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My Month in Ancient Greece
Wanting to read more this year than last, I kicked off 2018 with a trio of classics: The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, and Anabasis by Xenophon. My better-educated friends are stunned I hadn’t read any of these classics before, but I had the typical public school education. My English teacher would assign hot garbage like The Great Gatsby and I’d go home and read my dog-eared copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
If memory serves, I was assigned Gatsby three times (Lord, I hate that book). Meanwhile, my 10th-grader is reading Rousseau and Solzhenitsyn in her charter school. Not only am I filling my many gaps in the Western canon, if I don’t read, she’ll end up being way smarter than me. (Is “me” right or should it be “I?” I’ll ask my daughter when she gets home.)
I read the trio in the order listed above and the reading got better with each title.
The Iliad is epically epic, rendered in a stiff dactylic hexameter with many, many, many repeating phrases. Between “rosy-fingered dawn” and “the wine-dark sea,” Homer’s epithets lull the reader into a trance, which I suppose was the point in oral storytelling. As a result, the myriad battles and names start blending together.
But, man, those battles are brutal. The semi-divine soldiers are walking Cuisinarts, leading to lovely vignettes like this:
Next Erymas was doom’d his fate to feel,
His open’d mouth received the Cretan steel:
Beneath the brain the point a passage tore,
Crash’d the thin bones, and drown’d the teeth in gore:
His mouth, his eyes, his nostrils, pour a flood;
He sobs his soul out in the gush of blood.
Spoiler alert: Erymas didn’t make it. As you can see, I read the older translations of these works; the above is Alexander Pope’s translation. I wanted the feel of the original, so I didn’t hunt down the modern versions. All three books are decidedly un-“woke.”
For The Odyssey, I chose the Harvard Classics version translated by Samuel Butler. This epic was far more interesting (and fun!) than the grim, brain-splattered Iliad. Ulysses slides into a Mediterranean port, feasts on great food, charms exotic women, grabs a pile of loot, and is off to the next isle.
Granted, the fellow gets in a few scrapes along the way, even being forced into love slavery by an eternally gorgeous nymph (poor guy), but returns home after 20 years to wreak vengeance on the cads trying to bed his wife. (Monogamy was pretty much a one-way street in ancient Hellas.)
After reading both of Homer’s works, I think The Iliad is geared toward young men, especially those of a military mindset. It’s all heroism, glory, and honor. I really should have tackled this in my Navy days.
The Odyssey is an even better adventure, but its themes of home, wisdom, fatherhood, and marriage are aimed squarely at those of us with more mileage on the drivetrain. The heroes still kill their share of monsters and men, but Ulysses always chooses brains before brawn.
The real revelation for me was Anabasis by Xenophon. How Hollywood hasn’t released a trilogy of this epic is beyond me. (No, The Warriors doesn’t count.) Here are the Cliffs Notes for this real-life tale:
Cyrus the Younger wants to topple his brother Artaxerxes II from the Persian throne, so he recruits 10,000 Greek mercenaries (including Xenophon) to help. They march 1,500 miles from the west coast of modern-day Turkey to the middle of modern-day Iraq and, in the first big battle, Cyrus is killed.
Uh-oh.
Now, the entire Persian army opposes the Greeks. The pro-Cyrus Persians say, “No actually, we were for Artaxerxes the whole time!” and turn against the Greeks. The Hellenic generals ask the King for safe passage … and he murders them.
Xenophon is more philosopher than soldier, but he gives an inspiring speech, the troops elect him leader, and they all hightail it due north while anyone, everyone, and everything tries to kill them.
They cross deserts and rivers and mountains through searing heat, waist-deep snow, and constant attacks from ahead and behind by an ever-hostile collection of bronze-age barbarians. Upon hitting Turkey’s north shore, they finally enter a Greek colony. Happy ending, right? Well, that’s when the soldiers start turning on each other.
