I’m embarking on a year-long crash course in the humanities. These are my notes for week 2.
Following Ted Gioia’s curriculum, I tackled a small volume of early Greek poetry and the first ten books of the Odyssey. I also heard music from recent descendents of these ancient bards and saw a classic (and disturbing!) film.
Readings
I was apprehensive going in. I’ve read poems in four languages (English, Spanish, French, and Italian) and always struggled.
Not this time. The volume I used was Greek Lyrics, translated by Richard Lattimore. It consists mostly of short poems and fragments. Standout poets: Theógenis, Alcaeus, Hybrias, Anácreon, and – especially – Sappho, whose love poems knocked my socks off.
The most engaging poems are the ones that deal with tangible subjects, such as love, produce, warfare, and the ocean, rather than godly exploits or abstractions. I was surprised at how mundane and relatable many are. For example, accruing wealth and power is a recurring theme. Here’s Alcaeus:
This was the word of Aristodamos in Sparta, and not so badly phrased at all.
He said: “Money’s the man.” It’s true. There’s no poor man who’s known as good or valued much.
And Hybrias:
My wealth is great; it is a spear and a sword,
and the grand hairy shield to guard my body.
With these I plow, with these I harvest,
with these I tread the sweet wine from the grapevine,
with these I am called master of the rabble.And they who dare not carry the spear and sword
and the grand hairy shield to guard their bodies,
all these fall down before me, kiss my knee, hail me
their high king and master.
Theógnis gets to the point:
For the multitude of mankind there is only one virtue: Money.
And there was no good found in anything else,
not if you had the sagacity of the great Rhadamánthys,
not if you had the resource of Sísyphos, Aíolos’ son,
who by the crafty guile in his mind came up out of Hades
and flattered the Queen of the Dead into letting him go,
Persephone, who dims men’s mind with the water of Lethe;
and to this day no other man has made such an escape,
once the darkness of death has closed in a vapor about him,
once he has taken his way to the shadowy place of the dead
and gone on through the black gates which shut the protesting
souls of dead men in and will not let them go free;
yet Sísyphos was a hero who came back even from that place
into the light of the sun through the resource in his mind;
not if you could be false and make falsehood look like honesty,
not if you had fair speech like Nestor the almost-divine,
not if in the speed of your feet you outran the flying
Harpies or the North Wind’s two sons in the storm of their feet.
None of these; but all men must understand when I tell them:
Money, and nothing but Money, holds all the power in the world.
Is it irony? A complaint? It mostly felt straightforward. Some (e.g., the Hybrias passage above) read like a rapper boasting.
People kvetch about things going down the tube today due to greed. (See Cory Doctorow’s term enshittification.) But the drive to amass wealth and power isn’t a recent development. The sooner you establish a healthy relationship with money and power, the better your life will be.
The 6th century BCE was not just a simpler time from a material perspective. These people come across as refreshingly honest about their drives – certainly more than we are, with our endless virtue signalling on social media.
Another theme that stood out in this collection was impermanence. Like us, these folks grappled with aging and death. Here’s Anácreon:
I have gone gray at the temples,
yes, my head is white, there’s nothing
of the grace of youth that’s left me,
and my teeth are like an old man’s.
Life is lovely. But the lifetime
that remains for me is little.
For this cause I mourn. The terrors
of the Dark Pit never leave me.
For the house of Death is deep down
underneath; the downward journey
to be feared, for once I go there
I know well there’s no returning.
Yikes! Sorry to spoil your Sunday, friend.
Alright, on to the Odyssey, one of the foundational texts of Western culture. I’d already “read” it a decade ago. The quotes are there because – sacrilege! – I heard it as an audiobook.
In this case it’s justified, since the original was recited. And this audiobook is one of my favorites: it’s based on the Fagles translation and read by Sir Ian McKellen, who makes the work come alive with cinematic inflections. It’s worth your while, even if (especially if!) you’ve been put off by Homer.
The assignment for this week was books 1-10; roughly the first half of the poem. I’m sure you know the story. But if you don’t, be warned: I have no apprehensions about spoiling a 3,000-year-old book.
The gist: Odysseus (aka Ulysses) returns to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan war. (I.e., the events portrayed in the Iliad.) Along the way, he faces multiple obstacles both feasible and fantastic (and often metaphorical.) The poem is a patchwork of what feel like ancient folktales woven into a narrative with a surprisingly sophisticated structure.
A few random thoughts.
This is a story about logistics before modern information networks – i.e., Odysseus’s journey would’ve played out differently if these folks had iPhones and GPS. (Or modern values: fortunately, sacking other people’s lands has become the exception rather than the norm.)
