Fra Verus

Wizardly Virgil's Foundational Fan Fiction and Farming Facts

2019-11-17T16:27:00-05:00

Next up is the three major works of the Roman poet Virgil, being the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid.

The Eclogues have not aged well. It is essentially an overtly political idyllic poem. The issues addressed and alluded to are so particular to Virgil's time and place that I, personally, did not get much out of it. I would recommend skipping it.

Like Lucretius' De rerum natura, Virgil's Georgics is a sort of textbook in poem form. But rather than addressing the nature of the universe, it more narrowly addresses the field of agriculture. This leaves me continuing to wonder how much of the essentials of civilization could be grabbed into small poetical works for preservation. While we make use of mnemonics in schools today, I don't think that we are really using them to their full potential. Imagine if, instead of a crib sheet, you could have an unforgettable poem in your head for every exam?

There is some surprisingly "modern" farming advice in the Georgics. For example, crop rotation is discussed. If you just read Wikipedia on the subject, it skips from a mention in Leviticus to reign of Charlemagne with nothing in between. This is the sort of lapse in knowledge that you get when no-one reads the canon anymore. Centuries of knowledge just slip away as everything becomes a summary of a summary. History becomes a game of Chinese telephone

The Aeneid is definitely Virgil's greatest work, in all respects, i.e. fame, length, and worth. If you'll stretch your memory back to the very beginning of this blog with the works of Homer, you'll remember a certain war in which the Greeks destroyed a little ol' place called Troy. Virgil not only decided to write a sequel, he decided to write it about the Trojan survivors to legitimize the Roman Empire.

The first half of the Aeneid much resembles the Odyssey. Aeneas, plagued by the machinations of a bitter Juno, must lead his band of survivors from Troy to find a new homeland. They even run into the cyclops island from the Odyssey and meet one of Odysseus' men who was left behind. This wandering culminates in a near marriage between Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage as part of Juno's plot to prevent Rome's fated glorious future. Much ink has been spilled adapting the tragic aspects of that love story.

The second half more closely mirrors the Iliad. The Trojans arrive in Italy but find themselves at war with half the peninsula due to Juno's continued meddling. This half is seldom read. The standard edition given to young Latin students only covers the first half of the book. The second half is criticized as being "just" about battles. But the same could be easily said about the Iliad. And I find the language of the second half superior. The taunts thrown back and forth are exceptional. Also like the Iliad, there is a scene in which Aeneas receives a shield forged by Vulcan that depicts scenes from the future up until Virgil's own time.

The Aeneid speaks to a universal need for some sense of origin that we find both in countries and individuals. Every family has some story about how they are connected to some famous so-and-so, how their grandfather fought in such and such war, or how their family arrived by boat fleeing war. Even the mighty Roman Empire had to tell itself that it was descended from the demi-god Aeneas. There's comfort in continuity with the past.

Platonic Poltinus

2019-11-16T23:01:00-05:00

Next up on the list is a brutal seven-volume slog through Plotinus' six Enneads. Plotinus was a 3rd-century AD Greek-speaking Neoplatonist philosopher. He also marks the end of the pre-Christian philosophers in the Great Books list. In many ways, his school of philosophy and his place in time allow him to serve as a sort of bridge between ancient and medieval philosophy or between pagan philosophy and Christian theology.

Like most of the other schools of philosophy from the waning days of the Roman Empire covered in the Greek Books list, Plotinus' brand of Platonism had become arguably monotheist. Plotinus' philosophies revolves around the idea of the One, the original driving force and source of all levels and aspects of reality. A.H. Armstrong, the translator of the edition I linked above, does not believe that the One qualifies as a god because the One is not external to our universe, but rather an integral part of it. I, however, am unsure about such a fine distinction.

And somewhat analogously to the Stoics, Plotinus advocates rejection of the base material world for a life of the mind. Armstrong translates this higher world as the realm of Intellect. Readers of Plato will be more familiar with the concept under a different name in English: the World of Forms.

To put these two things another, more familiar, way: reject the flesh and turn your eyes toward God. These disparate schools were definitely sharing in a common zeitgeist. And it further reinforces my view of a strong intellectual continuity between the pre-Christian antiquity and the Christian medieval period.

The new surprise for me when reading Plotinus was finally understanding how Platonism ended up tied to magical practices as time went on. My realization came from reading Plotinus' refutation against the astrologers. Much akin to the Stoics and their concept of logos, Plotinus viewed the One as a sort of organizing principle behind the whole universe, through which all things were connected in some way. Now, if we assume that all things are connected, then it is possible that any one thing can have some degree of influence on any other thing in the universe, even if the influence is unintelligible to the senses. Astrologers believe that stars and planets influence things to a large degree in exactly this way. And the sympathetic magic of later esoteric schools is meant to work in a similar manner. Christian prayer could be viewed as working through a similar mechanism, though I am not aware of any real theological argument along those lines.

Plotinus takes the view that although such influences are possible, they are too slight to be worth thinking about. He makes an essentially empirical argument that the degree of influence claimed by the astrologers simply does not correspond to observable outcomes. But it is notable that Plotinus feels that he has to make this argument at all. It tells us that this was a significant view in Plotinus' time. It is also possible that Plotinus was unconsciously motivated by the narcissism of small differences. In other words, he could feel this idea creeping into the greater Platonist community andbecoming a threat to his own beliefs.

Unfortunately, after reading the Stoics, I feel compelled now to ask myself one question when reading any new philosophy: How does this help me live a better life? While Plotinus has helped me understand the continuity between late antiquity and the medieval period, I do not think any of his writing has provided me with any tools for actual personal growth. It is not sufficient for me anymore to read something like, "reject the world of the senses and seek the word of the Intellect." Even if I were to accept this as a valid and worthy goal, Plotinus does not spend any ink on discussing how this is actually achieved. The Stoics, in contrast, want nothing more than to show you exactly how to achieve your full human potential through a lived and practiced, rather than purely theoretical, philosophy.

The Freed Man

2018-10-09T22:54:00-04:00

Next up is Epictetus' Discourses and the Handbook. Epictetus is yet another Stoic author. Unlike our previous two Stoic authors, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, Epictetus was neither wealthy nor powerful. Rather, he was a freed slave he strove to live simply. His explanation of Stoic principles is the most rigorous and best-organized of the three authors. His "handbook" is actually a concise compilation of Stoic ideas created by one of his students. It is so concise that I could easily imagine it as a pamphlet. Maybe as the modern Stoicism movement continues growing it will become one. However, his rigor does come at a cost. His writings feel like lectures. This is probably because they originally were lectures. They lack the intimacy of Seneca's Letters or Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. For this reason, many modern proponents of Stoicism recommend leaving him for last. I think I would have been happier had I started with Epictetus but I can see how leaving him for last may be beneficial for most people.

Epictetus brings clarity to a number of issues for me. For example, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius speak of the Stoic observance of duty. But one's duty is never clearly defined. Epictetus offers some crucial guidance here. He argues that one's duties are defined by one's social relationships. In other words, your duties are primarily to your family and friends. You have a duty to be a good son or a good father and a duty to be a good friend. And then less immediately one has a relationship to one's community, city, and country. This clarity also presents a challenge for me. I am semi-estranged from my own family and I have a hard time feeling a patriotic duty to a country that has allowed itself to be consistently mismanaged my entire life. In short, Epictetus brought me one step forward on the matter of duty only to present mewith a new problem to solve.

Epictetus also clearly avoids the fallacy of believing that perception determines reality, which Marcus Aurelius seems to argue for. Instead, the Handbook says, "It is not the things themselves that disturb men, but their judgments about these things." In other words, perception determines one's emotional state. This says nothing about objective reality. The change is only within ourselves. I am much more comfortable with Epicetus' framing of the issue than that of the other two authors.

Epictetus also makes the point that allowing one's judgment of another person's actions to affect one's emotional state gives that person power. And such an action is irrational in a way. Why should we reward those who cause us harm with further power over us? He cites an example of a man who is easily upset by his slave's incompetence. If the slave can shatter his owner's emotional composure effortlessly, who is really in control?

There is plenty more to Epictetus but much of it is just a more direct explanation of things covered by Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. For example, the need to accept fate, the need concentrate on living one's philosophy rather than merely thinking about it, or the need to detach one's happiness from external things. But his brevity and clarity mean that he is the author I will most likely reread when I feel the need for reinforcement.

The ABCs of Stoicism

2018-07-26T23:41:00-04:00

While it's not technically on the GBWW list, Seneca's Letters fits right in with Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Seneca is a hard man to describe. He was a first century moral philosopher, a playwright, and a billionaire (by Roman standards). He had dealings, good and bad, with multiple Roman emperors. He wrote his Letters late in his life to a young man named Lucilius in order to help Lucilius develop as a practitioner of Stoicism.

It is important to note the word "practitioner". Unlike many philosophies, Stoicism is a philosophy that is, first and foremost, meant to be lived. It can be thought of not just as philosophy in the conventional sense but also as a toolbox for better living. Revisiting my complaint about Marcus Aurelius and sour grapes, I now realize, thanks to Seneca, that his technique of reframing things in order to become indifferent to them is not really about the actual reasoning involved. The only important thing is achieving that sense of indifference. This may seem a little intellectually dishonest. However, Stoicism asks a lot of its practitioners. It asks them to become indifferent to pleasure, bad fortune, and even death itself. Faced with such a formidable task, it is understandable that a Stoic would gladly take up any tool available.

The importance of this indifference is clear to me now, even if it is difficult to put into practice. Seneca argues that the happy life is the virtuous life. But a lot of ancient philosophers make this same claim and from many different points of view. The key to understanding the Stoic argument is understanding that you can not be consistently happy if your happiness is tied to things you can not control. This is how indifference becomes important. In the strictest sense, there is very little we can control. We can influence many things in the world and make more desirable outcomes more probable. But this control is never absolute. As such, there is always room for disappointment. There is, however, one thing that we can always control: our own choices. So if a person can become indifferent to all the uncontrollable things and care only about his own choices, achievement of the happy life begins to seem possible. You would only be left with the problem of making sure that you are happy with all of your choices. And while we regret the outcomes of many virtuous choices, it is irrational to be unhappy with the choices themselves. Thus, if you only care about your choices and you always make good choices that you can be happy about, you will have a happy life. It is a state of mind as appealing as it is difficult to reach. But that is the promise of Stoicism in a nutshell.

Seneca has also taught me a few things about the nature of fame and personal achievement. Personally, I have never been too interested in fame. I value my quiet life too much. But fame can be powerful. It can even be necessary for achieving certain goals. What kind of emperor would Marcus Aurelius be if no-one knew his name? Thankfully, I have no such goals. Though perhaps someday I will. And, hopefully, on that day, I will be able to think of fame as a mere tool. I say this because Seneca has also made it clear to me that fame is dangerous. I do not mean physically dangerous, though it can be. Instead, it is dangerous spiritually. The core of the problem is that fame is a numbers game. It requires appealing to the maximum number of people possible. And you achieve this by appealing to the middle of humanity's bell curve. And the average human is imperfect in many ways. This average human is neither particularly bright nor particularly good. As such, this human is a terrible judge of character. To appeal to this type of human in the numbers required for true fame, you will likely need to make compromises and cultivate attributes that most appeal to literal mediocrity. In a way, Seneca argues that we should aspire to become something so great that remaining appealing to the crowd would be difficult or impossible. Because of fame's natural impediment to greatness, the majority of the best and most successful people are people you have never heard of. If you want to be the best, you can not waste your time or compromise yourself trying to be recognized as the best. And if you do become the best, even if the crowd doesn't know who you are, the people who matter will be unable to ignore you.

Seneca provides some lessons on friendship that I have taken to heart as well. It is a truism, said in many forms, that we are the company we keep. Butlike many truisms, they go by us unnoticed. Seneca may have finally made it stick in my case. If you care about being good, with respect to morality or even some professional skill, do not allow yourself to fall in with those who are average or worse. Seek out exceptional souls and mind wherever you can. Appreciate them, Allow them to help you grow. And be sure to return the favor.

Seneca has probably affected me more than anything I have ever read in recent years. And there is far more wisdom in these volumes I could ever discuss here. Seneca even addresses this very problem. How do you cite the good parts of a work that is almost nothing but good parts? The only reasonable course of action is to encourage people to read the whole work themselves. Some authors Seneca would quote to Lucilius. But for truly great authors, he would send the whole book. So I urge you: Please, if you care about your own well-being, strongly consider reading some Seneca and the other Stoic authors.

