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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
Kagan’s Pelopensian War is excellent. So is Hansen’s A War Like No Other.
That is one of my favorite baseball books. There are so many great lines.
You do a disservice to T. J. Eckleburg.
I read Siddhartha in high school German class. Also Glasperlenspiel. Not a Hesse fan. Far too much navel gazing.
Ok, beat this. The two full books I was assigned in my freshman English class were The Execution of Private Slovik and Bury My Heart My Heart at Wounded Knee. Were it not for Lewis and Tolkien on my own time, I probably would have given up reading.
Actually, one of my big problems with assigned reading was that I had several other books I would much rather read. I disliked so many of the assigned books and there were other, far more fun books out there.
About the time I was rolling my eyes at the class-assigned A Separate Peace I was reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair just for the fun of it. (The battle of Waterloo – cool!)
I guess I was lucky. My assigned high school coming-of-age novel was Red Badge of Courage. I thought it was excellent and still do.
I had to read that one in high school as well. I was naive back then and was told it was a great book and accepted that conclusion, even though I didn’t like it.
I’ve since learned that anti-heroes just aren’t my bag. I like heroes. I won’t say it’s not well written, but my standard includes being admirable for its subject as well.
Anti-hero? No way. He grows up. He realizes what his fantasies were. He runs away but then comes back and faces reality. No way is he an anti-hero. He becomes a mature adult.
Yeah. I don’t like that. Heroes don’t have those lapses of judgment.
I really enjoyed reading Oxford University Press 2010 translation of Polybius’ Histories which is an account of the Punic Wars and the Roman constitutional government to help explain to his fellow Greeks why the Romans had conquered them.
I led a group of middle schoolers through (selected portions) of it and had a blast. It’s such a fantastic read.
(I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby and although it was an assigned reading, I still think it’s a brilliant novel.)
And it’s pricey, which is why I haven’t read it and opt for the free lectures.
I polished off Tolkien and Lewis (Chronicles and the Space Trilogy) by the 6th grade, reading with a flashlight under the covers after lights out. I don’t recall reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee but that was probably because my sister got our mother’s copy and read that while her classmates struggled with Dick and Jane. She regaled me with the gory parts on the bus ride home.
Growing up without TV and with a library card, spending many more hours in libraries than in movie theaters, the required reading lists no longer come to mind, washed out by whatever I was interested in at the moment.
It sits in between an earlier style of fiction that now seems overly melodramatic (think Charles Dickens) and the modern, less sentimental style. It thus comes across as vaguely “off”, because it doesn’t entirely fit into either of those camps.
It’s also something of a swan-song for America’s gilded age, which is alien to a modern audience. It’s like trying to explain the malaise era 1970s to a millenial. If you weren’t there, it’s almost impossible to fully understand it.
I think I’ve noted elsewhere that I prefer Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned for that sort of look.
If you want to shift gears and read something light I’d recommend Gore Vidal’s Burr.
Is that about Raymond Burr?
And 1876. I liked both very much. Vidal is a talented creep.
Great post and discussion, Jon, but it reminds me of the quote (don’t recall the origin): “We buy books because we think we’re buying the time to read them.”
There’s one book written by a Greek poet, points out, hope’s the last, needful deception–you don’t know how we’ll turn out.
Aristotle confirms…
(A slightly belated) welcome aboard!