That New Epigraph

Sophocles, Antigone, line 332.  There are lots of translations but I prefer my own:

There are many wonders, but none so wonderful as humankind.

I had the great privilege of reciting this line last year while standing center stage in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus.  I was standing next to a professor of Greek.  I don't think he understood a word I was saying, nor that it was Greek.

The passage continues (from Jebb's translation, lifted from Perseus):

[335] This power spans the sea, even when it surges white before the gales of the south-wind, and makes a path under swells that threaten to engulf him. Earth, too, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, [340] he wears away to his own ends, turning the soil with the offspring of horses as the plows weave to and fro year after year.

Update:  I'm thinking maybe Taxmom (infra) wants me to go all the way to 375.  Okay by me:

[343] The light-hearted tribe of birds [345] and the clans of wild beasts and the sea-brood of the deep he snares in the meshes of his twisted nets, and he leads them captive, very-skilled man. He masters by his arts [350] the beast who dwells in the wilds and roams the hills. He tames the shaggy-maned horse, putting the yoke upon its neck, and tames the tireless mountain bull. 

[354] Speech and thought fast as the [355] wind and the moods that give order to a city he has taught himself, and how to flee the arrows of the inhospitable frost under clear skies and the arrows of the storming rain. [360] He has resource for everything. Lacking resource in nothing he strides towards what must come. From Death alone he shall procure no escape, but from baffling diseases he has devised flights.  [365] Possessing resourceful skill, a subtlety beyond expectation he moves now to evil, now to good. When he honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods to which he is bound by oath, [370] his city prospers. But banned from his city is he who, thanks to his rashness, couples with disgrace. Never may he share my home, [375] never think my thoughts, who does these things!

 Long for an epigraph, but still good.

Bleah

I've been stalled out on this one all week:

[200β] ...ἴσως γὰρ ἄν τις ταῦτα οἰηθείη καὶ πάντα τὰ τοιαῦτα τοὺς ὄντας
[200ξ] τε τοιούτους καὶ ἔχοντας ταῦτα τούτων ἅπερ ἔχουσι καὶ ἐπιθυμεῖν

So Plato, Symposium, via Perseus.  Kenneth Dover gives:

For one might perhaps think (sc. on the subject of) those (sc. qualities) and everything of that kind that those who are such and possess those (sc. qualities) also desire those things (τούτων) which they have.

 Plato, Symposium 135 (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics ed.)  Dover must think it tricky; Dover rarely gives this much specific help.  Harold N, Fowler (Perseus) gives:

 Since we are apt to suppose in these and all such cases that men of this or that sort, possessing these qualities, do also desire what they have already.

 Joseph Epstein says: that Socrates; presentation was"tighter than Noël Coward's act at Vegas.” [Snobbery: The American Vision 104 (2002)].   I say I need to review my pronouns.

Founding Narrative

Such things should be said beside the fire in winter-time when a man reclines full-fed on a soft couch, drinking the sweet wine and munching chick-peas - such things as: "Who and whence are you? and how old are you, good man? how old were you when the Mede came?'

Arnaldo Momigliano. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization 

(Kindle Locations 1431-1433). Kindle Edition.

Momigliano clarifies: 

The arrival of the Mede in Ionia - that is, Harpagus the Mede's conquest on behalf of Cyrus the Persian about 545 B.C. - was the beginning of a new age for Xenophanes of Colophon. He himself had left his native city as a young man in consequence of that event. At the age of 92 he was still alive, about 472 B.C. The Persian conquest of the kingdom of Lydia involved in one form or another all the Greeks of Asia Minor. The Greeks had crossed swords with the Assyrians and had had their troubles with the Egyptians, but had never lived inside a great empire - at least not after the Hittite Empire of which they remembered nothing. The Lydian rule had been easy to accept, as Lydia was soon dominated by Greek culture - open to Greek traders, artists, soldiers and oracles. Cyrus was as epoch-making for the Greeks as he was for the Jews - though the reasons were different.

Id., 1433.

The Mountains Looked on Marathon....

Two days after the Greek elections might not be the ideal time for this.  Unfortunately, there is no convenient time for this.

Something that Actually Works

Okay, at the beginning of my annual eight-month vacation, I'm thinking it is time to go back and bone up on my never-very-functional classical Greek.  Right now for calisthenics, I'm working my way through a battered copy of Martin Hiner's Greek Comprehensions for Schools (1992) which I seem to have spilled coffee on already at some unknown time in the past.