That Other Western Civilization

2018-04-19T14:50:00-04:00

Backtracking a little after Meditations, I bit the bullet and read Lucretius' De Rerum Natura.This title is and can be translated a number of different ways, owing to the broadness of the Latin word res. The most literal translation would probably be "About the nature of things". However, in this context "things" encompasses the entire universe. It is a first-century BC Latin Epicurean poem, physics textbook, philosophical treatise, and personal letter all rolled into one. The linked translation is pretty standard for Loeb editions. In other words, there's Latin on the left and fairly literal English on the right with a moderate number of footnotes and a scholarly introduction. You may want to consider other options if you have no interest in the Latin on the left-hand side.

Epicureanism is a curious thing. While other ancient schools of thought like Platonism, Aristotelianism, and even Stoicism still hold some currency in the present day, Epicureanism is largely forgotten in the mainstream. And when it is remembered, it is used as a synonym for hedonism. And the thing that makes this strange is that Epicureanism actually more closely aligns with the modern Western world view than these other philosophies in many ways. For example, Lucretius argues that either the gods do not exist or that they have no reason to care about the affairs of mortals and are therefore irrelevant. He also champions atomism, the idea that matter is made from atoms rather than the classical elements. He even concludes that other planets must exist. While he still argues largely through logic, much in the way that Aristotle and Plato did, he also pushes the Epicurean idea of the reliability of the senses. In other words, Epicureans rejected the Platonic notion of a shadow world and instead accepted the idea of an objective and observable universe. This belief in the senses, incidentally, is the root of the insistence that Epicureans are hedonists. The form of argumentation is very familiar but the conclusions are completely different. It is like looking in a mirror version of the Western tradition.

So given the strong parallels to modern thinking and the empirically-verified truth of that thinking, why did Epicureanism die off rather than catch on? I think Epicureanism had problems with both the medium and the message.

By "medium", I mean the style of argumentation. Argument by logic alone is fraught with peril. It only takes one faulty assumption or one fallacy to turn an entire, seemingly logical, worldview into a useless house of cards. And in worse instances, Plato accuses some "philosophers" of spinning logic with no regard for truth simply because it was an easy way to get students and their fees. To varying degrees, ancient philosophers were aware of the limitations of their epistemological approach. However, most were certain of the rigor of their own methodology. The end result is that logic alone lacked sufficient persuasive force. Even if the conclusions were true, it was too difficult to discern complex and true logic from complex and false logic. You can see similar problems in our modern statistical approaches. One mistake and "overwhelming" statistical evidence can become completely meaningless. Empiricism, in contrast, lends itself to physical demonstrations. And in a way that worried Plato but likely pleased the Epicureans, people believe what they can see. But lacking that, philosophies could come and go like fashions, regardless of how accurately they described the world. Truth alone was not sufficient and often not even required.

And by "message", I mean that some of the claims of Epicureanism are extremely inconvenient. For example, the essential atheism of Epicureanism made it impossible for many political figures to openly endorse it. Roman paganism was the de facto state religion and many government ceremonies and practices were essentially religious. Lucretius even warns his intended reader, the praetor Gaius Memmius, that pursuing the truth of Epicurean philosophy may not always be compatible with his official duties. Contrast this with Stoicism. Some argue that Stoicism tends toward monotheism. Others reject this. But in either case, it is compatible with the general idea of deism. And even if it were not, Stoics would argue that duty obliged Stoic politicians to perform the necessary state rituals with at least seeming earnestness. In other words, Emperor Marcus Aurelius could function both as a Stoic and as Emperor openly without any real philosophical conflict and without turning popular opinion against him. An Epicurean Emperor would have been in a much more difficult position. And this would have been true, to varying degrees, of anyone with any office in the Roman political system. In other words, Epicureanism was likely at a patronage and advocacy disadvantage. Religions and philosophies benefit immensely from the conversion of political figures. And Epicureanism could never realistically compete on that front.

In a similar vein, many people likely had issues with the Epicurean view that even though the soul exists, it is mortal. In other words, there is nothing after death. And this has never been a popular point of view. People take comfort in the notion of an immortal soul, whether it is Aristotle or the Pope preaching the idea. The survival instinct in humans, like all animals, is strong and the thought of utter annihilation makes our blood run cold. Fighting such instinctual preferences requires more evidence than Epicurean methods could muster.

In short, if you are going to push a new philosophy or religion, it helps to make it convenient and appealing. Impossible-to-prove promises that feel good can often win more converts than truth. Lucretius was somewhat aware of this fact that. It is the whole reason De Rerum Natura is a poem. He thought that a beautiful form would make uncomfortable truths easier to digest.

My next reading will probably take me back to the Stoics with the letters of Seneca, assuming Amazon ever ships me the third volume in the set.

Our Empire, Ourselves

2018-04-10T13:17:00-04:00

Well, for various reasons, I have been reading a lot of other stuff not on the list. I took a stab at Lucretius in Latin but it was a slog. I will attempt it with a better edition and better self-preparation. Aquinas is also still waiting for me to forget my boredom with him.

In the meantime, I decided to tackle Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus' Meditations. Despite being written by a Roman Emperor, the Meditations are actually in Greek. The translation I have picked is likely not for everyone. Hutcheson and Moor's translation is considered an important part of the Scottish Enlightenment and overall efforts in the English-speaking world to harmonize pagan Stoicism with Christianity. Their footnotes are pretty useful. This new edition from Liberty Fund also has copious additional end-notes from the editors. It is probably not the most readable translation. The most commonly recommended translation in my circles is this one by Gregory Hays. While Hays' translation seems quite readable, I chose Hutcheson and Moor because the specialized Stoic vocabulary seems more consistently and faithfully translated. But 18th-century prose may be more of an impediment for other readers. Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature was invaluable here.

The first book of the Meditations stands out from the others. While the other books present, often repetitiously, various Stoic maxims and ideals, the first book is more of a statement of gratitude to the people in Antoninus' life for the virtues they taught him. After reading this book, I immediately began to wonder what my own version of this book would look like. And I realized that my life has not brought me in contact with many people whom I could reasonably use as models of virtue. This was a depressing thought. However, I have learned a lot by using people as negative role models. Friends and relatives have shown me what not to do simply by making poor decisions and playing out the consequences before my eyes. This makes me wonder many people Antoninus describes were also negative role models for him. His tends to put an optimistic spin on everything and only concentrates on what he learned from each person, not usually how he learned it. It is entirely possible that some of these names belonged to terrible people, not virtuous ones. Charitably discussing negative role models is certainly the only way I could write a comparable chapter. But there is a lesson in that. The lives of the worst people you know can serve as cautionary tales. And while it is hard to appreciate such people, it is easy to appreciate the knowledge you gain from their failures. In a sense, these people have all taken a metaphorical bullet for me. I can be grateful for that. And no matter how limited this gratitude may be, it has diminished the bitterness that I held before. I can be grateful for that, too.

I have yet to resolve many of the other questions the Meditations left me with. For example, the Stoics believed that no man is truly evil, merely ignorant. The idea is that men only do bad things because they do not understand their own nature, the nature of the universe, Goodness, Justice, or some other fundamental idea. And it is the job of a true Stoic to try to correct such people, if possible. And if correction is not possible, a Stoic should simply accept that fact like all the other unchangeable things in the world. But if enough people started behaving in the Stoic fashion, the consequences for bad behavior would diminish. In other words, Stoicism in the face of evil men enables those same evil men. Of course, if everyone adopted Stoic virtues, this would not be a problem. But that seems like an impossible Utopian ideal to me. So Stoic acceptance would seem to be something of a selfish act. The Stoic seems to enable evil in exchange for his own inner calm. That said, Antoninus also discusses the importance of Justice. But he is fairly non-specific about what Justice looks like in application. Maybe the other Stoic authors can shed some light on this point. There has to be some dividing criteria between the man-made evil you accept and the man-made evil you actively retaliate against for the benefit of society as a whole.

The Stoics also adhere to an eternal bugbear of mine. As Shakespeare describe the concept, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I suspect that I have addressed this elsewhere in my posts. But this thinking fundamentally denies the existence of an objective reality. Furthermore, no amount of imagining a knife in the heart to be good will keep it from killing you. However, it is possible that Stoics did not accept this idea as literally true. Instead, it could simply be a mental trick to help acceptance and subjugation of the animal self to the rational self. Similarly, the Stoics talk about breaking things down into their basic components until they become unappealing. For example, to fight the desire for wine, a Stoic would think of it as merely grape juice gone bad. "Rotten grape juice" is not nearly as appealing as "wine", but they describe essentially the same thing. This is self-delusion. And to use another Shakespeare quote, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." In other words, "rotten grape juice" can still get you drunk or encourage conviviality. The Stoics essentially take Aesop's fox and his sour grapes as a role model. This is clearly irrational. But to be charitable and channel my inner Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the seemingly "irrational" can sometimes become rational if it is sufficiently useful. This line of thinking, in moderation, can be medicinal; in excess, it can be narcotic.

The list of ideas in the Meditations that I am still struggling with is fairly long. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to address them all here. However, another Stoic author is on the reading list, Epictetus with his Discourses. This will give me an opportunity to revisit some of the same ideas down the road.

Quadwrecker

2017-01-21T14:04:00-05:00

Completing the set of early-modern satires is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. This book has seen a ton of editions and you can't go wrong with most of them. I mostly chose this edition because it comes in hardcover and it has original illustrations by Jon Corbino. It is a solid and comfortable size. The Corbino illustrations are interesting at times. My only complaint would be that the Corbino illustrations rarely show up very close to the related scene. Pick it up if you want a nice hardcover with some weird art as a bonus or just stick with the Dover edition otherwise. Either option is amazingly cheap.

The story of Gulliver's Travels is one of those stories that is "well-known", largely through numerous adaptations, e.g. movies and cartoons. But like many popular stories known primarily through adaptations, many details and themes have gone missing over the years. In that way, it reminded me a lot of H.G. Wells' Time Machine. For example, many adaptations focus on Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the land of tiny people and the land of giants, respectively. Gulliver's time in those lands makes up only half the book. This still leaves the land where they have floating islands powered by lodestone and adamant and the land of noble, intelligent horse people. It was also a bit racier than the child-friendly adaptations. For example, I do not remember everseeing a version as kid where Gulliver whips his dick out to extinguish a fire, as he does in the book. They also leave out the complications of clothing and defecation in differently-scaled lands. This process has, over the years, shifted the story from a feeling of science fiction foreshadowing works such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World to a kind of fantastic fairy tale. Literary adaptation is simultaneously both a creative and a destructive force.

While I say the book had the feeling of science fiction, it is primarily intended to be a satire. These things are not mutually exclusive. Swift is broadly attempting to criticize the politics and culture of his own age. In particular, there is something noted in various ways in each of the lands that remains true even in our own modern American society: we really do not put much thought in to selecting leaders. For example, we really do not seem to care all that much if our leaders are even remotely virtuous. One need only look at the products of our presidential elections. In your everyday life, what would you entrust to a former coke-head, a serial adulterer, or even a self-proclaimed pussy-grabber? If you have any sense, the answer is, "Not much." And yet these things are not stumbling blocks to the most important job in the country. After the fact, we are often astounded by the lies and crimes of our leaders. How do we not see that immoral people will continuing being immoral once we elect them? How do we still not see it when they engage in the predictable bad behavior and we are offered a chance to reelect them? It is a madness born out of a society that can not even say "virtue" as anything other than a sexual euphemism. This was as much as problem in Swift's day as it is in our own. It seems to have weighed heavily upon him. And his gift to posterity is to share this burden with us. It is strange how hard it can sometimes be to be grateful for a useful and necessary thing.

The ending of the book provides a sort of warning for those who gaze too long into the abyss of humanity's flaws. Gulliver spends so much time away from flawed humanity that, when he finally returns home for the last time, he cannot even see his own family as anything other than a bunch of ugly and disgusting beasts. Strangely, I have not fallen into this trap because, when push comes to shove, I am nearly as resigned as I am cynical. While I see humanity as very flawed, I do not really expect anything else. I hope for more from myself but I do not really have any inclination to hold people in myeveryday life to any real standard. I just accept their faults as normal. Christianity also has its own way of framing and resolving this conflict: While we are all born with original sin, we are also still made in the image of God and we each have a shot at redemption. If you find yourself going down Gulliver'spath, grab one of these sorts of logical lifelines as soon as possible. Otherwise, only misery can follow.

