pede / ad non amicos heu mihi postis et heu / limina dura, quibus lumbos et infregi latus.

Horace, Epode 11:20-22

I just liked Horace!  Just a minute ago.  I wanted to put some Latin in the title of this thing, so I looked back over the Epodes that had vexed me so all last week (and for some of the summer) and remembered this one.  I think I was cross, and I read them so quickly Wednesday, that anything nice about them slipped away amidst all the unpleasantness.  It was hard, though, to go from reading the lovely and resounding Eclogues the week before to this harsh iambic vitriol.  Although not all the poems are iambic, which brings me to a minor complaint about the otherwise decent commentary by David Mankin: it is really difficult to tell what meter a poem is in.  Well, it’s not that difficult, because you scan it, and then you know, but it would be so nice to know in advance what I’m getting in to.  Prepared, I might read differently a dactylic epode than an iambic one, or at least I’d think about it from the start.  But in my hastiness, it’s not until I’ve gone some way into the poem and wonder about the quantity of a syllable and try to scan as iambs and get completely stressed out because nowhere in the commentary does Mankin just tell me this is in dactylic hexameter/trimeter couplets.  But: the Epodes are in the past, where they will remain until about 7 weeks in the future.  Now we’re reading the Georgics!

A few years ago, when I was reading Latin with Billy a lot, there was this one afternoon after DFU when we walked all over campus as it rained a bit.  We explored the sub-sub-basement of the science library and looked at a book about geology.  We crept into a brick area that reminded me of an archaeological site.  And we had this long conversation that was probably mostly me pontificating.  I can’t remember what it was about, but I remember it was long and I felt passionately about it.  I think it was nearly certainly about language.  But since I can’t remember it makes the episode even more dreamlike, in that college atmosphere.  That reminds me of another story I wrote in college, called Castle Coumbe.  But no need for lengthy digressions.  After this conversation with Billy, we were at the coffee shop and I had an idea about a story, about someone like me (all stories start that way), reading Greek and Latin, who discovers someone’s journal, or maybe it’s a text with really involved marginalia.  And she becomes closer and closer to the author of this marginalia, who had the intention that in the future, a reader would read his, or her, text and sympathize with it to such a degree that the author would have some degree of immortality.  There was also something about the Georgics, which at the time I had never read, containing some sort of ultimate truth, Da Vinci Code style.

Anyway, aside from the Latin, I’ve had the extreme pleasure of enjoying some Herodotus recently.  I read Book 1 and part of Book 2 in English before school started, as you recall, and was so excited!  And now reading it in Greek is even more awesome.  It was difficult deciding on what I wanted to do my presentation, but though it wasn’t really well received, I am myself very interested in my idea.  Which is what counts?  I was just thinking again about Emily and her confidence, and how inspiring it is, but how far I am from having it.  Sometimes when I see names like Elaine Fantham I freeze inside, like I’ll never be anyone.  I don’t know why Fantham made me feel like that–I don’t even like what I’ve read of her very much.  And but so my presentation was about physical objects, which became interesting in Prose Sem today when Sarah was talking about how archaeologists have used Herodotus and how it’s led to some troubles, and she related this fascinating but extremely rambling story about a frieze in Anatolia somewhere that has heiroglyphs on it and Herodotus says confidently that it’s Egyptian and translates it, but now we know it’s actually Hittite or something.  Oh, her talk was pretty interesting–boring, but interesting.  I want to know more about Near Eastern mythology, migration, language.  Dear gods, please don’t make me an Indo-Europeanist!  So, it was nice when Sarah mentioned the physical in Herodotus, because it made me feel a little bit more relevant than the class’ reception of my idea had.

I really loved what my colleague Emily said about there being two levels of memory in H’s text.  At 15.1, he writes Ἄρδυος δἑ τοῦ Γύγεω μετὰ Γύγην βασιλεύσαντος μνήμην ποιήσομαι, and as I said in my presentation, using evidence from elsewhere in the early chapters to corroborate my idea, in this way Herodotus is using the word ποιήσομαι to signify both poetry/literature and physical craftsmanship, making a σῆμα.  So those are both really the ἐς ἀεὶ kind of memory.  But if you think about the pragmatics (which we’re going to do for a little while now) Herodotus uses, the anaphoric introductions of characters and stories really fits with the other, intratextual, memory.  So before you even meet Croesus at 6.1, H alludes to the man who, he knows, is αὐτὸς πρῶτον ὑπάρξαντα ἀδίκων ἔργων ἐς τοὺς Ἕλληνας (5.3), then at 6.1 H says Κροῖσος ἧν Λυδὸς μὲν γένος… and at 6.2 he gets the big οὗτος ὁ Κροῖσος…  This is what Helma Dik talks about in her book that I borrowed from Andy while he was away but have since had to return, but she addresses it as well in the book on Word Order in Tragic Diction.  The way pronouns refer back to someone of interest who’s just been introduced.  Pronouns are also interesting when the Greeks, the Medes, and the Trojans are all involved in placing blame and being peeved at 3.2–it’s hard to tell who’s who, which Alex suggested was H’s grammatical representation of the mess you can get in when you try to exchange ἴσα πρὸς ἴσα (2.1).  It has become clear to me since yesterday that I will have to talk to Alex about my MA paper, incidentally, because apparently it is about space.  Apparently, because it does not yet exist on this physical plane, alas.

I should write more about this later.  It’s pretty hard for me to talk too specifically about Herodotus when I’ve only read 24 sections of it, but it’s good exercise.  I’d write more about what I read today, but it was just rereading of Georgic 1.  Today in lecture I taught the students about adjectives vs. adverbs–an excellent distinction!  Probably I should have prepared it, however, because adverbs like “charmingly” and “alarmingly” aren’t really that common.  I guess when we get to adverb formation Wheelock will get into the semantics of the distinction.  Oh.  There was something else I wanted to say about pragmatics and Herodotus.  There’s a way to think about different kinds of speech acts in terms of the relationship between the world and the words.  So an assertion fits the words to the world, a declarative changes the world with its words, a command tries to change the world with the words, a promise changes the world in the future with the words, an emotional statement matches the words to the emotional world, etc.  So when we talk, as we do when we read Bakker, about the difference between apodeixis and epideixis, I think that apodeixis is, in his definition, a speech act that changes the world with the words, while an epideixis fits the words to the world.  So how does H’s project change the world?  Alex mentioned someone who wrote that Thucydides wrote “the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians” but actually wrote the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians, that is, there was no one war before he put narrative to it.  Well, the same is true of all history, like how that equation I dreamed about a few years ago (Δexperience/Δtime) represents life, but it doesn’t make any sense unless you plot the points on it, which is what writing does, but that the plotted points can only resemble in the most sketchy way real life, but we live as though it does.  Well, that’s an old idea that I probably shouldn’t have brought up now, but from now on I’m going to think about how Herodotus changes the world.  What a great book!

Now I’m going to my chairs to write my Master’s paper.  Maybe!

καὶ περὶ μὲν ἀναθημάτων τοσαῦτα εἰρήσθω.

Herodotus 93.4: “And that’s all I have to say on the subject of dedications.”

