Callimachus: The Nerd of Alexandria

 After the completion of the Oedipus at Colonus, the group chose to take an 'interregnum' before starting the Hippolytus of Euripides. In this period the group is studying Callimachus' Epigrams. This involves a changes in meter and in dialect. For more than a thousand lines, the meter has been iambic trimeter admixed with the complex yet partly predictable meters of the Chorus. The meter of epigrams, however, is elegiac couplet, a topic which this blog has addressed in previous posts. For those who might not be familiar with the elegiac couplet in Greek literature, it might be best compared to a limerick - a poem of predictable pattern but not constrained to the frivolity of the latter. A couplet, as one might guess from the name, has two lines. The first is a dactylic hexameter similar to that of epic poetry. The second is a pair of two and a half feet, of which the second must be two dactyls and the beginning of a foot. That consistency drives home the identity of the couplet as a unit. The end of the unit must reinforce the nature of the poetry. In longer works, such as epic poetry, extending to hundreds or thousands of lines, there may be exceptions; but if there were such in a poem of six lines, the irregularity could be construed as poor composition. 

The matter of length raises a different matter: the form is called a couplet because it is short. The minimum length of a couplet is two lines. There is no specific maximum length, but the form implies brevity, especially in the Callimachean school of aesthetics, where a big book is a bad book. This limitation of space drives a further phenomenon, that of the hapax legomenon. There is less room for description in a shorter form of poetry, nor does Callimachus deem it desirable, so references must be brief and potent. A word or phrase in such poetry invokes an entire scene of Homer or Hesiod. Critically, this invocation only works if the audience has what one would call today media literacy. The circumstances in the epigram may be different in way subtle or gross from the passage so invoked, but this method only works if the original source is known. There was no annotated Aeschylus in the era of Callimachus!

The other change is that of dialect. For those who start Greek from Attic, which is most learners, they may know the rule about etas and alphas after vowel and rho, but they may not realize that Attic's rule is a sign of incomplete linguistic change which the Ionic dialect fulfilled (whether or not Zeus was involved). It is a minor difference which does not affect meter. The next difference does affect meter. The adjective for singular you in Attic is 'sos'. In Ionic it is 'teos'. Even without extensive linguistic training, it is easy to note that the first is one syllable, while the second is two. In a meter as constricted as elegiac couplet, this difference has an oversize impact. The first may be short or long and therefore combined with a suitable element as the poet desires, but the second must be a pyrrhic if the second syllable is short and an iamb if the second syllable is long. In The Ionic option, that means one syllable of flexibility down!

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: The Anti-Iliad

 Recently our Greek group finished reading Oedipus at Colonus, the last, posthumously produced, play of the tragedian Sophocles of Colonus (this is the famous Sophocles, but the specification is relevant here). The 'trilogy' of Theban plays known today is not a true trilogy, but rather three individual plays from three trilogies from a tragedian who has a deep attachment to the Theban Cycle. Not only are these plays separate, but it is impossible to tell for certain where they fit into the cycles of their respective trilogies. 

One may, nonetheless, form opinions about such matters. It seems likely that the Oedipus at Colonus is the last of its trilogy. The correspondence of the agedness of the protagonist and the playwright, who fittingly did not live to see the premier performance, is one piece of evidence. The Oedipus at Colonus is also heavy on the talking, even for a Greek tragedy. The choice of protagonist and setting, in the Grove of the Kindly Ones forces the other characters to come to Oedipus rather than mingling freely. Each of Oedipus' male relatives come to him as petitioners as if he were already apotheosized. Oedipus fills the prophetic role usually reserved for Tiresias in Theban material. Oedipus undergoes apotheosis at the end, thereby removing himself from any following plays - this apotheosis prompted one of our group to describe the Oedipus at Colonus as the anti-Iliad, since Achilles' arc in that work involves his realization that, no matter how mighty he is, no matter his lineage, he is nonetheless mortal. Oedipus, in contrast, becomes more and more aloof from mortal concerns as the Oedipus at Colonus continues, culminating in his ascent in status to a hero cult, the level accorded to those below the falling angel and above the rising ape. The details surrounding this apotheosis are not always clear in their symbolism, but this is to be expected of a ritual which ends a play that frequently enjoins reverent silence. 