On other reading fronts, Aquinas' Summa is still on-going. I took a bit of a break for a while and so progress stopped for a while. I am now trying to get back in to it with a little over half of it to go. I have the nugget of at least one more post on that kicking around in my brain. On the French front, I have picked up the complete works of Pascal but it is an incredible amount of text without the crutch of a dual-language edition.

NEETs in Enlightenment France

2016-10-16T20:08:00-04:00

Next up on the French side of things is Denis Diderot's Le Neveau de Rameau or Rameau'sNephew. This edition is available in paperback, hardcover, and on-line. The hardcover edition is well-bound and printed on heavy paper. I can not really speak for the paperback edition. The on-line edition includes much of the music mentioned within Le Neveau. The printed text notes when these musical selections are available. The edition contains an astounding amount number of endnotes, completely with images of many of people and places mentioned. Between the dialogue itself and the endnotes, this edition serves as a kind ofWho's Who of the French Enlightenment. A ton of work and love clearly went in to this edition. Unfortunately, the translation and original French are printed in separate sections, forcing the reader to flip back and forth to do any comparison. The same is true of the endnotes. I really wish publishers would stick to footnotes and side-by-side translations. This edition could be perfect with those simple layout changes. That said, it is the only dual-language edition in existence as far as I know and beggars can not be choosers.

This is an 18th-century fictitious dialogue between an unnamed narrator MOI, or me, and LUI, or him. LUI does most of the talking. He is a cynical man who is down on his luck despite coming from the well-to-do family of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. MOI's attempts to defuse his bitter cynicism are feeble. The topics they discuss are numerous so I will have to keep my focus narrow.

One of the topics raised is the notion that those whom history deems "great" men are often failures in other parts of their lives. In other words, the idea is that great men are not good men. For example, it is argued that though Jean-Philippe Rameau was a great composer, he was a dick to his family. Several other examples are given. The explanation for this supposed pattern is that a talented genius must sacrifice other parts of his or her life in pursuit of hisor her craft. But I think the reasoning here is flawed. Few people are well-rounded and equally good at all aspects of life. Why should this be any different for the gifted? Being a good composer is a very different skill set than being a good uncle or father (though we only have the scoundrel LUI's word on Rameau's value as a family man). Being great at certain crafts, like musical composition, suggests a high degree of general intelligence but it does not guarantee it. And high general intelligence does not necessarily imply high morals. Ipersonally believe that very high intelligence helps in developing good moralsbut I have seen slightly-above-average intelligence allow many people to justify their mercenary pragmatism. But, on the whole, I think we are dealing with a difference of degree, not of kind, and not a particularly large difference at that. In other words, great men and average men conduct themselves much the same in many areas of their lives. I think this notion of the bad great man is an illusion of the availability heuristic. LUI knows one bad great man and can name a few others. But elsewhere he praises many other great men. It is easier to keep a mental catalog of the exceptional assholes than the everyday man. And LUI repeats the same mistake with other groups of people. He knows many bad clergymen, therefore all clergy are bad. He knows many bad fellow Parisians, therefore all of Paris is rotten to the core. None of these things implies bad character. LUI's imagination and memory are simply insufficient to properly judge these things.

After LUI is done condemning the geniuses, he later laments that society is too dumb to recognize true genius, himself being one of the true genius. Yet he is very long on the things he could do, if only society would recognize and support him, and short on the things he has done. Likewise, virtually every other unrecognized genius cited, like Voltaire, is famous to this very day. In short, LUI is just a bitter underachiever at best.

Next up on the list will be Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel. It is not in French but it is the final work that I need to read in the Swift-Voltaire-Diderot volume. Plus, I am really trying to accelerate my reading of the Summa so that I am not spending the next year finishing it. Stay tuned, buckaroos.

The Possibility of the Pre-Photonic Rulebreaker

2016-10-05T23:51:00-04:00

Next up is the first part of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. This edition is fantastic. Physically, the volumes are as beautiful as they are sturdy. The English translation is solid. There are not really really any footnotes but Aquinas designed the Summa to serve as a first introduction to scholastic theology and philosophy. Some familiarity with Aristotle and Plato helps a lot but is not absolutely necessary. That said, Aquinas' language is sometimes quite complicated in a way that English just doesn't handle very well. Even with my so-so Latin, I find it much easier to follow the flow of logic in the Latin original than in the faithful English translation.

One of the first things a reader of the Summa notices is the unusual system of argumentation. While many ancient and medieval forms of argumentation remain familiar to modern readers, the so-called summa style is mostly dead. The style has the following form: First a question is asked, usually conceptually linked to the previous question, if there is one. Then arguments against the author's view are given, usually representing varying schools of thought and methods of argumentation. Then the author's response to the question is given. Finally, each earlier argument that had opposed the author's view is given its own individual refutation. Both the author's own view and the imagined critics cite a broad range of respected sources. Nearly all the works are cited equally by both sides. Normally I would expect this style of argumentation to be an endless string of strawmen. But Aquinas, for the most part, has the humility to represent the opposing views fairly and with citations as worthy those he gives his own arguments. That said, given that he argues against such heavyweights as Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and countless others, it is unlikely that seriously strawmanning these figures would have endeared him to the Church or the rest of the scholastic community. And you can't go wrong with humility seasoned by pragmatism. It is, however, a lot of work. The sheer amount of work involved is likely the biggest factor in this style's unpopularity.

The first part of the Summa contains what are known as Aquinas' five arguments for the existence of God. This popular description is somewhat misleading and yet it is the thing the Summa is most known for. It seems only right that I address it. While it is an argument for God's existence, it is also clearly stated to be a definition, e.g. "this is what we call God". The arguments are largely Aristotelian. First, there is classic unmoved mover argument. This is based on the Aristotelian observation that nothing moves unless moved by something else. And if one logically follows the chain back, it seems necessary that there must be some strange thing that does not have this same constraint. Otherwise, how would anything in our presentuniverse be moving at all? The second argument is about "efficient cause". This is logically much the same as the unmoved mover argument except that the chain of movement is replaced with the chain of cause and effect. The third argument is also similar, instead being about a chain of existence, i.e. you can't create something from nothing therefore there must be an original and necessary thing. The fourth argument is about gradation. In other words, we live in a universe of greater or lesser and better or worse. It is assumed that these things are intrinsic properties of the universe and not merely the product of the human mind. And it is then supposed that in such a system there must be a greatest and best being. The final argument is that our universe has a level of complexity but also order and seeming purpose that would suggest that it was deliberately designed in some way.

The first three arguments are perhaps the most persuasive, even if they are all basically a single argument. We have no real answer for the ultimate origin of the universe. Sure, we have the Big Bang. And where'd that matter come from? Maybe it all came from photons. Where did all those photons come from? With better tools, we have peeled back the onion a lot more than Aristotle ever could but we still seem to have a logical dead end. Logic would seem to suggest that somehow either the rules changed, there was a thing that could violate therules, or there is something entirely external to the system of our universe as we know it. These do not necessarily imply the popular contemporary notion of what God is, but they are what Aquinas means when he says God. He is not some bearded sky wizard. He is either the physics changer, the physics breaker, or the simulation programmer.

I find the argument from gradation pretty fascinating from a Platonist perspective. But it is hard to prove that it is not either a human construct or a simple happy byproduct of how the universe works. And while some things are said to be better than others, it is often situational. There is no magical perfect chair, for example. There could, however, be a perfect chair for a given person in a given situation. God would probably make a bad chair though.

The final argument kind of falls apart when one realizes that complexity and order are largely relative terms and we have no other universes for comparison. Maybe our universe, on some imaginary absolute scale, is a total chaotic shitshow. Or maybe our universe is, relatively speaking, ordered perfection. As for its seeming purpose, I think it would be pretty lame to have all this for no reason. But the universe probably does not care much about my feelings on the subject.

Given all these things, I think I am firmly in the camp of believing that atheism is irrational because it denies the clearly possible. On the other hand, theism is unable to definitely prove its case. Agnosticism would seem to be the most rational path. However, theism can also be rational just by acknowledging its own optimism.

On some funnier notes, Aquinas will occasionally refute arguments that cite the Old Testament by simply saying that the ancient Hebrews were simply too primitive to fully grasp God's or Moses' true meaning. In a later part, he argues against the idea of astrology in part by saying that though "necromancers" believe that the movements of the planets and stars is important for the invocation of demons, it is not actually true. Instead, demons just let necromancers believe that it is true because demons are great fun-loving trolls like that.

I have also finished Rameau's Nephew and should be writing something short about that soon. And there will likely be at least one more Summa post before I finish reading it.

How to Become a Mamamouchi

2016-09-23T22:37:00-04:00

Next up in my French reading is Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. It is in the same Dover volume as Le Tartuffe and has the same translator. Therefore, my comments on the actual edition remain the same as in my last post. I would only note that because this play is largely in prose rather than verse, it is much easier to read. As a result, the shoddy English translation is far less essential.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is not a play in the typical sense. Instead, it is classified as a comédie-ballet, a short-lived genre ofthe 17th and 18th centuries. A comédie-ballet is something like a hybrid of an opera and a play. Some elements are staged like a play and others like an opera. Molière wrote the play-like portions. Jean-Baptiste Lully did the music. And the dances were choreographed by Pierre Beauchamp. In the context of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the main narrative is in the play-like portion. The operatic elements exist within the context of the story itself. That is to say, the music and dancing are logically called for by the story and are not merely secondary mode of story telling. For example, when the title character, Monsieur Jourdain, wishes to entertain some dinner guests, he has music played and dances performed for them. During that sequence, the operatic style takes over. It should be obvious that simply reading the play would be different from watching a live performance to an even greater degree than normal. Fortunately, a French group called Le Poème Harmonique performed and recorded this play in 2005 complete with music, dance, and 17th century staging practices (including costumes, gestures, and makeup). You canfind the DVD on Amazon. It is quite the sensory experience.

As for the play itself, I found it much better than Le Tartuffe. Infact, it is hard to believe that these plays were written by the same man. While Le Tartuffe was full of rather base humor, the jokes in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme are of a much more elevated nature. The first act in particular has some great exchanges between Monsieur Jourdain and the various tutors he has hired. The philosophy tutor in particular was great. I believe the difference in perceived quality may just be down to Molière writing for different audiences. Le Tartuffe seems written for a popular audience. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, on the other hand, was first performed for King Louis XIV. The implicit joke of the whole play, that a mere merchant cannot easily become a gentleman, would likely be a source of anxiety rather than levity for a popular audience. I will be keeping this idea in mind when I read more Molière down the road.

Next up will likely be Denis Diderot's Le Neveau de Rameau. However, I am getting close to the end of the first part of Aquinas'Summa. I still have not decided how many posts the Summa will receive.

Le Faux Dévot

2016-09-06T21:35:00-04:00

Next up in my French reading is Molière's Le Tartuffe. This is a no-frills Dover dual-language paperback edition, much like my copy of Candide. However,the translation of Tartuffe is a lot less literal than Candide. In fact, some of the translation choices are simply bizarre. This is perplexing because literalness is supposedly part of the Dover dual-language edition philosophy. I do not recommend the translation as anything other than an aide for reading the French. The footnotes, though few, explained everything that I would otherwise have had to look up. For someone just starting out with the French language of today, Molière's French provides a significantly greater challenge than the language of Voltaire. I would not recommend it to another beginner like myself.

Molière himself was an early modern playwright of the mid-17th century, only a few decades after Shakespeare's time. Partly due to the temporal proximity, Molière is often referred to as the French Shakespeare. However, unlike Shakespeare, Molière only dabbled in the genre of comedy. And his comedies are quite different from Shakespeare's due to a much greater influence of the Italian commedia dell'arte on Molière's work. While Shakespeare borrowed elements from commedia once in a while, Molière strongly adheres to the style. His characters are largely the stock characters of commedia with little to distinguish them from other characters in other plays adhering to the same archetypes. And, true to commedia, the action is largely driven by simplistic and petty emotions most at home in the most lizard-like part of the human brain. It is theatre designed for popular and common appeal. Even the metrical style of Molière relies heavily on rhyming couplets that would appeal even to a child. It seems to me that Molière's comedies have more in common with the old Greek satyr plays than Shakespeare.