Lately mostly I’ve been reading my Linguistics textbook (morphology!), exhausting myself over Pindar’s Pythian 4, and gasping about Herodotus.  Oh, he is so good.  So great.  We could just read nothing else!  He’s got every element of every field I care about.  And I like Thucydides very much, but his presentation is not so fun-filled as Herodotus’.  I see Thucydides sort of vaguely, like he’s this coldish academic, ordering things (the term is anachronistic, of course, but Thucydides verges on it) scientifically, only occasionally getting drawn into the passion of the narrative he’s laying out.  This is where I love him, not the bits about human nature or real politik or any political theory, but the stories that Bakkar talks about, the cinematic (anachronistic) elements: the siege of Plataea, the Sicilian expedition.  I love the beginning, I love the way characterization develops through speeches.  But Herodotus!  His stories are desultory in a very delightful way: you’ll meet someone who’s the son of someone, and paragraphs later you’ll meet the father and hear his drama.  You’ll be hanging with Croesus in Sardis, and suddenly you’re among the Lacedaimonians, commiserating their losses.  Stories develop like this, something’s really exciting!  But we’ll get to that later.  And you’ve almost forgotten it was coming up, then it does.   Like how he foreshadows Gyges’ crime being retributed upon the 5th generation, saying that they all forgot it at the time.  But then, the oracle tells Croesus that his realm fell because of δόλῳ γυναικηίῳ, and you remember what Herodotus said, pages ago.  This is why I love narratology and hope to learn about it soon.

I’ve also been trying to learn about semiotics.  I had a dream that Emily told me to read Kant and the Platypus, but it was the night after Andy and I had talked about it.  I also thought I was going mad (I’ve had “Creep” by Radiohead going through my brain ceaselessly), but it seems to have subsided.  For now!  This short post is dedicated to Andy and the linguists.

ταῦτα μέν, ὦ παῖ, κρείσσονα χρυσοῦ, / μεγάλης δὲ τύχης καὶ ὑπερβορέου / μείζονα φωνεῖς · δύνασαι γάρ.

Choephori 372-4

I love this part of the kommos, when the chorus, annoyed with the Atreid kids and their whiny, “but who’s going to retribute my father’s death?  is Zeus going to send someone?”, snaps at them “those [note ταῦτα, distal deixis in comparison to Electra's τῶνδε in the previous line, referring to the present sufferings] things you’re saying are greater than gold, better than a great and hyperborean fate.  Because that’s all you can do [sc. talk].”  And then everyone gets all worked up and finally Electra says, fine, I am demanding just recompense for unjustice (δίκαν δ᾽ἐξ ἀδίκων ἀπαιτῶ, 398), but the chorus says, shouldn’t you rather ask for more than recompense? (προσαιτεῖν, 401), but Orestes, that batty kid, is talking like Cassandra (πόποι δᾶ Cho. 405=Ag. 1072) and still looking for someone to come save him.  It’s so great, I don’t even want to write about it, I just want to gush about it, like when at 333-4 Electra says “a tomb-adjacent lamentation composed of two children, you see, groans you up” (δὶπαις (sic) τοί σ᾽ἐπιτύμβιος / θρῆνος ἀναστενάζει).  Gods, only Aeschylus can pack words together like that, burdening them beyond capacity!  He makes me wonder what we can actually know, scientifically, about language, if a great poet can come along and break words, compound words, exercise words so beautifully.  Also, I never noticed til now that the first syllable of what should be δἰπαις has a grave printed instead of what must be an acute.  I’ll check Garvie on this tomorrow.  Shocking!  Mr. Page is usually so diligent (& that’s not all Denniston told me!).

This exceedingly strange thing happened to me yesterday: I checked out from the library the introductory textbook they use in Linguistics classes here and began to read.  The epigraph of the first chapter was from Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell, which I’d never heard of before.  Well, later that evening, I was sitting in my chair, reading Lorrie Moore’s Self Help and the epigraph to the story “How to Go” (really chilling, wounding story about suicide) was also from Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell.  So many strange coincidences have been happening lately; it’s a pleasant past-time to speculate upon them.  I also read a hundred or so lines of Eumenides yesterday, but not yet enough to have much to write about.

Today, besides reading a little Choephori (it felt great!  I was thinking about it really hard as I rode my bicycle up the hills, so I was mad and sweating for it by the time I got to my office) and some more of the Linguistics textbook (it’s at one moment difficult, because how specifically can we really talk about tongue placement in vowel pronunciation, and the next fantastically settling, like learning the answer to a question you used to think couldn’t even be asked.  This is how I feel about pragmatics, too, but I haven’t been reading much about that lately, having finished Fillmore’s Lectures on Deixis (it got even more ridiculously sexist: in the penultimate paragraph, he introduces a situation in which he complements a woman for having lovely legs and she responds, “thank you,” to which he should not say “you’re welcome.”).  I’ll get back to it soon.), I read an article by Bakker which turned out to have been the article I was supposed to have read instead of the one I read on Tuesday.  Mario had said I should find an article about Thucydides and ἐπίδειξις, but he actually meant Herodotus and ἀπόδειξις.

The beginning of the article develops its argument in the following way, although I’ve somewhat simplified it.  1. ἱστορίη is possibly derived from the same root as οἶδα, so there’s an element of autopsy involved in the pursuit.  2. There’s actually no autopsy involved, but actually ἱστορίη is what you learn from ἀκουή.  3. It’s not so much ἀκουή as learned γνώμη that results in ἰστορίη.  4. Maybe ἱστορίη / ἵστωρ is derived from ἵζομαι, because the rough breathing is difficult to reconcile with the digamma of ὄιδα.  However, the transformation from -δζ- to -στ- is equally untenable.  But 5. It doesn’t matter which word it derived from because Herodotus would have had both in his mind (yes on point a., irrelevant on point b.).  Sometimes Bakker’s arguments are just so ambivalent, with a drift that reminds me of the ocean.  It’s pleasant not to have to choose.  Of course, he does get to a point and it’s good, and it deserves more discussion, that ἱστορίη, in its pursuit for the αἰτιοi of the διαφορή, uncovers conflicting λόγοι and creates a semantic διαφορή.  From there he moves to the difference between apodeixis and epideixis, and how some scholars conflate them but actually their usages are very distinct: epideixis shows something that preexisted but was also unasked for or unexpected (I don’t think these two connotations correlate).  ἐπιδείκνυμι is the verb used when Candaules’ wife tells Gyges to kill her husband for “showing me off naked.”  Whereas, apodeixis refers to something a. demonstrated as proof or response to a request and b. that did not exist before, so it is simultaneously a creation and a revelation.  Again, there’s something in the two definitions that I can’t quite connect.  He ends by discussing the deictic pronoun ἧδε, modifying the ἱστοριή, and makes my favorite kind of argument, about the book being a σῆμα.  Actually, he doesn’t end there; he goes on to talk about Thucydides’ antagonist engagement with Herodotus; but it was such a nice article otherwise that I’ll ignore that part.

possum multa tibi ueterum praecepta referre / ni refugis tenuisque piget cognoscere curas.

Georgics 1.176-7 (I can offer you many lessons from the ancients, unless you run away, or you think it’s gross to learn about these tender concerns.)

I know that by choosing to title this entry in Latin I will have irked my brother, but the sad truth is that I’ve read no Greek today, to speak of.  Over the past week I read some Greek–annotating a few hundred lines of Choephori, reading the bits of Ajax that Ajax says with Emily at the vegan bar–but I don’t want to write about Choephori quite yet, and I neglected to bring my Sophocles home from the office.  I’d like to write about Sophocles soon, definitely.  But generally you would not be accusing me falsely if you were to suggest that I have not been reading nearly enough Greek and Latin lately.

So today at school I acquired a few more articles to read, the Elata-Alster article we read for Agamemnon class, called “The King’s Double Bind,” which I remember Emily scoffing at because the article’s thesis is that “Chalchas’ prophetic utterance… manifests the paradoxical structure of a formally undecidable proposition and is, as such, a meaningless statement” (Arethusa 18 (1985):23).  But actually I think I was persuaded by the argument, and I liked it very much, but I can’t remember it any more.  I feel, although this could be my argument rather than hers, that the circular paradox of the prophecy (tenor and vehicle mixed, cause/effect relationship reversed, sign and interpretation confused) represents the unbearable impossibility (the meaning of this word that I intend here is that used when you throw your hands into the air and say “this is impossible!” with despair) of communication with the gods, of living with the concept/structure/fact of gods.