One could argue that the many speeches of Theban partisans in the Oedipus at Colonus are a way of setting up the conflicts and this is therefore the first of its trilogy. In that case, the shadow of the Colonus would hang over the participants in the coming war. This is less likely than the above for two reasons. The first is that Sophocles had already written the angry aftermath of conflict in Antigone, the earliest of his extant Theban plays. The more mature approach of Oedipus Tyrannus, the chronologically middle play, suggests that Sophocles, as playwright, was writing the plays according to his aging and increase in understanding rather than the internal chronological order of the Theban Cycle. The last trilogy, therefore, would focus on the last days of Oedipus just as Sophocles is declining, although perhaps not as much as his sons and heirs might wish. The second reason is that Sophocles is a Colonus lad himself, possessing a great interest in the cycle around the hero. The other two surviving plays are set at Thebes, but the shrine is at Colonus. The playwright's last work should end where he began.

Space Odyssey (SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 - and some TNG)

 In Star Trek:Picard, many veterans of the TNG era returned, including Riker and Deanna Troi. The series is set decades later, and Riker and Troi are married and have a daughter Kendra, named after the daughter that Troi's mother had lost and never mentioned until the episode of TNG in which she did mention it. The Rikers lost a son instead of a daughter on the frontier planet Nepenthe.

The name of the planet, however, is the key to the Classical connection. Although the name Nepenthe appears to be merely conforming to the classic science fiction trope of naming planet with Classical Greco-Roman names, there are deeper connections. 

The name Nepenthe means 'no sorrow', a appropriate name for a planet where parents are trying to heal, but nepenthe is also the name of a drug in Homer's Odyssey when Telemachus, son of Odysseus, goes to Sparta to meet with Menelaus and Helen (who also have a daughter, Hermione) to seek information about his father. Menelaus and Helen welcome him. At the feast, however, Helen slips the drug nepenthe into Menelaus' cup to ease the burden of his memories. Menelaus, in modern terms, has PTSD from the Trojan war. The Greek word pharmaka refers to drugs both used for healing as well as more nefarious purposes. Both Helen and Deanna are skilled healers with a daughter (Hermione, Kendra) and a husband who was second in the command structure (Menelaus, Riker). Helen drugs her husband with nepenthe, while Deanna psychically removes her husband's emotional burden on the planet Nepenthe. In neither case is consent considered despite both women's history of enduring rape, in both the abduction and the violation sense; and it is hard to overlook that the science fictional woman is named Troi!

The Premature Journey of Jason, Son of Aeson

The following may be misanalysis according to those wiser than myself, but ask yourself this: how much misanalysis or reanalysis has been the source of new creativity? The story and backstory of Jason would not have reached such complexity if variatio were not a tool of the storyteller and the storytold

My obsession with Jason has resurfaced (appropriately for the topic of this post), something which either started with Euripides' Medea, or Pythian 4 - Pindar is one hell of a pharmaka! The trajectory of Jason has the trappings of  formal hero's journey yet he fails in critical ways. Although the etymological data is fascinating, I believe I have identified a larger potential problem with Jason's hero's journey - namely, that he underwent catabasis, the transformative experience of descending to the underworld and returning transformed, prematurely. According to Pythian 4, Aeson of Iolcus, whose name means 'rightly ruling', was overthrown by his half brother Pelias for reasons that we need not explore further here. The upshot of this usurpation was Jason's secret birth. It's important to realize that he was not named Jason at birth; Chiron, the immortal Centaur, divine physician, and trainer to heroes, bestowed that name. Before Chiron received him, however, the household of the deposed king feigned funeral customs over the live baby so that Pelias or his spies would believe that there had been a stillbirth. The baby then passed into the hands of Chiron, who named him Jason. In Greek, 'Jason' means 'the one who will heal' or perhaps 'the one who comes to heal' because the future participle in Greek indicates not just futurity but intention. In this situation, one might think that Jason is primed to become the young hero, the true heir to the kingdom, and that there are, at least not yet, no dark aspects to the legend. There is an aspect that I had not yet considered, and perhaps this applies to all lost princes and true heirs. The catabasis is transformative for the hero not only because he survives it but because he can process it. This processing is not available to a babe. By undergoing the catabasis at that stage of life, there is no possibility of consciously remembering the trauma, but only unconscious warping. The other effect of this journey, on a dramatic level, is that the hero has achieved the hero's journey, however faulty. Once the epic hero has completed his journey to the heights of glory, there is a possibility of falling from those heights. This opens new narrative paths for the storyteller; some heroes rise above yet another challenge, but Jason does not. Jason retrieves the Golden Fleece and returns to Iolcus, but he neither retrieves his kingdom nor kills the usurper Pelias himself. He fails in the intention of his very name! This failure could be the result of an incomplete completion of the hero's journey.

