/greeks/

I've read about half of Plato, Aristotle's basic works, the pre-Socratic fragments, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Hesiod. I'd really like to read Euripedes and finish Plato, but I'm working on Vergil right now.

Are you a woman?

Iliad is really fucken boring.
Odyssey is much more interesting, and shows the same morals, values and accents as Iliad.
If you want to start with Greeks, better to start with the Odyssey.

I've read the Iliad and am about to finish the Odyssey, really enjoyed both
Problem is now I'm stuck where to go next; there's just a rabbit-hole of recommendations and opinions since I'm using Veeky Forums as my main guide. Pretty sure Hesiod and the Tragedies are next but which translations? When should I start introducing commentaries? Which ones? Should I have read Ovid and scholarly introductions to the Greeks first? It's spiralling out of control and I'm sure I'm being too neurotic about it but that's just my nature

I knew it, should've picked some other example for the morality.
Basically, the whole thing feels very amoral, Odysseus' sleeping around isn't even punished or approved of, it just happens. This is a simple example but it exists in other aspects of the story too. Shit simply happens, a god decides it and fucks a mortal over or helps him, with no moral behind it. There is no ethical axis in here, even the gods themselves are as shitty as humans.
No, I'm not a woman.

>Where in the process of starting with the greeks are you?
Done, going to go back and reread everything next year
>How are you liking it so far?
Love it, I'll study the greeks for the rest of my life
>Is it what you expected? Why or why not?
Expectations lead to disappointment, but no I certainly didn't expect Plato to be essentially plays. It's deceptively easy to read, but endlessly rich.

You are reading Homer with a 21st century Christian mindset.

The Greek gods are not paragons of virtue (although, perhaps you could argue so in the case of Apollo), nor are they omnipotent. The gods are personifications of nature, fate, human emotion, and ideals. As for Odysseus getting to have bang hot goddesses, that's just the prerogative of males in ancient times.

So, what are you supposed to take away from it?

>》》》》》》implying
How can someone be so wrong? Liking the Odyssey over the Iliad is the epitome of plebbiness

What, the Iliad and the Odyssey? I enjoy them because they explore the depths of human emotion better than any other work of art. How often do you see a love stronger than that between Achilles and Patroklus? Rage greater than that of Achilles? Courage greater than Hector's? Loyalty greater than that of Penelope, and contrasted so brilliantly to Cletemnestra's betrayal of Agamemnon? there are so many more examples for the whole range of emotions, as well as piety, revenge, etc.

you are an apologist. All of that tragic shit still happens if you worship greek gods. So don't tell people some bullshit about how they were metaphors, when they were physical beings that people believed in for their own pagan short-sightedness that did NOT spawn from animism.

Ok, ok, I get that. What bothers me is what is behind these things. The whole poems feel like nothing more than descriptions of pointless wars. Everyone does whatever they want (actually, what they are predetermined to). If the two epics really have nothing more than the stories, the sequences of events and characters, they are profoundly nihilistic (and boring) books.

I'm not saying the gods are metaphors, I'm saying they were, to the Greeks, physical gods that were personifications of nature (Artemis, Poseidon, Zeus, etc.), love (Aphrodite), wisdom and rationality (Athena, Apollo), war (Ares), etc. They were basically forms for various emotions and phenomena.

The two epics explore man's place in the universe and what it means to be human against a backdrop of eternity and fate. If you cannot appreciate that, I don't know what to say.

i read edith hamilton's mythology, the iliad, the trojan war (supplement), the odyssey and now i'm about to start on some aeschylus

mythology was fine, the iliad was good, the trojan war book was kind of boring, and the odyssey was great.

>that scene where a Trojan soldier has a spear thrust under his chin impaling his eyeball which is then paraded around
can't remember whose aristeia it was but god damn wasn't expecting that level of gory detail

>The two epics explore man's place in the universe and what it means to be human against a backdrop of eternity and fate.
Could you apply this to Iliad? I'm interested in seeing your thinking applied.

>If you cannot appreciate that, I don't know what to say.
I do want to appreciate the poems desu. I hope you can help me with that.

>Greeks
>Nietzsche
>Heidegger
>Leo Strauss

Pretty much all you have to read to understand the problems of philosophy.