As you might have noticed, all the books on Pragmatics that I’ve been reading have made me ultra-concerned about my language use.  I would like to be as accurate as possible in communication, but sometimes I can’t remember or don’t know the right word for what specifically I want to talk about, usually in discussions of literary theory, a field in which precision is both requisite and recondite.  So this has led me to think about jargon, about how a meaning becomes agreed-upon, how a concept is funneled into a term that had previously no such association with said concept.  An example of this are the words “tenor” and “vehicle” used to describe the parts of a metaphor.  Other times, a word is invented, such as “joissance,” or becomes a different part of speech, like how the adjective “signified” became the noun “signified.”  And when I have thoughts like this, I am vexed! because it is so hard to think through these things, to summon examples and make hypotheses, to experiment with language, but I know everything I’m thinking about right now is just incredibly obvious to anyone who’s read anything about literary theory.  I don’t mean that I am lazy (though you can think that), that I don’t want to think about these things myself, I just mean it is inefficient.  If each person is expected to reinvent, sola, the thoughts of previous generations, nothing would ever get done.  But on the other hand, I’m afraid if I learn too much theory I’ll get sucked into a school (of theory), and think homogeneously, and never have new ideas.  O the narrow path we tread / when we desire to be well-read / but also read before we’re dead! (sorry)

The other articles I got today were Martin’s “Telemachus and the Last Hero Song” (Colby Quarterly 29 (1993): 222-240), which might cajole me finally to read Bloom, and Bakker’s “Contract and Design: Thucydides’ Writing” (Brill’s Companion to Thucydides, (2006): 109-129), in which Bakker argues that the word συγγράφειν refers to contracts, especially architectural contracts.  It’s pretty interesting, bringing in evidence from inscriptions and medical writing and thoroughly grounded in the text (as always, with our Bakker).  He responds to Loraux’s 1986 article “Thucydide a écrit la guerre du Péloponnèse” (Métis 1:139-61) in which she says that when Thucydides says he ξυνέγραψε the Peloponnesian war, despite being the subject of the sentence, “the subject effaces himself, neutralizing the act of writing, and the historian’s research, into the verb’s direct object, which is the war itself.  The syntax of the sentence is one of pure transitivity” (Bakker (111), summarizing Loraux).  This is not a sentiment I understand.  I know all the words in these sentences, I believe I know what they connote, but I do not understand how what Bakker / Loraux describe being done is accomplished.  But I’m going to get a book about functional Pragmatics (when I googled “pure transitivity,” a book on Pragmatics showed up!) and see how that makes me feel.  I loved it when Bakker started talking about deixis, as in the process of a political treaty (or a contract, or Thucydides’ book) which involves 1) συγγραφή, writing up the agreed-upon terms, 2)  δεῖξις, showing the contract to the community involved, and 3) σύνθεσις (this is my connotation-free (! since 2003!) term for the abstract of what is called in the treaties τὰ ξυγκείμενα, since τίθημι is the active of κεῖμαι), “the treaty, enacted and ratified, is ‘holding together’ as a solid structure” (124).  He also notes, which I find fascinating, that in contract inscriptions, “the building project typically begins its life as a συγγραφή, and ends it in the act of ἀπόδειξις” (127): it is rewarding to contemplate in these terms the difference between Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ projects.  In the end Bakker argues that Thucydides’ book is not complete in its writing, because, like the architectural contract, the συγγραφή specifies an ἔργον upon its completion, and that it requires a subsequent deixis (he notes the significance of the word σκοπεῖν, common in Thucydides’ book and also found in inscriptions of public decree, a statement of public record that anyone who wants to may see the decree (τῷ βουλομένῳ σκοπεῖν (121)), which is sufficiently convincing for me that deixis and σκοπεῖν are connected), and finally that it does not have established meaning (is not τὰ ξυγκείμενα) until it is read by a reader of the future generations who can use the paradigm Thucydides writes about (for he writes “not so much the events themselves as the events in themselves, the events reduced to their essence” (119), that is, not The War but War As War) to understand her or his own situation.

Well, I don’t know about this.  The argument that Thucydides’ book is a contract because it uses contractual vocabulary is interesting, but certainly not exclusive.  And the difference between an architectural contract or a city decree is that they are declarative speech acts, coming from a speaker privileged to change the world with his words (as the pragmatics say), and Thucydides is not, he is only putting it in order.  Think about it like this: the sentence “Thucydides gathered and wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, how they made war with one another, starting straight away at its beginning and expecting it to be great and the most worthy of those that came before, etc.” is not a declaration, like “the war has (hereby) begun” spoken by the general or someone who has the authority to start a war, but is rather a statement, like “the war has begun” spoken by a chagrined bystander.  I am not sure why Bakker has a problem with τὸν πὀλεμον being the direct object of ξυνέγραψε, either, since to me it seems obvious that “τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων” is just the title of the book, since when ancient people talked about books they use their titles (they’re not titles, as we think of them, but descriptions, usually sort of vague: τὰ περὶ something, or τὰ [πράγματα τὰ] τοῦ somebody) as objects like we do (“did you leave your Phaedrus in there?” would be something like τὸν Φαῖδρον σου), declining the article and the noun (which I think is interesting, that the title isn’t always in the nominative).  Also when subsequently Thucydides talks about his book he calls it a συγγραφή, as Bakker notes.  So that solution is neat and doesn’t require dubious argumentation.  But: it’s less exciting and sexy, which is why Bakker is Bakker, and I am not a world famous classicist.  Heu.

I was going to write about Georgic 1, of which I read about 100 lines today, but I’m so tired (I’ve been writing for almost 2 hours!  I also made soup.) and I am far from finished with it.  I think it’s great, though: it’s really powerful, but also playful.  It only seems a little bit false, unlike the Eclogues.  Maybe because he’s not talking about Caesar all the damn time.

Bye!

illa dies fatum miserae mihi dixit, ab illa / pessima mutati coepit amoris hiems

“That day spoke fate to poor me, and from it began the worst winter of transformed love.“  Heroides 5.33-4.

I think soon I’m going to get interested in weather metaphors.  I’ve been reading Zeitlin’s article about ritual sacrifice in the Oresteia (I know! it’s taking forever!) and she talks briefly about wind and weather (because god forbid she leave out any detail about anything even marginally relevant)(sorry).  I have a tingle of curiosity, maybe because we were reading bucolic poetry recently.  This Heroid is from Oenone to Paris.  I think this story is really beautiful and strange, as I mentioned earlier.  I haven’t read much of this poem, but I really don’t think there’s a significant stylistic difference between this and the Sappho epistula.  Anyway, seasons.  Start looking out for them.

So all I’ve been doing lately is a combination of pragmatics and nothing.  I’ve read about 300 lines of Ajax, 50 lines of the Oenone epistula, “The Lion in the House” by Bernard Knox, and a lot of Fillmore’s Lectures on Deixis.  Last night, Andy and Christian and I read some Odyssey, but it’s the same amount I read with Carl recently so I don’t have anything new to say about it, really.  Just that after having read some of de Jong’s commentary, it’s much more pleasant to read.  I’ve been thinking about narratology, what it is, how helpful I think it will be to me.  And I can’t help but conclude that it’s helpful to everyone!  Why would you not care about themes, development, movement, and so forth?  But, amidst all the reading I’ve been enjoying, I’ve begun to have this small suspicion lately that’s been troubling me: why don’t I care about feminist theory anymore?  I came here with feminism rampant, it was what I cared about the most, and that hasn’t changed.  But here’s the thing that happened: yesterday, I went to the library to pick up a book from ILL.  But instead of my book about prepositions, within the paper jacket of the book I’d requested the library had placed a book called The G Spot, about sexuality.  It was chilling: on top of the worries I’d already had, I had then to return this book (which a year ago I would have devoured) and request that my book about prepositions be found for me.