Dulce Et Decorum Est: the Homeric Hymn to Ares

 In the Homeric Hymns the Hymn to Ares is a rebuttal to the notion in popular media that Ares is incompetent, amoral, or evil. This Hymn, on the other hand, is a warrior's prayer for courage and discipline in battle and preferably no need to go to war in the first place. The initial lines of the Hymn are a list of complimentary epithets. Such a list is a common feature of the beginning of Homeric Hymns and often a primary component of abbreviated Hymns. I wonder, therefore, if such introductions were not pedagogical tool for memorizing the appropriate epithets. In contemporary times, the line "immortal, invisible, god only wise" is virtually unforgettable. These epithets could further provide an inspiration for the poet to fill the space between the invocation and the missa est, either with a known tale or a tale of his own invention appropriate to the god and rendered unverifiable by attribution to a distant region. A contemporary example of the former could be the responses before and after the Gospel, which in liturgical traditions is determined by a lectionary; an example of the latter could be the Prayers of the People, which contains sufficient flexibility to include quotidian concerns.

Et In Arcadia Nos: The Hymn to Hermes and the Hymn to Pan

        The overall structure of the Hymns to Pan and Hermes are parallel; the comparisons serve as a scaffold to highlight the contrasts, Both exist within the framework of a Homeric hymn and therefore introduce a god from his birth and highlight at least one story associated with him. The structure of these two Hymns, however, is carefully parallel in cast and plot: the cast consists of a father, a mother, a divine baby, a god who takes the baby to Olympus, and Zeus, either alone or in council. The plot is as follows: the father 'mingles in love' with the mother; the mother gives birth to the baby; the baby displays divine characteristics; a god transports the baby to Olympus; the baby is accepted by the gods and gains a "Big Brother" among the Olympians.

        The similarities should be addressed first, so that the contrasts may be better understood. The conception and parturition of each god is couched in similar verbs of birthing and accomplishment of goals. Each god immediately displays characteristic powers: the art and invention of Hermes and the startling power of Pan. The action around the babies is characterized by swiftness: Hermes' motions and sojourns are described with many phrases denoting fleetness; the Hymn to Pan, because it is much shorter, incorporates more fleetness into the syntax and prosody than the extant vocabulary. Apollo brings baby Hermes to the throne of Zeus, while Hermes brings baby Pan to the council of immortals of which Zeus is the head. Both babies are ultimately accepted as gods (although Pan is not an Olympian) and both acquire a Big Brother among older immortals - Apollo in the case of Hermes and Dionysus in the case of Pan.

        The contrasts between the Hymns are many. The preconception, conception, and birth of Hermes use an extensive vocabulary of secrecy. Maia is a loner whom Zeus meets at night specifically when Hera is asleep. The grown Hermes, in contrast, has a wedding, a public event, to the daughter of Dryops. The here unnamed daughter of Dryops, perhaps Penelope (but not that Penelope), bears Pan in a palace, rather than the cave in which Maia gave birth - even if that cave was akin to a Gilded Age cottage! The onomastic patterns of the mother and the father also contrast: Maia in the Hymn to Hermes is a daughter of the otherwise unknown Megameidas and frequently appears by name in two declensions, while the mother of Pan remains unnamed save for her patronymic. Hermes, once he is born, is a classically beautiful god, whom Maia places in vain in his cradle; Pan frightens his mother so much that she immediately flees after she has borne him because she is afraid of his unlovely face and prematurely bearded appearance. The daughter of Dryops' increased vulnerability to the power of a god may be due to her potential mortal status: nymphe may refer to an immortal young woman or an ordinary mortal bride. Hermes, although he is a god, consorts with mortal shepherds such as Dryops, son of Apollo, Hermes' BFF. Perhaps, though, giving birth to the Arcadian Jersey Devil would throw off anyone, mortal and immortal alike. The way in which baby Hermes and Pan display their precocious adulthood also differs: Hermes remains a baby in size but indulges in adult activities such reiving, so much so that Apollo deems him competent for trial, whereas Pan displays adult features but has the characteristic lack of agency of a day old baby. This may be why the introductory segment of the Hymn to Pan where he is an adult is about the same length as the story of baby Pan panicking his mothers - the adult behavior necessary to characterize Pan is displaced to a portion where such behavior can be covered. 

