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

[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!