“You grumble that my letters to you are not very polished. Well, who speaks with polish unless they want to talk ostentatiously? I want my letters to have the quality of the kind of conversation we’d have while sitting next to each other or walking: easy and unlabored, since there is nothing forced or false about them.
If I could, I would prefer to show rather than tell you what I am feeling. Even if I were debating with you, I wouldn’t stomp my foot, or wave my hands around, or raise my voice–I’d abandon those tricks to the orators because I am happy to have shared my experiences with you without elaborating them or cheapening them.
I wish I could make this single thing clear to you: whatever I say, I don’t just feel it, I mean it. Men kiss their girlfriends one way and their children another, but enough emotion is clear in the parental embrace too, since it is sacred and restrained.”
Minus tibi accuratas a me epistulas mitti quereris. Quis enim accurate loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui? Qualis sermo meus esset, si una sederemus aut ambularemus, inlaboratus et facilis, tales esse epistulas meas volo, quae nihil habent accersitum nec fictum. Si fieri posset, quid sentiam, ostendere quam loqui mallem. Etiam si disputarem, nec supploderem pedem nec manum iactarem nec attollerem vocem, sed ista oratoribus reliquissem, contentus sensus meos ad te pertulisse, quos nec exornassem nec abiecissem. Hoc unum plane tibi adprobare vellem: omnia me illa sentire, quae dicerem, nec tantum sentire, sed amare. Aliter homines amicam, aliter liberos osculantur; tamen in hoc quoque amplexu tam sancto et moderato satis apparet adfectus.
“What is left for me, then, with other people so that they may listen to my confessions as if they would heal all my problems? We are a species desperate to know about other people’s lives but negligent in fixing our own. Why do those who do not want me to say who they are want to ask me who I am?
When they hear from me directly about myself, how can they know whether I speak truly when no one knows what moves another person except for the spirit that moves within them? Yet, if they hear about themselves from you, they cannot say, “The Lord lies.” Since, what is hearing about ourselves from you apart from knowing oneself? Truly, who understands this and says “this is untrue” except for someone who lies.”
(3) Quid mihi ergo est cum hominibus, ut audiant confessiones meas, quasi ipsi sanaturi sint omnes languores meos? curiosum genus ad cognoscendam vitam alienam, desidiosum ad corrigendam suam. quid a me quaerunt audire qui sim, qui nolunt a te audire qui sint? et unde sciunt, cum a me ipso de me ipso audiunt, an verum dicam, quandoquidem nemo scit hominum quid agatur in homine, nisi spiritus hominis qui in ipso est? si autem a te audiant de se ipsis, non poterunt dicere, “mentitur dominus.” quid est enim a te audire de se nisi cognoscere se? quis porro cognoscit et dicit, “falsum est,” nisi ipse mentiatur?
“Whenever he went to a drinking party, Nikanor was afflicted with fear of the flute girl. Whenever she began playing the flute and he would hear it in the Symposium, he would be filled with anxiety. He said he could scarcely endure it whenever it was night. But during the day time, he was not scared off by hearing it. These kinds of reactions lasted a very long time.”
“Democles, who was his companion, used to seem blind and weak in his body. He was not able to walk along a cliff or on a bridge to cross over even a smallest depth of a ditch. But he was capable of crossing the ditch itself. This impacted him for a great amount of time.”
Attic red-figure mug with girl playing the double-flute and man dancing with krotala (castanets). Beazley Archive 204127 (Classical Art Research Centre, Oxford)
At some point last year, Sophia Efthimiatou reached out and started a conversation with me about moving my work at sententiaeantiquae.com to substack. I was interested in exploring the platform, partly because wordpress has changed some of their infrastructure in annoying ways, but also because I am an itinerant tinkerer, happier with starting things, perhaps, than imagining how to finish them.
I came up with the idea of working through the Iliad again for a few reasons. First, Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad brought the epic more into public focus. Second, I found the discussion around the translation sadly divorced from Homeric scholarship and I wanted to create some sort of a resource for new readers interested in engaging in the epic more. And, third, I wanted a project to get back into the Iliad with a depth I had lost in my years away from the epic.
