“You know that somewhere Timo the Philasian calls the Museum a birdcage as he mocks the scholars who are supported there because they were fed like the priciest birds in a big cage:
Many are fed in many-peopled Egypt,
The paper-pushers closed up waging endless war
in the bird-cage of the Muses.
“It would not be sweet for me to write about the relative age of Homer and Hesiod, even though I have worked on the problem as closely as possible. This is because I am familiar with the fault-finding character of others and not the least of those who dominate the study of epic poetry in my time.”
“And, you, my grammarians who do not inquire into these sorts of things, I quote from Herodicus the Babylonian:
Flee, Aristarcheans, over the wide back of the sea
Flee Greece, men more frightened than the brown deer,
Corner-buzzers, monosyllabists, men who care about Sphin and sphoin and whether its min or nin*.
This is what I would have for you storm-drowned men:
But may Greece and God-born Babylon always wait for Herodicus.
And, to add another, the words of the comic poet Anaxandrides:
…It brings pleasure
Whenever someone discovers some new notion,
To share it with everyone. But those who at first
Keep it to themselves have no judge for their skill
And are later despised. For it is right to offer the mob
Everything anyone might think is brand-new.
The majority of them departed at these words and slowly the party disbanded.”
“It would be annoying to list all the people who spent their lives pursuing board games, ball games, or sunbathing. Men whose pleasures are so busy are not at leisure. For example, no one will be surprised that those occupied by useless literary studies work strenuously—and there is great band of these in Rome now too. This sickness used to just afflict the Greeks, to discover the number of oars Odysseus possessed, whether the Iliad was written before theOdyssey, whether the poems belong to the same author, and other matters like this which, if you keep them to yourself, cannot please your private mind; but if you publish them, you seem less learned than annoying.”
Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam. Non sunt otiosi, quorum voluptates multum negotii habent. Nam de illis nemo dubitabit, quin operose nihil agant, qui litterarum inutilium studiis detinentur, quae iam apud Romanos quoque magna manus est. Graecorum iste morbus fuit quaerere, quem numerum Ulixes remigum habuisset, prior scripta esset Ilias an Odyssia, praeterea an eiusdem essent auctoris, alia deinceps huius notae, quae sive contineas, nihil tacitam conscientiam iuvant sive proferas, non doctior videaris sed molestior.
And self loathing eventually takes over.
Palladas of Alexandria, Greek Anthology 9.169
“The wrath of Achilles has become for me,
a scholar, the cause of destructive poverty.
Would that this rage had left me with the Danaans slain
before academia’s bitter deprivation left its stain.
Yet, to allow Agamemnon to steal Briseis
and Paris take Helen, I became a beggar instead.”
“Learning about medicine is a bit like the development of plants in the earth. For our native skill is like the land; the beliefs of our teachers are like seeds. Childhood learning is similar to when seeds are planted in the field. And the place where learning happens is like the nourishment that comes to plants from the sky around them. Hard work is like the working of the field. Time brings strength to all these things so that they grow to completion.”
“I am now going to consider one of the most significant and influential things I have said. For we must select teachers for our students who are also free of slander in their own lives, whose habits cannot be criticized and who are best in regards to experience. For obtaining a proper education is the spring and root of goodness. Just as a farmer helps straighten young plants, so too may good teachers guide students with precepts and advice so that their characters may grow correctly. These days there are certain fathers one might condemn because, before considering the people who will teach their children, entrust them to inexperienced or unworthy teachers, either because of ignorance or naivete.”
When I was in kindergarten, my teacher had us sing this song all the time. I did not realize it at the time that we were engaged in an ultra meta-educative reflection. Do you like to grow ideas in the garden of your mind?
“People of every age enter this classroom. “Do we grow old only to follow the young?” When I go into the theater as an old man and I am drawn to the racetrack and no fight is finished without me, shall I be embarrassed to go to a philosopher? You must learn as long as you are ignorant—if we may trust the proverb. And nothing is more fit to the present than this: as long as you live you must learn how to live. Nevertheless, there is still something which I teach there. You ask, what may I teach? That an old man must learn too.
