What’s your best one liner? The art of being succint- lessons from Ancient Greece
Teaching myself Ancient Greek — The Odyssey (Part 2) I.3–5
To the question on this Reddit post:
Came the top answer:
Being succinct
If you can’t summarise your thoughts in 20 words, you probably can’t in 2000 words either.
Here we see Homer, the author of The Odyssey, summarising what would take place in the rest of the book.
He does it in three lines. In the 12,000 or so remaining lines of the book he will expand on that.
His art is such that he could paint a story with 12,000 lines, but also with 3.
Today I’ll share what I’ve been learning.
This post we have:
i) a general point about spoilers, and
ii) 3 grammar points for the more technical reader.
Text
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
My translation:
He saw the cities and learnt the mind of many men,
truly suffered many pains on the sea in his heart,
trying to gain his life and the safe return of the companions.
I. General reflections
Can a more succint summary be written?
In three lines, we learn that the point of the story is a rescue.
A rather ominous one, in fact. There are undertones of failure already.
Someone once said to me that the best books aren’t those with the best plot.
The best stories are those whose endings you already know, but still grip you with everything.
II. Grammatical observations
- πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
‘Of many men’.
This escaped my attention until I consulted a translation.
The phrase in fact modifies both cities (ἄστεα) and mind (νόον).
2. ἔγνω
‘He learnt’.
Don’t be deceived by the omega ending. Thought it usually occurs in the first personal single, this ending is due to the 3rd aorist group.
It simply takes the root γνω.
3. ἔγνω
‘He learnt’.
Same word, different point. The epsilon at the start emphasises the past-ness of the action.
This known as the ‘augment’.
References
I’ve been using Homeric Greek — Book 1 edited by Leslie Collins Edwards.
Next up, I.6–10.
