Plutarch, Moralia. A Letter of Condolence to Apollonius, 106e-f
“For when is death not present among us? Truly, as Heraclitus says, “living and dying is the same and so is being awake and asleep or youth and old age. For each turns back into the other again.”
Just as someone can make shapes of living things from the same clay and then collapse them and shape something new again repeatedly, so too did nature shape our ancestors from the same material, collapse it, and reshape it to make our parents and us in turn”
“Custom, the king of everything,
Of mortals and immortal alike,
Guides them with the final hand
To the most violent kinds of justice.
I’ll prove this
With the deeds of Herakles
Since he drove the cattle of Geryon
To the Cyclopean gates of Eurystheus
Unpunished and unpaid.
“But when a person comes around with sufficient nature, he shakes off and shatters all these things [laws], escaping them. He tramples all over our precedents and edicts, our pronouncements and all the laws that a contrary to his nature, and our slave rises up to become our master and clearly shows the justice of nature. This is what Pindar seems to indicate in that song when he says…”
“Pittacus’ saying doesn’t sound right
To me, even though spoken by a wise person.
He said it is hard to be good.
Only god can have that prize, it is impossible
For a human to not be bad,
When unalterable misfortune grips them.
When things are going well,
Anyone can be noble–
And anyone breaks bad in bad times.
And the people who are best?
They’re mostly the ones the gods favor.
That’s why I am not going to throw my life away
Searching out the impossible, an impractical
Empty hope–a person free of all fault,
Not a one of all those who eat the harvest of the broad earth
But if I find one, I will let you know.
For now, I praise all people who
Do nothing shameful willingly.
Not even the gods battle necessity.
I don’t love blame–it seems enough to me
For someone not to be evil, and not too untrustworthy
And to know something of the justice that keeps a city safe.
That’s a safe man–I will not fault
Him, since there’s no limit
To the parade of fools.
All things not completely mixed with shame,
Are fine indeed.”
I am moving some essays and longer projects to a substack called “Painful Signs, Or, Joel’s Substack.” I am experimenting with this space for a few reasons: (1) wordpress has gotten a little annoying; (2) I’d like to try something different; (3) substack seems to make it easier to raise funds we can donate to good causes. Here’s the summary on the first page from the site:
It is an extension of the sententiaeantiquae.com multiverse designed for longer essays, threaded projects, and revision and renewal of older ideas. I have spent over a decade building a website bringing together translations and commentary on ancient Greece and Rome with great collaborators and partners. This site will feature only my own work and, in its first months/years, focus in particular on the Iliad.
As sententiaeantiquae.com nears 10,000 posts and the twitter feed @sentantiq dies a Musk-fueled death, this new space provides something of a tabula rasa to think again about writing outside of the cycle of academic publication, about public engagement, about how to think and write about the past, and how to develop and sustain new projects.
This site will have free and paid subscriptions. Free subscriptions get access to regular shorter posts; longer posts and the archive go to paid subscriptions.
All funds generated by paid subscriptions will be donated to non-profit groups working to support the study of the ancient world and emphasizing public engagement. I will make annual statements about where funds are sent.
I have trouble imagining too many people doing paid subscriptions, but anything we get from the other site will be sent to groups and initiatives we have supported in the past.. Sententiaeantiquae.com isn’t going anywhere. I won’t cross-post much from substack, so check it out and subscribe (for free or otherwise!)
Why “Painful Signs?”
“Painful Signs” is my loose translation of the description of the message Proitos sends along with Bellerophon in book 6 of the Iliad when he sends him to Lykia, with the hopes his father-in-law will murder him. (Proitos’ wife was in love with Bellerophon, but he refused her, so she told Proitos that Bellerophon raped her. Because they were guest-friends, however, Proitos could not have him killed in his country).
Homer, Iliad 6.168-170
“Then he sent him to Lykia and he gave him painful signs,
He marked many heart-rending things on a folded table,
Which he told him to show to his father-in-law, so he would die.”
This is the only apparent reference to writing in Homeric epic, but most sources believe it is not actually so. Here are ancient scholars’ comments:
Schol. T ad Hom. Il. 6.168 ex
Murderous signs: letters.
“It would be strange if people who developed every kind of craft would not know about letters. Some people claim these are like the sacred images of the Egyptians, used to communicate actions.”
“written on a folded tablet”: this appears to use letters. But it does not mean this-instead to scrape [graphein] means to ‘smooth’ out. This is really the impression of images through which Proitos’ father-in-law may understand”
I like this phrase “painful signs” and its use in the Iliad because it conveys (to me) some sense of the peril of secret messages, of the potential dangers of a fixed communication, of the insidious side of language. There’s something telling in the way that the message’s bearer does not know its contents and their implications.