But the human race still shames me every time I enter the school. Near to that theater of the Neapolitans, I have to pass that house of Metronax. There, the place is packed too as with a burning desire they judge who is the best flute player. The Greek horn and a herald bring a crowd. But in the place where we seek what a good man is, where how to be a good man may be learned, the smallest audience sits and they seem to most people to be up to no good in their pursuit. They are called useless and lazy. May such derision touch me. For the insults of the ignorant should be heard with a gentle mind. Contempt itself must be held in contempt as we journey toward better things.”
Omnis aetatis homines haec schola admittit. “In hoc senescamus, ut iuvenes sequamur?” In theatrum senex ibo et in circum deferar et nullum par sine me depugnabit ad philosophum ire erubescam?
Tamdiu discendum est, quamdiu nescias; si proverbio credimus, quamdiu vivas. Nec ulli hoc rei magis convenit quam huic: tamdiu discendum est, quemadmodum vivas, quamdiu vivas. Ego tamen illic aliquid et doceo. Quaeris, quid doceam? Etiam seni esse discendum. Pudet autem me generis humani, quotiens scholam intravi. Praeter ipsum theatrum Neapolitanorum, ut scis, transeundum est Metronactis petenti domum. Illud quidem fartum est et ingenti studio, quis sit pythaules bonus, iudicatur; habet tubicen quoque Graecus et praeco concursum. At in illo loco, in quo vir bonus quaeritur, in quo vir bonus discitur, paucissimi sedent, et hi plerisque videntur nihil boni negotii habere quod agant; inepti et inertes vocantur. Mihi contingat iste derisus; aequo animo audienda sunt inperitorum convicia et ad honesta vadenti contemnendus est ipse contemptus.
“What is the Odyssey about except about love,
A woman alone, pursued by many suitors while her husband’s gone.”
aut quid Odyssea est nisi femina propter amorem,
dum vir abest, multis una petita procis?
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1406b
“Alcidamas called the Odyssey a ‘fine mirror of human life’ ”
καλὸν ἀνθρωπίνου βίου κάτοπτρον
Michael Apostolios, Proverbia 14.56
“I will make your house a wooden horse”: this means I will make it disappear. Themistokles’ groom said this. It comes from the Wooden Horse at Troy, the one Odysseus used to take the city.”
“But I think that we old men might listen happily to someone reciting the Iliad and the Odyssey well and quickly declare that they were completely victorious! Who, then, would rightly be the winner—that’s the next issue, right?”
“Homer didn’t think it right to tell where he came from, who his parents were, no even what he should be called. Nope—instead, he’s happy if we don’t know the name of whoever composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.”
Editor’s note: We are happy to bring you this amazing guest post. SA is always open for posts about ancient literature and the modern world. Feel free to reach out over email if you have an idea
While visual arts have been synonymous with classics for centuries, substantial research has connected the field of classics to performing arts, specifically theater, dance, and music. In his paper, The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides, author Maurice P. Cunningham asserts that the originality of the Heroides lies in how they were written as “lyric-dramatic monologues to be presented on the stage with music and dancing.” I wish to take this argument one step further, for I believe that the Heroides are intrinsically connected to music, specifically the genre of lyrical jazz, through a shared emotional power that transcends language or form.
Jazz, a uniquely American folk art form, traces its lineage to the spirituals sung by enslaved Africans in the American South. Jazz arose organically from the experience of oppressed people, who had very little formal education, let alone access to classical literature. It seems ludicrous to compare the two art forms, but lyrical jazz resonates emotionally with Roman elegy. Whether it is Sulpicia or Etta James, artists reach into the abyss of the human experience to pull out captivating tales of loss and longing, considering how love and heartbreak are fundamental parts of the human condition. Both Ovid’s Heroides and lyrical jazz represent the vulnerability and heartache of the central female characters by portraying personal truth as reality, illustrating raw emotional reactions to abandonment, and appealing to shared common tropes.