        Baby Hermes' first trip to Olympus is as a prisoner for crimes which he has indeed committed, but Pan's first visit is a formal presentation. The gods who choose to act as Big Brothers to each baby also contrast. Apollo, as a god who values order, is a brake to Hermes' relatively chaotic nature, while Dionysus is an enabler to Pan's rustic partying. The humor in each Hymn is appropriate to the god: Hermes' humor may be occasionally crude but is always clever, while that of Pan is the world's worst game of peek-a-boo. The role of mortals in the Hymn to Hermes is extensive if secondary to that of the gods - the Old Man of Onchestus receives two divine visitations - but the roe of mortals in the Hymn to Pan, although mandatory due to Hermes' affiliation with mortals and immortals alike per his own Hymn, is reduced and backgrounded.

        The points covered above are by no means the entirety of the comparisons and contrasts between the Hymn to Hermes and the Hymn to Pan, but they are sufficient to demonstrate the interrelationship between the texts. This is particularly relevant if the Hymn to Pan is a later response to the older (but not much older) Hymn to Hermes. The study of these two Hymns would benefit from further examination of their shared vocabulary and even etymology.

Primary Sources (Greek first, English second)

Hymn to Hermes

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0137%3Ahymn%3D4

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D4

Hymn to Pan

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0137%3Ahymn%3D19

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D19

A Hydrography of Words (Muta cum Liquida secundum linguam Graecam)

 When I was a lad, I learned a rule about length in metrical poetry called muta cum liquida, wherein the first category of consonants followed by the second could be considered long or short, depending on the needs of the poet. These terms are are no longer as useful as they once were, even to literates - the former is obsolete, while the latter appropriately has changed its shoreline. The modern meaning of 'liquid' is restricted to lambda and rho, but the older meaning encompassed nasals, mu and nu. A more nuanced understanding is not that the vowel before these consonants may be long and short, but that the short vowels may be lengthened. This revelation enables further nuance: the voiceless consonants of Greek display the fluidity of this rule, but the voiced consonants delta and gamma do not admit it. Beta is omitted, perhaps because it is more likely to assimilate to the following nasals. A potential reason for delta and gamma to deny this variability is that vowels, even short ones, are ever so slightly lengthened before a voiced consonant; this lengthening is enough (in Greek) to create an impediment. Such incomplete transitions are common among languages and go a long way to creating their individual flavors.

The Clever Old Man, Part II: Immortal Gods and Mortal Men

 The Old Man and Zeus are the apices of the "age triangle" in the Hymn to Hermes, The "age triangle" is the trinity of persons necessary to exploring the concept of time within the Hymn. Hermes and Apollo represent new birth and flourishing youth, respectively, but the apex of the triangle must be occupied by an old man, or at least a mature one past the prime of youth. The singer of the Hymn insists the Hermes' activities pertain to both mortals and immortals; Apollo, while not so deeply involved, spends a substantial time on Earth rather than Olympus. The two brothers are so intimately linked that they recieve a mutual epithet: "the very beautiful children." The immortality of the youth and the babe with the power is non-negotiable, forcing the distinction in mortality upon the position of the Elder.; thus the Old Man and Zeus are separate characters.  The appearances of Zeus and the Old Man form a chiastic structure: Zeus is first and last, as befits an immortal, while the Old Man's two appearances are in between. This return to the beginning is a characteristic of epic (here, some might say mock-epic) composition. Whereas Zeus establishes the cosmic arrangement that Hermes and Apollo are literal BFFs, the Old Man represents the mortal, cyclical arrangement of the three Ages of Man. He first meets the Babe, literally born today; next he encounters the Youth; he himself represents Eld, so there is no need for a third encounter. His scope of movement is limited to his plot of land, while the protagonist and antagonist travel the breadth of Greece in pursuit of cattle. The Old Man is also temporally limited by virtue of his mortality: he is old, but the plants he is preparing are very young, younger even than the divine baby Hermes who comments on them. The fruits of the vineyard rise from the earth; yet when the Old Man dies, he will return to the earth. The god who will escort him to the Underworld is Hermes in his role as psychopomp, thereby linking dearh and life in a never-ending cycle.