So, I am taking this phrase as a bit of a thematic tuning for the beginning of a return to thinking about the Iliad . I think it is probably tenuous to claim that this tablet taken from the Peloponnese to Asia Minor is in away a symbol for epic itself, but I don’t think its too much to say that the episode shows a poetic concern with what effects signs have on the world, and how they have different meaning depending on who you are.
Waxed ivory tablet from British Museum. #131952. Neo Assyrian, 8th Century BCE
Spear-famed Odysseus was alone. Not one Argive
was at his side, as fear had gripped them all.
So, his mood raw, he spoke to his own proud heart:
“Ay, what happens next? It’s wrong to cut and run
Scared of the throng, yet worse to be taken alone.
(Zeus has sent the other Danaans scrambling.)
But why is my dear heart debating with me?
I already know cowards steer clear of war
but the best fighter must absolutely
stand firm, whether he’s struck or strikes another.”
One scholiast remarks that Homer arranged the scene to achieve an effect of particular importance to a performance artist:
“Odysseus was alone: He [Homer] once again besets Odysseus with struggles, with the consequence that he [Homer] completely engages the [song’s]audience.”
οίώθη δ’ Όδυσεύς: αγώνας πάλιν κινεί επί τω Όδυσσεϊ· ώστε εκ παντός συνέχει τον ακροατήν. (Schol. T. 401)
Another scholiast presents Odysseus as though he too is a self-conscious artist:
“He spoke to his proud heart : He [Odysseus] poetically translates his thoughts as if they were spoken [aloud].”
R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (p. 9):
The works of a number of major writers have been examined from this point of view, and we are in a position to form a clear picture of the classical reading of Alcuin, John of Salisbury, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Ronsard, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, to name only a few. Caution, however, is very necessary. If a man quotes a passage, he has read it; but we must not assume that he has read the work in which it occurs. Quotations were often taken second-hand from grammar books. The researches of C.K. Ullman have revealed that anthologies contributed largely to the classical knowledge of medieval scholars; and everybody has been aware for a long time now that many of the Renaissance pundits, like Rabelais and Ben Jonson, similarly derived the greater part of their erudition from popular handbooks. Nor can we accept without reserve the claims made by individuals that they or others had read certain classical authors, for no medieval or Renaissance writer is altogether free from the minor vice of exaggeration.
“Remember that you are an actor in a drama, whatever kind the playwright desires. If he wishes it to be short, it is short. If he wants it to be long, it is long.
If he wants you to act as a beggar, act even that part seriously. And the same if you are a cripple, a ruler, or a fool. This is your role: to play well the part you were given. It is another’s duty to choose.”
Teles the Philosopher, On Self-Sufficiency (Hense, 5)
“Just as a good actor will carry off well whatever role the poet assigns him, so too a good person should manage well whatever chance allots. For chance, as Biôn says, just like poetry, assigns the role of the first speaker and the second speaker, now a king and then a vagabond. Don’t long to be the second speaker when you have the role of the first. Otherwise, you will create disharmony.”
“There will soon be a time when the tragic actors will believe that their masks and costumes are their real selves. You have these things as material and a plot. Say something so we may know whether you are a tragic actor or a comedian. For they have the rest of their material in common [apart from the words]. If one, then, should deprive the actor of his buskins and his masks and introduce him to the stage as only a ghost, has the actor been lost or does he remain? If he has a voice, he remains.”
“Emanuel Chrysoloras, who first brought Greek literature back to Italy seven hundred years after it had been driven out by various barbarian invasions, was endowed with such humanity of liberal intellect in his teaching, that his famous image seems worthy of being placed first among the images of Greeks of exceptional merit, although no monuments of his weighty learning remain except some rules on the art of grammar. He was an indefatigable teacher, but he is open to the charge of having been lazy in writing, since the other part of the glory which we have chosen was sought by his useful profession.