I’ve concluded, (a poorly formatted outline follows), that a) I do care but nothing I’ve read lately in Greek or Latin has interested me in terms of feminism.  Which argument is 1) bullshit in essense, because a good theory should be applicable, at least in part, to any text, right? and 2) completely untrue because (a) Electra is a fascinating character, (b) I’ve thought a lot about Athena being referred to by the narrator as female, by Telemachus as male, and (c) I’ve been reading the Heroides, which is utterly rich in terms of constructions of femininity.  Then I concluded that b) I do not care about social history.  To which I responded that 1) I can’t possibly know if I care because I know almost nothing about it, and 2) I don’t think there’s any field of inquiry that’s unhelpful, even if only in part.  So then c) I just haven’t read enough feminist theory to be able to come up with interesting ideas on my own.  To which 1) I’d read scarcely anything about grammar when I decided I wanted desperately to write about it, but 2) it’s true that I haven’t read enough.  So either (a) I should read more, such as the article about feminist theory and reception that Brian mentioned this evening, or (b) I should figure out why I haven’t read it.  From which point we return to the original inquiry.  And thence point d) there’s a reason external to me that I haven’t read more feminist theory, which could be 1) because there haven’t been any classes offered specifically in it, to which (a) see c.1, or 2) because somebody’s intimidated me from it, to which (a) when have I ever let anyone influence my intellectual pursuits? and (b) there have been a lot of professors who have supported me in it, also.  But, fortunately, I’ve resolved my anxiety to some degree by thinking about sexism in scholarship in what I hope will be a productive way.

But first: a digression.  Is it possible that Aeschylus, like a blogger in grad school, used ambiguous language specifically so that he wouldn’t get shit for what he was saying?  At the beginning of the Agamemnon, as you remember, the watchman says ὡς ἑκὼν ἐγὼ / μαθοῦσιν αὐδῶ κοὐ μαθοῦσι λήθομαι. (38-9).  In the 30s, a couple scholars wrote that he was referring to mystery cults here, but people talk like this all the time.  If you’re in a mixed social situation, like on Brian’s porch a couple weeks ago, you can say things that mean one thing to some people, but something significantly different to others.  What I’m saying right now is neither new nor interesting, but it is sort of comforting.  I like the pursuit of meaning, especially because of its ultimate inefficacy.  I mean, you ask because you want to know, but you have to accept that you’ll never know.  And that seems healthy.

Anyway, Charles Fillmore delivered his Lectures on Deixis in 1971.  In the reprinting of 1997, he writes in the introduction, “I even tried to update pronominal reference, and to repopulate the world of my examples in ways that reflected a more current gender awareness, but I have never been able to deal easily with the grammatical consequences of such monstrosities as “(s)he” or “his/her”.  But I confess to being more than a little surprised at my own practice, just twenty-five years ago” (2).  I am not sure I understand this statement.  What does he mean by “I confess to being more than a little surprised…”?  Is he surprised at how sexist he was?  That is what I assume he means.  But he seems to be no less sexist now, as the following argument demonstrates.

The word “even” at the beginning of the paragraph quoted refers to his earlier apology for not updating the lectures in terms of subsequent scholarship: “I made a few half-hearted attempts to re-do the lectures in at least this respect, but in the end I gave up” (1).  The latter statement is even more confusing.  Why would a scholar say something like “half-hearted”?  Surely he should suggest that he cared about updating the lectures, even though time constraints prevented him from doing so.  And then he “gave up”.   And so the later statement about pronouns, in light of the earlier copout, seems utterly diminished: he “gave up” on fixing the scholarly details, which should be of utmost importance, so to demonstrate how necessary it was to publish an only slightly updated edition, he refers to what (the pragmatics of the sentence suggest) is a somewhat unreasonable pandering to “political correctness” (read for “current gender awareness”).  Here’s my view of the situation, simplified.

Proposition 1: It is important to publish books that are up-to-date with current scholarship.
Excuse 1: I tried, but gave up.
Proposition 2: Current gender awareness requires equal usage of feminine and masculine pronouns.
Excuse 2: I even tried that.

To me it seems that this use of “even” is a response to the suggestion “at least you could have,” as in the following example.

Proposition 1: It is important that you clean the house.
Excuse 1: I tried, but gave up.
Proposition 2: Well, at least you could have cleaned the kitchen!
Proposition 2. I even tried that.

These examples, my attempt to be more scientifical, like the books I’ve been reading, are not the only reason, however, for me to think that Fillmore is really sexist.  In all the examples that do involve feminine pronouns, the female seems always to be in some subordinate role, either working for a man, dating a man, or being “about yea high.”  But, on the other hand, I like this book, I’ve learned a lot from it, and I find Fillmore’s style clear and pleasant.  So while I can criticize the book for being sexist, everyone already knows that academic writing from the 70s is sexist, and everyone already knows that some people are still sexist.  So that doesn’t seem very productive to me.  But there is one thing he says on the subject of female pronouns that I think is productive to think about.  On page 10, note 8, Fillmore writes “These lectures were written at a time when the pronoun “he” was used as a general third-person pronoun.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they were written at a time when we usually peopled our illustrations with males.”  This really made me curious, whether there was a difference between examples wherein the “standard” or “abstract” masculine pronoun are used and those in which masculine and feminine pronouns are used in turn.  What follows is what now occurs to me, and I can’t claim its universality because I haven’t surveyed other people about it.  Consider the following examples:

1. Tara went to her room.
2. She went to her room.
3. He went to his room.
4. One goes to one’s room.
5. X goes to x’s room.

When I read the first three examples, I imagine a person, and when I read 5, I imagine a generalization.  4 is ambiguous, because it could be an indirect command (read “it is appropriate now for you to go to your room”) or a generalization like 5.  But 20 or 30 years ago, I think people would have read 3 as as general as 5.  It is likely that some people, like Fillmore, still do, but I think the serious impact of the inclusion of feminine pronouns has been the de-universalization of the example.  And this leads me to the matter of interest.  What is the difference between populating your examples with abstracts and populating them with individuals?  At first, I didn’t think it mattered much (the phrases “he opened his book and began to read” and “she opened her book and began to read” both result in someone reading), but then I began to wonder, especially because of how Fillmore casts women in subordinate roles.  If we’re talking, as we are, about pragmatics, a necessary part of that is social interaction.  And often, women interact differently from men.  So when Fillmore says “we populated our illustrations with males,” he’s not talking about the abstract, or the universal.  He’s actually talking about males: the examples were about them because the examples were for them.  And so now I wonder if using female pronouns has made pragmatics (and whatever other field of study a scholar is engaged in) more about females.  I haven’t read anything, however, to suggest that this is the case.  I’m sure there’s a subset of pragmatics that takes into account gender theory: And I want to get to know that subset!

So that’s how I got my feminism back.  The initial data I introduced led me in this direction tonight, but it could have taken me in any number of directions.  Actually, on reflection, I think now I’d say something completely different about the difference between “even” and “at least.”  And I have more to say about “such monstrosities as ‘(s)he’ or ‘his/her’.”  But in this (particular) preliminary analysis, the combination of data and environment led to these questions, to these conclusions, to these suggestions for further inquiry, but for someone else they could result in utterly dissimilar conclusions.  And that is exciting.

