Aoidoi: on Hiatus

It should be obvious from the lack of posts here and updates to Aoidoi.org itself that I've not been producing work for the site much in the last to years or so. So, I'm declaring Aoidoi.org officially on hiatus.

I have no plans at all to take the site down, and I hope some day to have time to work on documents for it and Scholiastae again in the future, but right now Life is keeping me occupied with other things.

Aoidoi: the Cologne Epode of Archilochus

Bret Mulligan and some of his students worked up the (in)famous Cologne Epode, Archilochus 196A, and very kindly sent it on to Aoidoi.org.

Aoidoi: Delectus Indelectatus updated

I've added six new poemlets to the Delectus Indelectatus, a collection of Greek poets being cranky, vulgar or mean. I resisted the urge to just add the totality of Palladas' output.

Aoidoi: Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus

Newly commented, Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus, for a little Stoic reading.

Aoidoi: Bion 9 and 11

I've worked up two shorter fragments by Bion. I was looking something up recently in Theocritus, and happened to notice the smaller of Bion's works hanging out way at the end of the book (the OCT Bucolici Graeci), and found them straightforward to read, even in dialect.

Bion 9 is about whom the Muses will and will not help. Bion 11 is an appeal to Hesperus, the evening start.

Scholiastae Changing

As I posted about almost two years ago, the experiment in using a wiki to collaboratively annotate ancient texts was a flop. So, I'll be taking that down at the end of April of this year. In the meantime, I've been converting the better texts into the same format I use for Aoidoi.org. The results are somewhat more attractive than a web page, at least. I've managed to automate some of the conversion from Wiki (and my own Wiki annotation module) to LaTeX, but it still takes a certain amount of hand-holding.

Don't put data in to XML format unless you know you already have a way to extract it in a format you consider agreeable.

In any case, the better Wiki prose texts will end up on the new Scholiastae front page, and the few poems will go to Aoidoi.

Transatlantic Style: Classical Greek and Classical Nahuatl

I've taken a bit of a break from working up texts for Aoidoi.org for a while, instead working on some fun prose reading more for practice than anything. Lucian is fun, and the True Story edition by Nimis and Hayes is a nicely portable version. I've also recently started to study Classical Nahuatl, now that a more approachable textbook has finally come out, a translation and adaptation of Launey's standard Introduction, produced by a classicist no less, Christopher Mackay. There are a few other textbooks available in English for Classical Nahuatl, but they are pretty unsatisfactory, for reasons too tedious to go into here.

Apparently, Nahuatl poetry can be as opaque and obscure as Pindar, but I'm not really ready to step into that. Instead, I have been trying my hand at a few of Aesop's fables, which got a linguistic and cultural translation into Nahuatl (see Google Books, A. Peñafiel and the ms. transcription from Amoxcalli.org.mx). Keeping notes on my work with these has forced me to learn a few new LaTeX packages, so I now have a good setup to do Aoidoi-style notes on prose, something that has eluded me for years. I think I may migrate some of my prose work from Scholiastae to this format, which is just nicer to read and to edit.

To classicists (amateur or professional) who want to learn an interesting literary language with a entirely different tradition, I highly recommend Classical Nahuatl now that better learning materials are available for it. The morphology is not as complex, but in some ways studying it reminds me of studying Classical Greek. In particular, that vague anxiety and sinking feeling one gets upon learning yet another particle and when seeing yet another novel chain of particles.

In my brief Nahuatl studies so far, I have noticed a few turns of phrase which have close parallels in Classical Greek, or Indo-European, stylistics. There have in the past been unfortunate attempts to relate Nahuatl to Indo-European — I will leave that to you to hunt down in Google Books. I just thought these parallel developments were interesting.

Throughout the Mesoamerican cultural zone, the merism is a major stylistic device. They can be more metaphorical, and is usually called difrasismo in this context. Some are fairly obvious, and others are more obscure —

in xochitl in cuicatl the flower, the song : poetry
in cuitlapilli in ahtlapalli the tail, the wing : the common folk
yohualli ehecatl night, wind : invisible, or intangible

The first parallel to Indo-European habits is the difrasismo in axcaitl in tlatquitl which together are a general term for "property." The parallel comes in in tlatquitl which is derived from the verb itqui, which means to carry something. This doesn't perfectly match any mersim in IE literature, but it does match a stylistic preoccupation with movable vs. immovable wealth, Avest. pasu.vīra "cattle (and) men", Umbr. ueiro pequo "men and cattle." English goods and chattels almost gets there, since chattels includes the notion of movable property.

