Before officers had pistols

Xenophon's Anabasis 1.3.1:

ἐνταῦθα ἔμεινεν ὁ Κῦρος καὶ ἡ στρατιὰ ἡμέρας εἴκοσιν· οἱ γὰρ στρατιῶται οὐκ ἔφασαν ἰέναι τοῦ πρόσω· ὑπώπτευον γὰρ ἤδη ἐπὶ βασιλέα ἰέναι· μισθωθῆναι δὲ οὐκ ἐπὶ τούτῳ ἔφασαν. πρῶτος δὲ Κλέαρχος τοὺς αὑτοῦ στρατιώτας ἐβιάζετο ἰέναι· οἱ δ᾽ αὐτόν τε ἔβαλλον καὶ τὰ ὑποζύγια τὰ ἐκείνου, ἐπεὶ ἄρξαιντο προϊέναι. Κλέαρχος δὲ τότε μὲν μικρὸν ἐξέφυγε μὴ καταπετρωθῆναι, ὕστερον δ᾽ ἐπεὶ ἔγνω ὅτι οὐ δυνήσεται βιάσασθαι, συνήγαγεν ἐκκλησίαν τῶν αὑτοῦ στρατιωτῶν.

There Cyrus and the army remained for twenty days, because the soldiers said they would would not go forward. They now suspected that they were going against the great king, and they said they hadn't been paid for that. Clearchus was the first to try to make his army go. They pelted him and the pack animals whenever they tried to go forward. Clearchus then fled for a bit so as not to get stoned to death, and later, when he realized he'd not be able to force them, called an assembly of his own troops.

Greeks! What can you do with these people?

Pseudo-Callisthenes Enwebbened

In case my own blogging is too impossibly obscure, I offer up much lighter reading: the Alexander Romance in blog format. It's in Greek, of course, transcribed from an offering of the GoogleBorg. Where the scan has a bug-squish instead of a letter I supplement from Leif Bergson's 1965 Der Griechische Alexanderroman Rezension β. The Greek is very easy and it's already divided into lots of teeny chapters, so the blog format seemed like a good way to transcribe it for now.

As far as I can see there are no online editions of this yet. When I finish each book (there are three) I'll take the blog posts and turn them into a single, nicer document.

The Astronautilia and the shadow of Homer

A bit more than a year ago I mentioned the Astronautilia and its author, Jan Křesadlo. Thanks to the help of his son, who very kindly sent me a PDF copy of the Greek portion of the manuscript (all of it), I can now present the opening to that work: Astronautilia (PDF).

As in the Ode to Stalin, Křesadlo's use of the heroic hexameter is sometimes a bit of a shock. When I first started reading the Astronautilia I found this a bit off-putting. Now I'm inclined to look on this more favorably, even if not all of his verses are things you'd want to show to a tutor at Oxford, say, for fear of inducing a stroke.

Based on current web logs, the commentary I did on Theocritus 13 may go down in Aoidoi.org history as the least popular effort ever — worse even than the notes on Pindar. I myself came away from working on that with a sense that Theocritus, and the Alexandrian poets in general, were on the near edge of artistic panic thanks to the overwhelming shadow of Homer. Part of this impression may come from my choice of reading to prepare for Theocritus, but it's hard not to see the dialect, the curious twisting of Homeric words and phasing, and the bucolic digressions as a desperate attempt to get out of that massive shadow. Right now I'm not sure I want to read Theocritus again, but I have some sympathy for the guy. He made a good effort to make the hexameter his own.

Having seen Theocritus' struggles, I'm now a lot more kindly disposed toward Křesadlo's sometimes radical innovations in his Epic hexameters. He observed the licenses Homer allowed himself and then ran with those ideas. The manuscript as sent to me — I don't know if it appears in the edition with the facing Czech translation — has a glossary of "unusual forms and words." In that you can really see Křesadlo taking hold of Epic Greek and making it serve his own purposes. Excepting the imports from Modern Greek, his process is clearly modeled on variations found in standard Epic Greek. The very first line announces he's not producing a school exercise in the style of Homer:

ἀρχόμενος πρῶτον Μουσῶν χορῷ εἰξ Ἑλικῶνος

In Epic the preposition represented in Attic by ἐν, "in," has two additional metrical variants, ἐνί and εἰν. There is no metrical reason at all to lengthen the preposition ἐξ, "out (of)," but Křesadlo has produced a free Homerism, εἰξ, unexampled in any Greek I've ever seen.

