Inside of a drinking krater–a mixing bowl for wine. This is a black vase with a red figure in the middle. The figure is a nude man with his head and shoulders in a giant wine jar
“I want to speak of the Atreides,
And I want to sing about Cadmos,
But the sound of my strings
Echoes only with Love.
Just yesterday I changed my strings
And then the whole lyre
And I was trying to sing
The labors of Herakles
But the lyre returned
Only the sound of Love.
Goodbye, heroes
For the rest of my time
My lyre sings only tales of Love”
Both of these poems use Troy and Thebes as metonyms for poetic traditions. The second is even more associative, substituting family names for the locations. In both cases, the contrast is between heroic tales of war and the subjects appropriate to lyric songs (love, etc). Troy and Thebes show up as the primary location for the death of the race of heroes in Hesiod too:
Hesiod, Works and Days, 158-165:
“Kronos’ son Zeus made a better and more just third race,
the divine generation of heroic men who are called
hemitheoi, the earlier generation on the boundless earth.
And then evil war and dread conflict wiped them out,
some of them under seven-gated Thebes, the Cadmean land,
where they struggled over the flocks of Oedipus,
and leading others in ships for booty across the sea
at Troy, for the sake of well-tressed Helen.”
Edmund Wilson, Reflections on the Teaching of Latin:
It is still possible for a student to- day, as it was forty years ago, to have been through four or five years of Latin and yet, as I have recently had a chance to note, not to have learned, for example, the words for the commonest colors and animals, the parts of the body and the seasons of the year. Why?
The answer is: Caesar and Cicero – the military vocabulary of the one, the highfalutin rhetoric of the other. And what is the reason for prescribing these writers? The answer to this is that Caesar, at some now remote point of the past, was selected as the only example of classical Latin prose that was simple and straight-forward enough for a schoolboy to make his way through, and that Cicero represented the ideal of Latin diction at a time when it was thought essential for every educated man to write Latin. And why the years of grinding at grammar at the expense of learning to read? This is a part of the ancient tradition of abstract intellectual discipline. The justification for it is the same as the justification for piling problems of algebra on students who have no mathematical interests and will never have occasion to use algebra. Both at worst have a minimum of practical use. Latin syntax does give us some training in the relation of words in a sentence, as algebra gives us some idea of what is involved in mathematical method; but there is nevertheless a fallacy in this old ideal. It strikes us as rather monstrous when we read about how Karl Marx, that intellectual prodigy, used to exercise his mental muscles by committing to memory whole pages of languages he did not understand; yet actually our teaching of Latin inflicts something not very different. The student is made to memorize pages of declensions, conjugations, and rules for grammatical constructions that mean little or nothing to him as language.
Does the minimum of real Latin that he acquires in this way serve any useful purpose in later life? The lawyer hardly needs this instruction to pick up the Latin phrases of the law; the student in most scientific fields can learn the terminology of his subject without worrying about Cicero and Caesar.
“Let us drink wine happily
And toast Bacchus with songs,
That inventor of choral performances,
The lover of all music.
He shares the life of the Loves-
Kythera loves him too
Drunkenness was born thanks to him;
Grace was born thanks to him.
Grief takes a break when he’s around.
Pain goes to sleep too.
So once the drink is mixed,
Have the cute boys take it around.
Then grief has run away,
Mixed in with the wind-driven squall.
Let’s take a drink, then.
Let’s take a break from our worries.
What benefit is there from
Stressing over our pains?
How can we know the future?
Life is unclear to mortal-kind.
I want to get drunk and dance.
I want to douse myself in perfume and play
With handsome men
And pretty women too.”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers: Thales 1.35-37
“These sayings are also attributed to him:
God is the oldest of all things in existence, since god* was never born.
The most beautiful thing is the universe, since it is god’s creation and it contains everything.
Mind is the fastest thing since it runs through everything.
Compulsion is the strongest thing, since it overpowers everything.
The wisest thing is time, since it uncovers all.
Thales claimed that there was no difference between death and being alive. When someone asked why he didn’t die then, he said “because it would make no difference.”
“Come on, best of the painters,
Paint! Best of the Painters,
Expert in the Rhoadian art,
Paint my girlfriend who is away
Just as I tell you to.
First, paint her hair
Soft and black as it is.
As much as the wax can handle,
Make it smell of perfume.
Then make her whole cheek
Beneath her dark hair
Her ivory forehead.
Don’t separate her eyebrows
Or let them touch
Leave them as they are
Touching almost without notice,
The dark circles of her lashes.
Make her glance true
Bright like fire, flashing
Like Athena’s gaze,
But wet like Cythera’s
Color her nose and cheeks,
Mixing milk together with rose.
Dye her lips like Persuasion’s,
Just begging for kisses.
Have all the Graces fly
Beneath her chin
Around her marble smooth neck.
Dress the rest of her
In purple robes
But leave a little skin to see
Proof of her body below.
Stop! I am looking at her.
Wax–you’ll be chatting me up soon!”
“Paint my dear Bathullos,
My boyfriend, as I instruct.
Make his hair bright–
Dark underneath,
But sun-brightened on top.
Add his curls free
Of the rest, set in a mess
As they wish.