More Greek and Latin soon!  Please don’t tell Brent I was speculating again!

ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο πλὴν / εἴδωλ’ ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν ἢ κούφην σκιάν.

Ajax 125-6

Among the reasons I haven’t been around much is the fact that I’ve been learning about pragmatics, and it’s embarrassing for me to talk about something I don’t know about yet.  But it’s really been affecting many life, inasmuch as I notice style in texts and communication more than I had before.  It’s interesting, because things about which I’ve sort of absentmindedly speculated in the past are now scienced out for me in really clear and meaningful ways.  I have some trouble with the application of pragmatics to poetry, still.  An article I’m reading by this fellow Slings, and also Dik’s books, make me wonder about what poetry is and can tell us about communication.  You’ll notice that choral passages are rarely used as examples of the pragmatics of Greek utterances, while dialogue is.  But iambs are poetry, too, and shouldn’t be expected to represent spoken Greek.  Then you have to wonder whether we can talk about ‘spoken Greek’ at all, since we really don’t have it (it’s not Plato).  I mean, we can extrapolate what we know about crosscultural language-use practices and the version of Greek represented by all the texts to try to recreate ‘spoken Greek,’ but it’s still just a recreation with no actual control sample with which to compare it.  (Well, it bothers me to ask these kinds of questions, at least publicly, because I know someone else has asked them before and answered them, and if I just was patient, and read more, I would know the answer.)  Anyway, Slings keeps telling me “we can assume,” and I’m just not ready for that.

I haven’t been reading too much Greek and Latin, since I’ve been learning about Pragmatics.  I read the Epode about garlic, which was pretty funny, and interesting because it referred to Medea and Deianeira.  It also reminded me of Eclogue 2, which has a woman mixing garlic and herbs that is metapoetic for the floral garlanding that is the poem.  I was going to write about it but then I found out Goldhill wrote an article (which I haven’t read yet, though I have the book out) on the poem and I figured it was hopeless.  I finished the selections of the Aitia that are in the Hellenistic Anthology, about Acontius and Cydippe, so I’d like to read the double Herois about them.  Callimachus: I’m not sure.  I just don’t understand the aesthetic; but I do really like digressions, and when he started talking about the ancient geographer Xenomedes I was thrilled.  So when he drifts through the story, desultorily like, not stopping to describe what one would assume should be the important parts of the plot, I think we have to wonder why he emphasizes the bits of the story that seem like minutia.  But I don’t like wondering alone anymore.  It’s far more productive to wonder with someone.  You’d think, on that model, that a seminar would be the best environment for wondering, but that’s often not the case.  There are principles of quality and of quantity to take into consideration.  For example, one good person to wonder with is of far greater value than even ten fellow-wonderers of lesser value.  I am not sure how one commodifies a study companion.  I am not sure if one should; in fact, one probably should avoid attaching value to people.  Anyway, I also started reading Ajax, which is where the heading of this post came from.  Sophocles is so sad and beautiful.  I haven’t gotten very far, but I hope to finish it next week.  I also thought it was really cute when Odysseus gasps, “τί δρᾷς, Ἀθάνα;” and she tells him not to be such a baby.  They have such a great relationship!

What I’ve done mostly today is transcribe my great-uncle’s war correspondence, because I have a large stack of letters to finish before school starts.  I typed a month’s worth of letters from the parents to Uncle Merle, chronologically backwards.  So first I get the mother’s letter about Christmas, who was there, what they ate, etc., then the father’s account of same, then the sister’s account of same (there was a character in attendance whose name was spelled 4 different ways! (Stokky, Staake, Stoky, and Stokke)).  This sequence was followed by a post-Christmas round by the same players of the same events now adumbrated which were previously in retrospect.  It was interesting to study the slow reversal of time.  The reason I think this is relevant is because I did the typing in the DPI Office, and I speculated about pragmatics while doing it.

I would like to justify my presence here by doing some kind of close reading but I don’t have anything I really want to do that to right now, because I’m not far enough in the Sophocles do draw any kind of conclusions about the text.  Instead, I’m going to go to my chair and read Fillmore’s Lectures on Deixis.  I’m going over there now! (Study questions: where is ‘there’? when is ‘now’? how does the concept of ‘internet presence’ affect our perception of deictic anchorage? For example: my gmail tells people I’m present when I am not, but I do not intend for it to do so.  And my neglecting to set my status as ‘away’ is certainly not intentional, since it’s never occurred to me until now to do so.  I was thinking about this recently in terms of voice-mail.  If you record on your home phone “I’m not here,” you are anticipating a moment in the future when this statement will be true.  But if you were to record this on a cellphone, it will generally be an untrue statement because you and your cellphone are probably in the same location.  But then, I thought that most people don’t have that message on their voice-mail, perhaps because there’s an awareness that the semantic linkage between phone and home has been disconnected (pun!).)

quidquid erit, melius quam nunc erit.

Heroides 15.177

I just finally finished the Sappho epistle.  Not sure where I stand on the issue of authorship.  Knox (Peter not Bernard), in his commentary, is completely sure that it is not Ovid, and he pulls out examples of where the poem is “not well developed (279), “awkward” (282, quoting Tarrant, who is a hater), and “odd” (289).  But it seems to me that if he were assured, on the other hand, that it was Ovid, he would probably justify these same features as “Ovidian idiosyncracy” or “iconoclasm.”  This isn’t a very interesting argument, but it makes me a little indignant.  But I really didn’t use the Knox at all, just read his introductory notes and now flipped through it for incendiary phraseology.  The poem was pretty easy, I don’t know why I didn’t just finish it 3 weeks ago when I started it.  I checked out the Knox and also Kenney’s commentary of the double Heroides to maybe compare the style, also because I am sort of reading Callimachus and the version of Acontius and Cydippe in Ovid is supposed to be really interesting, textually, whereas Callimachus’ version includes a delightful geographical digression.  Oh, the digression!  I love it!  Gosh, I wouldn’t mind finding a few more fragments of Iamblichus (and damn!, I wrote a paper about him not 5 months ago and I couldn’t remember his name At All.  My brain should try to be a little awesomer.).  Anyway, here are a few words about the epistula Sapphus.  I like these lines, which I read today:

Lesbides aequoreae, nupturaque nuptaque proles,
Lesbides, Aeolia nomina dicta lyra,
Lesbides, infamem quae me fecistis amatae,
desinite ad citeras turba uenire meas!

I like the conflation of herself with her musical instruments, which she does throughout.  As though writing love lyric drove her to enact love lyric, so by being too closely associated with her music she becomes solely an instrument for passionate loving.  This is another example of a song that could easily be transformed into a pop song, especially the title of this post, omg, Sappho adolescens.