I decided I really needed to put a bit in writing, and then recalled that I didn't possess an adequate Greek font.  How dreary: I've tried to configure Greek fonts before and never got them quite right.

But I popped on over to the Greek study group web page and copped myself a freebie of something called Unicorn.  I downloaded; I unzipped; I fired up; I found myself looking at a blank page.

But hey wait a minute--it's all there.  Just press escape twice, and you're good to go.

Are you surprised?  Maybe I should not have been.  Countless apps these days come on board the Iphone friction free.  But I  go back to the Pleistocene.  The very idea of a program that you did not have to configure, start over, reonfigure--and finally abandon as worthless.  Something that actually works: how refreshing, And free, BTW.  I have no idea who this Kirk Lougheed guy is  (I don't suppose it is this guy?), but he has my gratitude.  Now, as I was saying,ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα ...

Steadman's Labor of Love

Here's a labor of love: a new edition of Plato's Symposium for intermediate students, with facing-pages vocab and commentary.  I say "labor of love" in the sense that I expect no edition of a Greek text is going to yield enough to cover the cost of paper.  More, the author (well--editor) has produced it himself as print-on-demand, with the side offer of an e-file under a Creative Commons license.  And if "print on demand" suggests "vanity press"--the author/editor tells us exactly nothing about himself in the book, unless you count a couple of email addresses and  the sidenote "Ph.D."  A bit of Googling suggests that he--the name is "Geoffrey Steadman"--is a high school teacher in Tennessee, and surely to prepare a work of this sort for an audience of high school students is to learn a lot about humility.

The most obvious appeal of the book is the facing-pages vocabulary with running same-page commentary.  This kind of layout is so obviously helpful you can't imagine why editors haven't always done it this way.  I suppose you could say the model is the Loeb Classical Library, with its facing-pages English and Greek (or Latin, as the case might be)--or whoever it is from whom Loeb got its idea.  You get a version of it in the superb teaching materials from the Joint Association of Classsical Teachers, published by Cambridge University Press.  There are others: I have at hand a lovely edition of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe with the same facing-pages presentation. And here's a presentation of Plato's Apology; it has running commentary with vocab in the back, but the commentary is so thorough that you won't need much vocab.

For the basic text, Steadman has done what any sensible presenter ought to do--he's taken an old out-of-copyright edition and just photocopied.  He's added some helpful general commentary and intro but the guts of it is in what must have been the appallingly tedious labor of assembling all the vocab and the meticulous commentary notes--I get a headache just thinking about it.

I wish I could say the notes answered all my questions, but notes like this never do: it's a mug's game, trying to anticipate what every reader will want and need and somebody--everybody--is bound to come up disappointed.  Still, as I work my way through Steadman, I do find myself keeping handy a copy of the 1980 Cambridge Edition by Kenneth Dover.  Some of Dover's comments are gems in themselves and they certainly are prodigies of patient scholarship.

But Dover doesn't do facing pages.   And Steadman's comments are all you have any reason to expect.  I see he's done at least three more editions of this sort (link, link, link).  And did I mention that the top price is $14.95?  I see the new third volume of Hornblower's Commentary on Thucydides is retailing at $350.  For that price you could by 23 Steadmans, with money left  over for a latte.  If somebody gives this guy a MacArthur Grant, they won't have any complaints from me.

The English Thucydides

I was fussing a while ago about how I couldn't read Thucydides in the original. I could have added: lacking the original I have what surely count as the next best thing: the great translation by Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher in his own right and one of the great prose stylists in the language:

For oppressed with the violence of the calamity, and not knowing what to do, men grew careless both of holy and profane things alike. And the laws which they formerly used touching funerals, were all now broken; every one burying where he could find room. And many for want of things necessary, after so many deaths before, were forced to become impudent in the funerals of their friends. For when one had made a funeral pile, another getting before him would throw on his dead, and give it fire. And when one was in burning, another would come, and having cast thereon him whom he carried, go his way again.

And the great licentiousness, which also in other kinds was used in the city, began at first from this disease. For that which a man before would dissemble, and not acknowledge to be done for voluptuousness, he durst now do freely; seeing before his eyes such quick revolution, of the rich dying, and men worth nothing inheriting their estates. Insomuch as they justified a speedy fruition of their goods, even for their pleasure; as men that thought they held their lives but by the day. As for pains, no man was forward in any action of honour to take any; because they thought it uncertain whether they should die or not before they achieved it. But what any man knew to be delightful, and to be profitable to pleasure, that was made both profitable and honourable. Neither the fear of the gods, nor laws of men, awed any man: not the former, because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship, from seeing that alike they all perished: nor the latter, because no man expected that lives would last till he received punishment of his crimes by judgment. But they thought, there was now over their heads some far greater judgment decreed against them; before which fell, they thought to enjoy some little part of their lives.