Make his forehead crowned
With eyebrows, darker than serpents.
Leave his eyes black, fierce
Mixed with peace.
Their ferocity is from Ares
Their peace is from Cythera–
He uses them to frighten at times
And to dangle hope in others.
Give his tender cheek
And apple’s red glow–
And, if you can manage,
Add Modesty’s light blush.
I don’t know how you can make his lips
Gentle yet still compelling.
So let the wax itself
Hold it all, chatting in silence.
Below his face give him a neck
Nicer ivory than Adonis had.
Provide him with Hermes’ chest
And his two hands.
Grant him Polydeuces’ thighs
and Dionysus’ belly.
Above his tender thighs,
Thighs holding roiling fire,
Give him a sufficient penis,
Already longing for the Paphian.
Unfortunately, your art begrudges:
It is incapable of showing his
Back. That would have been nicer.
Why do I need to tell you about his feet?
Take my money, however much you say.
Record this Apollo and
Make me a Bathullos.
And if you ever visit Samos,
Paint an Apollo after my Bathyllos.”
I prize the Greek more for the movement of the words, rhythm, perhaps than for anything else. There is the POIKILOTHRON and then Catullus, ‘Collis O Heliconii,’ and some Propertius, that one could do worse than know by heart for the sake of knowing what rhythm really is. And there is the gulph between TIS O SAPPHO ADIKEI, and Pindar’s big rhetorical drum TINA THEON, TIN’ EROA, TINA D’ ANDREA KELADESOMEN, which one should get carefully fixed in the mind. I’ll explain viva voce if this metatype-phosed Greek is too unintelligible.
It is perhaps a sense of Latin that helps or seems to have helped people to a sort of superexcellent neatness in writing English — something different from French clarity. It may be merely from the care one takes in following the construction in an inflected language.
“These kind of things belong to poets; we, moreover, want to be philosophers, masters of facts not fables. And yet, these gods of poetry, if they know that these things would be ruinous for their children, would be considered to have sinned in conferring a favor.
It is just as if, according to that thing which Aristo of Chios used to say, that philosophers hurt their audiences when the things they say well are interpreted badly (for it was possible still to leave Aristippus’ school as a profligate or Zeno’s school bitter and angry).
If it is this way, and those who have heard them leave with twisted minds because they understand the philosophers’ arguments incorrectly, then it befits philosophers more to be quiet than cause their audiences harm. In this way, if people pervert the capacity for reason which was given by the gods to provide good council and used it instead for fraud and harm, then it would have been better if it had not been given to the human race at all.”
Poetarum ista sunt, nos autem philosophi esse volumus, rerum auctores, non fabularum. Atque hi tamen ipsi di poetici si scissent perniciosa fore illa filiis, peccasse in beneficio putarentur. Ut si verum est quod Aristo Chius dicere solebat, nocere audientibus philosophos iis qui bene dicta male interpretarentur (posse enim asotos ex Aristippi, acerbos e Zenonis schola exire), prorsus, si qui audierunt vitiosi essent discessuri quod perverse philosophorum disputationem interpretarentur, tacere praestaret philosophos quam iis qui se audissent nocere: sic, si homines rationem bono consilio a dis immortalibus datam in fraudem malitiamque convertunt, non dari illam quam dari humano generi melius fuit. Ut, si medicus sciat eum aegrotum qui iussus sit vinum sumere meracius sumpturum statimque periturum, magna sit in culpa, sic vestra ista providentia reprehendenda, quae rationem dederit
Nicolas-André Monsiau “The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia ” 1800
“Once, in the middle of the night,
At that time when the bear
Is already turning round the Plowman’s hand,
And all mortal peoples lie
Overcome by exhaustion,
Love stationed himself outside
The bolts of my doors and was knocking.
I said, “who’s knocking at my door?
You’ve broken up my dreams!”
And Love said, “Open up!
I am just a baby, don’t be afraid.
I am getting damp as I wander
Through this moonless night.”
I felt pity when I heard this
And immediately grabbed my lamp.
I opened the door and saw
Baby there, wearing a quiver
With arrows and a bow.
I sat him down near my hearth
And I warmed his hands with mine
And pressed the gold water from his hair.
Once he shrugged off his shivers,
He said, “Come on, let’s try this bow,
Whether its string has been ruined from getting wet.
He drew and shot true,
In the middle of my heart, like a mosquito.
He jumped up and laughed out with a smile,
“Friend, celebrate with me!
My bow is unharmed,
Although your heart will hurt for a while!
“Not falling in love hurts.
Yet falling in love hurts too.
But more painful than everything
Is to fail at loving completely.
Family means nothing to love.
Wisdom, manner are crushed.
Only money matters.
I wish the first person who loved money
Would have died.
Because of it, no brother matters
Because of it, no parents matter.
Wars, murders–because of money.
And this is worse. Those of us who love
Lose because of money.”
“I imagined I was running in a dream,,
But on my shoulders wearing wings.
Love dragged lead somehow
On his pretty feet,
As he was pursuing, almost catching me.
What does this dream want to mean?
I imagine that while I
Have been wrapped up in many
Loves and have slipped away from some
I am caught, stuck, in this one.”
