St. Nicholas, Part I: Philosophical Abstractions

Yesterday was a wearying day and I went to sleep fairly late (or, er, early), so though I had set the alarm clock, I turned it off once it rang (the first class began at 8:30) and thus slept through to noon and later.

The kitchen was still in a mess, but all the shopping had been done. I had the Byzantinian folk literature course at 6:15, so for the next couple of hours I read books online and copied out (by hand) a few more lines of Homer in the Greek original.

TO round out my Greek studies and to relieve my guilt for not doing more in that language, I have decided to read the Iliad and translate it in my head. Surprisingly enough we do not have an ancient Greek text of the Iliad itself wherefore I had to turn to an electronic text, and I am writing it out by hand so that it's easier to consult. About a week ago I looked into the bookshelves, and by grace of my grandfather's and my father's love for ancient Greek, found:

Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (University of Oklahoma Press), ed. copyright 1963.
Homer, The Iliad (Penguin Classics) Transl. E. V. Rieu, 1966.
Homer, Ilias, Odyssee (dtv weltliteratur) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voß (Iliad: orig. publ. 1793), edition from 1982.
Homer, Ilias und Odyssee (Rheingauer Verlagsgesellschaft) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voss, edited by Hans Rupé and E.R. Weiß, 1980.
William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Homeric Vocabularies (University of Oklahoma Press), revised by Clyde Pharr, ed. copyright 1969.
J.E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Bantam), 1980. [This has a label bearing my grandmother's name and our Victoria address on the title page.]


The Lexicon is so detailed that I can look up every word without fearing that a verb, noun, etc., form will be impossible to find. The mythology handbook has also been useful in determining what Peleiadew and Aïdi are. But I've only worked through the first four lines in this manner. (c:

WE do have a copy of the Odyssey in the original Greek (thanks to Pudel? I've forgotten where we had it from) and long ago I tried translating it, too, with much less success; my one year of ancient Greek is much more effective when it is given time to sink in and when it is refreshed and rounded out with modern Greek. Besides, I relied on a general ancient Greek dictionary. The Iliad is also relevant as such because we are reading a retelling of it by M. Karagatsis in my Greek language class on Tuesdays.

Of course I still think that the Iliad is less accessible than many other myths, particularly since I know the latter through popularized retellings which sort of squish together half-a-dozen different texts and simplify these.

But it impressed me so deeply when we started reading the short version in class that I have repented of the opinion I had as a child, that it was fairly inaccessible, no one was particularly likeable and why should a twerp like Paris have so much of an effect?, etc. Because somehow I find it strangely true to life, or rather to the individual characters of people and to the broad movements of politics and warfare which one reads about in newspapers. Rulers are unjust, they start wars for dumb reasons, these wars persist for much longer than needed, individuals are sacrificed and betrayed for strategy, women are submerged as much as possible from any influence (depending, I guess, on the state), there are however friendships and family loyalties and all sorts of other optimistic things going on at a personal and public level, and people are still attempting to swim against the current.

Fate brings the tragedy, but here 'fate' is not the limp energy or lack of common sense of the hero (though there is plenty of that, too), and it is not some implausible plot device of the author, and it is not heightened by a playwright continually milking a dialogue for pathos and elegance. The tragedy is that this is the way that the world is; 'fate' simply means, in this case, that sooner or later people are no longer insulated from the world and are therefore trapped within larger social, economic, etc. movements, not because they are passive but because these are the parameters within they are active.

For perhaps these reasons the Iliad affects me much more emotionally than before, so that I feel kind of weepy even when reading the Karagatsis retelling, despite the distractions of needing to look up a word in the dictionary, etc. In fact the proper way to read it may be with a sofa, blanket, carton of ice cream and lots and lots of tissues.

What I particularly love about it is that it is not moralizing; people are good and bad, and so are the gods, but it does not mean that they become worthless or that they are punished for being on the wrong side of a moral question. It is through the effects of what a person does where you really see why this or that selfish action is just a metaphorical poisoning of the well which does nobody any good.

IT MAY be silly, but what I have been trying to consider over the last year or so is that if God loves each of us and sees our good sides as well as our bad sides, what positive qualities does he see in this or that disagreeable-seeming person whom I know or read about, and how does he manage to remain tolerant of people even when their actions evince a great deal of evil? I worry that it might make me excuse too much, and that it is too ambitious a line of thought; but basically it relieves my unease about misunderstanding and hating people whom I think are mean.

Besides I have to wonder what an evil person is. In real life, the 'mean' people I have personally encountered have not murdered, tortured, or started wars. The older I get, the more I realize that meannesses are not in fact ironed out of our characters as we become older, so meannesses are an inevitable fact of life even if they are not legitimate — they are also for the most part very small meannesses if one looks at the history of the world since, let's say the invention of writing. One is always tempted to think of new developments as The Worst, but nameless or famous despots of the past and especially the Second World War make it difficult to think that one is seeing the worst and most destructive vein of humanity today. Either way, if I hate meannesses, I hate humanity, which is not very nice and I think very contrary to the spirit of my religion. And, pragmatically, if I learn to cope with pettier meannesses, I can hopefully learn to cope with greater meannesses, which becomes particularly important if I ever interact with people who do murder or torture or start wars, and perhaps if I am to accept meannesses in myself.

THIS evening, at any rate, I had the folk literature course. I came perhaps ten minutes late, which is still pretty good for me lately. We are reading a selection of begging verse by an unknown author or perhaps multiple authors, which were first formally published by Korais in 1829. One is by an impoverished poet beggar, a second by a monk who finds austerity not to his liking, and a third by a man who has followed the precepts of his father with little success, and each of them address themselves to the Emperor (e.g. Manuel I, Comnenus) hoping for remedy in the form of lucre. They are a mixture of high language and low language; one question is whether the writer was a poor person socially climbing, a rich person slumming, or in fact a composite of a written poem which was then transformed by oral transfer into a hybrid of formal and colloquial idiom. Besides there are various authorship theories, one of which credits the 11th-12th century writer Theodoros Prodromos. (In between, the professor handed me a chocolate St. Nicholas, of which he had already distributed some to the three other classmates, which I thought was nice and which reminded me of the classmate who did the same in the Greek prelanguage course last year.)

I wondered several things, which is for example whether 'Prodromos,' a name mentioned in the poems, was a real name or an artificial one. But this theory may have been mentioned in class, too, when I wasn't paying good enough attention. Because, I was thinking, symbolic names are often given to imaginary authors or characters, like Voltaire's Candide (in which, I seem to remember, Candide can pass for a name but also for a reference to naïveté). Pro + dromos [road] is a fitting name for an itinerant. 'Ptwxo' is sometimes affixed to the name, and even in Homeric Greek ptwxos already meant 'beggar.' At any rate, the poems are collectively known as Ptochoprodromiká.