The heroines of lyrical jazz narratives and of the Heroides both accept their own biased personal realities as the objective truth. In Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion, Edward M. Bradley notes how “the only formal expression of objective reality we encounter within each poem is defined exclusively by the turbulent flow of emotions running through the mind of the heroine” (159). We see this pattern clearly in Epistula V, a letter from Oenone to Paris, in which she acknowledges how he cruelly abandoned her in favor of Helen of Sparta, yet describes a scene featuring them together. She paints a picture of Paris and herself lying under a tree:
Epistula 5.15-18
Often you might gather between [where] we lay [under] the ceiling’s tree, And having been mixed when the grass presented the swelling to the leaves; Often above straw bedding and deep hay lying down the small wicker hut was kept off the frost”
Saepe greges inter requievimus arbore tecti
mixtaque cum foliis praebuit herba torum.
Saepe super stramen fenoque iacentibus alto
defensa est humili cana pruina casa
“Greges; you might gather,” a present subjunctive of characteristic, indicates that Oenone has built a fantasy world for herself in which Paris is still hers; she ascribes idealized behaviors to Paris that do not reconcile with his current actions. She describes a world that is peaceful, removed from the turbulent realities of her circumstances amidst the Trojan War, since she cannot cope with the loss of her idyllic life with Paris.
Paris and Oenone by Pieter Lastman, oil on panel, 1610, High Museum of Art
In accordance with Bradley’s observation, Ovid chooses to focus on Oenone’s emotional narrative, forgoing the objective sequence of events that his audience would be familiar with. Jazz lyricists have this exact focus. Jazz indeed is a “turbulent flow of emotions” represented in music, whose audience solely receives a subjective portrait of a story based on a highly emotional account rather than a clear factual report. In Nina Simone’s song “If I Should Lose You,” she presents numerous hypothetical scenes, describing what would happen if she lost her beloved. She cries that “If I should lose you, the stars would fall from the skies, if I should lose you, the leaves would wither and die.”
The lyrics do not provide the listener any information about Simone’s actual circumstances, but the listener does receive a rich portrait of Simone’s emotional landscape. In fact, the audience does not know that Simone’s beloved is actually gone until the song’s penultimate couplet: “I gave you my love, but I was living a dream.” Here, through the switch from conditional subjunctives earlier in the song to this indicative past tense, Simone recognizes that she deceived herself. The lyrics are too heavily invested in describing her heartache to give any tangible narrative details to the listeners until the end. Both Epistula 5 and this lyrical jazz piece are more interested in portraying emotional scenes with florid imagery than offering a clear sequence of events.
Another common theme between lyrical jazz and the Heroides is how women process abandonment in romantic relationships. Earlier in Phyllis’s letter, she relives the day her beloved abandoned her and wishes in hindsight that the night Demophoon left was her last night living. She cries, “Heu! Patior telis vulnera facta meis; Oh! I suffer wounds having been made by my own weapons!” (Epistula 2.48). Phyllis blames herself for Demophoon’s actions, and processes her own abandonment by punishing herself and assuming all responsibility. She further laments that “speravi melius, quia me meruisse putavi; I hoped for the best, because I thought that I deserved it,” (Epistula 2.61).
The sheer emotion in her speech clearly demonstrates the strength of her heartbreak and her overwhelming shame, especially when remembering her former naivete, her previous belief that merit would bring about ideal circumstances in love. The perfect tense of “speravi; I hoped,” “putavi; I thought,” and “meruisse; I deserved” alludes to a personal growth, as she reflects on a previous childish persona. Use of the perfect tense denotes completed past action, indicating that she is no longer the naive person who would trust traditional notions of love and relationships.
This type of character growth is also represented in Etta James’s “Fool That I Am,” where she regrets her past actions, calling herself a “fool that I am for falling in love with you and a fool I am for thinking you loved me too.” James laments her former naivete and her foolhardy belief that her beloved actually loved her back. The repetition of “fool that I am” and the past tense of “you loved me” both suggest feelings of shame surrounding her past innocence. Both heroines respond to abandonment by criticizing themselves; they are both ashamed of how they naively believed that their lovers would stay.