Copied from the admirable Online Library of Liberty here (footnotes omitted). Hobbes' Thucydides strikes me as one of those works which, if not exactly better than the original (how would I know) still is in any event a work of art important in its own right. Elizabethan/Renaissance England seems to have been rich in that sort of thing: consider, not least, the King James Bible. I'm sure the following is not original with me but I'll say it anyway: seems to me that Hobbes' generally black view of human life as a "warre of all against all" must have been at least in part inspired by his experience of the plague in Athens, as rendered so vividly in the excerpt above.

Oh and by the way: while I am still not up to tackling Thouk in Greek, I'm hanging on to my copy of Blaise Nagy's, Thucydides Reader. Apologies, Blaise and maybe I will get to you yet.

Whirl/Vortex/Pot-bellied Stove

Yesterday I wrote:

Whirl is king,
Zeus being dead.

...quoting (rather grandly) Aristophanes, and remarking that when you went looking for it on Google, the first reference you found was me.

Buce's friend Bruce comes up with a perfectly good reason why I am the only one who quotes it that way: it's wrong. A much more conventional version reads "... having driven out Zeus." That's WikiQuotes, with a reference to--get ready for it--Walter Lippmann, in the epigraph to his Preface to Morals. That may be an implausible source, but--also implausibly?--I think it is the first place I saw it, going through my Lippmann phase about 50 years ago. So I must have misremembered it from the start.

It seems that Bruce and Lippmann are onto something. Per Perseus, we have Aristphanes' Clouds, line 1473:

Δῖνος βασιλεύει τὸν Δἴ ἐξεληλακώς.

[and cf. also l.831.]

That is:

Dinos basileuei ton Di'exelelakos

That is, um, "whirl is king, having driven out Zeus." Turns out there is a pun here. "Dinos"= "whirl," but "dinos" is also a piece of pottery-"a round goblet," in the notes to Bruce's translation. So a moment later Strepsiades is saying:

What a fool I was! A piece of pottery, and I thought it was a god!

[That's the Bantam Classic translation by Moses Hadas.]

Actually, a pun plus a play on words. "Dinos" (whirl/pot) has driven out "Di'," "Dios," a form of "Zeus." Get it? Oh yuk yuk.

"Whirl" isn't enough for some people. The on-line translation of Ian Johnston has "vortex." The much-admired William Arrowsmith translation offers "convection-principle," and laments that

...they told me that the whole universe was a kind of potbellied stove like that model here, an enormous cosmical barbecue, and the gods were nothing but a lot of hot air and gas swirling around in the flue.

So, God as something you buy down at the appliance warehouse.

I Bet This Works:

I bet this works: learn a foreign language by reading Harry Potter in translation (link).

Fact is, I'm almost certain it works. Or more precisely: I have a supremo edition of Herodotus’ Histories in classical Greek, with Italian on the facing pages. Pardon, that is Erodoto, Le Storie—it is the one with the splendid introduction by David Asheri, best general intro to Herodotus that I ever saw. I figure that even if I can’t read the Greek (often), at least I can make out the Italian (sometimes).

My only hesitancy is that I haven’t read Harry Potter (yet) in English.

Fn.: Years ago I met a guy who had taken a class in Gothic. Apparently the only significant Gothic text is the (incomplete) New Testament, so the students had worked with a facing-pages text: Greek on one side, Gothic on the other. When they got stumped on the Gothic, the professor would say “Read the Greek! Read the Greek!”

Hat Tip: Kottke.

The Universal Language

This must be the easiest-to-remember limerick:

I once knew a lady of Spain
Who cried, "let us do it again!

And again! And again!
And again, and again!

And again and again and again!"

It turns out that romance is the same in any language. Here’s the Greek version:

I once saw a lass from Marsala*
Tucked snug in the grass with her fella,

She told her ephebos**,
“You must never leave us! Oh

Poioumen alla kai alla!”***

*Western Sicily, lots of Greek influence out there.
**Modern Greek beta=v, so I win.
***Hey, I tried for Greek script, couldn't figure out how to make it work.