So working on this substack has allowed me to continue a few things I care about in a different context: sharing more of the depth of the past and scholarship about it to a broader community and using the practice of doing so to help me continue learning and expanding my own work. (I have long used blogging as a process for practice and continued learning and for developing projects.)
So the invitation to try out substack also came at time when I was finishing up a book project (more in a few weeks!) and was thinking about next projects. I had spent more than a decade working almost exclusively on the Iliad and then turned quite quickly to a project on the Odyssey that culminated in a book on that epic and modern psychology. I have worked on many Homer related projects, but not writing a book on the Iliad would always gnaw at met.
The breadth and depth of Homeric scholarship is pretty much unrivalled in the humanities. Not only are there numerous modern languages that continue to produce important and critical material about the poems, but the history of Homeric scholarship goes back to the original performance of the texts. To add to this, interdisciplinarity and the continued popularity of heroic myth has produced a staggeringly impressive variegation of commentary on Homer. The task of mere familiarity with scholarly trends is simultaneously Herculean and Sisyphean—so much so that my advisor in graduate school repeatedly told me to find something ‘new’ to write on because the bibliography is just too big.
Alas, I have rarely been one to take good advice. So I somehow made myself into a Homerist. But I spent the first part of my career writing articles to make up for my ignorance and weak spots. Once I spent nearly a decade away from reading all of the new and wonderful scholarship about the Iliad, I had to find a way to get back into it, all while doing the rest of my job.
Sosias (potter, signed). Painting attributed to the Sosias Painter (name piece for Beazley, overriding attribution) or the Kleophrades Painter (Robertson) or Euthymides (Ohly-Dumm)
So, moving forward, I am going to continue posting on the Iliad almost exclusively, focusing on three general areas: (1) highlighting and discussing new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) pursuing a series of themes as I re-read the Iliad in Greek (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; notions of agency and determinism; hints about performance and reception; ways of thinking about the reception of Homer by diverse audiences); (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me.
Areas 2 and 3 are those that have long motivated my online work, but 1 (promoting other people’s scholarship) is something that I came to while working through the substack posts. One of my fundamental frustrations with scholarship is the lack of correlation between the intensity of the labor and the impact our work has. So much Classical scholarship is only read by people who are writing on the same topic in order to publish an article only a handful of people will really read. So much of our work is really good and can enrich the way people understand the past—but it just doesn’t reach a larger audience. So what I hope to do is to discuss an article or book every week to show why it matters and what benefit it offers. (And not in a book review kind of way: I have no intention of criticizing scholarship and will avoid negative comments—I have thrown enough scholarly shade in my day and need to make some amends).
So, starting next week, this substack will continue in these directions. And who knows where it will end.
“Chamaeleon claims in his book On Stesichorus that it wasn’t only Homer’s poetry that was accompanied by music but also Archilochus’ and Hesiod’s too. He adds the work of Mimnermus and Phocylides to this as well.”
“Then Mimnermos, who discovered the sweet sound
And breath of gentle pentameter, after he suffered terribly,
Was burning for Nanno. With his lips often on the grey lotus
Pipe, he partied with Examyes.
But he was hateful to serious Hermobios and Pherekles.”
“Mimnermos, the son of Ligurtuades, from Kolophon or Smurnos or Astupalaios. An elegiac poet. He lived during the 37th Olympiad [ c. 632-629 BCE) and so lived before the Seven Sages. Some people say that he lived at the same time they did. He used to be called Liguastades because of his harmony and clarity. He wrote…those many books.”
“….but dear youth is like a short dream
Then suddenly hard and ugly old age
Drapes down over your head.
It makes a man hateful and unloved, even unknown
As it weakens his eyes and clouds his mind.”
“Everything’s gone to hell and is in the shitter, Kyrnos,
And not even one of the blessed, immortal gods is to blame!
No, it’s the violence of men, their craven profits, and arrogance
That’s damned us to evil from bountiful good.”
This is the final post dedicated to Iliad 24. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
“And so they were completing the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses”
῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο
Imagine if all we had of the poem was a scholarly record conveying these two lines. What would we make of the journey that we would have to take to get from line 1 to line 2? How would we relate the opening request with the final fact and then connect these in turn to a larger tradition of myth? One might naturally assume that the former leads to the latter in a causal fashion, but there’s no necessary reason to posit that.