Is Zeus the most based Greek god?

Iliad, finished Mythology. I enjoy it so far but I'm looking forward more to the Odyssey. Hoping to get a lot of reading done this hunting season

Zeus is too wishy washy and lets himself get bossed around by his wife.

Hephaestus is a true bro.

Should I be reading the author's notes, introductions, annotations to the Iliad? I'm using the Pope translation.

I'm neurotic and a completionist as well, can't stand the idea that someone might have done something in a way that was better than mine.

After the Illiad/Odyssey it's pretty much philosophy go time I'd say. Read Aristotle first, then Plato, don't have to read everything they've ever written however. Take a lot of notes on this step, it'll make a huge difference since a lot of later philosophers expect you to have a decent grasp on both.

I would say that you're free to go after both, I personally dived into Stoicism afterwards, then went for Neo-Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Christianity, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel.

Realizing Aristotle is right about everything.

Can I skip Homer? I'm just too stupid for him

You can follow the entire full guide to get an amazing grasp at philosophy however, but I personally believe you should just read whatever interests you, form an opinion, and then try to disprove that opinion and form it again.

Why is Homer hard to understand? Are you reading some really prose-y version that isn't Fagles?

If it makes you feel better, I don't get everything either and need to google a lot.

i read the odyssey in a 72 hour involuntary psych lockdown
thats where i started and where i stopped with the greeks

Skip literature altogether.

Reading Plato. Just finished Phaedo right now and honestly not that impressed. If the next few dialogues are this blundering argumentation-wise, I might just read the symposium and then skip to Aristotle.

>second half of Pope's Odyssey, not really sailing through it but making steady progress
>intermittently studied the geopolitics of archaic Greece to fortify my grasp of the stories' setting

Am I gonna make it?

Oxford's Brief History is so bad. Much more fun and enlightening to read actual Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides.

Mind that I've read everything previously recommended by a "Start with the Greeks" chart, although an audiobook-skim of JB Bury's Greece superseded my reading of another summary of Hellenic history

>Where in the process of starting with the greeks are you?
Halfway through Aristotle. Read Homer twice, the Homeric hymns, Hesiod twice, all of the tragedians, selections of the Greek lyricists, Herodotus, Thucydides, most of Xenophon, Aesop, Pindar, selections of pre-Socratics, all of Plato, ~3 months of secondary reading on Plato. Picked up Lysias and intend to put some time into the Attic orators, probably once I'm through with Aristotle.

>How are you liking it so far?
Probably the single most impressive thing I've done with my life; almost certainly the most impressive thing I've independently undertaken and committed to. In comparison with what I've read I have almost no interest, let alone pride, in having finished a good university with a good degree.

>Is it what you expected? Why or why not?
I thought this was going to take me like 3 months. It's been 2.5 years of reading consistently if not frequently; the initial rushes of churning through Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides soon calmed down a bit. I had the most fun with history so I ended up moving into the Hellenic era (Arrian, Curtius Rufus) and have also read almost every Roman-era historian of literary value (Livy, Tacitus, Polybius, Suetonius, Sallust, Caesar, Diodorus, Dio, Dionysius, all of Plutarch's lives). Currently chipping away at Valerius Maximus; also have Herodian, Florus, Marcellinus, and the Augustan historians waiting on the shelf.

It's literally changed my life. I was not a big reader when I started, and have only recently begun to feel at least somewhat "well-read" not just in the scope of what I have under my belt, but the confidence I now have in approaching formerly foreign genres (poetry, epic poetry, drama, "real" history) and handling them critically (building methods for reading to aid retention, comprehension; learning how to seek out, select from, and interact with secondary sources ranging from near-contemporary texts, to old commentaries by Aquinas, to modern essays and academic texts).

1/3

2/3

I still casually read fiction, but now every time I turn my attention to a text of some significance, I can bring a lot of energy to bear on it, and am able to suck a lot of juice out of it, not only through the way I read, annotate, and make notes (all habits developed from the different genres of the Greeks), but through my (still amateur) ability to seek out significant critical texts (a habit developed mostly from trying to find texts to better understand Plato and Aristotle). For example I only recently read Dante's Commedia for the first time. There was undeniably a lot of stuff that I didn't grasp when I read it, but what could have been a relatively shallow experience was immediately supported by rereading my summaries, the passages I had noted while reading, reading a cambridge companion, the vita nuova, and then an essay on the vita nuova. Now I'm on a canto-by-canto commentary which I'll follow with 2-3 more minor works (monarchia, de vulgari eloquentia, maybe convivio) before reading 3 more brief books/essays on Dante as a whole, and probably topping it off with on-and-off readings of his early poems and those of one of his influential friends, whose verses caught my eye while reading an essay a few weeks ago.

