TFBT: Quotes April 2018

 It is said that after the death of Sophocles, when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica, their commander saw in a vision Dionysus, who ordered him to honor [tīmân], with all the customary honors [tīmai] of the dead, the new Siren [Seirēn]. It seemed to him that the dream [onar] referred to Sophocles and his poetry [poiēsis], and down to the present day people are used to liken to a Siren whatever is enchanting [epagōgon] in both poetry [poiēmata] and prose Pausanias 1.21.1 

"That dog can hunt."

"If there's no old farts when you start a new job, then it is not a good profession to get into." OSHA Inspector

 “Oh my, how mortals hold us gods responsible! ₃₃ For they say that their misfortunes come from us. But they get their sufferings, ₃₄ beyond what is fated, by way of their own acts of recklessness.” Od. 1.32-34

Pindar Pythian 8.95–96, σκιᾶς ὄναρ | ἄνθρωπος ‘man is the dream of a shade’ 

"But time is long, and perhaps similar things may occur again." Paus. 10.12.11

Aeneas seized a great stone, so huge that two men, as men now are, would be unable to lift it, but Aeneas wielded it quite easily.). Book 20

Iliad 20 “(Achilles) looked fiercely on radiant Hector and said, “Draw near, that you may meet your doom the sooner.” [430]”

Achilles sprang to his feet, led us by the hand into the house, placed us at table, and set before us such hospitable entertainment as is right [themis] for guests. Iliad 11.777

Iliad 12.200] for they had seen a sign from the gods when they had essayed to cross it—a soaring eagle that flew skirting the left wing of their army of warriors, with a monstrous blood-red snake in its talons still alive and struggling to escape. 

TFBT: December Quotes

“Homer shows us a lot about who we are even today.” Jean d’Ormesson 

“Homer is never boring, amazingly modern…do not let him be forgotten.”   Jean d’Ormesson 

“Knowledge kills my inner child.”  Maya M.

“All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?  From "Monty Python's Life of Brian"

To-do list; "The list that lasts forever".  Jason Anderson

“Tereus discovers that his stomach has become the tomb of his own son,” Gregory Nagy

“A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.’”   Isaiah 40.3

“ The company then flew to Salzburg where filming resumed on (Sound of Music) ...Wise faced opposition from city leaders who opposed him staging scenes with swastika banners. They relented after he threatened instead to include actual newsreel footage of crowds cheering Hitler during a visit to the town.”  (Wikipedia; The Sound of Music)

“ she anointed herself with olive oil, ambrosial, very soft, and scented specially for herself—if it were so much as shaken in the bronze-floored house of Zeus, the scent pervaded the universe of heaven and earth.    (Iliad 14: 171-4)

 

TFBT:Random Notes and Quotes September III

 The term Japhetic was also applied by William Jones, Rasmus Rask and others to what is now known as the Indo-European language group.

• Sir William Jones in 1786 as a group of related languages consisting of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Gothic, ... From the Bible narrative of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, came the name. 
• "japetisk " "Rasmus C. Rask, 1815 
• Leibniz in 1710 proposed the concept of the so-called Japhetic language group, consisting of languages now known as Indo-European, 
  

"God created Eve first, took out her rib and gave her a companion so she wouldn't be lonely."  Norman Lear describing his television series "All That Glitters"

“To stop striving forward is to slide back.”  (Me)

" The idea is thematic to the Iliad that no matter how valuable a given object, nor how much  prestige (timē) attaches to it, a man’s life (ψυχῆς 22.161) is of a different order of  importance altogether. to himself" (Models of Reception in the Divine Audience of the Iliad, Tobias Anthony Myers  

ληϊστοὶ μὲν γάρ τε βόες καὶ ἴφια μῆλα,
κτητοὶ δὲ τρίποδές τε καὶ ἵππων ξανθὰ κάρηνα, 

ἀνδρὸς δὲ ψυχὴ πάλιν ἐλθεῖν οὔτε λεϊστὴ            

For while cattle and fat sheep can be seized,
and tripods and tawny-headed horses can be acquired,
a man’s life cannot be seized so that it comes back again 

                                                Iliad 9.401-409

“The gods’ immortality and easy living make them capable of watching the life-and-death struggles of mortals as one might watch an athletic competition." (Myers referencing pace Bremer 1985 and de Jong 1987: 130-1.)