Beyond shared content, Ovid uses several direct tropes that carry over into jazz canon. In his paper Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes, Don L. F. Nilsen observes that “tropes function at the levels of semantics (meaning) and pragmatics (interrelationships between language and culture),” noting that “some tropes… become so developed and so extended that they actually become the discourse.”Not only do both elegy and lyrical jazz discuss the same emotions, they also portray the same reactions to those emotions and eventually become synonymous with those emotions. We see such in Dido’s letter to Aeneas, where the traditional trope of sleeplessness invokes Dido’s infatuation with the young hero: “Aeneas oculis vigilantis semper inhaeret, Aenean animo noxque quiesque refert; Aeneas clings always to my sleepless eyes, both the night and serenity bring Aeneas back to my mind,” (Epistula 7.25-26). She depicts herself as literally unable to sleep since Aeneas is constantly at the forefront of her mind.
Andrea Sacchi, “The Death of Dido”. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen. 17th CEntury
This image of the insomniac lover was a common trope in Roman elegy and remains a common representation of lovesickness in lyrical jazz. In Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” many vocalists, including the likes of Ella Fitzegerald and Barbra Streisand, mourned how they “couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t sleep when love came and told me I shouldn’t sleep.” Similarly, in the song “Prisoner of Love,” Etta James sings about how “I’m not free, He’s in my dreams awake or sleeping.” Both representations of sleeplessness emphasize a lack of power; they cannot sleep because they are overwhelmed by the pressure of love. The representation of the sleepless nighttime lover contributes to the emotional landscapes of these women, and merges with the underlying messaging to such a deep degree that lyrical jazz reflects representations from antiquity.
While Roman elegy and lyrical jazz belong to two separate millenia, the similarities between the two art forms are overwhelming with regard to the heroines’ alternate perceptions of reality which lead to unfiltered emotional reactions to abandonment. Each heroine’s consuming emotions of love, fear, doubt, sadness, and anxiety are expressed in similar tropes. The narrators live in an emotionally skewed reality, fueled by tropes common to love, to heartache, and to abandonment.
Maya Martinez is a high school senior at Friends Seminary studying Latin and Spanish. She is particularly interested in the connections between antiquity and the modern world and aims to make the field of classics both accessible and exciting to the general public. She is fascinated by the way in which translation impacts the overall narrative and how history alters a work’s legacy, particularly: what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is changed. In the fall semester, she will attend Brown University where she plans to continue her engagement with Classical Literature. This is her first publication.
Works Cited
“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Performance by Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Verve Label Group, 1956. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Bradley, Edward M. “Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion.” The Classical Journal, vol. 64, no. 4, Jan. 1969, pp. 158-62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3295901. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Cunningham, Maurice P. “The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides.” Classical Philology, vol. 44, no. 2, Apr. 1949, pp. 100-06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/267476. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
D’Angelo, Frank J. “Prolegomena to a Rhetoric of Tropes.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 6, no. 1, fall 1987, pp. 32-40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/465948. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Farrell, Joseph. “Reading and Writing the Heroides.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 98, 1998, pp. 307-38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/311346. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“Fool That I Am.” Performance by Etta James. The Second Time Around, Argo Records, 1961. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
Fulkerson, Laurel. “Writing Yourself to Death: Strategies of (Mis)reading in Heroides 2.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, no. 48, 2002, pp. 145-65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236218. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“If I Should Lose You.” Performance by Nina Simone. Wild Is The Wind, UMG Recordings, 1966. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
Nilsen, Don L. F. “Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, summer 1989, pp. 263-72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885294. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“Prisoner of Love.” Performance by Etta James. The Chess Box, UMG Recordings, 2000. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“I admit that I now have a bit of a different opinion from what I believed before. Perhaps it would be safest for my reputation to change nothing which I not only believed but also approved for many years. But I cannot endure knowing that I misrepresent myself, especially in this work which I compose as some help for our good students. For even Hippocrates, famous still for his skill in medicine, seems to have conducted himself very honorably when he admitted his own errors so his followers would not make a mistake. Marcus Tullius did not hesitate to condemn some of his own books in subsequent publications, the Catulus and Lucullus, for example.
Prolonged effort in research would certainly be useless if we were not allowed to improve upon previous opinions. Nevertheless, nothing of what I taught then was useless. These things I offer now, in fact, return us to basic principles. Thus it will cause no one grief to have learned from me. I am trying only to collect and lay out the same ideas in a slightly more sensible fashion. I want it made known to all, moreover, that I am showing this to others no later than I have convinced myself.”
