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Recent Posts
Category Archives: Poetry
Emotional Contagion (Iliad VIII)
January 19, 2023 – 6:07 am
On the day recounted in Book VIII of the Iliad,
- on earth, the Achaeans are twice driven behind their new walls;
- during the first rout,
- Odysseus does not hear when Diomedes urges him to come to the aid of Nestor;
- Hector thinks he will be able to burn the Achaean ships and kill all the men;
- Agamemnon prays for mere survival;
- the second time, Hector calls for fires to be lit, lest the Greeks try to escape in the night;
- during the first rout,
- in heaven, Zeus
- weighs out a heavier fate for the Achaeans;
- declares that it shall be so until Achilles is roused by the death of Patroclus;
- warns Hera and Athena not to interfere (though they try to anyway).
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.
On Homer’s Iliad Book VII
January 14, 2023 – 9:25 am
Biological History
January 9, 2023 – 9:39 am
“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
On Homer’s Iliad Book V
December 26, 2022 – 5:58 am
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.
On Homer’s Iliad Book III
December 12, 2022 – 5:23 pm
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.
On Homer’s Iliad Book II
December 4, 2022 – 9:34 pm
As I proposed last time, Achilles performs the greatest act in the Iliad by not killing Agamemnon in Book I. He then takes himself out of the action for a while. We are not going to see him again till Book IX, when he receives the embassy of Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus (chosen by Nestor in lines 168–9).
On Homer’s Iliad Book I
November 29, 2022 – 9:20 am
In Book I of the Iliad, Achilles restrains an impulse to run a sword through Agamemnon.
That may be the greatest act in the whole epic. I say so, having recently completed a reading of Njal’s Saga, which features a lot of impulsive killing. Now I am embarking on the Iliad again, a book at a time. Here I take up Book I and some comparisons with the saga.
I wrote here about Homer’s epic book by book between April, 2017, and September, 2019. I was reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation. In my account of Book I from then, there are details that do not otherwise stand out to me now, when I am reading mainly Murray’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library, and comparisons with Njal’s Saga are in mind.
Sacrifice and Simulation
September 26, 2022 – 11:04 am
Executive summary. An experiment has been performed to detect whether we are living in a simulation. The experiment is to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son. Whatever he does, he breaks a law. Thus there is more to the world than can be understood by natural science.