“The fact is that if you remove the ties of goodwill from our world, no house or city can stand tall nor can even agriculture persist! If this is less intelligible, one can perceive how powerful friendship and harmony are from the impact of disagreements and disharmony. What house is so stable or what state is so strong that it cannot be upended by hatred and division?”
Quod si exemeris ex rerum natura benevolentiae coniunctionem, nec domus ulla nec urbs stare poterit, ne agri quidem cultus permanebit. Id si minus intellegitur, quanta vis amicitiae concordiaeque sit, ex dissensionibus atque discordiis percipi potest. Quae enim domus tam stabilis, quae tam firma civitas est, quae non odiis et discidiis funditus possit everti?
Plato, Euthyphro 7c
“So if we were disagreeing about whether something was bigger or smaller, we’d turn to actual measurement to resolve our disagreement?”
“If we dispute about a fact, Cato, you and I can have no disagreement! There’s no difference between what you believe and I do when we compare the facts themselves once the words have been changed.”
Si de re disceptari oportet, nulla mihi tecum, Cato, potest esse dissensio; nihil est enim de quo aliter tu sentias atque ego, modo commutatis verbis ipsas res conferamus
“…Polydeukes.
I do not care that Lukaisin is among the dead*
And Enasphoros and swift-footed Sebros
The violent one….
The helmeted one…
Or Euteikhes and lord Areios
Exceptional among the Heroes.
The summoner
Great Eurotos in the chaos of Ares
And Alkon, and the best men
We will certainly not ignore them.
Yet Fate and the Way
Those most ancient ones
Overcame them all
And their untethered courage
Perished.
No human should fly to the heaven
Nor try to marry Aphrodite
The Kyprian Queen
Nor some child of Porkos, the sea-god
The Graces with loving eyes
Go to visit the house of Zeus.
A deity….
For friends…
Gives gifts…
In vain…
One went, another of them dead by arrow
Another by a marble millstone…
In Hades now…
Those people
Suffered unforgettable pain
Because they had evil plans.”
Greek, Attic; Bell-krater; Vases; Obverse, Orpheus among the Thracians; Reverse, libation scene. C 440 BCE, Painter of London E 497
*I may be obtuse or too lazy to follow it up, but I cannot make sense of the Loeb translation that takes the reconstructed οὐκ ἐγὼ]ν Λύκαισον ἐν καμοῦσιν ἀλέγω as “I do not reckon L. among the dead”. It seems atypical for the semantics of the verb and thematically unrelated to the judgment of this poem.
“Theognis of Megara, from Megara in Sicily. He lived around the time of the 59th Olympiad [ c/ 540 BCE]. He composed elegy for those who were saved from the Syracusans during the siege, around 2800 elegiac proverbs, a group of elegiac advice addressed to his lover Kyrnos, and other kinds of advisory lines. Theognis is useful because he wrote advice, but in the midst of this are interwoven foul and pederastic erotic lines too and many other things rejected by clean living.”
Theognis: This dude is Megarian, from Megara in Attica. The poet says this himself [783]. Plato didn’t acknowledge this when he claimed in Laws Book 1 that Theognis was from MEgara in Sicily. Not a few have followed Plato in this.”
“This is what Xenophon says about Theognis: “The words of Megarian Theognis: This poet has composed about nothing else except for human excellence and wickedness. This poetry is a treatise on people, as if an equestrian were to write about horses.”
“If someone praises you for as long as you see him
But lashes you with an evil tongue when you are apart,
That kind of man is not a very good friend at all.
He’s the kind who speaks smoothly with his tongue, but harbors different thoughts.
Let me have that kind of friend who knows his companion
And puts up with him when he’s mean or in a rage,
Like a brother. But you, friend, keep these things your heart
And you will remember me in future days.”
“One can survive the ruin from counterfeit silver and gold
Kurnos—and a wise person can easily discover it.
But if a dear friend’s mind is hidden in his chest
When he is false and he has a deceptive heart,
Well this the most counterfeit thing god has made for mortals
And it is the most painful thing of all to recognize.
For you cannot know the mind of a man or a woman
Before you investigate them, like an animal under a yoke—
And you cannot imagine what they are like at the right time
Since the outer image often misleads your judgment.”