The play Tartuffe itself did not appeal to me. Much of the earlier action is a family fighting. On stage, I'm sure all this bustling anger plus a little slapstick would probably elicit a chuckle or two. On paper, however, the characters just seem like jerks. The title character himself is a psychopathic conman out to swindle the head of the household by charming him with his false piety. He does not actually show up until the second half of the play. And until then, half the family thinks he is a living a saint and the other half suspects that he is a fraud. After reading Candide, I was already feeling burnt out on the perennial French trope of the holy hypocrite. Tartuffe did not help at all. In short, every single character in this play lacked depth and thus had little appeal to me.

The ending is perhaps the worst of part of the play. I am not reluctant to spoil because it is absolute garbage. Tartuffe manages to steal some papers incriminating the head of the household. He then uses these papers to get an audience with the king and permission to basically steal the family's house and put the head of the household in prison. When all this is revealed to the family, they are in utter despair. But then, out of nowhere, it is revealed the the king is such a great soul that he can immediately see through the lies of any conman and get at the truth of the matter. From these magical powers, he deduced that Tartuffe is a fraud and family is really a bunch of nice people. Thence Tartuffe is taken to prison just when he thought he won. This is such a blatant example of deus ex machina that it is literally used as one of Wikipedia's examples in the article on deus ex machina. This ending is bad and Molière should feel bad.

Next up on the list will be Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme or The Bourgeois Gentleman. Since it's more Molière and the bulk of its humor derives from outdated class expectations, I am not particularly excited. But maybe Molière will surprise me. And, if nothing else, it will further allow me to empathize with the plight of French secondary school students forced to read Molière.

Satirizing the Problem of Evil

2016-08-17T21:47:00-04:00

Skipping around a bit in the list to learn some French, I picked up a dual-language (facing translation) edition of Voltaire's Candide. This edition is a cheap paperback. There are probably better editions of the French and better translations of the English out there. However, side-by-side translations are great for learning a new language. Glancing at the other page when you do not understand something is much faster than looking up a word in a lexicon or dictionary. The translation is serviceable enough, though even with my nascent French I spotted what I would call definite mistakes in the translation. The binding is good for a paperback. The margins are wide, a useful feature when marking up difficult passages. There are footnotes throughout but they are insufficient unless the reader is familiar with obsolete Portuguese currency, Ottoman military ranks, and the Italian for, "It's a shame that I no longer have my balls." Unless you are interested in the dual-language format, I would suggest finding a different translation with better notes.

Voltaire's Candide is a satiric response to parts of the German philosopher Leibniz's Theodicy regarding the problem of evil. One of the eternal questions of philosophy and theology is, if God is good and omnipotent, why do bad things still happen to good people? There are a few ways to answer solve this problem. Leibniz's method was to argue that given man's free will, God's general plan, and the physical limitations of our created universe, we actually live in the best of all possible worlds. While bad things may happen constantly, we will discover at the end of the universe that, given the aforementioned constraints, everything turned out in the optimal way. This may not be optimal from an individual perspective, but it would be optimal in a grand, universal perspective. Until we get near the end of the universe and start tallying up all the utiles, this argument is hard to prove but still interesting to think about.

A lot has been made of Voltaire's "attack" on Leibniz. However, Voltaire was a historian, essayist, and philosopher. He was quite capable of writing a serious refutation of Leibniz. And given the comedic nature of Candide, I have a hard time believing that Voltaire saw his work as much more than playful engagement. He did reject Leibniz's premise, believing that there was simply too much suffering in the world for it to be the best possible world. He also disliked the possibility of Leibniz's idea encouraging a sort of lazy fatalism in people. If we live in the best of all possible world already, why make improvements? In defense of Leibniz on this latter point, I would argue what is the best possible world today is not necessarily the best possible world tomorrow. Since, in Leibniz's framework, free will is one of the limiting factors in the optimality of the world, we can have some influence on it. And I do not want to spoil anything, but the last few lines clearly demonstrate how Leibniz could still be right, despite Voltaire's objections. One of the gifts of intelligence is being able to entertain ideas that one may not actually believe. It is the mark of true genius to be able to do so while making a few good jokes.

To demonstrate the level of suffering in the world, Voltaire has our title character, Candide, bounce all around the world through unlikely circumstances, witnessing the evils of Voltaire's lifetime, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Candide, and other characters, visit France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, various parts of South America, and the fabled lost city of El Dorado. Despite all the unfortunate happenings of the book, or perhaps partly because of them, Candide manages to be one of the most genuinely funny books I have ever read. Some Great Books reading definitely helps with appreciating some of the jokes. Plato and Aristotle are particular prerequisites for getting the most out of Candide. Other jokes are perennial, such as Candide's remark that a critic is "someone who loathes the success of others, like a eunuch who hates those capable of enjoying sex." It would not have seemed exceptional before I read Candide, but I guess I am rather lucky to have the balls to be able to praise Voltaire's work.

In short, it is a quick read that both tackles serious metaphysical issues and provides some good laughs. I highly recommend to anyone with either a sense of humor or some metaphysical curiosity. Reading it should be a necessity for someone who possesses both.

Next up will likely be Moliere's Tartuffe and possibly his The Bourgeois Gentleman. My reading of Aquinas' Summa continues but, at the current pace, it will take another nine months to complete. I may review the three major parts separately, however.

The Real Stuff

2016-08-03T21:54:00-04:00

Squaring off the Greek math section is Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic. Sadly, this work is long out of print. You can scrounge Amazon or Abe Books for a copy. There are some paperback versions floating around that are just the translation without any of the introductory material. They tend to be a lot cheaper. However, they were intended only for internal use at St. John's College and the publisher did not give permission for the resale of those books. I went for the original hardcover version. The notes in this edition are truly exceptional. Most of Nicomachus' explanations and proofs are paired with alternate versions, often from other Greek authors, in the footnotes. So if Nicomachus loses you, the footnotes can often put you back on track. The notes also provided references to a number of other very interesting Greek mathematical works that I think I would like to check out the next time around.

Nicomachus starts off from a very defensive position. In essence, he tries to explain why anyone should care about arithmetic at all. He is very philosophical about it. And the basis of his argument is that the study of "real things" is essential to understanding reality and the universe. From there, he argues that arithmetic is among the things that are truly real. While we moderns would say that a deer in front of us is more real than an abstract concept like "animal", Nicomachus disagrees. A deer can die. However, the idea of "animal" could potentially outlive the existence of animals. In other words, qualities, quantities, and forms exist uniformly throughout all of time, while mere objects and creatures exist for only a slice of time. Therefore, in the grand scheme of the universe, these more abstract things spend more time being real than the seemingly concrete things. And should not the thing that exists for the entire life of the universe be considered more real than the thing that exists for a relative blink of an eye? It is certainly an interesting way of looking at things.

Nicomachus, shortly thereafter, addresses an issue I raised in a previous post: numbers can fill completely different functions, e.g. counting versus measuring, without us giving much thought to that fact. Nicomachus expands on that. He explains that arithmetic is the study of numbers, particularly numbers of the countable kind, i.e. integers. While arithmetic enables other types of math, it is conceptually prior to them all. He argues that the children of arithmetic are those types of math that study objects, motion, and ratios. These three types of math are what we call geometry, astronomy, and music, according to Nicomachus. While this may seem like mere word play, I think there is something to it. We easily become constrained by notions of what math is. But the whole system sometimes needs radical modification to deal with new problems. The classic example is Newton's physics requiring the development of Calculus. On the other side of the coin, Descartes unified geometry and algebra and effectively destroyed the classical/medieval conception of geometry. Meanwhile, music and its study of ratios has managed to soldier along largely without numbers and without being regarded as properly math. And I think there are serious conceptual revolutions still to be made. I once again point to D'arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form. There you can see how poorly our math copes with measuring a three-dimensional object's change over time. The problem demands some sort of calculus of geometry.

Though Nicomachus probably did not see such a division, after his philosophical expositions comes his purely mathematical ones. He dedicates himself primarily to figuring out the properties of numbers. He starts with evens and odds. He then goes into concepts like "even-times even", which we would call powers of two. Likewise, he goes into all the variants of the even and oddness of a number's divisors. Prime numbers and the sieve of Eratosthenes are explained. The list of classifications of numbers is long and fascinating. I can not really capture its breadth here. Though I am tempted to write a program that can detect all of Nicomachus' proposed classifications. Going beyond the properties of single numbers, Nicomachus also covers the 10 classic proportions in detail, including a bit about their history. Apparently in Pythagoras' day only first three, arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic, had yet been discovered. I once again recommend Matila Ghyka's The Geometry of Art and Life for exploration of those proportions in, well, art and life.

The road forward gets trickier from here. Per a friend's advice, I will be tackling the Latin authors in reverse order from Thomas Aquinas. The reason is that his Latin is quite easy to read and it provides a good follow-up to the Vulgate, both conceptually and linguistically. Unfortunately, Aquina's Summa in Latin is eight volumes. It will take quite a while for me to finish. However, there is some good news. I have recently put effort into expanding my ability to read academic French to also read literary French. I have started with Voltaire's Candide and, at the current pace, should be able to write a review of that in a month or so. I will likely continue with other French authors in the Great Books set. Hopefully this will keep the posts flowing while I tackle the Summa.

Only True Coneheads Need Apply

2016-07-25T19:08:00-04:00

This technically is not next on the list, but I have now read Sir Thomas Heath's translation of Apollonius of Perga's work On Conic Sections. Cambridge University Press still has this book in print, though in paperback only. For a hardcover edition, you will need to go scrounging through the used book listings once again. Like Heath's other translations, it is as approachable as Greek math is going to get. And Heath has relied much more heavily here on modern notation than in his other translations. This is largely because Apollonius' proofs are extremely large even with modern notation. I imagine nothing but the original textual descriptions would be an extremely tough nut for the modern reader to crack.

Between the first and second edition of the Great Books of the Western World, Apollonius was one of the few authors dropped. Mortimer J. Adler is said to have regretted the removal of Apollonius. However, having read Apollonius, I can understand why it was removed. His Conics is an extremely focused book. Since the Great Books reader has already read a ton of geometry, the novelty of the Greek methodology will have already lost its appeal by this point in the list. If you are not really into cones and the various ways to slice them up, this book is really not for you. Since it is not officially on the list and I was bored out of my mind, I have to confess that I mostly skimmed after the first quarter of the book. So my recommendation is to just stick to the second edition reading list and skip Apollonius unless you are a truly devote mathematician. For everyone else, maybe consider putting it on your list for the second round of reading where you catch up on all those related books you discovered through reading the existing list.

Grecian Pi[e]

2016-07-24T16:04:00-04:00

Next up on the list are The Works of Archimedes. This Dover edition is basically your only option these days. Sir Thomas Heath's translation is the only game in town and Dover's edition is the only edition still in print. If you are desperate for a better quality binding, Cambridge University Press put out Heath's original translation in hardcover in 1897. I opted to track down a copy of that. The downside is that Archimedes' The Method would not be rediscovered for nearly another decade after the CUP edition came out. They released a pamphlet supplement of The Method also by Heath. Unfortunately, I only discovered this after reading all of the 1897 edition. The supplement is quite rare now but I found exactly one copy in the hands of a Latvian book dealer. It was surprisingly cheap. Unfortunately, it will probably take several weeks to arrive so I may need make an addendum to this post if anything really interesting crops up in there. So, while I have not seen the Dover edition in person, it is probably the best of bet for any sane reader who does not want to spend a lot of time and cash with antiquarian book dealer listings.

Archimedes' work greatly resembles that of Euclid, from a modern perspective. So, a lot of what I said about the eye-opening experience of Euclid could also easily apply to Archimedes, if Archimedes is the reader's first introduction to Greek mathematics. However, I think Euclid would be easier on the first time reader. Euclid's Elements describes a system of geometry with enough detail that one can just start on the first page with no prior knowledge and make it all the way through to the end. Archimedes is not so forgiving. While Euclid's work can and did (even still does, in certain corners) serve as a textbook, most of Archimedes' works were simply problems that he wanted to tackle. His intended audience was fellow mathematicians, such as Dositheus of Pelusium, Conon of Samos, and other members of the illustrious Alexandrian crowd. Further, Archimedes' surviving works make reference to and depend on other works that do not survive. Since we have a full-blown system of geometry and mathematics of our own to rely on, filling in the missing piecesis not too difficult. However, these things together mean that Euclid is going to provide a smoother first hit for a prospective student of Greek mathematics.