That's a lot of reading, and frankly I doubt many literary works/figures will merit as much attention as I believed Dante did, but frankly I'd rather be able to be able to put in that much effort and have to be judicious in deciding how much time a writer/book is worth, than to read a book and not know how to delve into it/around it any further. That ability to seek out new writers, later inheritors of a literary tradition, auxiliary texts which improve your understanding, that's all stuff that you can and will learn from the Greeks, if you're being smart and curious. If you read only what's on the Greek charts, never read any intros, never think anything like "hey this Pindar guy sounds interesting, let me check him out," then yeah you'll read a bunch of largely irrelevant, seemingly dated stories. The actual writings of the Greeks are fine, especially with Homer and the better tragedies, but for me the real value has always been the method of reading and thinking that I've developed, the curiosity and confidence that I've nurtured, and a very old-world sense of thought and morality which, as long as you're not autistic about it and go LARPing around as a fucking classical Athenian, will foster in you a new and nowadays rarely-seen outwards perspective of the world, and an ability to stand out in it.

3/3

There's a passage from Plato that always sticks with me:
>Seeing the citadel of the young man's soul empty of knowledge, fine ways of living, and words of truth (which are the best watchmen and guardians of the thoughts of those men whom the gods love), [bad desires] finally occupy that citadel themselves. And in the absence of these guardians, false and boastful words and beliefs rush up and occupy this part of him. [Republic 560b]

Most people with any positive personal philosophy inherit it from religion; the Greeks and Romans are the secular version of that, except with a lot more worldly energy. If you don’t bullshit your way through them, you’ll grow a lot—mind and heart—and to top it all off will have a fucking blast reading some of the craziest, most exciting stories of all time. You’ll absolutely demolish your limitations of ambition, and will simultaneously be checked by some of history’s most painful reminders to be humble. I read my favorite passages from the historians and tragedians between sets at the gym, and often I find a Greek or Roman anecdote popping into my head when I’m tempted with some sort of vice or excess. I absolutely believe these guys have made me audacious and strong, but also temperate and thoughtful, in a way that I see in very few other people. If you want them to do so, the Greeks can give you new values, perspectives, fears, and hopes. If you don’t like the look of the common crowd, you should at least check out what the Greeks have to say. I think this passage from Plutarch’s “Marcellus” is a fitting end to this comment:

>The same men, whom continual defeats had accustomed to think themselves happy, if they could but save themselves by running from Hannibal, were by Marcellus taught to esteem it base and ignominious to return safe but unsuccessful; to be ashamed to confess that they had yielded one step in the terrors of the fight; and to grieve to extremity if they were not victorious.

My sentiments exactly. One does not ever stop starting with the Greeks.

lovely write-up, I'm just beginning on my journey with the Greeks and you've helped to affirm my feeling that I'm undertaking an important and life-changing project
hopefully in 3 years I'll be inspiring an apprehensive user like you are for me

>The "repeatedly going back to" part.
This is big. Comfiest and most noble aesthetic

You're forgetting the part where he tells Hera and Athena to shut the fuck up by reminding them that he can and would be perfectly willing to lift them and all the other gods up simultaneously with one arm and leave them dangling over the void.

I read that passage to my gf every once in a while just to remind her who's boss

the Strauss book was pretty meh but I love all the mythology.

I am actually working backwards because it's so fascinating.

I'm currently reading about Egyptian myth while I wait for my Homer books to come.

I have just begun this and I have a long way to go but I totally relate.

...

I'm taking a PhD in classics.

>tfw when you start so hard with the Greeks you end up doing only the Greeks

Anyway, anons, why don't we start a Classics general? I think it would be a good idea.
We discuss classics and give several useful links in the beginning e.g. ancient philosophy, ancient history, ancient poetry charts; useful websites for downloading greek texts/reading greek (e.g. perseus), other useful online resources.
Do you guys have any good ideas on how to make this happen?