There’s an openness, though, to both lines. The initial invocation asks for a story to be told; the final one offers a scene in process: the imperfect tense of the verb ἀμφίεπον shows an action that is ongoing but not yet complete, it leaves the audience with the sense that more is still to come, that the final word has not actually been spoken. This certainly functions to mark the epic as part of a larger story cycle, just as the imperfect in line 1.7 (Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή) indicates that the Iliad is part of a larger process, a cosmic narrative arc.
Yet, without external evidence, each name is merely an empty sign waiting to be filled, a story needing to be told. But we have the whole poem. We can follow from line 1.1 to 24.804. And we still likely ask why the Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses. Ancient scholars had a range of less than satisfactory answers. The scholia record that a scholar named Menekrates believed that Homer was silent about the events after Hektor because “he sensed his own weakness and inability to tell the events in the same way” (Schol. bT ad. Hom. Il. 21.804). Another claims that some modified the final line:
In this version, we find the possibility of an ever-expanding tale, moving from the Iliad to the events of the Aithiopis without much of a break at all. While I have no doubt that ancient performances offered such opportunities for stitching and re-stitching narratives together, I think we still need to contend with the beginning, middle, and end of our Iliad. Even if a performer would segue from an Iliad to an Aithiopis, we still face the fact that each was felt to be a unitary and individualizable narrative. So, here are some other reasons why the Iliad ends as it does.
1.‘Epic’ time is different from normal narrative time: it is more like a time loop in modern science fiction. All the main events always happen and have already always happened, but there’s room for variation in the journey between them. This occupies a place between what we might clumsily call “ritual time” and a causal narrative chain. For the former, I have in mind the narrative cycle of a liturgical calendar where congregants/audiences are treated to the same stories at the same part of the year. The stories never change because they have happened and must happen the same, but our experiences of them change as we move from one repetition to another. For the latter, the logic of causation is imposed through the repetition of the same basic events, but by finding space in the interstices to tell different stories, audiences explore the dynamic interaction between determinism and agency, between accepting what one cannot change and being empowered to alter what one can.
2.The city has already been destroyed in the imaginations of the characters and the audience. Following on the immutable layering of epic time, Iliadic narrative refers to canonical events of the Trojan War but mostly moves around them: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the marshaling of the armies, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the sack of the city, and other events all exist on the periphery, at times marginalized to such an extent that scholars can doubt whether or not the Homeric epics appeal to them. At the same time, the Iliad appropriates and reperforms moments from the larger tale that should not be part if its tale, engaging in a creative anachronism that manages to place the catalogue of ships, the teikhoskopia, the duel over Helen, and the building of Achaean fortifications between Achilles’ falling out with Agamemnon and the embassy to try to resolve the spat.
The Iliad reshuffles the deck of mythical time both to assert the supremacy of its story and to show that no series of events, no causal chain, can alter the outcome of the overall narrative. This is theological in the cosmic sense: notions like Zeus’ plan and the double determination (when the narrative shows the gods ‘causing’ an action but also features mortals choosing to act without knowledge of divine will) underscores the complexity of causation and the inscrutability of single efficient causes. At the same time, such shuffling is evocative of human cognition, the way we understand and retain basic concepts of beginning and ending but can lose track of intermediary steps.
3.Achilles has already died. In a way, this is no different than the previous point, but it is important enough to emphasize again. The Iliad does not merely deal out the deck of myth in a different order, it redraws the images on the most important cards to achieve similar ends. Achilles dies through Patroklos—his physical death is disassembled and re-used in book 11 and then book 16, anticipated in books 18, 19, 22, 23, and 24, but never performed because it has already been achieved. Just as the city is destroyed in the words of Hektor, Andromache, Priam, and Hecuba, so too is Achilles’ death portrayed through Patroklos’ surrogacy and the divine and mortal speeches that anticipate it.
4.Hektor’s death may be more important than Achilles’. As I have mentioned before, the Iliad takes part in an etiological (that is, explanatory) arc that moves from the dios boulê, Zeus’ plan to rid the world of the race of heroes, to an era when the realms of gods and men are more thoroughly distinct. While the Odyssey more-or-less completes this journey toward Hesiod’s Works and Days, where human beings toil distant from tangible divine favor or aid, the Iliad moves audiences from the twin rages of Achilles and Apollo in book 1 (where they are both upset at Agamemnon) to Apollo’s anger at Achilles for his treatment of Hektor in book 24. Apollo—much to Hera’s surprise—takes the side of a non-divine mortal for the rite of burial against one closer to his own kin.
