/clas/ - Classical Greek and Roman Literature Thread

Ethics and poetics

Thanks for the responses. Since the main topic of interest for me in philosophy is ethics, I guess I'll tackle Aristotle once I finish Epictetus and The Meditations.

Someone in the previous thread asked what language could help with getting an idea of the pronunciation of vowel timing and accent in Classical Latin.

So I've found Lithuanian to be helpful with understanding how to time long and short vowels. Its vowel -qualities- are on average close to those of the restored Latin pronunciation as well, so you can safely internalise them and you'll only have a slight barbarian accent (to a reconstructed Roman you would, that is).

As for accent, Lithuanian has pitch accent, which some would argue existed in educated classical Latin under the influence of Greek, so that's pretty much perfect.

Best thread.

>tfw you ignore Veeky Forums memes and jump into modernist Top 100 reading charts
>it turns out they're all fucking shit
>go back to the Greeks like you should have in the first place
At last I truly see

>tfw trying to train myself to read in dactylic hexameter

Halfway through the Iliad, the Fagles translation specifically. Glad I found the pdf online because there was no way I was going to read the Pope translation.
I've had Plotinus' "Enneads" and Iamblichus' "The Pythagorian Life" lying around for a few months, so I'll most likely get to them in the near future.

Reading pic related, she talks about Ancient bio/chem warfare world-wide, but spends most of her time on the Greeks and Romans. Sheds interesting light on passages of myth, especially regarding Hercules that others might find interesting.

Rrading Herodotus, currently on book VII.
>mfw Xerxes' army is about to reach Thessaly

Reading*

>tfw still in Book IV
Currently reading about Libya.

Has anyone else noticed that Euripides stops refrencing a divinity as "the god" and starts just using the expression "god" instead in The Suppliants? Is this related to the new "monotheistic" theology in the vein of Parmenides and Anaxagoras' thought? Since we know that Euripides was deeply involved in philosophy this seems plausible but I'm not sure wether I'm reading too much into a translation or not.

It's probably a delineation between two different greek forms translated as God/Gods, or else a holdover from two or more conflicting translations used in reference.

Stealing this recc, thanks

Hesiod anons, I made the unfortunate choice of picking the Selincourt Penguin version over Landmark; are there any good online resources (maps with text references, especially) to make the pure unadulterated monolith of text more easily parsed?

I assume you mean Herodotus? No idea why you would need maps for Hesiod...

Yeah meant Herodotus, The Histories
I've been at work today and my brain is melting out my ears

A map for the part in Theogony were he starts listing out the rivers would make it much more interesting desu.

Currently reading the Loeb version and using this as a reference for the Ionian revolt and Darius and Xerxes' campaigns. Also Google Maps and simply googling any place that requires it has been useful.

Here's another one for good measure, plentiful resources can be found swiftly online. Haven't checked out the Landmark edition, but I'll stick with Loeb because I like the translator's style.

Is everyone here reading translations or are you reading the original greek?

O shit nigger thanks, may even start on The Histories take 2 tonight thanks to these

On an unrelated note, I've come to the end of the Discourses and a few Fragments on Epictetus, and there's been an issue with Epctetus' brand of stoicism that bugs me:
If the ideal stoic places no positive or negative value in externals, and values only the use of impressions which benefit and refine his own will, what was Epictetus' impetus to teach in the first place?
He discusses the dispossesion of his students at various lengths, criticizes the methods of many philosophical schools and Sophistic educators, and declares generally that a philosopher's school should be treated like a hospital, standing on the demand of patients - but he never addresses his own personal motivations for teaching, and this also leaves the question of when or how one should assent to impressions in the area of externals as a means of more greatly benefitting their will.

I ONLY JUST REALIZED THAT "SOPHISTICATED" HAS SOPHISTIC AS ITS ROOT

What translation of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon? I was originally going to go with Robert Strassler for all of them but looking more into it I'm less sure.

>halfway through iliad
>"I'll get to Plotinus soon"
l m a o

Keep going but don't feel dejected if you literally take years to reach Plotinus. There are literally ages of content between you and him right now. Nothing wrong with that, as there's a lot to explore and enjoy and learn from; just pace yourself.