Speaking of norms, Deus ex machina rules Homer’s cinematic universe – frustratingly so. Gods constantly swoop in and arbitrarily rescue, hinder, or otherwise influence heroes in the middle of the action. (For a modern version of this, see PINOCCHIO (1940) – especially the scene where Pinocchio learns of Geppetto’s fate. It’s off-putting, even in a fairy tale.)
The Odyssey also includes a surprising amount of sex (e.g., Aphrodite & Ares), drugs (e.g., the Lotus-Eaters, Ceres), and rock & roll (e.g., Demodocus’s randy song-within-the-song.) I thought it’d be fun to recite some of the poem for my 12 year-old son. Alas, I was on book 8 and didn’t remember it includes the aforementioned randy song. (Not a bad thing altogether – I’m glad if it helps him realize the classics can be “interesting.”)
It feels like I’m complaining. Far from it – I love diving into this alien world and appreciating how little people have changed in thirty centuries. The Fagles translation is excellent and McKellen’s narration pure joy. Seriously, check it out.
BTW, as I often do with audiobooks, I also got the Kindle version to highlight sections and read in bed. I shared my struggles with finding the correct edition in this post. My own mini-odyssey!
I’m also excited that Tyler Cowen has started a series of essays on the economics of the Odyssey. Very timely; it’s helping me engage with the text at a deeper level.
Audiovisual
Music: Gioia suggested songwriters this week, for obvious reasons. Two selections: Schubert’s Winterreise and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. As with the Odyssey, I’d already heard both but revisited them anyway. (I’d appreciate Winterreise more if I understood German.)
Beyond these recommendations, I found a fascinating album called Ancient Greek Music on Apple Music. It emphasized the alienness of this distant culture, much like Fellini’s SATYRICON did for ancient Rome.
Art: Gioia suggested ancient Greek sculpture. It’s difficult to appreciate sculpture on a screen. I saw the Laocoön and his Sons when I lived in Rome and it blew my mind. These objects must be experienced in physical space; JPEGs don’t do them justice.
That said, there’s an episode of Rick Steve’s Europe on YouTube about ancient Greek art. It helped me appreciate the significance and evolution of art during this period.
The gist: these folks aimed to create order from chaos. They valued balance and taste, focusing on details and proportions. (E.g., they invented the Golden mean.) They could’ve been information architects!
Cinema: Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, another classic film that had long been on my to-watch list.
It’s held up better than FORBIDDEN PLANET, but I found it hard to watch. (Albeit for better reasons.) No direct influence from Homer AFAIK, but the pairing reminded me that 3,000 years on, people still deceive themselves and others – and use belief in the supernatural to do so.
Note-taking Notes
I started a note for the Odyssey when I first heard the book in 2015, but it was minimal. I expanded it now by including thoughts from books 1-10 and linking to other notes (e.g., the one for the Illiad.) I also noted thoughts on Cowen’s post, since I expect to dig into that series more deeply.
The main way I used AI this week was to clarify some points in the Odyssey. For example, I was confused about how Athena appeared to mortals. Did they see her as a woman? If so, why did they address her as a man? So I asked ChatGPT:
ME: I’m reading The Odyssey. In the first few chapters, Athena accompanies Telemachus. I’m unclear on how she appears to others. Can they tell who she is? Does she appear as a man or a woman?
CHATGPT: In the early chapters of The Odyssey, Athena frequently disguises herself when interacting with mortals. Specifically, in her interactions with Telemachus, she assumes the form of Mentor, a trusted male advisor and friend of Odysseus. As Mentor, she appears to others as a human man, and there is no indication that mortals recognize her true identity.
The ability to appear in disguise is one of Athena’s divine powers, and her transformations are seamless to human perception. She uses these disguises to guide and inspire Telemachus without overwhelming him with her divine presence. For example, in Book 1, Athena first appears to Telemachus in the guise of Mentes, another male figure, and she provides him with counsel and encouragement to search for his father.
However, there are moments when it is implied that certain individuals might sense something extraordinary about her, especially given her wisdom and commanding presence. Later in the story, mortals sometimes suspect divine intervention after the fact, but during her appearances, she is perceived as the mortal figure she embodies.
So, in these early chapters:
- Athena appears as a man (Mentes or Mentor).
- Others do not recognize her as a goddess at the time.
- Her divine influence is felt through her words and actions, but her true identity remains concealed.
This explanation helped. Of course, it’s about something I’m reading at the moment, so I can tell if hallucinations creep in.
I read primarily on the Kindle and Books apps on my iPad. I’ve started keeping ChatGPT in the background and using the four-finger swipe gesture to flip between them. No need to upload anything; these texts are old and popular enough to already be in the LLM’s training corpus.