[Milton-L] RE: Dennis Danielson's quiet voice

[Jason Kerr]

I wish to endorse all that is being said about how marvelous a work of
literature the Iliad is (especially in Greek), but I'd like to add that it,
like PL, benefits greatly from being read in entirety. There's something
very powerful about the cumulative effect of all those people (each with a
name, until Achilles goes on the rampage) getting their brains sloshed
around their helmets, never to return to the verdant fields of home. And
I'll always stick up for the beautiful account of creation in PL, as well as
the "historical books" 11 and 12. This seems like a banal point, but the
exigencies of course design often force cuts. Of course, we all hope that
people out there encounter these works outside the classroom and freely give
them the attention they deserve, but that isn't always the case. Mario Di
Cesare's "cranky retirement" of re-reading Homer in Greek sounds like bliss
to me (especially as my own Greek is starting to look like roadkill in the
path of Time's winged chariot).

Cheers,
Jason A. Kerr

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:00 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:

>
>
> jfleming at sfu.ca wrote:
> >
> > But in Greek religion -- as Nietzsche points outs somewhere -- is it not
> > precisely the case that the gods made you do it (whatever it was)? "He
> must
> > have been deceived by a god," say the Greeks, at the downfall of a great
> > man.
>
> Helenn claims, and I think we are supposed to believe her, tht Aphrodite
> "made her" run off with Paris, and whenn he apologizes to Achilles
> Agamemnon similarly blames a god. Some critic (Lattimore? Knox?) points
> out that only human action  in the Iliad is signficant because humans
> die; the gods' immortality trivializes their actions.
>
> Achilles commits no Aristotelian error; he does NOT bring on his own
> tragedy; the tragic actionn is his bearing of the tragedy imposed on him
> by forces beyond his control. Most wonderfully in his recognition of the
> shared fates of Priam and his own father, but also in his magnificence
> in the conduct of the funeral games, at a point when he is still
> dominated by the rage and grief at the death of Patroclus.
>
> And the ending is beautiful beyond words:
>                        And once they'd heaped the mound
> They turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again
> they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector's honor,
> Held in the house of Priam, king by the will of Zeus.
>
> And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.
>
> One could almost use as a commentary on this, KM's:
>
> "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
> please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
> but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from
> the past."
>
> Carrol
>
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-- 
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

          —Czeslaw Milosz, from "Ars Poetica?"
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