Along the way, we see the widening distance between divine knowledge and human knowledge—the whole motif of double determination, whereby we as audience members see the gods and mortals as understanding different levels of causation for a given action. The repeated toggling between divine intervention paired with human decisions shows us separate worlds, even separate realities or dimensions whose entanglement does little more than increase damage and pain to one another. It is almost as if the Iliad attests to a time when the fabric between two different realities was thin enough to be permeable and that it shows us how perilous it is when beings from one realm meddle with events in another. The world of the gods was overturned by the silly decision of one man (Paris!); the mortal plain roils with each outsized, overwrought divine act. The steady movement towards emphasizing the honor of mortals in death and the separation of gods and humans both justifies and supports the way the world is for mortals and suggests rather strongly that it is better this way.
5.Hektor’s burial is the end of an era. And also a beginning. Hektor is different from Achilles as a full-mortal and as a ‘family’ man. By ending with his burial rather than the fall of the city or the funeral games for Achilles, the Iliad elevates his importance and closes out the race of heroes by encapsulating a different series of values in this one fallible man. Hektor is far from perfect throughout the epic: he struggles to understand his role in leading the city, he blusters and glowers when things don’t go his way, and he is shown to be in the framework of Achilles and Diomedes somewhat un-heroic in his final moments. But the laments that follow his death in books 22 and 24—cast against the obscenity of Achilles’ treatment of his body—double down on the importance of his unheroic character as a son, father, and a man whose kindness towards the most hated woman in the world and the cause of all his troubles is so incredible that scholars have speculated he was under the spell of her charisma. Hektor’s inconsistencies and internal contradictions form a counterpoint to Achilles’. In a universe where even the gods are churlish and quick-to-rage, what kinds of excess should we be grateful for in a man?
6.Hektor’s burial may also be self-reflective for epic poetry. As I mentioned above, the tense/aspect of the verb performing Hektor’s burial is incomplete, and ongoing (῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο). The Iliad doesn’t so much end as fade away, to black as in the end of the final episode of the Sopranos. The process of burying Hektor remains ongoing as the poem ends, as we all continue to engage in its continuation through sharing in his memory. But I think the process, the imperfectivity goes farther than this.
The process of the burial is the beginning of enshrining Hektor’s memory and creating his kleos. But this may also be an example of an unnoticed ekphrasis. While the tomb itself is not the creation of a work of art like Achilles’ shield, it is still the execution of a physical craft described within an oral/written artform. As such it may contain an implicit comparison between the practice of burial and the art of epic poetry.
Homer, Il. 24.797–800
“They quickly placed the bones in an empty trench and then They covered it with great, well-fitted stones. They rushed to heap up a marker, around which they set guards In case the well-greaved Achaeans should attack too soon.”
In Iliad seven, Hector challenges the ‘best of the Achaeans’ to a duel. There he imagines that, once he had won the contest, the dead hero’s tomb would be a monument to, and sign of, his everlasting glory. Ironically, the dead hero’s tomb turns out to be his, once the Trojans construct it at the epic’s end
But what kind of sign is it? Homer describes how the Trojans’ burial mound for Hector leaves ‘a mark’—the word here is sêma (from which we get the words ‘semantics’ or ‘semaphore’), and also means a sign or symbol. In the end, then, the epic leaves us with a symbol of some kind that I think points back to this epic itself. Ostensibly, of course, that is Hector’s burial mound, a physical marker of his fame—and as a metonym it stands for the fame of all the heroes who fought at Troy. Yet, its immediate referent, the physical thing it describes, is a ‘hollow grave’ (koilên kapeton).
An English speaker might wonder whether or not the hollowness of the grave marks some sort of empty meaning and thus offers some judgment on the vanity and meaninglessness of the conflict, perhaps evoking ambivalence. But part of the trick in translating metaphors from one culture to another is understanding that a cognitive valence can be very different. In English, ‘hollow’ and ‘empty’ tend to refer to the absence of substance within something else. (Hence, our use for it to describe depression or anhedonia.)