Zeus' role as the immortal apex involves telic motion rather than cyclical.  He begets Hermes in the beginning of the Hymn, accomplishing his goal. This goal is a pregnancy and a parturition, but the completion of the Twelve Olympians by Hermes' existence, at least in this Hymn, suggests that the will of Zeus is more comprehensive than "mingling in love" with a random goddess. In the latter part of the Hymn, Zeus arbitrates between his two sons by virtue of paternal authority, although he favors Hermes. The judgment and the oaths lock the cosmic "age triangle" into a principle, while the mortal form serves as a guide to mortals who dwell upon the wide earth. Zeus is in Heaven, but the Old Man is who mortals can become.

The Clever Old Man: An Essay on The Hymn to Hermes

 The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is sometimes placed in time between the more serious hymns and the satirical Battle of the Frogs and the Mice. It certainly leans towards a folkloric content while maintaining the format of its more sober brethren! Yet one of the features of epic structure is its flexibility - episodes may be expanded, contracted, or omitted depending on the whims of the audience and performer or broad time restrictions. Shorter and longer Hymns appear within this corpus. In Homeric Hymn 4, the longer and better-known Hymn to Hermes, the interactions of Hermes and Apollo with the Old Man are brief, since the Hymn is about Hermes and Apollo rather than Hermes and mortals; yet the Old Man is the only mortal featured, and the Hymn is insistent on the relationship of Hermes to both immortal gods and mortal Men. If Hermes possesses such important ties to mortals, the Old Man is the only mortal with whom he has any relationship within the Hymn. The Old Man's interaction with Hermes and Apollo, therefore, warrants examination. 

Hermes' interaction with the Old Man is brief; how threatening Hermes' speech is depends on one's perspective, but it is certain that Hermes has instructed the Old Man to pretend he did not see nor hear the things he saw and heard. In many contexts, that would be an instruction to lie, an extraordinary and impossible demand when the Old Man's next encounter with a god is one with the god of prophecy! Yet there is one specific place where falsehood and truth are so bound that one could tread the middle path between the two: a court of law. The interaction between Hermes and Apollo, after all, is a legal comedy. The Greek word used to describe Hermes' account of his actions before the throne of Zeus, the god of oaths as well as the father of the litigants, is not 'alethia', the more common word for truth, but rather 'atrekeos', the meaning of which is more closely 'technically correct'. This meaning of truth is consistent with the Old Man's reply to Apollo's interrogation: the Old Man reveals to Apollo his interaction with Hermes but only claims to have to seemed to see it: a day-old baby driving cattle backwards with Hellenic snowshoes is so surprising that one might well assume it was a hallucination. Many gods would be displeased by this betrayal, but Hermes, as a god of prevarication and precocious cleverness, might admire the quickness of such a mortal. The Old Man's fate is not revealed in the Hymn because this Hymn is about gods rather than Men. Yet in a version of Hermes' deeds in a less high register, one in which the role of Hermes as guide of Men took precedence over Olympian sibling rivalry, the Old Man's role would become pivotal.

The key lies in the exact word Apollo uses when he asks the Old Man if he has seen anyone rustling his cattle: he uses the word 'anera'. This term means either 'mortal', as in 'King of Men and Gods' or 'adult male'. In casual speech, the difference between 'anera' and 'tina' 'who' would be trivial, but this is a legal comedy, and in legal matters much that is trivial elsewhere attains significance. When Apollo asks the Old Man whether he has seen an 'anera', the Old Man can answer in the negative because Hermes is not a mortal nor is he an adult male. This level of semantics is not unique to the origin of Hermes: Apollo, who is consistently referred to as 'son of Leto' in the Hymn, was born on a floating island due to Hera's restrictions on Leto's place of parturition, while Zeus was hidden in a cradle hung from the ceiling so that he was technically neither in heaven nor on earth nor in the sea. The Old Man, in order to keep up with the gods of the Hymn, must operate on a commensurate level. 