Great posts.

Amazing posts, and I recognize a lot of this sentiment. I'm not as far on my journey as you are, but I already notice the benefits that better introspection can have in your life. Also, there is a sense of calmness and serenity of the soul that comes along with being a more read individual that is hard to put into words, I'm sure you understand what I mean.

Fantastic posts, I really empathise with your excitement about it.

Does anyone have a good guide or chart of which one should start with Greek texts, primary and any accompanying texts? I’m reading The Republic for the first time and I’m loving it. I’d like to read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations soon but I realise that’s skipping ahead a bit.

Fell for the translation meme, now full restart

these posts made me want to start with the greeks
someone post the chart

If you have any further questions about Starting with the Greeks, this is the time to ask.

The Cambridge Companions on anything are usually a good start.

But I'd say we need a good Greek Scholarship and Roman Scholarship Chart!

I want to fuck the middle siren brah

...

I’ve this one at home I ordered last year. I’ve heard it’s a great companion for the Socratics and after. Is that true?

Great posts, user! We need a /clas/ general now!

I guess this could be a good start. I'd go with the primary texts, though - and read secondary stuff alongside, to clarify things.

Pope's odyssey is shoddy and overwrought. It was translated by a whole workshop of rhymesters.

You and I made the same mistake. Read a different translation

>I still casually read fiction, but now every time I turn my attention to a text of some significance, I can bring a lot of energy to bear on it, and am able to suck a lot of juice out of it, not only through the way I read, annotate, and make notes (all habits developed from the different genres of the Greeks)
How? What Greek texts taught you that?

I think he meant he learned how to do that by working on the classics, which usually requires a little more attention.
I can understand this happening in relation to reading Homer and Plato, for instance. Working on them and the issues raised by their texts can make you more aware of how books in general work.

And what issues are raised in Homer's texts?

Why does Odysseus fuck every Goddess? Give me an account of why he does it.

Technically, they were nymphs (I've only read the Odyssey). Circe fucked Odysseus because Hermes told him to, as it was Zeus' will, and Calypso imprisoned him and forced herself on him.

There are a lot of issues. I am not an expert, but here are some examples:

1. The question of the author: trying to understand from the text whether the homeric poems were written by one or by more than one person.
2. The question of the internal coherence of the text: if the text was written by more than one, how can we take it to be internally coherent? How do we deal with apparent internal contradictions of a text? How do these problems relate to the structure of the poem?
3. Relation between form and presentation: how does the fact that the poem was meant to be presented orally influence its form and overall structure?

This is just very basic stuff, but these questions cannot be ignored while reading Homer. Asking them and working on them can give you tools to work on other texts - you start thinking about them in relation to their author, you start evaluing their internal coherence, ecc.
It's not like you are not going to do this with other books: the point is that in Homer you will supposedly have to work hard on these matters. It's like doing physical exercise, it's good to become accustomed to reading difficult things.

Oh, I was thinking about issues raised within the textual narrative, not "meta/extra-textual" analysis.

There are also those, I'd say. In general, the classics are very good training.
Same is true for philosophical texts, which I more familiar with. Understanding a philosophical thesis in an ancient text requires good understanding of the language, the grammar, the historical context, and the overall way of doing philosophy in the period you are studying. It takes a while, but is rewarding, and gets you used to reproduce that sort of meticulous, slow, systematic and attentive way of working with other texts as well.
I don't think the classics are the only ones doing this, but I think they are very helpful to give you new insight on how to read in general.

It won't take 3 years, you'll be seeing things differently almost immediately. Speaking of which, if you like the historians and want to be able to read history better, read the (Roman era, Roman focused, ethnically Greek) historian Polybius. Great histories but also a great teacher OF history, how to read it, write it, study it. Follows in the Thucydidean tradition, and will go far in helping you understand what that tradition actually is. Enjoy the ride!

The Strauss book is a bit of a meme. Did nothing for me. Also the cambridge companion is pretty much never read; I still haven't gotten to it and although I haven't started reading this one either, the Blackwell companion to Greek Tragedy looks like a much better accompaniment.