There are curiosities of declension:

ἄνηρες = ἄνερες = ἄνδρες (influenced by Modern, Greek, evidently)
κύωνες = κύνες modeled on ἄνηρες

He produces numerous doublets, giving him several metrical choices for a single word:

ἑλκήθρος -ου ὁ = ἑλκήθρον -ου τό "sledge"
ἐξίσωσις -εως ἡ = ἐξισώοσις "equation," a shocking reinterpretation of Epic distraction

"Robot" got special attention, as is appropriate in science fiction, with no fewer than four forms: ῥόβοτος -ου ὁ, ῥοβότης -ου ὁ, ῥόβως -ωτος ὁ, ῤουβώτης -ου ὁ, as well as ῥοβότη ἡ “she-robot.” My favorite definition is φεῖσρος -ου ὁ “fazer - an established sci-fi weapon shooting pernicious rays.” The resulting mix of Homeric phrasing and robots is interesting (Αν. ι. 25, p.89):

βῆν ἴμεν πρὸς πτολίεθρον ἐγὼ καὶ Φράντα ῥοβώτης

His freedom with the hexameter is also on display in this line. And he hasn't just used the Epic dialect for his art. He grabbed the scholarly apparatus of ancient texts and turned that into part of the work, too — sometimes he marks his own lines as doubtful, putting them [in square brackets.]

With the possible exception of Nonnos' Dionysiaca, the Astronautilia has to be the most wild and even disorienting appropriation of Homeric language I have ever seen, and am ever likely to see. I simply cannot imagine what motivated Křesadlo to produce such a work, and my innocence of the Czech language leaves me with little chance to compare this with his other works. But even with the shocks of meter I can't help but be delighted the Astronautilia exists.

On accenting first declension genitive plurals in adjectives

In the course of editing Theocritus 13 one of my proof-reader and sanity-checkers raised red flags about the accenting of the adjective in this line (citation form κυανέος):

      ἅτις κυανεᾶν οὐχ ἅψατο Συνδρομάδων ναῦς,     22

Now in first declension nouns, no matter where the accent is in the nominative, in the genitive plural the accent is perispomenon, νίκη, νικῶν. This is presented as a rule in most textbooks, but if you know Epic then it's clear that the accent is the result of the contraction of -άων (long alpha).

In Attic, first and second declension adjectives have forms and accenting identical to the nouns except for the feminine first declension genitive plural, which is accented like the masculine/neuter form. Thus, in Attic ἀξίων γυναικῶν not *ἀξιῶν γυναικῶν. Homer, however, keeps the full -άων ending (or derivatives of it, -έων, or after vowels -ῶν).

So what's going on with κυανεᾶν? Not one of my grammars has anything to say about this. From the form it's clear that this is a Doric (or Aeolic) contraction from -άων, so I was prepared to accept the accenting in all the editors of Theocritus I could find. I still wanted some clear statement about this, however. Finally I had to resort to an accenting manual, Chandler's A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation (GoogleBorg), which is actually a massive work. The very large section 203 (p.55) starts with,

Feminine adjectives and participles following the first declension (which in the oblique cases of the singular and in all cases of the plural are subject to the rules laid down for oblique cases in the first declension) present some peculiarities.

He then goes on to citations from the ancient grammarians. Then, section 204 (p.56),

The Aeolic and Doric genitives in αν are circumflexed, as κυλιχνᾶν, Τηϊᾶν, ...

So there you go. You need never worry about this perplexing matter again.

Aoidoi: Theocritus 13 — Hylas

Another longish poem, Theocritus 13, also known as the Rape of Hylas (taking the sense of "seizure" for rape rather than sexual violence, though the poem is perhaps ambiguous on that point). For amusement and edification I also made use of an old volume from Google Books and transcribed the ancient scholia on this poem.