I spent the entirety of the afternoon in my office getting ready to start thinking about my paper.  I am really interested in Functional Grammar, but I think I have a lot to learn before I can comprehend it, and I fear that I’m being irresponsible about it, as always.  I wish I’d taken Linguistics when the chance had offered itself, then I could have taken Phonetics this term and Morphology next term and I could talk about de Saussure suavely and without thinking about Magnetic Fields.  But Coulter George’s book, despite its author’s ridiculous name, is incredibly readable even though it is also quite dull.  It is about the differences between expression of agent with a passive noun; standard expression is genitive of agent with ὑπό, or dative of agent, usually in the perfect tenses.  Oh! This is interesting.  Smythe (§1488) says “The notion of agency does not belong to the dative, but it is a natural inference that the person interested is the agent.”  The Dative: Just Getting Better and Better.  Anyway, George analyzes several examples of non-standard agent expressions (i.e. ἐκ, παρά with genitive or dative, πρός).  I just read the sections this evening about prose, but he includes tragedy in the next section.  So far, I think that παρά isn’t strictly used of agency, but of source, especially since it’s most often used with verbs like πέμπω and δίδωμι, sometimes with διδάσκω, which is interesting to me.  And George reminded me of the part at the beginning of the Symposium (175e-e) when Socrates says to Agathon: εἰ γὰρ οὕτως ἔχει καὶ ἡ σοφία, πολλοῦ τιμῶμαι τὴν παρὰ σοὶ κατάκλισιν· οἶμαι γάρ με παρὰ σοῦ πολλῆς καὶ καλῆς σοφίας πληρωθήσεσθαι.  Look: two types of παρἀ!  In such proximity!

Having resorted to παρἀ puns, I have to stop now.  Oh, but first I have to tell you that I made a mistake in my translation of Pythian 11.  I was translating ἁβρότατος as a superlative of ἁβρός, which it looked like, but it’s actually a Doric genitive of ἁβρότης.  I checked the alpha against Finglass’s metrical analysis, and it is surely long, it’s an eta.  So now you translate the lines (31-5):

θάνεν μὲν αὐτὸς ἥρως Ἀτρεΐδας

ἵκων χρόνῳ κλυταῖς ἐν Ἀμύκλαις,

μάντιν τ’ ὄλεσσε κόραν, ἐπεὶ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένᾳ πυρωθέντας

Τρώων ἔλυσε δόμους
ἁβρότατος.

And he himself died, the hero, son of Atreus
coming at last to famous Amyclae,
and he ruined the mantic maiden, when for Helen’s sake,
he parted the burning homes of the Trojans
from luxury.

So what is going on here is a λύω with genitive construction that is not in the Middle Liddel but I did not check the LSJ.  And Finglass suggests that there’s irony because in 5th c. Greece luxury, ἁβρότης, was a really terrible thing so in his sacking of Troy Agamemnon thinks he’s doing them a favor.  I also want to notice the words “about Helen” “burning” in 33, because a lot of the time you burn from love.  Finglass didn’t write about that.  But, anyway, maybe we can talk about sound-alikes?  Maybe there’s a little tiny suggestion that in spending so much time in the East, Agamemnon himself became luxurized/soft, as he’s characterized in Agamemnon.  After all, ἕλυσε doesn’t need or want a genitive, it can destroy Troy fine on its own, and what does the genitive ἁβρότατος refer to, anyway?  Cassandra?  I don’t think that’s right, but listen to this: in Euripides’ Electra, there is reference several times to Clytemnestra being surrounded by Phrygian spoils, and that her slave women are Asian; in all the Orestes tragedies there’s a strong theme of luxury, of spoilage. Furthermore, Bowra wants Pindar to be influenced by Aeschylus, and the dating of the poem could be either 474 or 454.  He uses evidence about Pindar’s life to go with the later date.

Now this has made me think about the construction of history through anecdotes, something Emily’s written about.  But history really is constructed through the text, and anecdotes are texts, so it doesn’t really matter if they’re true.  The same goes for the Sappho epistle: everything we know about Sappho comes from her poems and poems people wrote about her, and wherever New Comedy and Ovid got the story about her love for Phaon, it doesn’t matter because it’s all part of the textual construction called Sappho.  And what I was saying earlier about Galatea and Polyphemus, how Philoxenus introduced this romance into the pre-Epic bucolic world (this is something Carl told me but I want to learn more about.  I wonder if the story of Paris and Oenone also came from the bucolic tradition.  OK I just checked Knox and he says “The existence of a Hellenistic narrative poem on Paris and Oenone has long been suspected…. The evidence for a Hellenistic model for this episode is not very convincing, depending for the most part on subjective assessments of the bucolic setting of Paris’ deathbed entreaty of Oenone and the pathetic strain of narrative, a type that is readily attributed to Hellenistic tastes” (141).  But I think we all know that P. Knox is a curmudgeon.  Well, maybe not.  He teaches at Boulder and looks quite nice.  But he could stand to be less incredulous, I think, because as I am about to say, there is no truth.) and it quickly became enfolded into the Book of mythology.  I think I’ve noticed that the Greek conception of facts is quite different from ours.  And that reminds me of Brian, who came to my office and made excellent observations, then said he’d probably not be back.  Seriously, Brian, if you do come back, I want you to appreciate how awesome it is that you were talking about facts and I just ended up talking about facts, totally independently.  And now I’m sorry that I was piqued and did not read your email carefully.  And Pindar is awesome.

I’m going now over to my chair to read some de Jong.  As the poet says, whatever happens can’t be worse than what’s happening now.

ἦ πολυιδρείη χαλεπὸν κακόν, ὅστις ἀκαρτεῖ / γλώσσης· ὡς ἐτεὸν παῖς ὅδε μαῦλιν ἔχει.

Callimachus, Aitia fr. 75.8-9: “And knowing too much is a really big problem for someone who can’t control his tongue: that one is really like a child with a knife.”

These nights of work and days of sleeping have caught up with me, with the result that I’ve done almost nothing productive today.  I spent most of the afternoon in the actual DPIO (sticky tabs fail) flipping listlessly through the books that once enticed me at the library but now lean unanimatedly against the wall.  For a good amount of time I agonized through maybe 75 lines of Callimachus, who seemed much more difficult than Pindar, and even more inscrutable.  What is this business with Demeter and the great old lady (alternatively, Housman supplies δρυός)?  Why contrast cicadas with asses?  But I’m mystified in a way that’s not at all irritation.  I think he has a bigger brain than anyone I’ve ever met before and he seems sort of like the pivot between the Greek literature and the Latin literature I know.  It’s also kind of melancholy, because I think about him there in Alexandria, reading all those books and writing about them, volumes and volumes that nobody will ever read.  However: I do believe that we’ll be finding hefty fragments of Ovid’s Medea pretty soon, on the obverse of a shopping list stuffed into a mummified crocodile.

After Callimachus tossed me aside I read some of this very strange book that seems to be a introductory primer for scholars to whom it’s never occurred to consider the theoretical framework with which one approaches classical texts.  I’m not sure whether we’ll agree, but at least the print is large.  I also read the first few pages of De Jong’s Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, since we’d read the beginning of the Telemachy the other day.  I think it’ll be helpful, but my mind’s been having trouble focusing today.  I glanced at a few other things, including an article about Agamemnon in the Odyssey by Olson that I look forward to reading tomorrow, then read about 60 lines of Philoctetes to calm myself down.

Carl and I finished the Eclogues with the agonistic Eclogue 7 (Corydon won) and the very sad Eclogue 9, about how the shepherds have lost their land to veterans of the Civil Wars..  We’ve talked a bit in the past few days about the difference between the temporal setting of Theocritus’ and Virgil’s bucolics.  It’s really interesting that actual Roman social reform is a threat to the world of the Eclogues.  I don’t think that it signifies at all a silencing of poetry from social pressure, so I’m not sure what the relationship between history and poetry is in this situation.