“Dude, let’s be friends with each other at a distance.
With the exception of wealth, there’s too much of any good thing.
But we can be friends for a long time, just spend time with different men
Who have a better grasp of your mind.”
Thanks to Dr. Rebecca Raphael for sharing this passage on the teleology of the human ass with me. This is mostly for distraction, but it also functions as a timely reminder of some of the absurd conclusions that can arise from teleological thinking.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals 689b
“A human being is has no tail, but does have buttocks although the quadruped does not. A human being also has legs which are fleshy in the thighs and calves, while all the rest of the animals have fleshless legs—and not only those animals which have live births, but as many of the other animals who have legs—and they are covered with sinew, are bony, and full of spines.
There is one explanation, you might say, for these differences and that is that humans are the only animal to stand upright. So, nature removed some of the fleshy parts from above and transferred the weight below in order to make the upper portions of human beings easier to bear. This is why nature made human butts fleshy along with their thighs and their calves. With the same act, it made the nature of the buttocks useful for taking a break.
For it is not a problem for the rest of the quadrupeds and they do not get tired from doing that continually. This is because they have four supports holding them up, it works the same as if they are lying down.But human beings do not easily remain standing upright: our bodies need rest and need to sit down.
This is why a human being has a fleshy butt and thighs and the same reason why we don’t have tails. All the nutrition which heads that way is spent on butts and thighs. The need and use of a tail, moreover, is negated by having butts and thighs. In quadrupeds and the rest of the animals, the situation is the opposite: because they are like dwarfs, all their weight is centered in their upper parts and it is separated from the lower section. For this reason, they have no butt and have hard legs.
Sappho, fr. 1 [1 D. H. Comp. 23 (vi 114ss. Usener–Radermacher) (+P. Oxy. 2288)]
“Fine-throned, Immortal Aphrodite,
Trick-weaving child of Zeus, I beg you,
Don’t overcome my heart, Queen
With foolishness and pain
But come to me, if ever in days gone by
You heard my voice as you listened from afar
then left your father’s golden home
And came–
Once you readied your chariot and
Your beautiful swift sparrows carried you
As they flew with fast beats around the dark earth
Midway beneath the sky–
They arrived quickly. Then you, goddess,
Grinned in your deathless way
And asked what’s wrong with me now and
Why I was calling again
And what I really wanted in my little maddened heart
To happen. ‘Whom shall I cajole this time
To accept you back into her love? Who hurt you
Sappho?
If she avoids you, she’ll chase you soon enough.
If she won’t take your presents, she’ll send some soon.
If she doesn’t love you now, soon she will love
Even if she is reluctant.’
Come to me now, too! Free me from my hard
Worry. Bring to pass all the things
My heart clings to. And you–
By my ally yourself.”
Dionysus of Halicarnassus: “The elegance and beauty of this selection resides in how it fits together and the fluidity of its connections.” ταύτης τῆς λέξεως ἡ εὐέπεια καὶ ἡ χάρις ἐν τῇ συνεχείᾳ καὶ λειότητι γέγονε τῶν ἁρμονιῶν.
Attic white-ground red-figured kylix of Aphrodite riding a swan (c. 460 BCE) found at Kameiros (Rhodes)
“I said, ‘A carpenter who gets sick considers it right to take a medicine from a doctor to puke up the sickness or to cleanse his bowels or to escape the disease through fire or incision. But if anyone advises a treatment of long duration to him—wrapping his head with bandages and the steps that follow that—he immediately says he does not have the time to be sick and that there’s no profit in living like this, that if he pays too much attention to sickness he neglects that work before him.
After that, he says farewell to that kind of a doctor and returns to his normal life, returning to health while focusing on his own work. But if his body isn’t strong enough to recover, then he’s free from all his problems because he’s dead.”
“Helios was allotted labor for all days–
He and his horse never have
A break after rosy-toed Dawn
Leaves Ocean and ascends the Sky.
A curved, much-loved bed carries him
Across the waves, crafted by Hephaestus’ hands
Made of dear gold, with wings, he deeply sleeps
Above the water’s surface, from the land of the Hesperides
To the Ethiopians’ home, where his chariot and horses
Wait until dawn arrives, newly-born,
When Hyperion’s son climbs into his second car…
“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-ranks
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
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