Archimedes has a lot of very Euclid-like proofs on spheres, cylinders, circles, conoids, and spheroids. But Archimedes is at his best when he tries to tackle specific and concrete problems. This is why, despite his great purely mathematical achievements, he is considered the father of engineering; while he was a great mathematician, he was the greatest engineer. I will give a few examples of my favorites.

Archimedes, like many mathematicians of the centuries, sought to figure out the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, i.e. pi. There is an age-old philosophical question about whether or not there is a difference between a circle and a polygon with an infinite (or simply extremely high) number of sides. An ideal circle certainly has no sides. But maybe in the real universe of Planck measurements there is no difference. Ultimately, for Archimedes' purposes, and most purposes involving pi, the answer does not really matter. The length of the sides of a polygon are very easy to measure. And a polygon drawn hugging the inside or outside of a circle will more closely approximate the circle as the number of sides goes up. Therefore, a polygon with a high number of sides can give a good approximation of pi. And the more sides one adds, the closer one gets. Archimedes chooses to go up to 96 sides, one polygon hugging the outside and one hugging the inside of a circle. This gives a lower bound for pi at 3 10/71 and an upper bound at 3 1/7. If these two values are averaged, it gives pi accurate up to 3.141. Further sides could be used to produce infinitely more values. Christoph Grienberger, an Austrian mathematician, pushed Archimedes' approach all the way to 39 digits of accuracy. Interestingly, Wikipedia is very misleading on this topic. Archimedes stopped at his 96-sided polygon proof because it was more than sufficient and smashed the accuracy of all existing estimates. Extending it further was an obvious practice left up to the reader. He had solved pi.

Archimedes also has a fascinating work where he describes the process of calculating how many grains of sand it would take to fill up the universe. He does this in response to the notion that there is no number big enough to count the grains of sand on Earth. His numbers for the size of the Earth and the universe are wildly off. His estimation for the size of the Earth is off by an order of magnitude and he dismisses the approximations of his own day which were actually fairly accurate. Still, while his methodology is bogus, he comes up with the same basic idea of our modern scientific notation of large numbers to represent the number of grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. In a sense, he fumbles the theoretical but nails the practical here.

I was always fascinated by the mechanics of see saws as a child, particularly the "trick" of moving along the seesaw to allow children of different sizes to still play with one another. He describes the math behind this process, along with a few methods for figuring out the center of gravity of common shapes, in his On the Equilibrium of Planes. The math here was surprisingly simple and a real personal joy for me.

Archimedes also describes the mechanics of hydrostatics, i.e. how things float, sink, and/or displace liquid. In other words, Archimedes knows what floats your boat. Given that we have already established that he also knows what tilts your seesaw, I think you are in for a good time. The math to solve the famous problem of how much gold is really in a crown is all laid out here, though he does not actually recount the story. It is possible that he came up with the method and wrote it down before discovering that particular practical use. It is also possible that the story of Archimedes and the gold crown was merely an illustrative story that later came to be treated as history by Vitruvius.

Heath, in his introduction, argues that Archimedes was fairly close to giving us Calculus. And I think he is right. Archimedes' section on spirals describes them both in geometric terms, i.e. moving along a circle and a line at the same time, and in terms of a change in magnitude over time. He also tackles the problem of calculating the area of these spirals. Elsewhere, he deals with calculating the area under many rather complicated curves. Combined with his fascination with mechanics, who knows what could have been, if only more interest had been given to Archimedes, more of his works preserved, or the scholarly community in Alexandria not hobbled over the years?

Angles that Euclid Would Know

2016-07-13T21:41:00-04:00

Next up on the list, as promised, is Euclid's Elements of Geometry. This is a dated but still definitive translation of Euclid's foundational work on Geometry done by Sir Thomas Little Heath. This particular edition is a slimmed down version his translation with the notes removed so that it can fit in a single volume. This volume is used at St. John's College and at a few other places with Great Books programs since Heath's full three-volume edition is considered too cumbersome. The same publisher, Green Lion, also provides a further condensed pocket version that has only the propositions and diagrams but no proofs called The Bones. If you would prefer all of Heath's unabridged commentary on top the translation, there is also a three volume paperback edition from Dover. You can also find the three volume version online. However, Heath's commentary adds substantially to the work's size and provides unnecessary distraction for the first time reader. That said, now that I've read through The Elements, I am interested in seeing what Heath had to say.

Euclid's Elements provides a fascinating look into a world of math without numbers. It is like learning some strange and beautiful alien language. To figure out this alternate system of math, I found it very helpful to buy a compass and straight edge so that I could replicate Euclid's geometric constructions. Euclid does not calculate. Euclid draws and "measures". I put "measures" in quotes because, once again, there are no numbers. The scale is completely arbitrary. A 5" circle and a 5' circle are identical in Euclidean geometry. The only thing that changes is the basic unit of measurement. Some operations are easier in this system. Others are harder. Cutting a line exactly in half or doubling it is very simple with a compass and straight edge. It is not, however, very useful for anything involving non-flat planes. Still, it should give the diligent reader a completely different way of looking at many areas of math.

Euclid is credited with being the origin of mathematical proofs. While it is true that he uses rigorous proofs in every proposition, it is inaccurate to saythat most modern proofs are quite on the same level as Euclid's. First, Euclid builds his whole geometry piece by piece. He starts with a few definitions and propositions and then builds from there. Most proofs depend on previous proofs. It's a self-contained system. Second, and more importantly, Euclid's focus on geometry means that he is not limited to just proving things mathematically or logically. No, Euclid is able to physically construct his objects on paper, in wax, or in the sand. In other words, much of what Euclid says can be tested empirically. Physical construction is a degree of proof beyond what symbols and numbers can provide.

There are many modern mathematicians who find it a remarkable coincidence that so much of the universe appears to be "mathematical". But when one reads Euclid, part of the earliest foundation of math, it is clear that these mathematicians have the arrow of causality backward. Mathematics is primarily descriptive. Its original purpose was to count, measure, calculate, and model very real things. And, historically, any math that did not mirror reality was not valid math. Reality was the arbiter of all things, no matter how much some new math may appear to be internally consistent. To say that the universe is mathematical is like saying that a beautiful landscape or portrait has the qualities of a painting. The model is not the thing, but we do not keep around defective models.

In a similar vein, there are those who claim that geometric forms and proportions show up in art, architecture, and nature as some sort of microscopic reflection of the universe's true nature. In the case of art and architecture, the fact that symmetry and ratio are pleasing to look at has been well-known and established since antiquity. While today these methods have become something of a lost art that people stumble upon intuitively, Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance architects and artists exploited them knowingly and deliberately. As for nature, it's more a matter of things tending toward simplicity and equilibrium, in the long run. However, things tend to be much more chaotic and less clearly mathematical in the short term or on small scales. This wide-spread tendency may actually point to some fundamental truth about our universe. I have no way of knowing. However, for those interested in how natural things tend to shift between the ugly and chaotic to the beautiful and orderly depending on scale, I highly recommend D'arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form. Thompson was, incidentally, a friend and colleague of Heath's at Cambridge.

One other thing struck me while reading Euclid's discussions of ratio. We are so obsessed with numbers these days that it is easy to miss that numbers really have two functions: to count and to measure. These are related but not quite identical things. With regard to counting, the numbers correspond to the fact that objects in the real world are often discrete things, either existing or not existing. There is a natural and obvious connection. However, with measurement, our units are entirely arbitrary. Ratios can be obscured by simply choosing the wrong size for the unit when represented by numbers. For example, the ratio between one meter and three meters is immediately obvious. On the other hand, the ratio between 3.281 feet and 9.843 is not quite so immediate. In Euclid's realm of arbitrary units, there is no real distinction. 1s are simply not equal if the units discussed are different. But one apple is numerically equivalent to one orange. We have combined two different things into a single idea of "number". This is why we end up with the strange distinction between "natural numbers", "rational numbers", "real numbers", and "irrational numbers". Even computers have to make a distinction between "counting numbers" and "measuring numbers", i.e. integers and floats, for performance reasons. We are forcing numbers to do more than one job. Our system definitely works and I am no mathematician. However, I can not help but wonder if there is anything we have failed to see because of our blurry distinction between the uses of numbers.

Did I mention that Euclid can also help you form geometrically perfect pentagrams for all your demon binding needs?

Novum Testamentum

2016-06-18T19:45:00-04:00

Way later than promised, I have finished reading the New Testament, also known as Bible II: The Adventures of God Junior. For details about the editionI choice, see my previous post: Antiquum Testamentum.

While it should come as no surprise to readers with a Christian background, the New Testament is radically different from the Old Testament. Rather than tales of the previously-mentioned endless warfare in the meat-grinder of civilization, the New Testament covers a time of relative peace in the Middle East, the era of the so-called Pax Romana or Roman Peace. The God of the New Testament is less about crushing your enemies, adhering to a long list of rules, and wrecking false idols than he is about loving one's fellow man, forgiveness, and "faith".

I put faith in quotes because the Latin word for faith, fides, has a broader meaning than the typical modern English usage. When we say faith, we tend to mean belief, or even blind belief. But the sense of the Latin equivalent is more a reciprocal relationship of loyalty and honesty. Fides is the same word we see show up in variant forms in phrases like bona fide and semper fi. It is the faith of "good faith". And it's interesting to see this contrasted with what we tend to translate as "works". The Latin opus (plural opera) is fairly translated as work or works. When I consider what Paul says in the larger context of Jewish law, one of the things he seemed to be saying was that it is important to follow Jesus and God's teachings honestly rather than simply going through the motions. I can think of two good examples of what I believe is meant by works rather than faith. First, consider the issue of the disciples picking wheat on the Sabbath or Jesus healing the sick on the Sabbath. Technically this is against the rules since the Sabbath is a day of rest. However, as Jesus says, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." What rest is there in hunger or illness? These things may violate the letter of the old law, but not the spirit of it since a starving or sick man can have no rest. To take another example, among modern Jews, there are certain people who believe in a long list of things that should not be done on the Sabbath. One of these things not to be done on the Sabbath is dialing a telephone. To overcome limitations like this, less faithful Jews have developed various devices and tricks. For example, I saw a video once of a man who had bought a fake hand on a stick thathe would use to dial his phone. He argued that the hand dialed the phone, not him. Therefore he claimed that he had no broken any rule. That is not a faithful adherence to God's old law. Thus it is easy to see the point of the argument that works without faith mean nothing.

Non-Christians may find it odd that I make reference to the "old law". By that I mean the laws given in the Old Testament, the ones Jews adhere to in varying degrees to this day. These laws were superseded with Jesus' arrival. When asked about what laws people should adhere to, it is said in the gospels that Jesus only explicitly listed a few things: do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not give false testimony, honor your mother and father, and love thy neighbor. Acts and the epistles of Paul further clarify that dietary restrictions and circumcision definitely do not apply to converts. This is important to keep in mind when common criticisms about the "hypocrisy" of Christians are thrown around. The majority of such criticisms depend on citations from Leviticus in the Old Testament. Aside from those things which also appear in the New Testament, nothing in Leviticus is prohibited to Christians. And many things in Leviticus are, arguably, not even prohibit to non-priestly Jews. Take for example homosexuality. In Leviticus, death is the punishment for homosexuality. In Romans, it is said to be a sin but it is in a list of sins so broad that all of us our guilty. Paul's point, a point commonly reiterated in the modern Catholic church but less so in Protestant churches, is that we are all sinners and our only potential redemption is through God's grace. In other words, homosexuals are just like the rest of us: forgiven through Jesus and damned without him. This difference between Romans and Leviticus is not a contradiction for Christians. The rules of Leviticus simply do not matter anymore. Thus there is no hypocrisy or contradiction here. Let he who is without reading comprehension go back to getting stoned.

On the topic of inconsistency and contradiction, there is some truth to the fact that the gospels do not all tell the same story of Jesus' life. However, having studied both medieval manuscript transmission, oral transmission, and history more generally, parallel accounts like this almost never have this level of consistency. The differences are primarily in the level of detail. For example, if I'm not mistaken, the story of Lazarus shows up in both Mark and John but only John goes into enough detail to actually give Lazarus' name. Faithfully recording the gospels must have been very serious business in the early church and that seems only natural given the obvious importance of God's son showing up, delivering the new law, raising the dead, healing the sick, and then coming back from the dead himself. Similarly, the idea that there is "no evidence" that Jesus ever existed is farcical unless one arbitrarily decidesthat the Bible somehow does not count. I think most people would be surprised how little evidence we have for people and events in antiquity. It is not that rare to know of something from a single manuscript copy of a single work. And yet we accept those things as historical fact. If you want to start saying that Jesus did not exist at all, you need to start questioning half of the things you think you know about the ancient world.