Ipse me paulum in alia quam prius habuerim opinione nunc esse confiteor. Et fortasse tutissimum erat famae modo studenti nihil ex eo mutare quod multis annis non sensissem modo verum etiam adprobassem. Sed non sustineo esse conscius mihi dissimulati, in eo praesertim opere quod ad bonorum iuvenum aliquam utilitatem componimus, in ulla parte iudicii mei. Nam et Hippocrates clarus arte medicinae videtur honestissime fecisse quod quosdam errores suos, ne posteri errarent, confessus est, et M. Tullius non dubitavit aliquos iam editos libros aliis postea scriptis ipse damnare, sicut Catulum atque Lucullum et… Etenim supervacuus foret in studiis longior labor si nihil liceret melius invenire praeteritis. Neque tamen quicquam ex iis quae tum praecepi supervacuum fuit; ad easdem enim particulas haec quoque quae nunc praecipiam revertentur. Ita neminem didicisse paeniteat: colligere tantum eadem ac disponere paulo significantius conor. Omnibus autem satis factum volo non me hoc serius demonstrare aliis quam mihi ipse persuaserim.
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
“The things that Homer says about Kirkê contain a wonderful theory about the soul. The interpretation runs as follows:
Some have the heads, voice, head and skin of swine, but the mind remains constant as it was before. This myth is similar to the riddle about the soul presented by Pythagoras and Plato, that it is indestructible in nature and unseen but that it is not safe from harm or unchangeable. In what is called its destruction or death, it undergoes a change and then a transference into different kinds of bodies pursuing an appearance and fit according to pleasure, by similarity and practice to how it lived life. In this, each person draws a great advantage from education and philosophy, since the soul has a memory of noble things, judges the shameful harshly, and is able to overcome the unnatural pleasures. This soul can pay attention to itself, and guard that it might not accidentally become a beast because it has grown attracted to an hideously shaped, unclean body regarding virtue, a body that excites and nourishes uncultured and unreasoning nature rather than increasing and nourishing thought.
“Once the soul is translated, that which is fated and nature, which Empedocles named the divine force that “wraps us in a foreign robe of flesh”, also re-fits the soul. Homer has named this circular journey and return of rebirth Kirkê, the child of the sun because the sun binds every destruction to birth and every birth in turn to destruction, always weaving them together. The Island Aiaia is also that place allotted to receive one who dies—where the souls first arrive as they wander, and suffer alienation as they mourn and they do not know which way is west nor “where the sun which brings mortals light comes upon the earth”.
As they long for their habits of pleasure—their shared life in the flesh and their way of life with the flesh—they provide the draught with its character again: it is the drink where birth is mixed and stirs together what is truly immortal and mortal, the thoughts and sufferings, the ethereal and the earthbound. The souls are enchanted and weakened by the pleasures that will lead them back to birth again. At this time, souls require great luck and great wisdom in order to avoid pursuing their worst aspects or passions and dedicate themselves to a cursed and beastly life”.
For it is right that it is called and considered a crossroad in the underworld around which the parts of the soul split: the rational, the emotional, and the desirous. Each of these produces a force or an inducement to the life appropriate to itself. This is no longer myth or poetry but truth and a story of nature. In this transformation and rebirth, when the aspect of desire overpowers and takes control, [Homer] is claiming that because of the dominance of pleasure and gluttony, they transform into the bodies of donkeys and pigs and receive unclean lives on the ground. The interpretation runs as follows.
Whenever a soul has an emotional component that has grown completely savage because of harsh rivalries or murderous savagery developing from some disagreement or vendetta, that soul finds a second birth which is full of bitterness and angry thoughts and falls into the shape of a wolf or a lion, embracing this body as if it were a tool of vengeance for his controlling passion. For this reason, one must keep clean when near death as if for a religious rite and restrain from every kind of base pleasure, put every harsh emotion to bed, and to withdraw from the body by suppressing envies, enmities, and rages down deep. This “Hermes of the golden-staff” happens to be that very reasoning which indicates clearly the good and either wholly restrains or saves it from the deadly draught should it drink—it preserves the soul in a human life and character for as long a time as is possible.”