IMO you lucked out. Landmarks are valuable but the translations are iffy, whereas Selincourt is a famously well regarded classics translator. The maps at the back of your edition will probably cover 95% of your needs, and the (at first apparently annoying) requirement of flipping to them constantly, to remind yourself of what's where, will very quickly teach you Greek geography to the point that like 80-85% of future locations will be at least vaguely familiar.

Shop around. Can't really go wrong with most modern translations, especially with big name publishers, for these writers. Any penguin/oxford edition will be fine. I read and enjoyed Oxford Herodotus (Waterfield), Hackett Thucydides (Lattimore I think) and Penguin Xenophon (Warner). Other choices include the Landmark editions and Loebs (wouldn't recommend Loeb for such widely accessible texts).

I read the Iliad, towards the beginning of last year (maybe March or a bit earlier), and tried to make an honest go at it. I read it through a few times, with two different translations, and tried to read (or listen to in a few cases) some secondary resources on it. Honestly I really did not enjoy the Iliad that much, it was such a fucking slog. Turned me pretty much completely off of "The Greeks" for awhile. Finally got myself to read the Odyssey, and holy shit is the Odyssey fantastic. Is the Iliad just something that completely doesn't work in translation but poetically is beautiful in the Greek? Obviously you're always going to miss something in translation (especially with poetry), but wow was the Odyssey ever on a completely different level of enjoyability.

From Book 2 to 7 of Thucydides am I just going to be reading boring accounts of battles and the main events of the war? Will there be some information regarding the history of certain sites or policies be relayed at least? The last three books of Herodotus began boring me terribly and I dont know if I can read another 6 by sufferance alone

This post should be a Veeky Forums banner

I just did a paper on Stoic married life based on Foucault's History of Sexuality, and it has rekindled my interest in Stoicism. I reread Marcus Aurelius' Meditations every year, but Seneca's Letters are collecting dust. I might make work of it sometime.

Get ready for some lit speeches man

Does anyone have recommandations on texts that predate the classical era ?
I'm looking to get my hands on anything that was written during the Bronze Age and the greek dark age.

Linear B (system used in the Mycenaean Age predating the Greek alphabet) was used mainly to record goods and shipments. Are you interested in grain and wool disbursements?

Also, the Dark Age has that name for a reason.

This
You're pretty much going to have to read historical analysis, there's no real primary sources on the early Greeks.

KEK We should do this, the current banner is complete shit

I just finished reading Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri (Landmark edition). I haven't gotten to the supplementary material but its been a great experience learning about the exploits and some of Alexander's characteristics. The footnotes were great and I can't wait to jump into the epilogue.

Hey OP, next time you make a new thread; can you remove the arrows at the start of the links? That way when someone wants to highlight a link, they can just triple click it to select the whole line.

>mfw the dude who houses Xerxes' army in Lydia asks him to spare his eldest son from war
>mfw Xerxes proceeds to kill all of that guy's sons and splits the corpse of the eldest in half, nails the halves in pilars and has the army march between them

Nigger, even Veeky Forums's built-in scripts makes links clickable now. How about you just fucking click the god damn links?

Is Cicero a good chap to start with?

>It werks on MY machine.

sucks for you faget

Oh fuck. You're right. I'm sorry for being such an idiot.

I'm so sorry. I don't deserve to be here.

How is Arrian's writing style (as best it can be gleaned through translated text)?
I usually find Classical history rough to follow, and I know Arrian's writing beyond the Discourses is supposed to differ greatly from the style used to deliver Epictetus' rhetoric

Good word

The Peripatetic school was influential in all sorts of ways that aren't always easy to pin down.

Aristotle becomes very important for the later Platonists, and it is their re-Platonized Aristotle that is passed along to the Medievals.

If you are very interested in Neoplatonism, you'll need to grapple with Aristotle sooner or later.

You should note though that some parts of Aristotle's corpus got a lot more attention than others. Aristotle has a giant body of work, but a small portion these got most of the attention. The Metaphysics, The Categories, the logical works, etc.

>Since the main topic of interest for me in philosophy is ethics, I guess I'll tackle Aristotle once I finish Epictetus and The Meditations.