But in ancient Greek, the word koilê is used to describe the shape made by a thing that allows it to hold something else. It can sometimes then come to shift to point to the absence of that something else, but it is, more often, a marker for the vessel which can carry something, even when it is carrying it. In conjunction with Hektor’s grave, consider the following lyric mentions of the ‘hollow ships’ of the Trojan War:
Consider:
Ibycus fr. 1a 16-19
Nor yet the overreaching virtue of heroes whom the hollow, many-benched ships brought as the destruction of Troy.
In both these passages, the ships are marked out for their potential to carry something and their ability to do so. It is also arguable that the ships carry ethical content of the heroes they convey to Troy as well. Of course, in the Iliad the ships are often invoked as empty in their capacity to carry things as well as people—but these moments are also seen as critical in telling the story, as when the Trojan herald Idaios refers to the beginning of the conflict:
Homer, Il. 7.399-400
“However many possessions Alexandros led in his hollow ships To troy. Oh, how I wish he had died first!”
On the internal surface, around the rim, four ships. Cemetery of Ancient Thera. 3rd quarter of the 6th cent. BC Archaeological Museum of Thera.
So, when the word used to describe that ‘hollow trench’ (koilein kápeton) is the same used for the ships that brought the Achaeans to Troy and will take their stories away, the grave is being marked out as a vessel for Hector’s fame. The message of Hektor’s “empty grave” is not like the elegiac regret of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, but instead it represents the potential of an empty vessel to be filled by the audience in its reception of the poem. It is a signal, I think, of the assumption that meaning continues to be made outside the world of the poem and that we stare into the sign we create the meaning based on what we ‘read’ there and knew before. Each time we engage in this process, we create anew. This outward looking burial mound that is simultaneously Hektor’s grave and the Iliad itself is a continuation of the narrative’s strategy of showing us characters responding to other’s narratives by reflecting on their own lives and then engaging in storytelling themselves, as we see in Achilles’ final story to Priam in book 24. We are the people to come, walking or sailing by on the Hellespont or traveling through the tale as it is sung or read. We recreate the story of Achilles, bound up in the grave of the man he killed, just as Hektor imagined his story would be told through his own enemy’s tomb.
So, in addition to Hector’s grave, this vessel, this sêma, refers to the Iliad itself. The epic is a vessel of fame, of Hector’s, Achilles’, and Agamemnon’s, but it is also a marker for the death of a world, for the end of a bygone time. On the one hand, it marks the transition from the heroic age to the present day. On the other, it acts as a grave marker of an entire tradition of epic poetry which would have sung about the wars at Troy and Thebes. We as audience members recreate the tale, but in the raiment of our time, transforming it, but reviving it too.
The hollowness of this thing is not about being empty, but about having the power to carry something, to produce something else, even something new. As the Tao Te Ching states, “We shape clay into a pot / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space / that makes it livable” (Chapter 11; Stephen Mitchell, 1988). Thus, Hector’s grave carries with it everything he was or could be; and the Iliad, far from empty and devoid of meaning, is that vessel that carries so much unknown across the oceans of time.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11 translated by Stephen Mitchell (1988)
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being but non-being is what we use.
black-figure terracotta vessel depicting an ancient greek ship.
“Nothing is unexpected, nothing is foresworn and
Nothing amazes now that father Zeus the Olympian
veiled the light to make it night at midday
even as sun was shining: so dread fear has overtaken men.
From this time on everything that men believe
will be doubted: may none of us who see this be surprised
when we see forest beasts taking turns in the salted field
with dolphins, when the echoing waves of the sea become
Dearer to them than the sand, and the dolphins love the wooded glen…”
When he arrives in Odysseus’ household, the seer Theoklymenos gets a little judgy:
Homer, Odyssey 20.351-57
“Wretches! What evil is this you are suffering? Now your heads
Are covered with night along with your faces and legs below.
A wailing burns and your cheeks streak with tears
As the walls and fine rafters are sprayed with blood.
The entryway is filled with ghosts, the courtyard is filled with ghosts
Heading to Erebos under the darkness. The sun has perished
From the sky and a wicked mist rushes over us.”
A suitor’s response is appropriately dismissive: 20.360-362
“A crazy stranger has just arrived from somewhere else.