Finally, there's the difrasismo I recently ran into, which reminded me of Michael Gilleland's list of asyndetic, privative adjectives. Now, asyndeton is quite common in Nahuatl, and certainly in difrasismo, so this isn't particularly marked stylistically. But the double negative struck me in in ahcualli in ahyectli, "immorality." The ah- element (here, "h" is the glottal stop) is the negative, and has been attached to cualli "a good thing" (in the sense of fitness for a purpose or pleasant) and yectli "a pure thing."

Now if only I could find a collection of difrasismos. Current dictionaries tend not to focus on these.

What other Chariot? A Textual Crux in Mimnermus 12

I recently received email asking me about a textual decision in the Aoidoi.org version of Mimnermus 12 (open that in a new window to follow along). They wanted to know why I kept the paradosis reading ἐπέβη ἑτέρων in line 11 when nearly everyone else accepted Schneidewin's emmendatation ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν. It turns out nearly everyone else does not include M.L. West. I use his Iambi et Elegi Graeci for sanity checking and a reasonably current apparatus. West's apparatus does include some emmendations, but not Schneidewin's ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, which I got from Campbell's 1967 Greek Lyric Poetry for the Aoidoi apparatus. I decided to do a little more digging.

First, for Schneidewin. In his 1838 Delectus poesis Graecorum elegiacae, iambicae, melicae (pp.16-17) he declines to include this emmendation attributed to him. So, either he saved this speculation for a later edition or published it in some paper I haven't been able to find.

Next, of course, comes Bergk. In his 1866 Teubner Poetae lyrici Graeci (p. 412) quite a lot gets said —

V.11 ἑτέρων VL, ἑτερέων BP, conieci σφετέρων vel προτέρων, Schneidewin ἱερῶν vel πτερινῶν vel ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, Ahrens στερεῶν vel ἐπεβήσετ’ ἄρ’ ὧν.

Well. Except Ahrens' ludicrous στερεῶν, these emmendations are strikingly banal. But what problem are they trying to fix?

My email correspondent and his colleague were concerned about the sense of ἑτέρων. Helios, sleeping the night away, has been born along by the waves in a golden, winged bed made by Hephaestus. When he arrives in the land of the Ethiopians, "where his swift chariot and horses stay," he gets on his other (ἑτέρων) chariot. The question is, what other chariot? Where's the other one? Some of the emmendations seem to be inspired by this same discomfort — σφετέρων, ἑῶν, ἱερῶν, κτλ. One of Bergk's emmendations, προτέρον, seems more concerned with the hiatus, since "his earlier chariot" doesn't remove that extra chariot from the picture. Hiatus for a long vowel in princeps position is sanctioned by both Homer and other elegiasts, but without more information it's hard for me to know for sure what motivated Bergk here.

When I first read this line, I had a passage from Hesiod's Theogony in my mind, 746-757, which describes Day and Night passing each other on the threshold to the same house each day. While Hesiod mentions no vehicle for them, chariots taking celstial divinities across the sky is a common idea across Indo-Eurostan. A little digging shows that Dawn herself, mentioned in line 3 of Mimnermus' poem, is given her own chariot in the Odyssey (23.243-246), and several times in Vedic and Avestan literature (M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, p.223.). We don't know enough about Mimnermus' model of the celestial mechanics, but it's certainly possible that the other chariot refers not to another of Helios', but someone else's.

Finally, the word I've been translating chariot, ὀχέων (a funky heteroclite in Homer, ὁ ὄχος, τὰ ὄχεα, but normal 2nd. declension plural in other authors), has a wider range of meaning. While chariot is certainly the common sense, it can mean anything which holds or carries something. In Odyssey 5.404 it describes harbors, λιμένες νηῶν ὄχοι. And it can even describe a ship, ὄχος ταχυήρης "a swift-oared vehicle." The related word ὄχημα covers the same range, from chariot to ship to vehicle. Right now I'm inclined to see ἑτέρω ὀχέων being contrasted not to some other horse-drawn conveyance, but to Helios' splendid sea-faring bed. In any case, I see no good reason to meddle with the paradosis.

RIP William Harris

I have learned through Nick, who learned from Harris' son, that Bill Harris died last Sunday, February 22nd.