Aristotle often has a bad reputation these days, but I found the Nicomachean Ethics to be an extremely thought-provoking read. I now understand why Aristotle proved to be so influential.

Is English your first tongue?

You could try mastering iambic pentameter in English first. The modern mind is ill-accustomed to the metrical. Mastering dactylic hexameter may require a more graded approach.

>This is a map showing where all of the characters originated in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad

Helps convey how wide-ranging the struggle was. Am I right?

I can recommend this for Xenophon.

The translation is accurate and reads well. The book is also inexpensive.

>Is the Iliad just something that completely doesn't work in translation but poetically is beautiful in the Greek?

The Illiad works on many levels. Some of these don't necessarily translate well. Many translations somehow diminish the hyper violence and the dark humour for example.

Consider the attached passage.

Phereclus gets stabbed in the ass. The spear goes through his ass and into his bladder. He starts spraying piss and blood all over the place as he dies. How is his death translated? "Death was a mist about him" Beautiful, but lacks a certain jocular punch.

>
>

The Odyssey is a psychological work, the Illiad an anthropological one. Of course both are intended to marry Classical Greek values to a sense of Bronze Age shared history and mythic culture, but the style is very different for doing so. I found The Odyssey quite boring in my original read in highschool, but took to the Illiad for likely the exact reasons you dislike it when I read it for the first time a year ago.

>Illiad

Where's the old Google drive document?

What's this inline translation from?

I'll axe again...

i am 24 pages into The Histories, 9 pages into notes, and have been reading since about the time I got home at 11:00 last night.
I should be worried, but I have a fairly strong notion that the density of notes will lessen as I move from the meandering background history into the meat of the war itself. This whole thing has also been a crash course on early middle-eastern civilizations for me as well.

That said, Croesus is a fucking badass holy shit (let me just sacrifice trillions of dollars worth of gold no big D) and Herodotus is a lying son of a bitch (the Dorians migrated south from the continent over the early period of Hellenic development, oh by the way they also totally created Macedon and therefor Alexander is GREEK)

If you have some knowledge of the history at the time, sure. If not, you should at least know the basics for many of his writings.
Read at least "The Catiline Conspiracy" by Sallust to have an idea what politics could be like plus maybe Plutarch's Life of Cicero to know what he was actually up to.

Unless you want to restrict yourself purely to his philosophical treatises (On Duties, On the Commonwealth...) and skip his political speeches completely but you would really miss out on some of his most well-known stuff then (like the Philippics or Against Catiline).

Why does Pliny describe chinks as having blonde hair, blue eyes and harsh voices?Even if he actually meant something like Tocharians there should still be way more east asian looking peoples over there.

But Herodotus lived like a century before Alexander the Great.
Maybe I am just naive but I usually gave Herodotus the benefit of the doubt. When something he says is inaccurate, I just assume that he didn't know any better, especially when talking about something like Egyptian history, he flat out says that he just talked with some priests and that is what they told him. Before history books, most history was just oral transmission and it's very easy to believe that people at some point start to modify their history to appear a little more special.

>What's this inline translation from?

Taken from the Chicago Homer. A very useful site.

homer.library.northwestern.edu/

And while I'm recommending sites, logeion is great for looking up ancient Greek words. Just copy them into the search box and press Go.

logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html

On the point of the founding of Mecedonia, isn't it a bit strange that he'd first place the origin of the land in the southward migration of the Doric people and then say that the kingdom was actually founded by a later northern migration?
It seems like a fumbled attempt to claim that the power of the Macedonians was inherently Doric despite the Dorians meandering about the place for a century.

not that Herodotus himself was the inventor of this claim, but he does go out of his way to disclaim conflicting or mythologized events

Oh no

Started learning the passive voice in Latin. Will it be used more often than the active, or not?

Also, I've decided to start writing in Latin to help my command of the language. As far as narration is concerned, will I be more likely to use passive or active voice, or does it all depend on style and what I'm attempting to convey?

>will I be more likely to use passive or active voice

Here's a frequency breakdown for ancient Greek. Latin will be different, but this should give you an idea. In short, active by far I would think.

