Weekday Greek

Early Hellenistic (3rd c. BCE) 5.23 (= Hadavas Callimachus 23). Fly baby, may you sleep like you make me sleep, on this cold porch. Your gray hair will make you remember all of this. Later Hellenistic (1st c. BCE) 5.24 (= Hadavas Meleager 6). My soul warns me to flee Heliodora's jealousy, and I've understood her tears and rage before. But I don't have the strength; the coquette warns me herself, as she kisses me. 5.8 (= Hadavas Meleager 15). Holy night and lamp, you alone were our witnesses to our oaths to love forever. But now he says his oaths are carried on water, and you see him in others' laps. 5.25 (= Hadavas Philodemus 4). Day or night when I'm in Cydilla's lap, I know I'm running at the cliff's edge, I know I'm throwing the dice over my head. But what of it? She doesn't know the beginning of fear. Early Imperial (1st c. CE) 5.32 (= Hadavas Argentarius 1). Melissa, you do everything a flower-loving bee does. You drip honey in my lips, and ...

Archilochus 1, 2, 5. Archilochus 1: I am a servant of Ares and understand the love gift of the Muses. Archilochus 2: my barley-cake and wine are in my spear; I drink it, leaning on my spear Archilochus 5: Some Saian revels in my shield, which I abandoned; why do I care? I'll get another.  1) Hard to imagine the poems these fragments came from. I've read them so many times independently, they feel like they stand alone in my head. 2) Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος is pretty interesting. ἐρατὸν δῶρον is a Homeric phrase, found at Il. 3.64 (μή μοι δῶρ᾽ ἐρατὰ πρόφερε χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης), where ἐρατὀς is a Homeric hapax. At that Iliad bit Hector unfavorably links Aphrodite's gifts with the kithara, but the two appear to be separate for him (3.54: οὐκ ἄν τοι χραίσμῃ κίθαρις τά τε δῶρ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης). Fun to see this Archilochus passage as a direct Homeric allusion, given the unusual phrase; but with a spin seeing the gifts as positive (as Paris implores Hector). Maybe Archilochus pr...

The Francois vase and an Attic vase by Sophilos both have similar processions of the gods to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Carpenter looks at each god in order in these processions and briefly summarizes their depictions in archaic and classical art. In the first half of this chapter (all I read so far), he looks at: the gods walking on foot: Iris, Hestia, Demeter, Leto, Dionysus, nymphs, Horai, Hebe the gods in chariots: Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Amphitrite (and more later) 1) I am not enjoying this book and might give up on it. It's a really boring catalogue of images without any real analysis of the images or situating of the images in ancient culture or even art history. I think the book best works as a reference work if you want something shorter than LIMC. If I do quit, I'll try to find something else on epic & ancient visual culture -- I would like to know more about it and presumably there's interesting work out there. 2) Some interesting details: In 6th a...

Herodotus 1.96-216 (read with 'tragedy' club) 1.95-130: Rise of Cyrus 1.95-107: Median kings: the good judge Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares, Astyages 108-122: Cyrus' birth narrative 123-130: Cyrus leads a Persian revolt against the Medes 1.130-140: Persian customs 1.141-178: Cyrus conquers western Asia Minor (Ionians, Lydians, etc.) 1.79-1.200: Cyrus conquers Assyria, including Babylonian customs 1.201-214: Cyrus tries and fails to conquer the Massagetai. 1) In Herodotus control over water is portrayed a) as an exotic, eastern thing and b) rather negatively. Some example:  We can look ahead to Cambyses whipping the Hellospont (7.35) -- "barbarian and insolent things," in Herodotus' words Cyrus "grows angry" at the river Gyndes and "punishes" it by dividing it into 360 canals (1.189-190) -- that is, his control over the river is portrayed as the irrational action of an autarch.  The queen of Babylon Nitokris relies on her control of water to d...

Tyrtaeus 5-7 (read in the Discord intermediate group) Tyrtaeus 5. our king Theopompus, through whom we conquered Messenia after twenty long years, and the Messenians retreated to Mt. Ithome. Tyrtaeus 6. like hard-pressed donkeys under dire necessity they bring us half of all their crops Tyrtaeus 7. mourning their masters, wives and husbands alike, when they die  1) fr. 6 and 7 from Pausanias, who uses them as evidence of the Spartans' 'wanton punishments' on the Messenians: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Paus.+4.14 2) More comparisons to donkeys (cf. Semonides 7.43-9, discussed before) -- a common feature of archaic elegy, it seems like. 3) Are these poems (e.g. ἀναγκαίης ὑπὸ λυγρῆς) sympathetic to the Messenians? Certainly Pausanias quoted these lines because they seemed to him to be evidence of the Spartans' arrogance toward to the Messenians (ὕβριζον ἐς τοὺς Μεσσηνίους) -- and on their face these lines seem to evoke some sympathy for the Messenians. May...

Tyrtaeus 4 (also read in intermediate Greek group in the Latin Discord server).  7th c. Spartan. This fragment is from Tyrtaeus' Eunomia; according to Aristotle, this work was written in response to factional discord after the Second Messenian War and to requests for land redistribution. They carried home oracles from Delphi: kings and elders should lead the βουλή; and then the men of the people should respond with straight proposals, speaking finely and doing justice, without any crooked actions to the city. Victory should follow the people's assembly. 1) tripartite distinction between kings, elders, and assembly resembles other archaic political institutions, e.g. those represented in the Iliad; does not obviously resemble the later more idiosyncratic Spartan political institutions.  2) 'straightness' as a trait of justice is commonplace, e.g. Hes. Theog. 86, ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσιν

Semonides 7 (read in the intermediate Greek group today on the Latin Discord server). God made woman's mind diverse (χωρίς). One woman he made out of a pig, who lies in the filth throughout the house, unwashed; and similarly with a fox, dog, the earth, the sea, a donkey, a weasel, a horse, monkey, and a bee; only the last, the bee is a good woman. Zeus made women the worst evil; all men think their wife is good, but they are mistaken. We all share the same fate. Zeus made it the worst evil, since Hades recived them fighting over a woman. 1) Allan in the Green and Yellow calls this poem a 'satire' -- not sure I see the humor. We have a little bit of mock-epic, but I don't think the comparisons to animals are intrinsically comic; and the narrator seems deathly earnest in his misogyny. Some of his complaints remind me of other bits of Greek misogyny; for example, the dog woman "wants to hear everything and know everything" (13: πάντ' ἀκοῦσαι, πάντα δ' εἰδ...