A focus on the Old Man in the Hymn to Hermes is inconsistent with the general structure of the Homeric Hymns, which privilege the experiences of immortals. This privilege obscures the importance of the Old Man to the Hymn and his potential centrality to a telling of the story in a less elevated register. The framing of the Hymn as a legal comedy restores this element, or, if the material was lowbrow in origin, preserves some small portion in the august halls of Homeric epic.

Dionysus, Semele, Bromius

 The anapest is a metrical foot that not only reflects its own nature of two shorts and a long, but also matches the initial syllables of the names of the Bacchic cult. Both Dionysus and Semele form anapests, as does Bromius, the most common appellation of Dionysus, under common metric conditions. Admittedly, Bacchius does not form an anapest. The question then arises: does meter dictate the names or do the names guide the meter, or is it a matter of reciprocity? Are there instrumental factors of which we are no longer aware? 

Heaven and Earth

 A feature of the myth of Dionysus which is likely to escape non-etymologists is the origin of the name Semele. Semele is an adaptation of the Thracian Earth goddess Zemele, cognate with the Greek word khthon, although it is not surprising the Greeks, hobbled by prejudice and the infant science of etymology, would not recognize it as such. Not only did the Thracian language lack the aspirated consonants (kh, th, ph) of Ancient Greek, but it was also a satem-language whereas Greek was a centum-language. This difference caused the sound which developed into kh in Greek to become z in Thracian. If Semele is Zemele, not a mortal but a god, then the union of Zeus and Semele is not a forbidden liaison between divine and mortal, but a union between heaven and earth, and Semele is the peer of Rhea or Demeter in the Bacchic rites by nature not merely by apotheosis.

Two and Half Feet in an Elegiac Trenchcoat

 In preparing for the June sampler of the Greek group, I was reminded how the second part of the elegiac couplet, the dactylic pentameter, resembles its lankier predecessor not so much as a younger sibling as much as a burn victim whose skin has been removed from one area to patch another, a Frankenstein of metrical composition. The dactylic hexameter is a well-behaved meter, rarely breaking its structure for moments of deep pathos or extraordinary gravity; the iambic pentameter, however, rather than losing a foot before the final spondee, amputates the spondee in order to graft a long syllable as the second-and-a-half foot, while extending the rigidity of the final dactyl and spondee (despondent for its other half?) to the entire latter half of the line. The iambic pentameter is a pair of two-and-half dactyls (Idaean or Cretan, they are always male) masquerading as a longer line.

If we switch to a more sober frame of mind, like the Medes upon the eve of a great decision, the hemiepes (for that is its name) is a more rational construction, although one would still think that half an epes (dactylic hexameter) would have three full feet. The elimination of the dibrach (two shorts) after the long is suggestive of the principle of brevis in longo, whereby even a syllable short in prose is treated as long at the end of the line; the dissonance comes from the two hemiepes (is the plural hemiepeis?) united in one line, thereby stranding what would have been a final syllable displaying brevis in longo as an orphaned syllable before the caesura. There are two explanation I can think for this. The first, closer to epic, is that the caesura in epes often falls after the first (long) syllable of the third foot, and therefore is the appropriate place for bisecting the meter; the second, closer to lyric, is that a three-line stanza of an epes and two hemiepes would not admit sufficient flexibility in the second line. I am inclined toward the former, if only because a half line with the caesura after the first short of the third foot of a dactylic hexameter would be subject to brevis in longo and therefore result in a half line indistinguishable from the latter half of a dactylic hexameter. But the resolution (pun intended) of this question admits of diverse answers.

Island in the Sea of Time

Snake Island, the island off the Romanian coast from which the Ukrainian soldiers shouted words as vociferous, if not as grandiose as some Laconic words of defiance has a history stretching back into the Greek myths. Upon this island lay the temple of Achilles, where now the lighthouse stands; on its model the Greeks constructed Elysium; on these shores Circe (in some accounts) absolved her niece Medea of the murder of her brother Absyrtus (whose resemblance to Abzu, the watery consort of Tiamat, does not pass unnoticed). Pindar's Olympic Ode 2 mentions the Tower of Kronos in the Islands of Blest. If any island should represent the ghosts and sorrows of war, it is this island. 