I got to know Bill from his web site, Humanities and the Liberal Arts. I had just started to study Greek on my own again, and stumbled on his web page, probably looking for sites about Homer. I emailed him about a stray link in May 2000, and we corresponded ever since, sometimes very regularly, sometimes with quiet spots. It was a casual comment by him that led to the creation of Aoidoi.org — I still have the email, July 10, 2002. From that time on we communicated regularly about our own web sites, sharing new work for the other's comment. Without his enthusiasm about the project — there's a lot of email between us about it — Aoidoi.org might have faded away early.

I know that plenty of other people have been encouraged in their studies by him.

His death is a shock to me, the tears coming only today, because we had been mailing each other about some of his work only a few weeks ago. 83, about to start his second round of chemo, and he had been recording himself reciting verse — Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas — and was intending to record some Sappho, in both English and Greek. He was always interested in getting verse off the page and into people's mouths, in whatever language. Last month was the first time I ever heard his voice.

I hadn't told him about the Scholiastae.org site yet, because I wanted to be able to show him a success, after a few more people got involved and posted things, taking control of their own education. That site, too, wouldn't exist but for him. I should have told him sooner.

New site: scholiastae.org

After years of waiting for web software to allow collaborative editing of documents like the ones I produce for Aoidoi.org, I finally gave up and wrote an extension to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia.

Testing of the extension is done, so now there's Scholiastae.org. You can see an example of the output — and the markup from the "view source" tab — for Catullus 48.

There aren't many texts there yet. I have a few works of Lucian I will be working up in the next few weeks, but of course I hope other people will be moved to create an account and add and comment upon works.

New Year's Gallimaufry

2008 was not a year of many blog posts. I thought I'd make a few random comments, before moving on to 2009.

I got my house re-sided at the end of the summer. Naturally, I take out a substantial debt to pay for this, just before the market exploded. My timing is, as always, impeccable.

The last few months of the year saw me start playing music again. In another month I hope to have my callouses back enough that I can slide notes on my mandolin without slicing open my fingers. I also went off the deep end, and got a 5-string banjo, on which I play old-time and celtic tunes — no bluegrass for me, thanks. In part, I blame Cathy Moore for playing all those funky, non-old-time tunes on the 5-string and making it work.

To make time for the music, my desultory attempts to get Latin back into my brain have been shut down.

I've mostly been reading Greek prose the last few months, but I have several things in the pipeline for Aoidoi. These will not see fruition for a month or so. A piece of web software I would love for Aoidoi does not yet exist, but I am afraid to write it.

Given the lovely state of the economy, paying to take classes in Greek seems like an extravagance right now. I'll probably not be doing that in the next year. Another sign of the economy and the strange state of contemporary American politics — for the first time in her 80 years, my grandmother voted Democratic last November.

I never had warts as a child, but I enter 2009 with a giant one on my face — very attractive. Good thing I don't believe in omens.

Aoidoi: Mesomedes' Hymn to Nemesis

This week, the somewhat strange Hymn to Nemesis.

The poem starts off with a fairly striking equestrian image:

Νέμεσι πτερόεσσα βίου ῥοπά,
κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας
ἃ κοῦφα φρυάγματα θνατῶν
ἐπέχεις ἀδάμαντι χαλινῷ...

Winged Nemsis, scale of life,
dark-eyed goddess, daughter of Justice,
you who check the vain whinnying of mortals
with an adamant bit...

The word I've translated "scale" above — ῤοπή, rhope — covers an interesting semantic range. The basic image, if the LSJ is to be believed, is of a scale sinking. But it covers everything from balance and weight, or "outcome," out to more remote notions like "decisive influence, crisis" or even just "moment."

Aoidoi: two poems of Solon

Yet more elegiacs, this time two fragments of Solon in a single document, Solon 9 & 11

Aoidoi: "The Toils of the Sun"

Yet more Mimnermus, this time 12 (West), The toils of the sun.

Aoidoi: “Like the leaves of spring”

A new poem is ready for Aoidoi.org, Mimnermus 2, Like the leaves of spring.

Aoidoi: more cranky poetry

The Delectus Indelectatus — a collection of brief, cranky poems — has been converted to unicode and has grown by five more poems.

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.

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.

Some Archilochus

Worked up for Aoidoi: Archilochus 13, mourning recent deaths at sea, reportedly including his sister's husband.

Aoidoi.org: Pindar's Isthmian 2

Using the new house style made possible by XeTeX I worked up (rather, finished working up) the famous poem with the "Mercenary Muse," Pindar's Isthmian 2.