Granted, Anabasis is an amazing war story, but it also serves as a history, an ancient travel guide, and a primer in leadership, group dynamics, and human nature.
If you haven’t read any of these three books, you should make up that deficit. But even if you have read Xenophon, I recommend picking it up again. You can get copies dirt cheap (or free) and many audiobook options are available.
I can also recommend a few excellent podcast discussions of these works:
- National Review’s The Great Books podcast on Xenophon here.
- BBC’s In Our Time on Xenophon here.
- BBC’s In Our Time on The Odyssey here.
- BBC’s In Our Time on The Iliad here.
Since the Ricochetti are more well-read than I (or me?), what are your impressions of these three Greek epics?
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Published in History, Literature
Donald Kagan’s Pelopenesian War goes to the end and is more accessible to the modern reader. I liked it as a companion to the original.
If you like Sci-fi redo of history The General series by S.M. Stirling and David Drake is a pseudo telling of Bellisarius but with a better outcome for our hero.
I’ve fortunately been spared in high school of the dreaded experience of reading Catcher in the Rye. I have unfortunately been burdened with people telling me all my life how brilliant it is. Yet, the snatches that have been shared with me convince me that it is a story from a whiny self-indulgent loser who blames others for his own problems. I’ll pass.
Well that or a fellow who believes in conspiracy theories.
We inhabit an era when one can download the audio of Kagan’s entire Yale class on Ancient Greece. Free, gratis. I’ve listened to it three times, so far. And I learn more every time.
Clearly I’m in in the minority as I found both The Iliad and The Odyssey long winded and bordering on TL:DR territory. Yet I’ve read Xenophon at least four times.
I recently got turned on to Iggulden’s series about the War of the Roses and I’m looking forward to reading his take on Ceasar.
My son just started reading the Odyssey. He’s a freshman in high school and is struggling with the language. He has access to an audio version, but we also have a copy of Padraic Colum’s “Homer for Children.” I can download an audio of that from our library. I’m hoping he’ll absorb it subconsciously while we ride in the car.
I saw “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” Does that count?
He comments that in his story on Ceasar he leaves stuff out! Caesar was an incredible,man.
Probably it’s not good reading for kids. They can’t understand most of the stuff that goes on. They’ve no experience, much less a man desperate to return to wife & son & father & home…
Underrated film.
Partially filmed at the Texas State Railroad.
Had no idea. The scenes with blind ol’Homer?
Among others. All of the scenes involving trains. The movie was filmed in 1999-2000. I still lived in Palestine, TX and was into the Texas State Railroad. (Embrace the history near where you live.) I wrote one of the scripts for the annual Murder on the DisORIENTed Express mysteries they held annually on the train.
That sounds like great fun!
I knew I couldn’t be the only one, but I’m the only one I know.
Why hasn’t Nine Princes in Amber been made into a movie?
Speaking of Seamus Heaney (Beowulf verse translation), I just discovered his last work was a translation of Aeneid VI. It was highly recommended in The Guardian. Putting it on my library list.
Awesome. However, I listened to The Great Courses lectures on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid by Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver before I read translations of these works.
My high school and college education was lacking in the liberal arts, mainly because 1) I wasn’t interested in that stuff at the time, and 2) I could never make more than a C, which meant my GPA was always in peril if I signed up for a humanities class.
As for other “must read” works such as The Great Gatsby, don’t waste your time. Instead, I suggest you read The Faker’s Guide to the Classics by Michelle Witte. In the Introduction, she explains:
“Some of these texts are painfully dull on their own. Who wants to add to that by reading even drier and more boring synopses and discussion points? Let’s be real. You don’t have time for thousand-page tomes anymore.”
In other words, she does the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.
To make learning about these works enjoyable, her analyses are written with a tremendous wit, sometimes playful, sometimes irreverent, but always funny. She uses modern slang and hip expressions when covering the plots and character development.
To summarize my advice:
If you are interested in actually reading classic works, see if there are related Great Courses available. If not, but you want to know about some of the classics (and modern) works literature, then go with Witte. You can’t go wrong either way.