>there is a sense of calmness and serenity of the soul that comes along with being a more read individual
Absolutely. It's important to find a balance between reading and "actually" living, but anyone who doesn't do the former is limiting himself to a single perspective in a single time in a single place. The most valuable lesson I think you can draw from the Greeks is that we are and always have been the same humans, regardless of our surrounding material circumstances, with the same virtues and vices; the more you read, the more you know about how humans behave. Something shocking to other people will, to you, simply be a modern rendition of an often 2500 year old trope. So, yes, I absolutely agree that it's calming.

I haven't read but for Plato I'd recommend (in this order) reading the relevant section of Copleston's history of philosophy, the Bloomsbury companion to Plato, AE Taylor's "Plato the man and his work" for a book-length treatment of all of the dialogues, and as suggested, the CCs to Plato and Plato's Republic. Most critical texts on Plato presume your familiarity with basically the whole corpus; if you want to only dip your toe in for now with stuff relevant to Republic, read the passages on it in the Bloomsbury companion and the Taylor book. CC to Republic is relatively difficult and, while technically commenting only on Republic, does so by drawing on many of the other dialogues. Leave it for later. Also I hear that Allan Bloom's intro essay to Republic is great, but haven't read it.

As said, the Greeks are masters of allegory and metaphor. Honestly fiction is still my weakest area, but it's impossible to read, e.g., the tragedians and Plato, without being forced to pay closer attention to characters, style, structure, method. A few Homer threads on lit scratch this surface in debates about whether Achilles or Hector was the true hero of the Iliad, but I have yet to see, e.g., anyone bring up the classic allegorical interpretation of Odyssey as the journey of the soul towards knowledge. Check out Strauss "the city and man" for some aggressively, arguably excessively deliberate interpretations of Greek texts.

Are you an ancient philosophy scholar, user? Because I am as well! :D

Nah just an amateur reader! Are you in academia? Do you have a specialty area?

Fuck Plato, fuck Socrates. Stoicism is the only philosophy worthwhile made by the pederasts.

thanks mate, really appreciate the time and effort you put into these posts and I'm sure plenty of other anons have benefited from it too
keep posting in greek threads ya legend

I'm doing a PhD at the moment, and I'm working
on Neoplatonism - or rather, would like to work on it. I worked on Plato for my bachelor and my MA thesis, now I'd like to move on Plotinus!

just make a thread
it's not that hard

when the thread gets bumped off, repeat

that's it

>1. The question of the author: trying to understand from the text whether the homeric poems were written by one or by more than one person.

Homer, THE Homer, has only been surpassed by Shakespeare. There's no way that some other guy's stuff could have been interpolated into his work without it sticking out like a sore thumb - like in Shakespeare's collaborative plays. Maybe a few lines here and there but >95% is from one person, for sure.

>The most valuable lesson I think you can draw from the Greeks is that we are and always have been the same humans, regardless of our surrounding material circumstances, with the same virtues and vices; the more you read, the more you know about how humans behave.
This is absolutely and became clear to me around the coincident series of events of a speech on Robinson Jeffers and reading Menander.

> anyone bring up the classic allegorical interpretation of Odyssey as the journey of the soul towards knowledge.
How? How does him reclaiming his home, wife, and child representative of knowledge?

rescue bump

I'm just gonna read Hamilton's Mythology, then The Iliad -> The Odyssey -> some Plato -> most of Aristotle

Is that sufficient? Going to move on to Shakespeare after

For a fully comprehensive read of Plato at least skim over Wikipedia pages of the Presocratics.

when daidalos works for a woman he builds a sex toy

when he works for a man he builds a prison

when he works for himself he builds a flying machine

Hamilton’s mythology is such a nice read, you’ll enjoy it

Currently reading the Odyssey

Is advancing to the Theban Plays > Herodotus > Thucydides > Xenophon > Diogenes' Lives of the Philosophers > The rest of philosophy in that sequence admissible?

>Odysseus' fired up cuckrage as he sees his court women SUED

i picked up a book on greek methology today

It is if you read the Oresteia after the Odyssey and before the Theban plays

How do you go about finding secondary literature? I just generally look at included bibliographies, but they're not always a good source, often listing upwards of 50 books of varying quality, from great to absolutely terrible.