There's more info in this article including a similar breakdown for Latin, but I can't get to it right now.

jstor.org/stable/43938849

>Keep going but don't feel dejected if you literally take years to reach Plotinus. There are literally ages of content between you and him right now.
>implying this hard
Kek. Why would you immediately assume, when someone tells you that he's reading the Iliad, that that was somehow his introduction to the greek canon? "Ages of content" he says..

If you know nothing about Latin prose, you cannot write it.

lmfao did this guy just try to transliterate "family" into Greek letters, using fucking beta code? I'd love to have a glimpse into the world of someone with an IQ that high.

>tfw read that as "The Expedition Guys"
would read tbqh

>the Persian War happened because Pisistratus liked giving it to his wife up the ass
Lmao Herodotus you absolute madman

>>i.4cdn.org/lit/1511555062371.png (What Translation of Homer Should I Read?)
this link is broken, bro

>bro
παράνομος

How is it even possible to be this retarded.

>Astyages dreams about his daughter pissing so much it sinks his city
>Marries her off to some Lydian fag
>Then he has a dream about a tree growing out of her pussy
>Immediately wants her back

What the actual fuck Media

>Lydian
Persian, I mean

nah Aristotle is very high regarded among academia. Im a philosophy major and he is probably the most referenced/discussed Greek philosopher. If anything, Plato is the one that has a bad rep, and its mostly because of the issue of essence he presents us with rather than his political views or his other arguments.

For of all you that are able, if you have a chance to take a class on at least Plato/Aristotle or if possible ancient greek philosophy as a whole, then take it. Im a big believer in self-education but the amount of complexity that is involved with reading through an already thick text that is also a translation of something ancient begs that these things are better learned with a professor that can point out when you are wrong about a subject. For example, Ive read the Republic about 4 times. the first 3 times were between highschool and my last ancient philosophy class. We read most of the Republic in class during the ancient philosophy class and i was astounded at how much I misunderstood or just plain didn't see in front of me. Sure, you get some people that are taking the class to fill up their schedule, but discussion about these works is absolutely essential to understanding the subject. If your goal is to understand later Greek and Roman philosophy and western philosophy as a whole, then you have to understand Plato and Aristotle. Simply put, 99% of western philosophers (at least until the late 1800s) applied Socratic and Aristotelian arguments to their theories.

I think most historians disbelieve the Dorian theory. Either way, proto-Russians invaded Serbia, but I wouldn't exactly call a Serb a Russian, see what I'm saying? Alexander clearly came from a much different culture then the rest of the hellens, and the Greek world looks a lot different (from dressing culture to etiquette) after Alexander established his empire. Im Greek btw, but I would never let my nationality blur my rationality.

Can't wait to dive into "the world of Odysseus" by moses finley. Fucking exams wish they were over, glossing over the table of contents made me erect already.

Anyone else read it?

...

Can someone give me a brainlet wojack with a supermassive black hole where the brain should be?

...

>Lament for Ur
>The Epic of Gilgamesh
>Theogony/Works and Days
>The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
>Debate Between Bird and Fish

About how many words do you estimate the collated works of Plato and Aristotle to be? Greek mythology is great entertainment to me, and history is very serviceable to my interests, politics is also up there with the others because I want to study as many governments of law, but I'm only interested in philosophy as much as I can divine the mentality of its contemporary or of later ages from it, for example however Socrates reacted to the prevailing opinions of his time or how Plato and Aristotle influenced the later Catholic Church.

With this in mind, how much material, that treats on ethics separate from what I mentioned above, would there be to skip? If I don't see it as too much I might even read it all out of curiosity and mend any lapses of study.

>identified as a demagogue by his enemies
>pretty much every celebrity of the time objected to him, he was pariodied in dramatic works

Was Cleon the Drumpf of Greece?

So, would Mexico be Sparta in that comparison?

>KEEP THE WALL

>CLEON CLUMPF GOT
>T
>W
>O
>SCOOPS
>OF FISH SAUCE! TYRANNICIDE HIM!

>About how many words do you estimate the collated works of Plato and Aristotle to be?

About 1.6 million words.