The Trojans are watching, lest the Achaeans sail away in the night. Achilles is staying in his own camp. As we open Book X of the Iliad, Agamemnon cannot sleep. He worries, not just about the Trojans, but about whether his own men are properly worried.
One of two men I found swimming near Kireçburnu
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Sunday, New Year’s Day, 2023
I could have called this post “Democracy versus Autocracy.”
Four pigeons and a cat
Tarabya Bayır Caddesi / Yücelevler Sokağı
(We live in the development behind the retaining wall)
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday morning, January 4, 2023
On the day recounted in Book VIII of the Iliad,
I wrote a fuller summary in 2017. Because I was reading it, I also talked about Huysmans, Against Nature, and the belief of the main character that the prose poem could
contain within its small compass, like beef essence, the power of a novel, while eliminating its tedious analyses and superfluous descriptions.
Now I shall find reason to bring up Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, and Freud, and especially William James and Collingwood on the subject of emotion.
Waters of the Bosphorus, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday morning, January 11, 2023
Book VII of the Iliad shows us the paradox of men at war who can still work together.
Cock and cat on a village street
near a stream channelled between concrete walls
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Tarabya Marina, Sarıyer, Istanbul
January 1, 2023
“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity,” says Glaucus to Diomedes in the Iliad (Book VI, line 146, in Lattimore’s translation). However, leaves are normally considered biologically; humanity, historically. I touched on the distinction in the previous post; now I want to say more. I shall be looking again at R.G. Collingwood’s notion of biological history as a kind of mistake. Continue reading
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Friday, December 30, 2022
Creative destruction
Arpa Suyu Sokağı, Şişli, Istanbul
Thursday, December 22, 2022
In Book V of the Iliad, the battlefield deaths that started in Book IV continue. Some of them are caused by Diomedes.
Each of us has two biological parents. In my case, those parents are not my real parents, namely the ones who raised me. Nonetheless, according to the theory that everybody seems to accept, including myself, each of us has grown up from a zygote, which was formed by the union of two gametes. Moreover, one of those gametes was an egg cell; the other, a sperm cell. The gametes came from gonads: an ovary and testis, respectively. Ovaries are possessed by females of our species; testes, by males. Being female or male is called sex.
We are also distinguished, when children, as being boys or girls. Boys grow up to be men; girls, women.
It is usually assumed that men are male and women are female. Some of us may insist that this is always so, by definition of the words in question. In that case, I will argue,
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, Istanbul
November 30, 2022
Last time I mentioned what I had remembered most from the Iliad, after reading it in high school: the metaphor in Book VI of humans as leaves dying in the fall, to be replaced by new ones in the spring. I also remembered how often men died at the hands of their fellow men:
Yeniköy (Νιχώρι) on the Bosphorus
Sarıyer, Istanbul, December 11, 2022
The Paphlagonians must have passed by here
on their way to join the Trojans
as they did according to Iliad II.851–5
as mentioned in the Wikipedia article “Cytorus”
created by me in 2010
In Book III of the Iliad, we learn about Menelaus, Paris, Hector, Helen, and Priam. Having learned about Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus in the first two books, now we know all of the players in the following summary of the epic.
Polytropy 