More generally, most of the criticisms of Christianity that I personally had or had read that lead me to become an atheist as a teenager simply fall apart with a single honest reading of the Bible as a trained historian. It really comes down to a few simple questions, which correspond very nicely with the affirmations in the Nicene Creed. Do you believe there is a God who created the universe? Do you believe that he became man in the form of Jesus? Do you believe that Jesus was killed and came back from the dead? Do you agree with his teachings that we should probably not murder, steal, and so on? Most people can agree to the last question easily. A lot of people have no problem with the first question, though it is quite the sticky wicket. It is those middle two questions that I find the most difficult. Did the apostles and disciples really see what they think they saw? Was human incarnation really the best method God could come up with? If one accepts that we live in a created universe with some driving force behind it, these things certainly seem possible. Unfortunately, without witnessing them, I can not, thus far, come up with an ironclad argument for why these things would be so. Still, this is progress. When reading the Great Books, I am often left with more questions than I started with. I think the Bible is the first time where I have read something and eliminated more questions than I gained. And I have definitely vastly narrowed down the doubtsI may have about the Christian faith.

In any case, next up should be Euclid, as I had originally planned. Stay tuned.

Antiquum Testamentum

2016-06-05T23:22:00-04:00

The observant reader will note that I have not updated this blog in roughly a year and a half. He or she may also note that the next item on my reading list is Euclid's Elements. While I did start Euclid, I did not get very far before I started to worry that my Latin skills were getting too rusty. To remedy the situation, I decided to start reading the Vulgate, i.e. the standard Latin translation of the Bible. The Bible is big and Latin is hard. Thus the delay. The hypothetical observant reader will notice that the Bible is not included in the list of Great Books volumes. However, it is meant to be read along with the set. It was simply not included in the set for two reasons. First, when the set was originally published, most buyers would already own acopy of the Bible. Second, the Great Books are all in translation (unless originally in English) and people get very particular about their Bible translations. I have so far only completed the Old Testament but it seemed worth treating the two Testaments separately. The New Testament is much shorter and my Latin is much improved since I began this project. Therefore, the next blog post should not take as long.

On the recommendation of a seminarian friend, who assured me that this is what all the cool priests use, I picked up this very fancy edition of the Vulgate: Douay-Rheims & Clementina Vulgata (English and Latin Edition) from Baronius Press. It is a beautiful gilt and leather-bound 8.5" by 11" volume. It includes both the Latin Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims English translation in an easy-to-read two column format. The same publisher also has nice editions of just the Douay-Rheims English translation and, though it may now be out of print, they at least once had a paperback Vulgate. That said, people are very particular about their Bible translations and most readers won't know Latin, even if they had the motivation to read this amount of it.

Having been raised by a fringe Protestant father, this was not my first encounter with the Old Testament. It is, however, my first time actually reading it straight through as an adult. Looking at it now as a historian of minor accomplishment has really changed my perspective. When I was younger, both Testaments were quite mysterious. We were a King James Version household so the language alone was strange. More than a few lines of the Bible have no clear meaning no matter how you translate them. Others are deliberately made vague in most modern translation. I also completely lacked any historical context for the events described within. I also lacked any real alternative mythologies or religions to compare it to. In short, I read it with completely new eyes this time around.

For pure literary pleasure, the Old Testament tends to get worse the further in one reads. Genesis was the most aesthetically pleasing to me and the Five Books of Moses overshadow most of the rest of the Old Testament. The historical books are especially a drag in the style department but they sometimes make up for it with narrative content. Song of Songs was a real eye-opener. In most modern translations it is presented as some awkward poem about Jesus' love for the Church. If Song of Songs 1:1 doesn'tinvolve something about "your tits are better than wine", you have some prude's censored translation. The original is quite erotic.

I really can not stress how much of a drag I found the historical books. It was an endless cycle of faithful Jews conquering other Semitic tribes until the Jews fell into decadence and faithlessness and were then in turn conquered by their neighbors. Rationally, I realize that the Middle East has historically been the meat grinder of civilizations and a history of any people from that region must necessarily involve cycles of conquest and defeat. But in the context of the Old Testament, defeat is always interpreted as a sign of God's displeasure. Theoretically, the Jews only needed to do a few simple things in order to avoid defeat. And this is a lesson that they failed to learn. By the time we reach the apocryphal 4 Esdras, God seems ready to give up on the Jews as his chosen people in favor of simply backing any and all who would follow his laws.

The apocryphal books were the most interesting because they were entirely new to me. Many books that Protestants consider apocryphal are considered canon by the Catholic Church. And Saint Jerome, creator of the Vulgate, also included a few apocryphal extras, like 4 Esdras, just because he was aparticular fan of those books. Some books are simply extended in the Catholic versions. For example, the Catholic Daniel versions typically end with Daniel creating a bomb and then using it to blow up a Babylonian dragon god. We definitely did not memorize anything that awesome in Awana. 1 Machabees provides some nice historical glue between the rest of the Old Testament and mainstream Classical Antiquity and, in turn, the New Testament. It also suggests that the Jews basically invited the Romans in because they did not like the oppressive rule of one of the successor states to Alexander the Great's empire. 4 Esdras' opening of God's favor up to any all, combined with the abandonment of his particular favoritism toward the Jews, suggests that maybe Christ and his disciples were picking up on an existing theological trend rather than taking their religion in an entirely new direction.

It was over one thousand pages of Latin and it took me a year to read. It is also one of the major works of both Western and Middle-Eastern civilizations. I have forgotten and glossed over a great deal. That is true of basically anything I talk about on this blog but I think the religious aspect of it makes me feel especially guilty this time. I have reduced the entire world view of several groups spanning thousands of years to a few short, and often pithy, paragraphs. It is not ideal. But the perfect is the enemy of the good, or so they say, and I was long overdue for a post.

Galen and the Crazy

2015-01-23T00:42:00-05:00

Next up is Galen: On the Natural Faculties (Loeb Classical Library). It's another Loeb but aside from the original Great Books volume, it's just about the only translation available. The remarks in my previous post about Hippocrates and the respective Loeb editions more or less apply equally to this volume of Galen. The only thing I would add is that this volume of Galen has a very extensive introduction and many useful footnotes, even compared to the Loeb norm. A.J. Brock is to be commended for his thorough work.

Galen was a Greek born in the 2nd century AD, well after the Roman conquest of Greece. His father was well-educated and reportedly virtuous architect. His mother, on the other hand, was said to be an irrational and angry woman who caused no end of grief for Galen's father. Learning by example and counter-example, Galen sought to emulate his father as much as possible and to shy away from the behaviours of his mother. As a young man, he wandered the major hubs of learning in the Eastern Mediterranean. After returning home and working as a surgeon for gladiators, he eventually made his way to Rome. He did not like what he found.

Much like the days of Plato, the best wisdom of those that had gone before was often ignored in Rome in favour of novel theories peddled by the reigning sophists of the day. Galen pitted his knowledge of Hippocrates, supplemented by his own experiments, against these sophists with limited results in his own day. In one instance, he argued against a prevailing notion that the bladder was a useless organ. Galen attempted to argue that he had seen the bladder swell with urine in animals and further that Aristotle says that nature does nothing without reason. His opponent remained unconvinced. Galen resorted to literally slicing open some poor animal right in front of the man. He then tied something around the animal's penis to keep it from urinating. He patched the animal back up and then reopened it later to show that the bladder was now swollen. He then untied the animal's penis and urine immediately came forth. The animal's bladder deflated. Galen's opponent was still not convinced.

Supporting arguments with evidence from vivisections was a favored tactic of Galen's. Empiricism, however, is not a fool-proof method against certain types of minds. Galen persisted in his arguments. He won great favor among some. He even became the personal physician of the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom we will read a work of later. It is hard not to strongly believe in truths one has witnessed first hand and can reproduce on command, provided a dog can be found quickly. And yet some people will always remain immune to reason. It was a case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The expected social catastrophe ensued and Galen was forced to flee for his life from the other medical practitioners in Rome. Marcus Aurelius would later beg him to come back but he refused.

So, the moral of the story is that while you can lead a sophist to a dog's piss-filled bladder, but you can't make him ~~drink~~ believe that it plays a role in dealing with urine. And adherence to the truth can be so enraging for the indoctrinated that not even the protection of one of the greatest Roman emperors can be counted on to preserve truth's advocate.

I might not have a med-school degree...

2015-01-20T00:00:00-05:00

Next up on the list is Hippocrates, Volume I: Ancient Medicine (Loeb Classical Library, No.147). Well, that's just the first volume. The complete Hippocrati ccorpus comes in ten volumes. This is almost certainly more than is in the corresponding Great Books volume. Someone less crazy than myself may wish to pick up something cheaper and more compact like Hippocratic Writings (Penguin Classics).

That said, you can never really go wrong with Loeb editions. The translations are never worse than serviceable. And on top of the translation, each Loeb volume has the original text on the page opposite the translation. Each work comes with a brief introduction, usually spending more time on the manuscript tradition than the layman is likely to care for. They are hardcover editions with excellent binding and a compact size. I have also never seen a library copy of a Loeb edition that wasn't still in great shape. In the academic world, Loeb editions are often the standard version for the original text. And if you can read the original language at all, it is great boon. Sadly, I know only a few words of Greek and largely picked up the Loeb version because it's the only complete translation of the Hippocratic corpus available. But I will almost certainly stick to Loeb editions when I reach Latin texts since that's one dead language I can read.

Hippocrates was one of the earliest great medical practitioners that we know of. Works believed to have been written by him are abundant. Works falsely ascribed to him are likewise abundant. The confusion is partly due to the fact that an entire school of thought, the Hippocratic school, emerged from his teachings and writings. His writings fell out of use in the Latin West during the medieval period but were used widely in the Arab world during the same time period. His work is largely the reason for the superiority of so-called "Arab" medicine during the medieval period. He regained popularity in the Latin West during the Renaissance and managed to fade out of use only when he had finally been surpassed.

The corpus consists of a great deal of medical advice that is still valid. For example, many of his surgeries and methods for dealing with broken bones are still more or less the same as one would find in a modern hospital. His work with diseases, however, is much more limited. He had no understanding of germ theory, for example. And he cannot really be faulted for that. Germ theory only became a dominant idea when we could literally see the damn things under a microscope. If Hippocrates could see bacteria, he may have modified some of his views. So, really, it was a failure in the field of optics, not the field of medicine. A similar argument can be made for the field of astronomy. It's all just theorizing until someone whips out the optics and starts measuring things.

Hippocrates had some understanding of the limits of his knowledge, however. This can be seen in his treatments. While much theorizing is done about wet versus dry, hot versus cold, and other such out-moded ways of thinking about the body, his actual treatments hint at his level of faith in this system of thinking. His treatments for diseases are usually all about keeping the patient comfortable and nourished. Nourishment is more important than it may first seem. Many diseases either dampen the appetite or outright make a person unable to digest normal food. These days we can just feed a person intravenously no matter the situation. He proposes various gruel-like foods for most situations. If things get worse, there are things like hydromel (honey diluted in water). Not all of them are bad ideas if you find yourself with the flu or food poisoning.

Hippocrates was also careful to record his cases. Even if he failed to save a patient, that knowledge could help others recognize the same illness and potentially save lives down the road. And even continued failure had the potential to teach something new. He would always have clear notes about what didn't work so that he could try something new. For this reason Hippocrates is often credited with being the first real empiricist. This is often in the context of contrasting him to Aristotle. I do not believe that that is entirely fair to Aristotle. Aristotle, especially in his biological text that no-one reads, relies heavily on observation. It is true that most of his works relies largely on reasoning from first principles but that is not his only method. Likewise, Hippocrates sometimes attempts to develop theories based on widely-held ideas of his own time. Therefore, I would argue that the difference is merely one of degree, not one of kind. Greek thought was not as monolithic as commonly portrayed. Who knows how much more varied the picture would look if the works of more authors had survived?

Brecht vs. Aristotle (Aristotle, Part II)

2014-07-29T21:14:00-04:00

Next up is the second half of Aristotle's complete works: The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2(Bollingen Series LXXI-2). My previous entry describes my general thoughts on this particular edition. I will only add that the binding on my copy of volume twohas started to come apart. It survived a cover-to-cover reading but it will likely need some minor repair in the near future.