Damn, I really wish it weren’t so awfully late.  I’d love to have had some more intelligent thoughts and reflections on what I’ve read.  I promise to check things off the list tomorrow, to read, to write.

mollia luteola pingit uaccinia calta

Eclogue 2.50

This afternoon, I read Pindar’s Pythian 11, tipped by a reference in Garvie’s introduction to an article by Bowra mentioning a fragment of Corinna mentioning a version of the Orestes story similar to Pindar’s telling of it in Pythian 11.  Well, apparently since Bowra we now think Corinna’s from the 3rd century, according to that jerk Slater’s BMCR of Finglass’ 2008 edition of Pythian 11.  According to the OCD we don’t know when she’s from because her Boeotian sounds late and no Alexandrian studied her til the 1st century, but Pausanius says she and Pindar were contemporaries and there’s also an anecdote that after being consistently beaten by her in poetry contests, Pindar called her a “Boeotian sow.”  So now we know more about Corinna.  Anyway, I read the Pindar straight from the TLG because I rarely if ever erred from my pajamas today, so I’m not sure how thoroughly I comprehended it.  Emily was reading it with commentary.  We were reading together via text message, which is somewhat inefficient.  Well, I won’t translate the entire thing, but here’s the relevant passage.  There a strange gnomic digression which Slater thinks that Finglass inadequately appreciates.  I think there are some errors in the text, also, which I’ll correct when I’ve gotten out Finglass’ edition (I am not sure why I am so fond of Finglass.  I have now learned that his first name is Patrick; he teaches at the University of Nottingham, which seems dreadfully romantic; he’s working on a commentary of Ajax; however of him the internet has no pictures, unfortunately.  So now we know more about Finglass.  Slater thinks his commentary is lax, but I’m more inclined to think poorly of Slater than of Finglass.  His Sophocles commentary is just so thorough!).

Pythian XI: 15-37

ἐν ἀφ νεαῖς ἀρούραισι Πυλάδα (15)

νικῶν ξένου Λάκωνος Ὀρέστα.

τὸν δὴ φονευομένου πατρὸς Ἀρσινόα Κλυταιμήστρας

χειρῶν ὕπο κρατερᾶν

ἐκ δόλου τροφὸς ἄνελε δυσπενθέος, (18)

ὁπότε Δαρδανίδα κόραν Πριάμου

Κασσάνδραν πολιῷ χαλκῷ σὺν Ἀγαμεμνονίᾳ (20)

ψυχᾷ πόρευ’ Ἀχέροντος ἀκτὰν παρ’ εὔσκιον

νηλὴς γυνά. πότερόν νιν ἄρ’ Ἰφιγένει’ ἐπ’ Εὐρίπῳ

σφαχθεῖσα τῆλε πάτρας

ἔκνισεν βαρυπάλαμον ὄρσαι χόλον; (23)

ἢ ἑτέρῳ λέχεϊ δαμαζομέναν

ἔννυχοι πάραγον κοῖται; τὸ δὲ νέαις ἀλόχοις (25)

ἔχθιστον ἀμπλάκιον καλύψαι τ’ ἀμάχανον

ἀλλοτρίαισι γλώσσαις·

κακολόγοι δὲ πολῖται.

ἴσχει τε γὰρ ὄλβος οὐ μείονα φθόνον·

ὁ δὲ χαμηλὰ πνέων ἄφαντον βρέμει. (30)

θάνεν μὲν αὐτὸς ἥρως Ἀτρεΐδας

ἵκων χρόνῳ κλυταῖς ἐν Ἀμύκλαις,

μάντιν τ’ ὄλεσσε κόραν, ἐπεὶ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένᾳ πυρωθέντας

Τρώων ἔλυσε δόμους

ἁβρότατος. ὁ δ’ ἄρα γέροντα ξένον (34)

Στροφίον ἐξίκετο, νέα κεφαλά, (35)

Παρνασσοῦ πόδα ναίοντ’· ἀλλὰ χρονίῳ σὺν Ἄρει

πέφνεν τε ματέρα θῆκέ τ’ Αἴγισθον ἐν φοναῖς.

[Thrasydaios] conquering in the rich fields of Pylades,
guest friend of Laconian Orestes,

whom Arsinoe the nurse rescued
after his father had been killed by a deadly trick

at the cruel hand of Clytemnestra,

when that pitiless woman,

with bright bronze,

sent the Dardanian child of Priam, Cassandra,

together with the soul of Agamemnon,

to the shaded shore of Acheron.

Did Iphigeneia, sacrificed at the Euripus,

far from her homeland,

provoke her heavy-handed anger to the attack?

Or did the nightly beddings tempt her,

conquered by another’s bed?

For new wives, this is the most despicable sin,

one impossible to hide from strangers’ tongues:

the citizens spread rumors.

For wealth doesn’t hold back greater envy,

but the one breathing lowly shouts unheard.

So: he died, the hero, the son of Atreus,

having reached, at last, famed Amyclae,

and he wrecked the mantic maiden

when he destroyed the homes of Troy,

burning for Helen,

lovely hero Agamemnon.

But Orestes, the young head, came to Strophius,

his old guest friend, who dwelt at the foot of Parnassus;

and after some time, with Ares, he killed his mother

and he brought Aegisthus to slaughter.

Well, translating Pindar is pretty exhausting.  I was going to translate for you also Eclogue 2 and talk about it (the title of this post is a provocatively metapoetic golden line about flowers) and also discuss further the line about saevus Amor since both of my readers have inquired about it.  But now I think that I will not.  I will, however, talk about the Pindar briefly, though it’s really difficult to do so because I can’t see both this page and the text, since the text is in another tab and the box in which I’m typing is too small to include the text.  But why complain?

Man, this is crazy.  Look at this line: τὸν δὴ φονευομένου πατρὸς Ἀρσινόα Κλυταιμήστρας.  Accusative τὸν=Orestes, father killed by genitive absolute, nominitive Arsinoe, genitive Clytemnestra.  What does it mean that Arsinoe is between πατρὸς and Clytemnestra, between two genitives, further, between the two paternal genitives of Orestes?  In Euripides (which I left at school so can’t quote now), I think Orestes is rescued, like, from the midst of the paternal slaughter, which is what it looks like what is happening here: Arsinoe comes between the murdered father and murdering Clytemnestra to rescue Orestes.  Anyway, let’s think a little bit about the hermeneutics of this sentence, with numbering proceeding from the already established action sequence (what they call proairetics).  1. “Orestes” (object).  2a. “father having been killed.”  3a. “Arsinoe.”  4a. “of Clytemnestra.”  4b. “by the strong hand.” 2b. “by a trick.”  3b. “the nurse rescued” (again Arsinoe rescues Orestes from in the middle of the δόλος and its adjective). 2c. “by a direful trick.”  What a great sentence!  Pindar!

I can keep going.  And I will.  Next section: “when <accusative> the Dardanian daughter of Priam, Cassandra” “with grey bronze” “with the Agamemnonian soul” (2 adverbial clauses with no verb yet) “sent” (no subject yet) “shore of Acheron” “to the shady” (completes the action of the verb: object, action, direction, and instrument, but still no subject) “pitiless woman” (there’s the subject!).

Following this are speculations on why she did it, which seem to match pretty well with the tragic versions.  Certainly in the Agamemnon her claimed motivation varies between retribution for Iphigeneia’s murder and her desire for Aegisthus, and as we saw the other day Euripides has her voice clearly exactly these two motivations.  The participle σφαχθεῖσα fits in interestingly with Zeitlin’s discussion of perverted ritual, which involves major discussion of Aeschylus’ uses of σφάζω.  Παράγω is an interesting word: it means “to pervert.”  So then it occurs to Pindar that many wives cheat on their husbands; he can’t be talking about Clytemnestra soleley because she’s not a new wife at all.  Then Pindar starts talking about gossip and envy and there’s the weird bit about “a person breathing things that are low to the ground roars inaudibly.”  Slater and Finglass disagree on the interpretation of the verb, and some French editor commenting on the BMCR blog says it’s utterly corrupt, but I haven’t seen an app. crit. of the text yet to tell you what I think.  Well, the bit about envy absolutely fits in with Aeschylus’ preoccupation, so that’s something nice to think about.  (Finglass is really into not caring about chronology.  I’m not sure how I feel!)

