Reading the Odyssey (Part 1) — Book I (I.1–2)
Over this year I’ve committed to reading Greek classics.
Maybe you’re an ancient language student, at school or university. Or you’re just an interested passer-by.
In these articles I will include both:
I. grammatical points and
II. general insights.
I hope you’ll find something you can pick up along the way.
But first, a remark on motivation.
Learning in Public
This is a concept I have learnt from software development.
99% of people, when confronted with a new subject, would lock themselves in a room.
Hunker down.
Then study for an extended period of time. 5 hours. 2 weeks. A lockdown.
But if you ask them what they’ve studied, not everyone can tell you.
Or tell you clearly. Or succinctly.
I’m very much on the same journey myself. When asked about a book I read about the Iranian coup of 1953 some years ago, I gave a few insights from the book, but it really wasn’t the main point of the book.
So this is my feeble and infantile attempts to tease out some clarity of thought from my learning.
Passage
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
My translation:
Tell me, Muse, of the resourceful man
who wandered in many ways
since he sacked the holy town of Troy
I. Grammatical Points
- Man, in the accusative.
This is the whole subject of the book. He is at the beginning of the whole book, quite literally spotlighted.
Odysseus is the man who sacked Troy. This is also recounted in Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid. He was the man who came up with the idea of the wooden horse.
There is a very desirable clarity in this which we can imitate.
2. Sacked, in the aorist 3rd person singular.
The object is the city (πτολίεθρον), which takes the accusative case.
The ending word, likewise, acts as emphasis.
II. General Insights
The Muse is a group of sister goddesses who were thought to give artistic inspiration.
There were nine of them.
Many writers in the renaissance period did the same.
For example, Shakespeare:
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
- Sonnet 100
O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
- Sonnet 101
In these two sonnets Shakespeare rebukes the Muse for being slow to praise the beauty of his beloved, who is like truth itself.
To me, the invocation of the muse is a reminder that what’s beautiful and truth is usually beyond what our minds can perceive.
That’s why we need help to grasp it.
References
I have been using Homeric Greek — Book 1 edited by Leslie Collins Edwards. The divisions of the chapter’s lines I’ll be using are based on this book.
Next up, I.3–5.
Originally published at https://brianmak.substack.com.