Alis in Waunderland

 I’ve been reading Pindar’s Olympian Ode 1. Every ode has a victor which it celebrates and almost every ode has a mythological antecedent. The Olympic victor here is Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, while the mythological antecedent is Pelops, son of Tantalus. The story which Pindar tells about Pelops is different from the usual tale; but Pelops returns to the mortal realm either way. Once Pelops is growing into a young man, he needs to find a bride, so he decides to enter the contest for the hand of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus of Pisa, a city near Olympia. The successful suitor receives Hippodamia as a bride; the unsuccessful suitors receive death, because myth never does anything halfway. Pisa and Olympia are in the land of Elis, or at least that is how the Attic Greek of Athens would render it. In the Ode, which is written in the Doric Greek of Thebes, the land is Alis, showing the long alpha for eta correspondence used (and sometimes abused) in certain parts of Greek poetry. In the land of Elis (or Alis) itself, the Doric Greek dialect is yet more archaic: it retains the digamma or wau lost in more rapidly developing dialects, and therefore Elis in Elean Greek is Walis or Valis (the digamma is sometimes rendered as beta in Greek which lacks it). This name, as speakers of Latin might notice, means ‘valley’ or ‘hollow’, which makes the subdistrict of Hollow Elis a Torpenhow Hill or Caermarthen Castle. The land, therefore, in which the Olympics occurred shares a name with a Swiss canton because humans are not very imaginative when it comes to naming things – the name Pisa is basically Las Vegas.

Now For An Epenthetic Remark ...

 As much as I love terminology, there are times when I feel that perhaps, just perhaps, scholars have gone overboard with splitting hairs (that metaphor was a malaphor with intent). Such is the case of the terminology around epenthesis. When two consonants or vowels love each other very much, but it would not be appropriate for them to conjugate, they must make room for the holy spirit, and this process is called epenthesis. Epenthesis applies to the insertion of the consonant or vowel between the sounds, but there is the possibility of being more specific, or perhaps pedantic. If it is a vowel, it is anaptyxis (Gesundheit!); if it is a consonant, it is excrescence (gross!). 

If we set aside for now the minor sin of mixing Latin and Greek terminology, an examination of the etymology of each term reveals different conceptions of the process. Epenthesis is the insertion (note the -en- of epenthesis) of a sound, and therefore a letter (in this context). Anaptyxis is the opening of a space for that sound. Excrescence is the growth of a sound between the adjacent sounds. Thus the process as viewed from anaptyxis and epenthesis is a process of forcible opening and insertion, but process as seen from excrescence is a natural growth in a space which must be occupied. All three terms are useful, but in a practical context of finishing one's assigned reading for the week, epenthesis suffices.

Take My Home, Take My An(a)-, Make It So I Cannot (Under)stand

Prepositional prefixes beyond the Attic pale often lose their final vowel. This causes the consonant to assimilate to the consonant of the verb root; thus anaphanen becomes amphanen once the nu makes contact with the phi. In the case of anamimnesko, however, the loss of the vowel can be catastrophic. The root here is mna with reduplication and suffix -sk- in the present tense alone. Neither reduplication nor the continuous suffix apply to the aorist, so anamnase becomes the unpronounceable anmnase. This is further reduced to amnase, which form now clashes with the alpha privative. If it were the alpha privative, it would have the opposite sense – both a catastrophe and an antistrophe. It is fortunate, therefore, that the preferred word for forgetfulness is lethe rather than amnesia!