Since I don't need to spend much time talking about the edition itself this time, it may be worth using this time/space to provide a few book care tips. On the topic of repair, I highly recommend that any serious reader pick up some acid free linen tape like this stuff. I've managed to repair more than a few books with that tape. It works pretty well and looks great. If you buy some linen tape other than what I linked above, be absolutely sure that it is acid free or it will start slowly eating away at your books. You can see the effect of acidity in older books first by the yellowing of the pages and then eventually stiffness and finally crumbling. This can also be a problem with storing papers or books incardboard boxes. If you are going to store paper stuff in boxes, I also recommend picking up one of these PH testing pens. The pens basically turn a part of the target paper or cardboard into a little litmus strip and you can use it to test whether or not the material is acidic. With cardboard boxes, there's really a race to the bottom and certain manufacturers will falsely claim that their cardboard is acid free. Without this pen you wont find out until your books are already damaged.

Now, back to the matter at hand. This second volume has a lot more of Aristotle's truly essential works which I think everyone should read. I mean in particular: Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics.

Politics outlines the different forms a government can take along with their various strengths and weaknesses. In this modern age, there is a common belief that democracy is the only truly legitimate form of government. Aristotle doesn't seem to think too highly of it because it has several predictable modes of failure. One in particular should seem rather familiar: the lower class, if it is abundant enough, will use its votes to start redistributing the property of the middle and upper class and it will continue to do so until either these classes revolt, flee, or are reduced to the point where there's nothing left to "redistribute". But as Aristotle shows, every form of government fails sooner or later when bad men inevitably end up in charge. The form of government does not prevent failure itself. The form only dictates the possible failure modes. Historically, the government of today is the one which addresses the failure mode of yesterday's government.

Rhetoric is a particularly interesting work in today's intellectual atmosphere. We don't really teach rhetoric as a subject anymore. We teach "writing" and weteach "critical thinking" or "logic". Our teaching on identifying bad logic in written arguments usually focuses on logical fallacies. Now, logical fallacies are a real problem that everyone should understand. But this approach alone has its limit. It focuses primarily on errors made on the production side, i.e. in the arguer's writing and thinking. Rhetoric is, in a way, the inverse of that. Rhetoric considers errors in thinking produced on the consumption side, i.e. in the listener or reader's own thoughts. Now, strictly speaking, rhetoric can involve the deliberate use of logical fallacies. However, that is not necessarily so and Aristotle tends to shy away from such tactics. But that doesn't leave the speaker without options for manipulation. To give one simple example, it's not really a failure of logic on the speaker's part to praise the virtues of the listener. It just has nothing to do with the argument at hand. And yet it still leaves the listener positively disposed toward everything that follows. The error is not the speaker's; the error is the listener's. This is the side we don't really teach anymore and that leaves our citizenry open to manipulation. We should fix it. The fact that education standards are created by those doing the manipulating means that we won't.

Poetics outlines a lot of what Aristotle thinks is essential to literature and what simply makes some works better than others. It is very focused on stage tragedies but a great deal of what he says is universal. And it's a lot more in-depth than the usual glib summary of "it's about how plays should have unity of place, time, and action". It's also a pretty short read in itself so I won't bore you with the details.

That said, there is one particular nugget in his Poetics which I think addresses a wide-spread modern misconception in the literary world. Among the things Aristotle says are essential to tragedy (by tragedy Aristotle means most plays which we today would not consider comedies), he lists "thought". And by "thought" he means, "proving or disproving some particular point, or enunciating some universal proposition." Now, the 20th-century German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht has a related idea, and that is that "all art is political". This is similar to Aristotle's idea that a tragedy must fundamentally involve "proving or disproving".

What about Aristotle's other option, "enunciating some universal proposition"? One would think this would be one sticky wicket for Brecht and friends. However, according to Brecht, in the cases when a piece of art seems apolitical, it is because it is actually reinforcing the status quo. In other words, to Brecht, there are no universal propositions. This is a common theme in 20th-century thought: everything is relative, everything is a social construct, and perception determines reality.

Are there truly no universally human ideas? I, and Aristotle, would say that there certainly are. There are some ideas that aren't even limited to humans. For example, there is a notion that beauty is merely what society tells us it is. But there are certain elements, such as symmetry, which clearly influence the mating choices of not just humans but virtually every animal in existence. Likewise, all animals, including humans, have some drive toward self-preservation such that death, unless there are some other mitigating circumstances involved, is certainly a universal ill. The whole realm of science is based on the idea that there are things which exist and can be measured. Perception does not determine atomic weight. Perception does not create gravity. The Earth will orbit the sun even if a smart fellow such as Aristotle denies it. These things are certainly universally true and apolitical, not merely social constructs accepted because they are part of the status quo. The only way out of this argument is to insist what we take to be objectively real is merely "politics", i.e. an invention of the culture and time we live in. But insist all you like Brechtians; the universe won't care.

On the Generation of 2,500 Pages (Aristotle, Part I)

2014-07-19T18:48:00-04:00

Long time no read/write. It has been over a year. This is even worse than mylast lapse. I got distracted reading other books that aren't on the list. I even learned Calculus. Maybe I should start doing write-ups about more stuff not on the list.

In any case, next up is Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1. Per the usual, I'll give a few words about this edition. This edition is more or less the standard all-in-one English translation of Aristotle. It's based on the older Oxford editions that were funded in the will of the famous Oxford classicist Benjamin Jowett. Nearly all of the original translations continue to be reused in this newer edition and not all of them have aged well. And while the series was originally printed in twelve volumes, it is now in two enormous and unwieldy volumes. I really would have preferred it if Aristotle's corpus were split into at least four volumes. There are virtually no footnotes and no endnotes. The footnotes that do exist are limited in scope, mostly about issues of textual criticism (not to be confused with literary criticism). These are a sort of problem that most translation readers do not care about in the slightest. In fact, without the actual Greek text available, these little notes are almost completely useless for interested parties. I suspect that this lack of notes may help sell the editor's other work the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Many terms are also rendered in Latin. Since I have studied Latin, this didn't cause any real issues for me. But it's rare these days to meet anyone outside of a medievalist who has studied Latin but not Greek. I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of would-be Aristotle readers know neither Latin nor Greek. As such,the overuse of Latin terms and phrases is a case of the translators not knowing their audience. So all in all, it's a crummy situation as far as editions go but it's allegedly the best we've got.

Since the negativity train is already rolling, I'll start my discussion of Aristotle's writings themselves with the bad. Aristotle writes about practically everything. This is both a good and a bad thing. The bad side of it is that there's a ton of it. As mentioned in the title of this post, there are about 2,500 pages in all. And while Aristotle is the effective, or merely academically alleged, father of many fields, not all of these fields will interest every reader. And even among fields which fit a reader's interests,s ome of his writings hold up better than others. For example, while I have some interest in formal logic, Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics were a real pain for me. Complex logic without a formal system of notation makes for pretty bad reading. When it's originally in Greek and translated into English, it's absolute hell. His On the Generation of Animals is another bore for me as it's basically 100 pages about how animals have sex. For the general reader, I recommend just cherry-picking the most personally interesting works in the corpus. For the Great Books nerd, it's probably best to just go through every work since Aristotle's work forms the cornerstone of practically every subject in the so-called Great Conversation. Even today, nearly every humanities or natural science college course will either reference Aristotle or actually outright assign the relevant writings.

Switching to the more positive side, a lot of things have jumped out at me reading Aristotle this time around (I've read several of his works but never the complete corpus before). Aristotle is often described in lectures and by later thinkers as this sort of intellectual monolithic giant. And it's certainly true that no-one else in his time managed to cover so many topics insuch detail, at least no-one whose work survives. I do not want to diminish Aristotle's accomplishments at all. But the way we talk about him these days is misleading. Even in the texts themselves, Aristotle mentions several other Greek philosophers of his age, though often just to argue against them. Further, you won't find it in the non-existent notes of this edition, but Aristotle spent roughly 20 years at Plato's academy before he went out into the big wide world. Allegedly he left in large part because he hated Plato's nephew who took over the academy (Plato had no children and the academy was technically a business). But that's 20 years of collaboration with fellow philosophers with similar training to his own. And less overtly, contrary towhat you may hear in pithy summaries of Aristotle's work, Aristotle bases a lot of his conclusion on observations. He even simply documents many observations, particularly of animals, seemingly for their own sake. The breadth of these observations (including actual geographic breadth!) leads me to believe that Aristotle must have been collaborating with a wider scientific community. It would also explain the inconsistency of some of his observations. Sometimes an animal is described in exact and accurate detail. Other times, an animal may be described vaguely and inaccurately. This suggests that the observations of Aristotle are actually the combined observations of many people.

These other philosophers that Aristotle mentions are sometimes clearly more correct. For example, it's commonly taught that Copernicus was the first to come up with the heliocentric model. Reading Aristotle, one discovers that this is simply not true. The Pythagoreans (yes, the disciples of the triangle guy) believed that Earth orbits around the Sun. They also accurately guessed that the sun is actually a great ball of fire. They were less accurate in their belief that the Earth's orbit is circular, however. They also suspected that there is a shadow Earth that is always on the opposite side of the sun and therefore invisible to us. But this last flaw derives from the limitations of Greek mechanics and Aristotle himself makes similar assumptions about counterbalancing weights elsewhere.

So, all in all, I guess the point here is that the typical brief glossing of Aristotle's place in the history of science is total nonsense. The work behind his writings was not his alone, nor just his and Plato's either. He did not work by reasoning alone. He made extensive use of observations. And many ideas which we insist didn't not come about until "modernity" were already there even in the time of the Greeks. And that's one of the major highlights of the Great Books curriculum as a whole. The pithy little narratives we push in textbooks today are often over-simplifications or outright falsehoods. And there's really no way to know for sure unless one reads the actual sources for one's self. At the end of the day, primary sources are what really matters; the rest is just bullshit of widely-varying utility.

Don't Eat the Plato

2013-06-03T21:05:00-04:00

After many months, I finally knocked out the next item in the list: Plato: Complete Works. First, as per the usual, here a few words about this edition. It has a few things going for it. It's relatively cheap for the massive amount of content--roughly $50 for 1,800 pages or so from one of the pillars of Western thought. And as an added bonus, you won't get just the works of Plato, but also the works of people who have pretended to be Plato gotten away with it for at least a century or two. So, it's plenty of the prolific Plato and pieces from the petty posers. The translations themselves were quite readable. The footnotes aren't extensive but I feel like the editors hit the sweet spot on that front. I think I found about half of the footnotes useful or interesting so though they are few, they aren't a huge waste of useless information or obvious information like some of the stuff I've picked up in the past. And hey, they're actual footnotes, not the endnotes that cheap publishers seem to like so much these days. The only criticism I really have about this edition is that it's a single volume. While it may sound handy to have it all in a single book, I found holding this thing up to read to be a serious pain. Reading it in bed before falling asleep just isn't possible. But I suppose its metaphorical weight is just as much an impediment to reading that way as its physical weight. I think I would have preferred it in a handier 2-6 volume set. That would certainly drive up costs, however. So all in all, good job John M. Cooper and Hackett Publishing.

My view of the text itself is not quite as universally positive. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Plato is pretty amazing, especially for the first-time reader. His Republic is an absolute must. Laws is also really good but much it felt like a watering down of Republic. Symposium is also a must if you have any interest in the topic of love. Just kind of work around the fact that it's broadly praising relationships between adult men and teenage boys. The dialogues are where things get rough. They all work off of a system of questions and answers. That's where the dialogue bit comes in. It's a perfectly reasonable way ofapproaching problems. Unfortunately, there's a lot of repetition when you put them all in a big collection. By Plato's reckoning, all of life's great questions really begin with establishing that a shipwright is one who builds ships, a farmer is one who farms, and a doctor is one who treats the body. Plato also relies heavily on the so-called "method of division". This involvesa process of trying to identify and categorize all things of a related type. Plato is quite bad at making these sorts of divisions and it often throws the remainder of the dialogue off the rails. A man can only take so much. For that reason, the bigger, non-dialogue works went much quicker for me.