Isaac Casaubon, Letter to Claude Saumaise (DXLIII)
“I received your letters, and the ancient epigrams which you added. How can I show my gratitude for these? To be sure, you can guess how grateful I am from my almost shameless petition for them. So, I’m ashamed of myself for giving you so much vexation. I do not understand the method and aim of your studies. And so, believe me, I am concerned about you and your health – I think of you as a brother. I exceed you in age, but you have outstripped me with the miraculous gifts which instilled in me long ago a marvelous expectation for you. Just spare your intellect, have some concern for your health, enjoy the joy of your age and preserve yourself in this, your youth, so that you can when you are older complete those studies which cannot be completed except by you.
I seem to see you like Tantalus in the middle of the water, for you cannot enjoy all of the riches of the Palatine Library. I can sense your avidity from your letters, and I also know with what violent force you are driven on to your studies. This makes me fear for your little body. Otherwise, I will write at another time about the poems which you sent – now I am extremely busy. If you see the [???] of Bongars, you will know from it what my cares are. For I have set aside my Polybius for the meantime. Farewell, my dearest friend.”
Some reflections from a student who took Greek for the first time this summer
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” –Aristotle
We’ve all experienced times throughout when education feels simply bitter, with the fruits that are promised to come not even on the horizon. In other words, any time a test rolls around or a paper is due. And yet, nearly every time, the relief of being done is a sweet enough fruit, and the realization that at least some significant learning was done is just a cherry on top. In no other area of study have I experienced feelings of bitterness towards education followed by enjoyment of its fruits in such rapid succession than in learning Ancient Greek.
As a lifelong Latin student, I admittedly thought that the first few classes, and even weeks, of my Ancient Greek course would be a breeze. Sure Latin and Greek were different languages, but they both fell under the Classics umbrella and used similar grammatical structures that are now second nature to my Latin oriented brain. However, I failed to account for a primary aspect of Greek: its alphabet. Most people, especially Classics students, know some of the Greek letters, like alpha, beta, or delta. Those in particular are familiar to English and Latin speakers, given that they closely resemble A, B, and D. It’s the rest of the alphabet that gave me, and most of my classmates, fits.
Many of the letters were completely foreign shapes that represented unfamiliar sounds. Some contracted sounds, such as ‘th’ and ‘ps’ are simply one letter, with many letters out of order from our standard English alphabet, and some letters like ‘h’ even being shown by an accent mark rather than a letter. So when we were asked to read aloud and translate Greek words, I found myself first transforming the characters into their approximate English counterparts to read them aloud, and then translating them into their English definitions. Not only is pronunciation not stressed at all in Latin, the altered alphabet made each word feel like an enormous hurdle.
However, as is Aristotle’s golden rule of education, the sweet fruits came not far behind. After a few hours of dutiful practice, both with classmates and alone, I became well acquainted with the formerly alien Ancient Greek letters. I can’t say it has become second nature, because to be frank I’m not sure if it ever will, but my fear of reading Greek words aloud has reduced dramatically. Unfortunately, that relief has been short lived, as our course has carried on to the minutiae of the language: declensions, conjugations, and articles. Yet, the immediate swing from bitterness to sweetness gives hope for further enjoyment of the Greek language.
“The happy man is the one with a healthy body, a wealthy soul and a well-educated nature” –Thales
Many philosophers throughout human history have spoken to the joy that is necessary to properly learn and live, and that the happiest people are those who are the most educated. While this notion feels at times preposterous, I find that it is especially true when students are allowed to thoroughly learn the material that interests them at their own speed.
By choosing an Ancient Greek course for the first time this summer, I have gone back to the basics of any language: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. And while I have little memory of doing similar exercises to learn English, I can remember building the foundations of Latin nearly six years ago. However, I have now reached the Latin stage where classes and homeworks are dominated solely by translations– I have a dictionary on hand, because at this point there’s no time to study more vocab, and whenever I see an infinitive verb, I just assume that the author is using some form of indirect speech. To be frank, I don’t think I’ve seen any form of “esse” in years. This ease I feel with Latin has helped me read increasingly complex texts and perform more adept analysis, but the fundamentals of the language have certainly been a bit lost.