Doubling Down: The Reduplication that Europeans Do Not See

Reduplication is a linguistic phenomenon so basic that it is found throughout the world, except in Europe. When, therefore, the Europeans spread across the world in conquest, encountering new languages which possessed this feature and triggering the creation of new languages which used this basic tool of communication, they scorned it; but this disdain required willful blindness on the part of the more educated Europeans to the existence of partial reduplication in one language that they elevated above all others: Greek. In some instances, where the ravages of time and the desperation of analogical repair had worn away the surface pattern, this blindness could be forgiven; in many cases, however, the reduplication was a clear and present feature. The history of the Indo-European languages in Europe was, in part, a process of systematically removing this reduplication, but in Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, it still remained, and those were tongues which the elites of Europe held in reverence. In Latin reduplication remained only in the perfect tense as an increasingly archaic and non-productive feature; in Greek, however, reduplication was the principal method by which the perfect was created, while reduplication in the present was non-productive. Since the fact of reduplication indicates a primary segment from which the reduplicated segment is taken, the reduplicated segment is almost always simplified, although the details of that simplification varies according to the language. If the simplification of European languages had been a laudable quality, the European point of view might have been consistent, but it was the complexity of Latin and Greek that was admired. Thus, logically, the complexity of foreign tongues should have been admired instead of suffering disdain.

The more change-oriented among my readers may see a lesson in this; I merely offer it as an observation.

Looking Backward: A Tale of Tmesis

The delights of digital tools are manifold, but one area in which they fail is the phenomenon of tmesis, whereby a prefix normally attached to a verb is separated, sometimes at a considerable distance due to the non-configurational nature of Greek, and thus the unwary may be led to the wrong dictionary entry. This separation, this cutting off, is an illusion, not just in translation, but in origin. It was quite logical for the Greeks who first observed this feature to call it a cutting off, a lobotomy of an intact word, for they were looking backward and needed merely a descriptive term rather than an analytical one. The science of philology was millennia away.

The true nature of the phenomenon, however, was not one of cutting, but of grafting. In earlier days, the adverb or preposition could float, and only gradually became attached to the verb. This is why some verbs could be modified by prepositional phrases, while others, to which the prefix was appended, governed cases other than the expected case. Some barbarian tongues, such as German, left this process conspicously incomplete; thus this process should be called thesis, not tmesis, but the cruel mistress of convention had established a false analysis as the official term.

The Words We Leave Behind

 A feature of the Pindaric realm, the epinician genre, is the double use of grammatical components and its corollary, the absence of words that would not have been absent in a prosaic work. The complex meter demands such compromises. This absence works best when the audience is so familiar with the story presented that it perceives the new text as an alternate presentation rather than a novelty. A problem, arises, therefore, when the audience receiving is no longer the audience originally intended to receive; and even more so when the primary language of that audience is not the language of the work.

This phenomenon, however, is not unfamiliar to contemporary consumers of media. Movie adaptations of popular franchises often depend on the audience's knowledge of the book series and therefore feel at liberty to discard scenes that convey critical information to those who have not read the books and are merely accompanying their progeny or sweetheart to the cinema. The consumer intimately familiar with the work may not realize how deficient these lacunae can be to their companion, and perhaps even become angry when they fail to appreciate the genius of their literary god. From the perspective of the companion, however, this low esteem for the film is appropriate; the cinematographers have failed to create a coherent narrative in service of spectacle.

A Sorrowful and Epitrite Heart

 The group has embarked upon reading Pindar Pythian 4 as a thematically appropriate work after reading Euripides' Medea. Pindar dwells on happier days, although there is an exile in the Ode. To say that the meter of Pindar is challenging would be an understatement, and scholars of previous generations had difficulty determining the lines. Their suffering, however, has brought wisdom to later generations.

Most classicists are trained on dactylic hexameter, iambic trimeter, and elegiac couplets, with the meter of the chorus often provided in the back of the text (assuming the text is not hopelessly corrupt). Other meters can be painful to learn and even passed over in the need to complete the lines assigned. Recitation is not as common as it once was.

The meter of Pythian 4 is dactylo-epitritic, which no doubt has a high morbidity rate. Dactyls are familiar to virtually all classicists, although in this case the dactyls are doubled and extended into a series long-short-short-long-short-short-long (a hemipes). Epitrite, which might also be a parasitic plant, is a specific kind of foot, but varies more than feet of two or three syllables. It is common for tetrasyllabic feet to vary in a specified way: once the foot is of this length, perhaps it is no longer productive (pace Latine loquentibus) to give individual names beyond the ordinal. The epitrite is a tetrasyllable in which one syllable must be short and the others long, much like desperate sailors at sea. The combination of this foot with the hemipes, along with variations, produce some long lines compared to epic or tragedy.