Oedipus Trilogy (Oedipus Rex (429 BC), Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC), Antigone (442 BC)) (Sophocles)

Re-read - first time would have been freshman year at Notre Dame, so 1974 or 1975.  I got the idea to read this from a book gifted on Father's Day from Paul Jr. and Nedda ("Papyrus" - lots of interesting thoughts on the ancient Greeks).

Pretty quick reading, the story lines are familiar.  Oedipus runs into some bad luck and is made eternally famous; in his old age he is supported by Antigone in particular and then protected by Theseus; one of his sons, slain in battle, is left to the jackals by Creon (an incredible insult in those days, perhaps any time) - at least until Antigone defies Creon.

Kind of amazing that folks were doing this quality of literature this long ago, I hope I don't take it for granted.  I hadn't realized the sequencing of the three works, how far apart in time.

The "Papyrus" book indicates that Sophocles was one of the big three of that time period (with Aeschyles and Euripides). 

Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8CE)

(512 pages (with notes))

Book club selection (via Nicole; session held (via Zoom) October 2021).

Another book I was interested in, but wouldn't have picked up absent a book club assignment.  Ovid's masterpiece; weaves in lots of myths.

Creation story right upfront - even in Roman times (and before), an Eden myth.  Things were great!  Then humans screwed things up!  Then a Flood.

Echo, Narcissus.   Phaethon has trouble with chariot - Phaeton automobiles.  Orpheus.  Orpheum theaters worldwide.  That aspect goes on and on - interesting.

Things we see in art galleries:  Andromeda's rescue; Rape of Europa; etc.

Jove a bit of a roustabout.  Not alone. 

Lots of violence, but how about Book 6, p. 144, Tereus - takes wife's sister, cuts out her tongue, his son pays, he dines - even by standards of all these stories, this was most graphic so far

What does this tell us about the listeners?  Meaningfully different than today's common TV fare?

Made me muse about a world where almost no one could read, and even fewer could own a manuscript (book).  Does predominately oral delivery encourage this type of literature?  

And how widely were these stories known?  Perhaps locals just knew their local stories?  Did the stories spread in the same form, or did [central] government have the tools to make things universal?  (Thinking of Discovery of France - centralized control of schooling for propaganda; printing.)

Triumph of Christianity concepts about ethics not connected to religion - and how.  (so many examples incl. rape, incest).  How the time was ripe for a new religion - these stories were old; Ovid's retelling masterful yet backward-looking and servile; not inspirational!

So many folks turned into birds or rocks or whatever - seemed odd.  I started wondering whether this was related to their view of the afterlife.  Even good folks could only foresee a dismal life as a "shade".  Perhaps virtuous victims were getting a good deal by living on as an animal or rock (avoiding both the rest of their now-unhappy life and also afterlife as a "shade")?  Unvirtuous victims get stuck as some undesirable animal or rock?  What is this metamorphosis business?

Ajax's debate with Ulysses was entertaining - classic brawn v. brain

I liked when the stories had more length - this happened toward the end, with Troy, Aeneas

Kind of odd how quickly things are skipped through - necessity, I suppose - Achilles death doesn't even mention his heel.  Dido just a line or two (she has her own opera!)

Fascinating to me that regimes controlled artists even 2000 years ago (and no doubt much farther back than that).  

The Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC (7th century?)) (translated by Emily Wilson)

(525 pages)

I much enjoyed reading this then-new translation back in 2008; this 2018 translation was receiving rave reviews so I gave it a try. 

It's great - highly recommended.  Translator is remarkably skillful at using short words, active phrases.  In the introduction she explains that she decided to use iambic pentameter - different than the original Greek, but customary/suitable for English.  She also states that she decided to restrict herself to the exact number of lines used by Homer - a "difficult constraint" - she "wanted a narrative pace that could match its stride to Homer's nimble gallop".  (That phrase from the introduction gives a glimpse of what she did with the translation.)

Her introduction runs 80 pages and is uniformly helpful, interesting.

I'm not seeing a reason to recount the plot because it's so well known (and because I briefly did so in the above 2008 link anyway).  So many stories that are essentially immortal in their own right, let alone to consider that they are all collected in this single epic. 

Also needless to say - this has been read and enjoyed for centuries (millennia, actually) - that won't stop.

The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller, 2012)

I liked this, and would recommend it.  But the reviewers were so enthusiastic that I think my expectations were set too high.

This is the story of Achilles - with the twist being
that it is told from the perspective of Patroclus (who was a significant character in the Iliad, but not that big a deal).

In this book, the boy Achilles selects Patroclus to be his special friend - an unlikely choice.  Achilles has a goddess-mother who doesn't care for Patroclus.  Achilles is fated to be the best warrior of his time, and there are some other unpromising prophecies about his future.

The two grow up together, including a couple years being trained by a centaur.  Patroclus and Achilles do turn out to be special friends.  Then comes the abduction of Helen and the Trojan War.

Quick read, creative approach, I liked the last couple chapters.

Hadn't realized that the story of Achilles' unprotected heel (targeted by archer Paris) was a later add-on (not part of the original Greek story).

The Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC) (translated Robert Fagles)

It was a pleasure to go back through this long-ish poem, and I can see why the Fagles' recent translation was named one Time magazine's 10 best books (1996). It was a sequel to Homer's Iliad, and a predecessor to the Aeneid (Fagles' translation discussed here).

Fagles teams up with this guy named Bernard Knox, who provides long, scholarly-sounding introductions. It's a great combination.

The story - Odysseus returning home from Troy to deal with the suitors chasing Penelope (to the chagrin of Laertes and Telemachus) is well known. And it is amazing how many elements of the story are staples: Cyclops; the sirens and their famous song; Calypso; Scylla and Charybdis; the visit to the land of the dead; etc.

One of the reasons I wanted to read it was because the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou" was loosely based on this; also James Joyce's "Ulysses," which I need to read again since it didn't make much sense to me the first time.

Great stuff.

The Aeneid (Virgil, 29-19 B.C. (Robert Fagles translation)

Somehow I have never gotten around to reading this. It was surprisingly enjoyable and worked well for reading on the stairmaster.

Some thoughts:

1. This work definitely is part of the traditional canon; references to it pop up all over the place. For example, it's been mentioned within the last couple days in the two other books that I have in process.

2. The foreward was helpful in explaining Virgil's purpose - basically he was writing something that put the founding of Rome and its empire-building and law-giving in a heroic aspect. He built directly on, and borrowed from, Homer. He also used the underworld visit as a device to praise the top political figures of his day.

3. Dido was a really strong character.

4. The underworld scenes are fascinating and seem to cover what I know of most religions' key elements of the afterlife. I don't know that much about Dante but he seemed to borrow very heavily from this (I do recall Virgil was even his guide as he passed through the underworld).

5. The battle sequences are full of graphic violence. Now I'm thinking this year's surprise hit movie of ancient warfare ("The 300") - which I avoided because I thought it would be too violent - may have been consistent with Virgil's descriptions.

6. He emphasizes piety and interaction with the gods as the key to Rome's success.

Ulysses (James Joyce, 1918)

I read this in part because it keeps showing up on lists of the "greatest novels of 20th century," sometimes as high as number one. I made it all the way through 800+ pages because I kept thinking something was going to happen. One day in Dublin (June 16, 1904). Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom. The book is full of literary allusions (most of which unfortunately are lost on me). It is modeled after Homer's epic of the same name (which would be of more interest if I knew that story better). The stream of consciousness stuff is fun for awhile - it makes one realize how much of time our minds are working just that way. Completely different writing styles in each chapter. Extremely clever.

Alexander the Great: (Norman F. Cantor, 2005 (published posthumously))

Short and highly readable, maybe that was the author's point? This was so cursory it was hardly worth the bother. Anyway, it's still an interesting summary of things Alexander.

There were a couple of useful perspectives, including that Alexander was primarily an adventurer with some good administrative skills; the author thinks he gets way too much credit for empire-building, when in fact pretty much everything fell apart right after his death. Cantor also does a good job of putting Alexander into the context of his time; points out that the Greeks often were romanticized yet constantly fought, mistreated women, were regularly brutal, etc.

Cantor gets lots of favorable attention but I'm not going to pick up his stuff again. "In the Wake of the Plague" and "Inventing the Middle Ages" weren't that great, either.

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Bryan Ward-Parkins, 2005)

This guy was writing in response to a controversy I didn’t know existed. Apparently there are various scholars taking the position that Rome didn’t really "fall" due to "barbarian attacks." These folks wouldn’t claim that the process was entirely peaceful, but they assert that the Roman world gradually reached accommodations with Germanic folks (please don’t call them barbarians or put down their culture as compared to Rome’s) and transitioned into a different, less centralized but equally satisfactory lifestyle.

And here I had envisioned these wild Gothic types looting and pillaging and whatever (just like the cover artwork on the book), I didn’t even know an alternate view was out there.

Anyway, this author disagrees with this school of thought. He feels that the process was violent, not consensual, and ended up with a huge degradation of civilization, if more pronounced in some areas than others. All this is quite interesting, and I find his position compelling. The guy has studied lots of potsherds over the years, studied the use of tile roofs and coins, and evidence (such as it is) of the spread of writing. All this gives a pretty good picture of the extent to which some version of prosperity spread far beyond upper crust Roman society and down to the average citizen. Trade clearly was taking place all over the Roman world. After the barbarians took over, this type of evidence suggests rapid, swift disintegration (especially in the western parts of the empire).

The part about Britain was particularly interesting – because Britain was on the very edge of Roman civilization. Apparently this makes it easier to identify the influence of Roman civilization, and in turn the post-barbarian drop-off is incredibly pronounced. The author describes it as going back to the Iron Age, with a recovery period mentioned in centuries.

Something else interesting (at least to me) is that I have had some of these dates mixed up in my head. I tend to think of Rome as falling shortly after the time of Christ, when the traditional measuring date for the fall is the taking of Rome by Odoacer in 476. Roman ways no doubt survived long after that. When you think of Clovis in 511, the rapid progress of Islam via battle in the vacuum during this time, Battle of Tours in 732, Charlemagne in 800 – it really was a short leap in time between some of these developments, rather than century after century of “dark ages.”

Short, well-written, worth reading.