“The Iliad is a ritual that simultaneously honors Troy in the distant past and wipes it out in the performative moment.”  Myers

“Book 4 (of the Iliad) contains the first representation of the gods as a body observing events at Troy – the first use of the “divine audience” motif. Books 1-3, while they do not yet use the divine audience motif as found dramatically in Book 4, do sometimes present an individual deity in the role of an interested, engaged observer of events at Troy. Strikingly, this observer figure is always Hera. “  Myers

"a burning city looms beyond the poem’s horizon". Myers

"The poet’s choice of Aias signals a shift from the period of Achaean victory to a period of defensive fighting in which Aias will emerge as the crucial figure: the Achaeans’ bulwark against destruction, who is never wounded himself," Myers

TFBT: Quotes for September

 Theogony, Hesiod, "There by the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds the Titan gods [730] are hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth. And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed gates of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it on every side. There Gyes and Cottus and great-souled Obriareus [735] live, trusty warders ". Poseidon built the walls of Troy too (7.451-4)  Hmm

“the time will come when the great enemy of the gods will be let loose and Asgard shall be desolate. This enemy is Loki, the fire-god, whose release just before the coming on of the twilight of the gods is in close agreement with the release of the chained Prometheus, by whom the sway of Zeus is to be brought to an end.” (Cox, George W, 1827-1902. “The mythology of the Aryan nations.”)  I don't know that Zeus' sway comes to an end, but the release of Prometheus does coincide with the pulling of the Cyprian Veil.

"real gods tend to see the divine perspective as characterized by a fundamental lack of seriousness which Reinhardt memorably called sublime frivolity.” Tobias Myers

Zeus does not give any hint to Thetis (or Achilles) that “the gods” do not now represent a perfectly unified front. And after all, what would it have served to give her the whole picture? By giving Thetis a blanket statement that the gods’ response as a group to her son’s behavior is outrage, he emphasizes his own faithfulness to his promise even in the face of what he misleading construes as unanimous opposition; then, by telling her to say to Achilles that “the  gods” as a group are angry,  zeus avoids mentioning the dissenting views, thereby presents the discussion as closed, ruling out, for example, any possibility of appeal by Achilles to some sympathetic deity. Tobias Myers 

"It is notable that, like the Phaeacians and suitors of the Odyssey, the gods are a part of the epic events which absorb their attention. Yet the Phaeacians do not at first realize that the character Odysseus from Demodocus’ songs is among them, any more than the suitors listening to Phemius’ song of Achaean nostos realize that they themselves will soon be slaughtered to a man as part of the most famous instance of the genre."  Tobias Myers

 Like sports fans convinced that if they miss a second of play their team will lose, the poet’s audience is prodded to stay alert by the negative example of Zeus whose team indeed starts losing when he turns his eyes away from Troy (13.1ff), or when he makes love and sleeps afterward (14.153ff), and of Ares whose own son dies when he is not watching (13.521-25). Tobias Myers

 Cf. Clay 2011: 8: “But the pleasure of the internal observer also invites the audience to be entranced by the sheer beauty of the scene and to share momentarily a divine perspective, viewing the Trojan watch fires from afar, where a transient human moment is mirrored in the eternal cosmic phenomena of the heavens. Like the gods, we the audience can witness this interplay of the ephemeral and the timeless, this conversion of the fleeting into the everlasting, that constitutes the transformative power

 Richardson; “Fate is Homer;” 

Mark Edwards remarks that “fate, of course, is the will of the poet, limited by the major features of the traditional legends.” 

"The gods normally descend from Olympus in order to take a hand in the action (at Troy)  all except for Zeus. In mythology Zeus also descends to the mortal world in various guises, but never does so in the Iliad." (  Tobias Myers) Just like he never appears on stage in the tragedy.

“the principle which they appear to hold in common that a god’s wrath against mortals takes precedence over a god’s protection of those same mortals. “  Tobias Myers

 "The one who thinks he loves his misstress because of herself, makes a mistake."  François de La Rochefoucauld  

"if you utter worthy (not worthless)  words, you will be my spokesman.Let this people turn to you  but you must not turn to them."  Jeremiah 15:19