The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

More specifically concerning: greek

12.06.01

12 June 2001, around 8.17.

More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE; it just shouldn’t be […]

Loxias

21 June 2001, around 12.30.

little bird

21 June 2001, around 12.32.

In the Garden

26 October 2002, around 17.05.

Books take up space, and libraries, being confined by walls, must occasionally weed the shelves of injudicious pamphlets and books unborrowed through the centuries. That this should astonish or dismay comes as something of a surprise. That, however, is not my theme. I would like to return to the metaphor of libraries as gardens. It […]

Codes of Misconduct

5 November 2002, around 16.16.

‘Entrance into the sanctuary is allowed: forty days after the miscarriage of a woman, a dog, or a donkey; forty-one days after sexual intercourse with a virgin; forty-one days after a death in the family; seven days after washing a corpse; three days after entering [the house where a death has occurred?]; three days after […]

Incomplete Associations (Greek)

16 March 2003, around 7.02.

The fragments of Sappho flutter like a silken ribbon caught in thorny centuries.1 Herodotus is the sound of nodding asleep amid the low murmur of unuttered secrets and improbable truths. The dialogues of Plato are a sly glance between clever friends. Thucydides marshals his words, setting them in trim, ordered lines, bristling and iron-edged. The […]

one of the oldest jokes in the book

9 June 2003, around 8.00.

Καππαδόκην ποτ’ ἔχιδνα κακὴ δάκεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ αὐτὴ // κάτθανε γευσαμένη αἵματος ἰοβόλου. A nasty asp once bit a Cappadocian girl; one taste of her arrow-slinging blood, though, and the snake died. —Demodocus (III; 4 B. & D.) Epigrammata Graeca (ed. Page)

An Errant Academic

10 July 2003, around 13.44.

I mentioned Seth Lerer’s Error and the Academic Self more than a month ago and, having finally finished reading it, there are a few more comments I would like to make. To begin, though, with a summary: errô, errare, erravi, erratus – to wander, to go astray, to err. The record of scholarship, particularly of […]

formicae

18 July 2003, around 14.04.

From a review (via A&L Daily) of a biography of Hans-Georg Gadamer (of whom I am as ignorant as a newborn): Was Gadamer really like Socrates? Or did he lack the courage that made the Greek drink poison rather than submit to the mob? Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was […]

poena sine fine

6 August 2003, around 8.05.

After reading Donna Wilson’s Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the ‘Iliad’ (based on the dissertation she prepared for the University of Texas, Austin) the largest question I have for the author concerns her relationship with her father. Her discussion of the character of reparation in the Iliad emphasizes the role of the father in […]

‘could it be J— H— herself?’

9 September 2003, around 13.27.

Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928 Independent lecturer in London, later a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Jane Harrison was author of (among other things): Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion (1903) and Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). She is also one of the few women mentioned in the who’s […]

Crambe repetita (2)

3 November 2003, around 18.00.

Ananias, fr. 4.

Citation (14)

1 December 2003, around 9.29.

the character of a historian.

pedant

4 December 2003, around 10.05.

One of the strangest footnotes I have ever written: On the knee as a seat of power, see Deonna (1939); on the knee as a gathering place for seminal fluids, see Onians (1951): p. 173–86. This lends credence to the theory that one channels the powers beyond when writing, because really, I don’t think I […]

axunesias

9 January 2004, around 15.33.

Μὴ οὖν προδόται γένησθε ὑμῶν αὐτῶν, γενόμενοι δ’ ὅτι ἐγγύτατα τῇ γνώμῃ τοῦ πάσχειν καὶ ὡς πρὸ παντὸς ἂν ἐτιμήσασθε αὐτοὺς χειρώσασθαι, νῦν ἀνταπόδοτε μὴ μαλακισθέντες πρὸς τὸ παρὸν αὐτίκα μηδὲ τοῦ ἐπικρεμασθέντος ποτὲ δεινοῦ ἀμνημονοῦντες. κολάσατε δὲ ἀξίως τούτους τε καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ξυμμάχοις παράδειγμα σαφὲς καταστήσατε, ὃς ἂν ἀφιστῆται, θανάτῳ ζημιωσόμενον. τόδε γὰρ […]

Citation (17)

22 February 2004, around 16.31.

Impossible Object

Citation (18)

8 March 2004, around 8.12.

adventurous students always read classics.

family albums

28 January 2006, around 14.03.

cricket, criticism, & Clytaemnestra

Citation (31)

27 April 2008, around 6.00.

Strabo considers ancient stories about the Armenians…

a glimpse

8 December 2010, around 6.59.

Cowpaths The image occurs to me: Odysseus’ men eating the cattle of the sun; because they are hungry of course. But they do not see that the cattle are sacred, and more to the point, do not belong to them. The word returns to me: νήπιοι. And it felt good to say it.1Which is not […]

Citation (46)

29 June 2012, around 15.16.

on the Greek language.

minatory

24 November 2014, around 12.00.

Neither this nor any of the mines we own in Yugoslavia is being worked for the first time. First the Greeks worked them, and then the Romans; then in the Middle Ages the Serbs brought in the Saxons to work them. Then under the Turks the work stopped, stopped dead, for five centuries, until we […]

what counts

5 April 2017, around 18.44.

The walk to work takes an hour to cover approximately three miles. This is a bit slow, perhaps, but given the uncertain state of draw bridges, traffic signals, and my own ambling pace, it feels about right. It gives me plenty of time to think – about the day ahead, about anything at all. The […]

pseudaphoristica (20)

1 June 2018, around 5.24.

holophrase.

resile

3 November 2023, around 9.13.

‘The Putrefaction of the Flesh of the Dying Emperor Galerius’, about 1413–1415 (Ms. 63, fol. 258) It is a short step from reading about how the early Greek philosophers tried to make sense of the world (and how scholars throughout the ages have tried to make sense of early Greek philosophers) to reading medical texts […]

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