“My English teacher would assign hot garbage like The Great Gatsby and I’d go home and read my dog-eared copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Best sentence I’ve read this year.
What I really like about Donald Kagan’s five volume version (which is hard to find now) is that he digs so deep into the war and while he certainly respects and admires Thucydides, he also points out his bias in certain areas and comes to different conclusions about the war and its causes and results. He backs up his claims with very thorough research and analysis. He’s brilliant.
Or in other words, why go to the Grand Canyon when you can look at someone else’s pictures of it?
:(
I knew you could do it! I’ve enjoyed all these works.
I first read a child’s version of The Odyssey, back when I was in middle school as it was an extension on my love of Greek myths at the time. I was rather surprised when I read the adult-translation. There was a lot taken out. But it remained a compelling adventure for me still. I think I’ve read that one multiple times (the adult version. I can’t remember the child’s translation).
The Illiad has one of my favorite scenes of all time. I’ve not read it as much but it is a compelling book all the same. Interestingly, @titustechera mentions his discussion, but I wrote about this book last year in my 30 Days of books series, and recently @ambrianne was looking for good translations of it as well. This could be the single most discussed Classical work on Ricochet.
Anabasis is also one of my favorites and is one I recommend as it’s one of the more approachable works of Greek literature. I’ve read this one a couple times as well.
If you want more classics, I’d suggest Herodotus’ The Histories. It’s a long one, but I like the cut of his jib. Herodotus discusses the rise of Persia as a military power and its eventual halt by the scrappy Greeks who send the Persians packing. Just take that one with a grain of salt as Herodotus frequently just makes things up to fill in literary gaps.
Ed.: This is off-topic.
Me: Jussssst a bit outside.
Side Note: For the record, though I liked The Great Gatsby the first time I read it. I didn’t read it the second time. Also, I was required to read Siddharta twice in High School and I think I deserve to get back the time it took for me to read it the first time. I refused to read that one the second time too and completely failed a quiz on its contents because I mixed up names.
I have mixed feelings about these required readings. I do think that there are some authors, such as Shakespeare, that’s had such a profound impact on the language and culture that they should be studied. I’m just not sure that assigning complete works does that.
No one refers to anything in Gatsby.
That’s an even stronger argument for Milton:
Of course, then you’d have to read Johnson, too.
Speaking of the OED, if you’re not up for paying their annual subscription for online access, try your public library’s web page. My membership gives me access to the OED, among other things.
If you think Gatsby is bad, who else had to suffer through A Separate Peace? Nothing more relevant to a late 1960s public school student in junior high than a novel set at an elite private boarding school in the 1940s. I felt like I was reading about an alternate reality.
I had to read A Separate Peace in a public high school in the 80’s. It was better than Siddharta.
Can’t argue that. But I wasn’t assigned Siddharta. In the 1960s it was still the preserve of the druggies.
Maybe I am biased because I was assigned it twice but A Separate Peace only once.
Not to hijack this one in scifi/fantasy too much, though they do seem like modern versions of Homer.
I read, but didn’t much like, Bradbury. I read and enjoyed Zelazny, though it now seems rather juvenile, like Eddings (Belgariad), McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern), and Anthony (Bio of a Space Tyrant).
Herbert remains excellent even from an adult perspective, as do Asimov and Heinlein. Though from Heinlein, I like Starship Troopers but not a Stranger in a Strange Land.
As an adult, my favorite is Orson Scott Card, particularly the Enders Game series, and especially The Worthing Saga, which I think is his best.
Incidentally, Enders Game is on the Marine Corps reading list, and Starship Troopers used to be on the list. It appears the Troopers was removed due to left wing political pressure.
That is particularly remarkable when far more soldiers were killed by disease than in combat.
The first note from the studio boobs would be “cut it down to three.”
And if HBO did it, they would add more full frontal to the narrative.