Homer and His Iliad
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Homer and His Iliad
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Re: Homer and His Iliad
#2A great read. Gets directly to the heart of the problem of ideation of authorship through deep time of an oral tradition transcribed. I can't see Homer as a singular, but I wonder which scribe cast the language strongly into a form modern ancient Greek scholars most recognise. We must be working back through fifth and sixth generation retakes on the ur-texts. Qualities of poetic form and things like alliteration go to "one hand not many" a bit.
I like how in the Persian/Indian tradition the voice of the author comes out "I, Rumi say this to you." We could do with a bit more of that. People write papers on the presence or absence of "he said"
The quality of the pot drawings (exemplified here) amazed me. Look at that bandaging! Nobody who has ever bound a wound would fail to see that as a faithful representation.
I struggle with why we can so easily cast the Illiad, Gilgamesh into one box, and put the Abrahamic/Judeo-Christian/Islamic into another box of literal received wisdom. Faith demands it, but logic about what we say regarding the passage of a song saga or poems across time distinct from the red letter word of God is entirely missing. Its anathema to cast these as "the same" but as an athiest I cannot say there are insurmountable differences. (The new testament has obvious differences noting it draws on the old, but is within the cast of written history where Troy stands before writing was strong in the western world. Certainly before maps were any good. We don't have a reliable contemporary place marker)
Schliemann wasn't helpful. I have a kids introduction to archaeology by C.W. Ceram (not unfree of a bad past, a pseudonym adopted to get distance from his Nazi PR job) which talks a bit about that, and how the post napoleonic French butchered rolled up papyrus to extract words from shards which modern xray machines would get as whole texts. Schliemann destroyed everything he touched looking for gold, basically.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#3That review was a lot of words saying nothing much.
On the topic of Iliad, I always found it puzzling that the (supposed) war started at the wedding of Achilles' parents, i.e. before Achilles was born. Yet Achilles apparently participated in the war as an already grown and famous man?
And then later on in the story, the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus) hides inside the wooden horse and helps sack the city. How old was Achilles, really? What's the timeline here?
Of course, a part of the answer is fiction being fictitious. But some classical authors assume more nuance to the chronology, with there being two Greek expeditions – first floundered – so the whole enterprise took 20 years rather than the popular 10; Achilles fathering Neoptolemus at the age of 13; etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/kza1ji/achilles_a...
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#4Science needs objectivity but it demands passion - a scientific life is hard, painstaking and long, that without something driving the scientist the effort is too much. Yes money helps, but most could make more elsewhere.
This balance takes us to odd places. Announcing super conductors that aren't quite there, seeing one author through words glanced sideways, but also studying worms in English gardens or photographic plates of stars for months on end, the same passions and the same failings lead us to success or failure
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#5> But according to Lane Fox he was not simply a poet. He may have been a charioteer – ‘I like to believe he drove a racing team himself’ – a hunter, even a ‘putative gardener’. In fact, as he sharpens into focus, this Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox, himself a great horseman
who also writes a gardening column.
Quite amazing what he believes he has uncovered.
> Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#6Author has also written a weekly gardening column for the Financial Times for 53 years!
https://www.ft.com/robin-lane-fox
https://www.ft.com/content/363b4fc4-6ace-11ea-a6ac-9122541af...
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#7Apparently there's a new translation of the Iliad coming out. A thread on it came up on twitter. The thread author strongly dislikes the new translation - be that as it may, author seems a bit biased tbh. But the thread has images of the same passage from multiple translations. It is interesting to see the differences!
The oral tradition roots of these texts makes translating them for modern readers a challenge. Religous texts are likely similar.
https://twitter.com/mualphaxi/status/1695481359072964734
Here's another one:
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#8That review was a lot of words saying nothing much. On the topic of Iliad, I always found it puzzling that the (supposed) war started at the wedding of Achilles' parents, i.e. before Achilles was born. Yet Achilles apparently participated in the war as an already grown and famous man? And then later on in the story, the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus) hides inside the wooden horse and helps sack the city. H…
[deleted]
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#9Apparently there's a new translation of the Iliad coming out. A thread on it came up on twitter. The thread author strongly dislikes the new translation - be that as it may, author seems a bit biased tbh. But the thread has images of the same passage from multiple translations. It is interesting to see the differences! The oral tradition roots of these texts makes translating them for modern readers a challenge. Reli…
"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#10Tangentially, I'd like to just plug the translations Robert Fitzgerald made of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1960s and 70s. Your experience of these books will very much come down to the translation you choose. In America at least, his are not the most commonly found in the classics section of a bookstore. I'm told he plays a bit loose with Homer's word choice (I don't read Ancient Greek), but personally I don't mind. Pasternak, when reproached for his loose translation Shakespeare, responded: "Who cares? We're both geniuses."