Come, quick, young men, send him out of the house
To the assembly since he thinks this is like the night!”
“A solar eclipse did not happen but Theoklymenos sees it this way as he tells a prophecy under divine influence since the sun will eclipse for these guys.”
People cite Plutarch (On the Face in the Moon 19), suggesting that he presents this scene as being an eclipse: but he is, in my opinion, satirizing a man who marshals an excess of questionable poetic ‘proofs’ to display his own erudition about eclipses. You can read a free version of this at Lacus Curtius.
From the Dallas Morning News
Peter Gainsford has a great piece about this from 2012 (TAPA 142 1-22). Over twitter, he pointed out that he did not include P. Oxy. 53, 3710 (M.W. Haslam, 1986) which contains a lot of information about eclipses in conjunction with the passage from the Odyssey.
I have read a good deal of scholia and I am not convinced that the passage changes anything about whether or not this part of Odyssey refers to an eclipse. Some ancient scholars may have thought so—and the scholion implies that—but scholiasts also tend to fill commentary with displays of erudition and minutiae. But, here’s my [hasty] translation of a section of the fragment. You can view the whole fragment here. Also, I welcome any suggestions for cleaning up this translation.
“Aristonikos says that it was the new moon then, from which [we get?] Apollo, since he is the sun himself. Aristarkhos of Samos writes that this is because eclipses happen on the new moon. Thales says that the sun goes into eclipse when the moon is in front of it and when the day [….] marks it, on which it makes the eclipse which some call the thirtieth day and others call the new moon.
Heraclitus says as follows: when the months come together [the eclipse?] appears then before the second new moon and then they grow sometimes less and at other times more. Diodorus explains the same thing. For, after the moon is hidden it moves towards the sun during the final [days] of the month until it impedes the rays of the sun and…..makes it disappear and then in turn….”
“The consulship went to Gordian, the boy. But there was a sign that Gordian would be emperor for a short time. It was this: there was a solar eclipse so much like night that it was not possible to do anything without burning torches. And yet, afterwards, the Roman people distracted itself with pleasures and entertainment, in order to soften the memory of the things that had happened.”
Gordiano puero consulatus. sed indicium non diu imperaturi Gordiani hoc fuit quod eclipsis solis facta est, ut nox crederetur, neque sine luminibus accensis quicquam agi posset, post haec tamen voluptatibus et deliciis populus Romanus vacavit, ut ea quae fuerant aspere gesta mitigaret.
Hippocrates of Cos, The Sacred Disease, IV
“If they pretend to know how to summon down the moon and obscure the sun, to make it storm or sunny, to bring rain or drought, to render the sea non-navigable and the earth fallow and other types of miracles, whether they say they can do with from magic rites or from some other ability or practice, which ‘experts’ say are possible, then they seem to me to be impious, to be atheists, without any strength but unlikely to refrain from any of the craziest actions.”
“Even on its own, flames have medical applications. It is known that if fires are set they bring many types of relief to the diseases which are caused by a solar eclipse.”
LXIX. Est et ipsis ignibus medica vis. pestilentiae quae obscuratione solis contrahitur, ignes si fiant, multifariam auxiliari certum est. Empedocles et Hippocrates id demonstravere diversis locis.
Manetho, On Festivals, Fr. 84.( Joannes Lydus, De Mensibus, IV, 87)
“We should note that Manetho in his work On Festivals says that a solar eclipse imposes a wretched influence on people, especially in their head and stomach.”
“So they were inquiring like men who have their heads in the clouds how things were in the city and the world. I said, “All are happy and they will be happy still”. They looked askance and said “If this is true, the city is knocked up with evil”.
I said I was of the same opinion and then: “Because you are raised so high and looking down at everything from a distance, you have noticed these things most perceptively. But how are affairs of the sky? Will the sun go into eclipse? Will the moon rise straight up? Will Mars take a quarter turn toward Jupiter and will Saturn stand directly opposite to the sun? Will Venus share its path with Mercury and bear those Hermaphrodites you love so much? Will they send soaking rain? Will they pour out drifts of snow on the earth? Will they cast down hail, disease, plague, hunger and drought? Is the thunderbolt pail empty? Is the lightning box full again?”