He was sent from Byzantium by the emperor John to seek aid for Greece, which was on the verge of collapse, by pleading with all of the kings of Europe. He completed this task with such diligent traveling that he finally stopped in Italy when Greece was liberated from fear, since Tamerlane – the terror of the East – had captured alive near Mount Stella the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (who had received the epithet of “Lightning” from the incredible swiftness of his movements). And so Chrysoloras, delighted that Greece had been freed from such an awful enemy, first in Venice, then in Florence, Rome, and finally in Pavia, which was under the rule of Giangaleazzo Visconti, managed to excite such a zeal for Greek literature that there sprang from his school minds worthy of the highest honor which on that account will never perish. Among these were Leonardo Bruni, Francesco Barbaro, Francesco Filelfo, Guarino Veronese, and Poggio Bracciolini. Later, when the synod which was called for resolving the controversy surrounding the pseudo-pontificate roused with desire to see such a spectacle, when Baldassare Cossa was deposed. Chrysoloras died in Constance. Poggio Bracciolini decorated his tomb with these lines:
‘Here lies Manuel Chrysoloras, the ornament of the Attic tongue, who came here to seek help for his afflicted country. Italy, this was a fortunate event for you, for he restored to you the grace of the Greek language, so long hidden. This was a fortunate event for you, Emanuel, for you found on Italian soil the honor which Greece never gave you – Greece, ruined in war.'”
“That man did not have this kind of strength and proud spirit
As I learn from those who came before me
Who saw him turning back the Lydian cavalry’s teeming ranks
On the Hermion plan, a man with an ash-spear in his hand.
Pallas Athena never carped at his heart’s
Rushing strength when he sped into the front-fighters,
In the clash of the bloody war,
Disappointing his enemies’ bitter bolts.
For not one of his opponents was a better man
At facing the work of powerful war,
When he [went] like the rays of the sun…”
This poem is not one of the best attributed to Mimnermus, but it has an a few interesting images and some instructive hapax legomena [“words that occur only once”]
1. A hapax legomenon [word only occuring once]: φερεμμελίην, “ash-spear” wielding”
2. ἀμεινότερος: a double formation, adding the comparative suffix –oter– to the irregular comparative ameinôn
3. Most editions have ὠκέος ἠελίοιο in the final line. I prefer εἴκελος because it works better with the dative αὐγῆισιν
“You know how I eat, and even how I sleep – no fortune could ever persuade me to add anything to these. Rather, I subtract a little every day, and it has reached the point now that only a little bit can be subtracted. Even if some royal fortune befell me, it could not drive frugality from my table or drive me to look for more sleep at night. My bed never holds me if I am healthy and awake, and I never toss in the sheets unless I am sick or sleeping. As soon as sleep departs from me, I depart from the bed, and I will lie enough or even more than enough on a bed of earth or rock.
Thinking about it, I hate my bed and I never return to it but at the urging of necessity, but soon I sense that I am freed from it as from the chains of nature, and without delay I rip myself out of it and flee to the closest library as though it were a citadel. This divorce occurs between me and my bed in the middle of the night: if by chance a shorter night or some late hours drag on, yet certainly dawn never sees us together. Finally, I strive with all my heart to prevent anything from coming between me and my more pleasant concerns, except that which the necessity of nature extracts from me in an imperious way – I mean things like sleep, food, and the short and honorable solace which is just enough for relaxing the body and replenishing the spirit.”
Victum meum nosti, somnum quoque; his ut addam, nulla michi unquam fortuna suaserit; demo potius aliquid in dies, iamque eo perventum est ut modicum demi possit; denique non si regie opes advenerint, aut e mensa frugalitatem pellere poterunt aut in cubiculum longos somnos arcessere. Nunquam me sanum ac vigilem lectus habet, nunquam nisi eger aut dormiens stratis versor; simul et me somnus et ego lectum desero, et somnum morti et lectulum busto simillimum duco. Cum supremus sopor obrepserit, satis superque satis in cubiculo terreo seu saxeo iacebimus; id meditans lectulum meum odi et ad illum nisi urgente necessitate non redeo, sed ab illo mox ut me nature vinclis explicitum sentio, incuntanter avellor inque bibliothecam illi proximam velut in arcem fugio. Fit hoc inter nos media nocte divortium, quod siquando forte vel nox brevior vel vigilie longiores traxerint, at profecto nunquam simul aurora nos invenit; postremo modis omnibus nitor nequid melioribus curis interveniat, preter id solum quod imperiose necessitas nature exigit, somnum dico et cibum et breve honestumque solatium vegetando corpori refovendoque animo duntaxat ydoneum. Id enimvero quia pro varietate temporum ac locorum variari oportet, et quale michi nunc sit nisi audias nosse non potes, dicam. Amo solitudinem ut soleo sectorque silentium nisi inter amicos, inter quos nemo me loquacior, hanc reor ob causam quod amicorum presentia solito rarior nunc est; raritas autem desiderium accendit. Sepe igitur annuum silentium diurna loquacitate compenso rursumque amicis abeuntibus mutus fio; importunum negotium cum vulgo loqui aut omnino cum homine quem non amor tibi seu doctrina conciliet.