So after that digression we get back to Agamemnon with θάνεν μὲν.  Here is what Agamemnon did: 1. he died (θάνεν) 2. he ruined Cassandra (ὄλεσσε) and 3. he wrecked the houses of Troy (ἔλυσε).  And after all that, especially after the mention of Helen, the sentence ends with him called ἁβρότατος, which strikes me as a very odd epithet for such a violent hero.

I have to finish this now, so I’ll just briefly note that 1. both the relationship between Orestes and Pylades and that between Orestes and Strophius (Pylades’ father) are characterized by ξενία which according to Bowra is really important for the Pythian games.  2. Ares is generally not the god that helps Orestes.  Usually he acts because of Apollo’s oracle, but it seems possible that Hermes acted as his helper in an earlier version of the myth (see Garvie).  Ares stands metonymically for warlike violence, but that’s pretty far from the deceitful way Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in other versions of the myth.  3. πέφνεν is super Homeric.  Oh, but I just did a search and I guess Pindar uses it, too.  But not really anyone else.  Maybe we can talk about the relationship of the myth to the rest of the poem later, but it doesn’t seem like Finglass got too far with it, and I’m (ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν) no Finglass.

In conclusion: did you know there are scholia on Pindar?!

οἱ δ᾽αὖτε σπόγγοισι πολυτρήτοισι τραπέζας / νίζον καὶ πρότιθεν…

(Odyssey 1.111-12)

It’s been a pretty good day for reading awesome things in Greek.  After about an hour of gazing at Garvie’s introduction to the Choephori, which led me as always on the trail of more and more articles, I betook myself to the library where, wandering down the aisles of PA, I chanced upon a pristine Green & Yellow of Lucian in which is included a trial between Σ and Τ, with Σ accusing Τ of πλεονεξία to jurors composed of the vowels.  I think that everyone should read it!  So that was most of the afternoon, but after I finished that I read some 150 lines of Philoctetes.  Neoptolemos is a huge nerd.  Odysseus tells him to lie, which is always a good time (lying with Odysseus…), and Neoptolemos is like “isn’t lying bad?” and Odysseus responds “everlasting fame and glory, dude.”  To which superior logic Neoptolemos eventually accedes.

Well, it was after 10 when I got to Carl’s and after having some tasty wine I’m less in the mood for serious analysis of text than I often am.  I don’t have my Sophocles with me, so I can’t really quote at you from that, but there are some pretty great moments already, like when Neoptolemos sees the sodden pile of rags and goes “ἰοὺ ἰού· καὶ ταῦτά γ’ ἄλλα θάλπεται / ῥάκη, βαρείας του νοσηλείας πλέα,” because not only is the image of a pile of warm rags, sodden with heavy sickness, really evocative, ἰοὺ ἰού also sounds exactly like “ew ew,” which is exactly what a nerd like Neoptolemos would say when confronted by true human pathos.  But, Freudianly, he never knew his father and even if he had Achilles was a huge jerk.  So no wonder he’s so ill-suited for outings with our Odysseus.

Speaking of Odysseus, Carl and I read a little bit of the beginning of the Odyssey, which I’ve never read before, and it is amazing.  Right away, from the first, we’re talking about Aigisthos and Orestes, contrasting Aigisthos’ behavior (listen, we told you not to kill Agamemnon and marry his wife.  So don’t be surprised when you get your ass retributed!) with Odysseus (he was always sacrificing next to the ships of the Achaians!).  Which is an interesting contrast, because usually it’s Odysseus and Agamemnon paralleled.  Aigisthos isn’t really anything like Odysseus, he’s clearly like Paris (as Aeschylus makes clear), or in this poem like the suitors.  Furthermore, both Aigisthos and the suitors have really inappropriate epithets: at 29 Aigisthos is called ἀμύμονος Αἰγίσθοιο, and when Athena disguised as Mentor comes to Ithaca, the suitors are called μνηστῆρας ἀγήνορας, which means something like “courageous.”  I’m not sure about Homeric irony vs. formulaic necessity, but I’d like to read more, for sure.  Anyway, I’m really thrilled by the description of Ithaca, when Athena comes upon it.  I don’t remember when we read Book 5 winter quarter being so enamored of the detail, but I’m excited to read all of the rest of the poem, particularly Book 6 on Phaeacia.  Ostensibly, I want to read the Telemachy for resemblances between Telemachus and Orestes, but reading the Odyssey just generally makes me really happy.  I like the Iliad, for sure, but the story of the Odyssey is so much more fun, with the fantasy world and the real world, the journeys between them.  But, as I was saying, the description of Ithaca: the suitors are sitting on the front porch on cowskins, playing dice, “while some servants mixed wine and water in a krater, / and others, still, with sponges filled with holes, washed and set the tables, / and others divided a lot of meat.” (110-112)  Πρὸς θεῶν, that’s good!

Tomorrow I’d like to read more Latin, I’m now going to embark on a few more chapters of S/Z, I have an article by Bowra on Pindar’s version of the Oresteia to look forward to.  I really have enjoyed the reading I did today, wish I could write about it more fetchingly (it is the text, not I, that should be fetching, of course), but it’s late, and the wine, and so forth.  The Garvie introduction was really interesting, about different sources for the Orestes myth that vary in location, names of participants, degree of involvement of participants.  I had a much more simplistic view of the development of mythology between Homer and the tragedians, had not really thought about the fact that just as in the time of Pindar/Aeschylus, so too in Homer’s time there were extremely different versions of the myths.

As an unexpected digression, I’d like to muse on the Homeric question for a moment.  When we say Homer, how are our readers supposed to know what we mean by that name?  When I read things that are really old, I assume that the author means the actual human being Homer, but I am wondering now if it matters, if it makes that much of a difference what the hypothetic Victorian philologist intended as long as he (yeah, probably he) isn’t discussing specifically the historicity of Homer.  But on the other hand, in current scholarship, when we talk about Homer, should we specify our stance on the Homeric question, or is there a laxity about that topic in the field which allows us to make our arguments without making our opinions explicit, as long as we aren’t discussing historicity or chronology or whatever (don’t ask/don’t tell).  I wonder because I talk about Homer all the time, but I’m pretty agnostic as pertains to the Homeric question, and in the work I’m interested in doing it really doesn’t matter if I think Homer was a guy living in 750 BC for whom the alphabet was invented (impossible! Cadmus brought the alphabet from the Phoenicians and he precedes by far the Trojan War!  This is something I have dwelt upon at length.) or if I think he’s a figment of the ancient mind or if I think he’s a maiden of Sicily or if I think he has a scar upon his thigh (hence ὁ μέρος).  But maybe it is important, maybe my readers won’t understand me quite unless I come out with a statement on the Homeric question.  Maybe it keeps us from communicating as accurately as we could.  Maybe I lack intellectual curiosity for not wanting to Know For Certain who this poet we call Homer is.  Damn!  I am feeling pretty hotly ambivalent right now!

Anyway, excuse that ejaculation, I just wanted to add that I found out that there was a comedy in which the 24 members of the chorus played letters of the alphabet!  And that there are vace paintings of Agamemnon’s murder from the 7th century!  And that the ambiguity about the meaning of the word ἀτρύγετος is basically dumb because while a few lexicographers say it comes from ἄτρυτος, which is etymologically ridiculous, Hesychius (seriously!) and like everyone else glosses it as ἄκαρπος.  Which is clearly what it means, because there are no fruits in the sea (or the air; it’s sometimes used to refer to air where, similarly, no fruits grow).

Bye!