Here's to the aorist optative

[starlady]

Oh man, it's been years since I'd thought about the aorist optative. I'm such a bad lapsed Classicist. But here's a line from this week's Economist about the study of ancient Greek that I thought was too damn good not to share:

Intellectual elitism, as much as an appreciation of Aristophanes’s bawdy humour, is the glue that binds Hellenists together—stoked, in some schools, by a feeling of official neglect or hostility from peers.

The article concludes by saying that the real threat to the classics in general and Greek in particular is not modernity but globlization. I could see that. In the meantime, off to the grocery store.

Comments

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

Loads. Iliad 18.104: ἀλλ’ ἧμαι παρὰ νηυσὶν ἐτώσιον ἄχθος ἀρούρης.

And yes, I am ridiculously delighted to see οἱ πολλοί without an additional article.

As a sidenote, did anybody see the article a couple days ago (can't remember where, right off) on some scientists figuring out the exact day on which Odysseus returned home based on eclipses and whatnot? Reactions?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I saw that. I almost posted on it. I would totally buy it (unlike the scientists in the article, who seemed to not want to acknowledge that The Odyssey could be gasp! based in fact, or that people could remember a solar eclipse in verse for 500 years. fools.).

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

See, I'm not so sure. One of the things I find totally fascinating about Homer is that it has all sorts of stuff that goes back 500 years before it was written, but on the other hand, it also has a bunch of anachronisms from the 8th century. I don't know if you could tell which category a solar eclipse would fall into, especially if that sort of thing is fairly common doom-laden imagery and wouldn't necessarily refer to a real event. And especially if the passage doesn't clearly describe an eclipse and Plutarch was the first one to interpret it that way.

I guess I feel that this is one of those instances where you actually need scientists and Hellenists working together instead of going off on their own, because both sides have certain necessary insights (both positive and negative). The article seemed to me an oversimplification on several counts.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it could be completely wrong-headed for all those reasons. But I was annoyed by the dismissal of the possibility that the memory of the event had survived for 500 years, when so many other things clearly do.

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

I'm not necessarily saying it's all wrong; I'm just saying they should have at least consulted somebody who actually knows about such things. Somebody who could confirm the validity of oral tradition, and then caution them about certain other things. When all your evidence is philological, you really need a philologist in on it.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Interdisciplinarism!