TFBT: Random Quotes

Been hanging out in airports during myriad moments in the last two weeks.  Finally had a chase to read many essays I'd filed away.  Here are random quotes I found interesting.

“ Juno’s (Hera’s) hatred transcends space and history, and it readily makes enemies of neutrals.”  https://t.co/Pc0srdHiO3

“In contrast with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad—who declares at one point that he hates “like the Gates of Death” the man who says one thing but means another—the hero of the Odyssey has no scruples about lying to get what he wants…. But all this made him (Odysseus) unbearable to my father”   A FATHER AND SON’S FINAL ODYSSEY  by Daniel Mendelsohn  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/a-father-and-sons-final-odyssey

When we were getting ready for the welcome cocktail party, he started to put on a brown polyester shirt, which I snatched from his hands and threw over the balcony railing into the Aegean. “Daddy! It’s a Mediterranean cruise! Mom must have packed something blue or white!” “What? A shirt is a shirt!”  Mendelsohn

There was no way I was going into Calypso’s cave. “What are you talking about?” my father exclaimed when I told him. “You have to go! Seven-tenths of the Odyssey takes place there!” “Seven-tenths?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “The epic is twenty-four books long—” “Math, Dan! Math. Odysseus spends ten years getting home, right?” I nodded. “And he spends seven years with Calypso, right?” I nodded again.  So, in theory, seven-tenths of the Odyssey actually takes place there! You can’t miss it!” Mendelsohn

we saw the sea, always the sea, with its many faces, glass- smooth and stone-rough...and sometimes an impenetrable purple, the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black. Mendelsohn

The apostrophe marks a juncture at which a significant step is taken by Patroclus away from the boundaries set by Achilles, and closer to his doom.   Revisiting the Apostrophes to Patroclus in Iliad 16, by Emily Allen-Hornblower   http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/4702

And indeed when Bellerophon was brought down to the Aleïan Plain and was moving about in blindness because of his fall, Pegasus was traveling up and down. Tzetes  scholia on Lycophron 17   Is it possible that Bellephron's fall from the shoulders of imagination and inspiration manifest (Pegasus) to this plane is indicative of his lose of second sight?  

Ixion’s attack on Leto consort of Zeus (Lêtô gar hêlkêse, Dios kudrên parakoitin), is given by Homer as the transgression.  ".  Iliad 6.201: Did Bellerophon Wander Blindly?  I thought it was Hera. The author is thinking of the Giant Tityusm.  Please see below;

 "I [Odysseus in Haides] saw Tityos (Tityus) also, son of the mighty goddess Gaia (Gaea, Earth); he lay on the ground, his bulk stretched out over nine roods. Two vultures, one on each side of him, sat and kept plucking at his liver, reaching down to the very bowels; he could not beat them off with his hands. And this was because he had once assaulted a mistress of Zeus himself, the far-famed Leto, as she walked towards Pytho through the lovely spaces of Panopeus."  Homer, Odyssey 11. 580 ff

In sum, Bellerophon’s blindness reported by the Tzetzes scholia in conjunction with the B scholia to 165 reporting that Bellerophon spied on heaven is consistent with various features of stories involving other characters punished for seeing the divine illicit and then disclosing it. Iliad 6.201: Did Bellerophon Wander Blindly? 

"Paramonos, son of Euhodos, from Piraeus, Athenian ephebe. Having felt joy together with many others many times in my few years, I lie here below, struck by deep sleep. Occupying a place among the stars together with Kastor and Pollux, I am a new Theseus." quoted by Chaniotis in his notes,  To Encounter a Hero: Localization and Travel in Hellenistic Hero Cults, Ellen Bradshaw Aitken