During my experiences with Greek this summer, however, I have made a genuine commitment to understanding each and every aspect of the sentences I translate. I, of course, want to be precise with my vocabulary translations, but rather than simply trying to get through as many sentences as possible, and half-heartedly moving on from any phrases that don’t quite make sense, I’m trying to actually figure out what I don’t quite understand. While these goals have certainly made learning Greek more time consuming than I originally anticipated, it has actually brought considerable joy to me. For the first time in years I feel less of a time crunch to get through material, and therefore increased enjoyment and fulfillment in learning the material.
I’ve often heard people discuss the extreme difficulty of the English language, and that, most of the time, it simply makes very little sense. From the spelling of our words to the grammatical structure of our sentences, English is often considered one of the hardest languages to learn. However, I don’t think that I personally understood why that was until I returned to the fundamentals of Ancient Greek.
Latin and Greek are the two foreign languages I have studied the most, and both have a calculated, almost mathematical, structure. Since the case of a noun or adjective determines what the word’s role in the sentence is, we as readers can identify each word’s job purely by looking at the ending. The same is true for verbs, as the ending tells us the person, number, tense, and mood of the verb all within a few letters at the end of the word. And while these rules, of course, have many exceptions, even those exceptions have trends that can be studied and then identified when looking at a sentence. In general, one can learn the languages by studying paradigms and grammar charts, in addition to practicing translating sentences. These paradigms are so accurate, in fact, that often personal pronouns and “to be” verbs can be omitted. The ancient Latin and Greek texts even had no spaces between words, punctuation, or capital letters; however, readers could still understand the material because of the steadfast rules of the languages.
These immovable, easily explainable rules seem to be what’s missing from English. Most of the reasoning behind why certain words look the way they do or function in a particular manner is because that’s just the way it works (in word order). There’s not a easy declension or case system for all English nouns and adjectives, verbs don’t share common endings that allow one to identify their syntax, and spelling feels, at times, completely arbitrary. We have so many words that are spelled the same with different meanings or have the same pronunciation with different meanings that we categorize them: homographs and homophones. While not everyone has a mathematically-oriented brain, the calculated approach Latin and Greek take to grammar certainly makes them easier to wrap our heads around, in addition to highlighting the outright confusing nature of English.
Having now completed my Introductory Greek summer course, I am able to reflect on the most impactful aspects that I took away from the class. While learning a new language always provides a new window into how we think about various dialects, grammar, and vocabulary, I find that learning a Classical language gives an additional perspective that modern languages cannot supply. By learning a dead language, I, and all Classics students, are forced to examine how life was when Ancient Greek was the common denominator. I briefly took a Spanish course in middle school, and I recall the translation passages consisting of dialogue between people getting food at a market, or walking down a city street; however, the Greek passages consist of philosophical debates between philosophers of the time, or strenuous journeys across dangerous seas in triremes. In uncovering these events that are so foreign to the modern eye, I am truly taking a history course along with a language course. This multifaceted learning experience certainly gives me genuine interest and enjoyment in translating large volumes of text.
In addition, as I made my way through the unique, and admittedly odd, stories, I was forced to make somewhat of a human connection with the characters. For example, many of our passages involved a character who lived his life as Homer would, and frequently quoted the great poet. While his antics were at times confusing, I would always become a little more alert and absorbed in the text when he, and his Homeric philosophies, appeared in the passages. These little nuances, that can really be found only in the texts of Classical, dead languages, showcase the human interest that learning Ancient Greek provides. Looking forward, such connections to the text has greatly heightened my fascination with the Classics as a whole, and encouraged me to dive deeper into the field.
My name is Matthew Abati, and I am a rising high school senior at Milton Academy just outside of Boston. I have been a Classics lover since middle school and am very excited to share some of my thoughts on the Classics here on Sententiae Antiquae! When I’m not in school, I love to read all types of books and play all types of sports.
