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
There are four more sections in the chapter, and these constitute the next reading: 7 the public realm: the common; 8 the private realm: property; 9 the social and the private; 10 the location of human activities.
Beşiktaş, February 15, 2022
Oku = “Read” (second-person singular imperative)
A significant passage in this reading lies on page 42 (¶ 6.9):
… the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the wilful obliteration of their very subject matter.
My post “Law and History” took up something like this argument. Continue reading
We are reading now Book II of Plato’s Republic, Stephanus pages 357–83, covering:
Dog with copy of Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic:
A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue, 2012
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey, September 2, 2021
In reading his rendition of the Iliad, having enjoyed hearing Chapman speak out loud and bold;
having enjoyed writing here about each book, particularly the last ten books in ten days on an Aegean beach in September of this year (2019);
having taken the name of this blog from the first line of the Odyssey;
having obtained, from Homer Books here in Istanbul, Emily Wilson’s recent translation (New York: Norton, 2018);
Achilles is found singing to a lyre, in a passage of Book IX of the Iliad. Homer sets the scene in five dactylic hexameters; George Chapman translates them into four couplets of fourteeners.
I wrote a post about each book of the Iliad, in Chapman’s version of 1611. As I said at the end, I look forward to reading Emily Wilson’s version. Meanwhile, here I examine the vignette of the lyre in several existing English translations, as well as in the original.
We may speculate, and it is interesting that we do speculate, because I think the questions do not ultimately make sense—not the sense that seems to be intended anyway, whereby something can be got for nothing.
View from Şavşat
Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad
When Neptune was helping the Greeks stave off certain defeat, I tried to suggest that divine intervention in the course of events might be understood as human resolve to change that course. This was in Book XIII of the Iliad, where Neptune took the form of one of the Greeks—Calchas—in order to exhort the others. They would have listened to Calchas anyway; he was a prophet. Ajax Oileus said he could tell Calchas was “really” a god; we can read this to mean Calchas was inspiring. We can say this of somebody today, without meaning to suggest any supernatural influence.
Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad
Of my posts on the Iliad, this may be the one that I return to the most. I originally began with Chapman’s four-line “Argument”; however, his two-line “Other Argument” now serves better:
Iota sings the Ambassie,
And great Achilles sterne replie.
The stern reply is that Achilles will not fight, and his mind will not be changed by material gifts. Agamemnon has violated the “general laws of virtue,” according to lines 610–9 (of which I originally quoted all but the first two):
This is the first of twenty-four posts, one on each book of Homer’s Iliad in Chapman’s translation.
“Achilles banefull wrath” is to be resounded by the Goddess, whom the poet invokes.
Strife between Achilles and Agamemnon is the story of the Iliad. It begins with Apollo, who has plagued the Greek army.
Homer denies no human responsibility. Apollo has plagued the army, because Agamemnon insists on keeping a man’s daughter as his slave. The woman’s father is a priest of Apollo called Chryses; we shall come to know the daughter’s name only as Chryseis. She has been taken in a Greek raid on her home town, which will be called Chrysa. We shall hear more about the raid later in Book I, when Achilles tells the story to his mother.
Thus Homer’s narrative is not sequential. In a technique that will become standard in literature, we start in medias res.
Polytropy 