There are plenty of gems to be found in the dialogues if you're willing to put in the work. If you're in a hurry, you may want to pick and choose dialogues based on Cooper's summaries at the beginning. Covering them all here would not be practical. Of the smaller dialogues, I think Theaetetus was one of the stronger arguments and the most relevant today. Here Plato tackles the problem of whether reality is objective, subjective, or a mix. This is a topic somewhat dear to me and I even wrote a paper on it a long time ago for an applied philosophy class as a teenager in community college. However, I hadn't actually read Theaetetus at the time. Given the similarities between my argument and Plato's, I now understand why the professor found it both worthy of an A and so damn amusing. Basically, if there is such a thing as objective reality, our job is done because everything is just like we perceive it. Now, we know that isn't, strictly speaking the case. Our senses fool us quite often under certain circumstances. But by and large, with the right methodology, we can usually produce consistent observations. Our prior technological progress kind of depends on that fact. Now, let us suppose that someone comes along, maybe from the local Zen center, and insists that perception determines reality and there's no such thing as an objective reality. This is usually followed by an explanation of how reality "really" works. Now, first off, if reality is really subjective, logically you don't have any real need to listen to the guy at the Zen center. His assessment of reality cannot be proven to be any mor ecorrect than whatever you already have in your head. And if perception does determine reality and you are perceiving a reality that behaves entirely like an objective one, then that "fact" really doesn't change anything at all. So, in short, objective reality either truly exists or you've created your own functionally objective reality through self-deception and the difference is purely academic.

Now, as I said, the really good stuff is really in Republic and Laws. Since I think Laws is largely a dilution of Republic to make it more palatable and practical for real-world implementation, let's just stick to the more philosophically pure Republic. The goal of Republic is to outline an ideal society that would be productive, secure, and full of virtue. Now, this virtue bit is a little circular. Plato's arguments about the virtues usually end up arguing that certain virtues are what they are because it's what's good for the city. So, an ideal city is one full of virtue and virtue is what makes an ideal city. Now, it's important to understand that the Greek "arete" that gets translatedas "virtue" basically means the qualities that make something fit for its purpose. So, for example, sharpness would be a "virtue" of a knife. Now, if Plato feels that virtue is whatever is good for the city, that implies that Plato thinks that man's purpose is to serve the State. I don't know about you, but I certainly have other priorities. But defining virtue gets a lot harder toa dvocate when it doesn't have a clear payoff. Why be good? Because it makes the State stronger and/or makes God happy. There's a clear payoff in most virtue systems because simply saying "It's the right thing to do, man." isn't the most obviously logical of arguments. I don't have any better answers but I remain dissatisfied with Plato's conception of virtue.

Now, things get even creepier for the libertarian-minded when we get to Plato's actual planned implementation. He outlines a process for testing children from a young age to determine who is the most talented. These children would then be placed in a rigid caste system with virtually zero social mobility once the testing is done. Further, all forms of stories would be censored to ensure that they advocate Plato's system of virtues. Even the myths about the gods are up on the chopping block. Plato believed that control of literature, performance, and myth was the way to make virtuous society. I find it fascinating to see just how old this idea of making society "better" through extreme authoritarianism really is. You could say that any mythical group like the Illuminati is really just a bunch of Platonist extremists. And somehow I find that idea hilarious. I mean, if you just switch it from "there's a secret organization controlling everything" to "there are radical Platonists trying to control everything" it seems a lot more plausible. I mean, obfuscation of the real mechanisms of power is pretty central to Plato's plan. It's such an old idea, someone out there has to have at least attempted it. I've read that people did in Byzantium at least. The idea really just breaks down in the logistics of controlling that much stuff and in assuming that media and education dictate thought enough for reliable control. Or maybe I'm wrong about that part, radical Platonists really do control the world, and I'm going to get thrown into a black van and kidnapped tomorrow for writing this.

Athens vs. Sparta

2012-11-14T04:14:00-05:00

Next up is Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It is the history of the ~30 year war between Sparta and Athens told by a prominent Athenian citizen who spent half of the war in exile with the Spartas due to his having commanded a failed expedition. Thus a lot of the history is a first-hand account with the remaining being almost entirely compromised of second-hand accounts.

The edition I've linked is another Landmark edition. This one has meatier footnotes and a nice big map at the end, though all the maps in this volume are in black and white. So two of my major criticisms of their Herodotus edition have been somewhat ameliorated. Sadly, the Thucydides predates the Herodotus edition so I guess this wasn't a general trend in the series. Maybe someday I'll try their Xenophon or Arrian and report my findings.

I'll start off with the bad part of Thucydides. His history is largely a military one, owing to the nature of the topic. If you aren't into military history, and I'm not, some of the long passages about circumvallation and hoplite formations can be exhausting. But a lot of other history-loving folks get a lot of enjoyment out of this sort of thing. If you are one of those folks, you're in for a treat. It just isn't for me, at least not to the extent that it is present in Thucydides. And it is still valuable and useful information from a historical perspective.

On the upside, even if you just skim those aspects, Thucydides is pretty brilliant in his commentaries. He also loads up on some brilliant Greek and Spartan speeches, the treaties, and the very occasional cultural tidbit. I'm tempted to bomb you folks with quotes. I shall abstain. Thucydides tries to maintain objectivity throughout. This is pretty hilarious when Cleon comes up. You may remember him as the corrupt politician mocked by Aristophanes. It's hard to describe but the weight is in what is not said. Despite being as diplomatic as possible, you get the sense that Thucydides hated this man more than any other figure in his history.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from the course of the war. First, the war largely started due to the fact that Spartan and Athenian influenced expanded so greatly that they started to have conflicts among their various allies and client states. Basically, they started to step on each other's toes. But neither was really interested in a direct confrontation. The overlapping spheres of influence simply made it inevitable. It is unnecessary entanglements and their consequences in action. Second, when Athens started losing, people started blaming anything and everything, even democracy itself. As such, democracy more or less died for the bulk of the war, replaced with unstable tyrannies and oligarchies. Defeat spurs on knee-jerk reactions. On the upside, it can also produce some serious rethinking in the long run. This war gave us Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, which you'll hear about more in the future. Third, prolonged war weakened both Athens and Sparta permanently. The ruling Spartan class was all but spent by the end. Athens lost its empire. They were no longer capable of challenging Persian power on the Persian side of the pond, much to the woe of the Ionian Greeks over there. And before long, the inevitable happened: they got steam-rolled by a foreign power. But they got lucky there. That invading power would be Alexander the Great and his semi-Hellenic Macedonians, which assured a strong Greek presence on that side of the Mediterranean until the fall of Byzantium some 1800 years later. Obviously they'd lose out to the Romans but Greek culture quickly became one of the pillars of the Empire and ultimately the Greek side outlasted the Roman side.

Èrodotus' Ìstories

2012-10-27T20:05:00-04:00

Next up on the list is Herodotus' The Histories. Here Herodotus provides adetailed account of the Persian Wars, the parties involved, and the events leading to the wars.

But first, a word about the edition I selected: This is part of a series of Greek histories in translation, each called The Landmark X. They provide a load of maps, copious footnotes, and marginal summaries. They are certainly quite showy. Unfortunately, the maps are the same regions over and over. For the most part, all of these maps could be replaced with one good foldout map. And the footnotes are likewise repetitive. The vast majority of the footnotes come after a place name. The footnote then just says to see a certain map. As a person who compulsively looks at footnotes, this is quite tedious for me. It kind of forces the reader to ignore the footnote markers in the text simply to avoid being overwhelmed by "see map". But if you do that, then you don't see the few real footnotes. The footnoting system is also non-standard. Rather than the marker telling you which footnote you want precisely, you get a letter which must be combined with the paragraph number. The book does not always have footnotes on the same page as the marker either. These factors make finding the footnote you want somewhat more difficult than usual. I'm really baffled as to why they didn't just stick with a standard academic footnote style. They replaced it with something that is in every way inferior. The book also includes several academic essays in the back. Many of them are quite interesting. Unfortunately, a number of these are two- or three-page blurbs with virtually no citations. All-in-all, it's a very readable translation in a good binding. The extras just leave something to be desired.

Herodotus himself is often referred to as the "father of history" as his Histories is the first major Western attempt at writing a real history formed from contemporary accounts of events. His account of the war is considered to be generally accurate. He does, however, get a lot of criticism for his descriptions of contemporary cultures and historical events past living memory. I don't think this is entirely a fair criticism. Herodotus traveled a great deal and made inquiries, usually through an interpreter. He seems to have made an honest effort to recount what people told him. And even he is skeptical of many of these accounts. Further, the apparent ridiculousness of his claims have actually reduced over the course of the past century. As our understanding of cultures contemporary to Herodotus has increased, he has started to make a lot more sense. He seems to have at least gotten the methodological basics of writing history down while lacking good predecessors to serve as models. While it's easy to assume that things like source skepticism are obvious, many writers even today do a worse job than Herodotus. And if everyone you talk to says that giant ants mine gold in India and you can't make it there yourself to verify it, you can't just ignore what little evidence you have.

The story of the war itself is pretty depressing until the end. Without reading Herodotus, it is easy to only really learn about the Greek victories at Marathon, Thermopylae (sort of), and Plataea. In reality, virtually all Greek territory fell to the Persians except the Peloponnese. That's like 10-20% of Greece remaining. Athens itself was torched by the Persians. The only thing that really saved them in the end was that after Thermopylae the Greeks managed to avoid another major engagement for so long that the Persians simply had to send most of their army home due to a lack of supplies and the Persian emperor's insanity. And when it finally got to Plataea, aside from the Spartans and the Athenians, not many of the still free Greek cities were willing to stand their ground for very long. Greek civilization as we remember it was at the brink of annihilation. I won't spoil the play by play, but it is both frightening and compelling to read about Western civilization in its infancy reduced to a tiny ember and then to see it turn things around at the last moment.

One minor detail kept cropping up that kind of surprised me: the Spartans had great enthusiasm for freedom and a hatred of tyrants. This is surprising coming from slave owners with two kings. But it is important to remember that not all kings are tyrants. And being a tyrant king is kind of hard when there is a second king around to challenge you with his half of the army. As for the slavery bit, Spartans believed that they were simply different classes of people, some of whom were fit to be slaves while others were fit to be free. While oppressing a slave was just the natural order of things for them, oppressing a member of the free class was simply intolerable. It was so intolerable that the Spartans made a habit of invading neighboring cities that had succumbed to tyrants, kicking the tyrants out, and then just going home. The Athenians had a similar policy but it doesn't seem such an exceptional idea coming from the birthplace of democracy. But it is interesting to note that while Athens fell into tyranny several times, I have yet to find any mention of similar periods in Sparta. A dual-monarchy may not have the potential to be as free as a democracy but it also seemed to lack the potential for tyranny as well. I wonder if history has any other examples of sustained and functional dual-monarchies? I don't believe I've ever come across any.

Aristophanes Brings the Lulz

2012-09-24T15:54:00-04:00

Rounding out the volume of Greek drama is Aristophanes: The Complete Plays. Now, the translation of Aristophanes one gets is extremely important. His plays have a lot of swearing and sometimes massive strap-ons. For the bulk of the 20th century, this stuff was considered too racy as is. Unfortunately, this means that virtually every translation available cuts out all these good bits. Paul Roche's translation, linked above, keeps it all intact as much as possible.

Roche's translation does suffer from two problems, however. First, Aristophanes makes extensive use of dialects to show class and place of origin. Roche tries to emulate this with British regional and class dialects or accents. I thought this was a decent half-measure for a virtually intractable problem. Judging from reviews, a lot of people disagree with me here. So if you genuinely don't like Roche's solution or you are some sort of data-driven plebeian whose tastes are enslaved to Amazon reviews, look elsewhere. Except then you'll be stuck with translations which have "docked the cock", so to speak.

But really, this is all just nitpicking. His translations are awesome. His footnotes are extensive without being tedious or patronizing. And they'rea ctual footnotes, not endnotes. With the tragedies, endnotes were acceptable because you really didn't need to know much that wasn't in the Homeric literature and other plays. The comedies, on the other hand, heavily emphasize current events and culture, including making reference to other plays that survive only in fragments or not at all. Having read the tragedies and the Homeric stuff is still enough for a lot of the jokes. And the giant floppy cocks, of course, are eternal wit. That leaves about a third of the jokes that don't really work without explanation.

To speed things up, I just read all eleven of Aristophanes' surviving plays in one go. For the sake of brevity, I'll lump his similar play together. First up are the anti-war plays: Acharnians, Knights, Peace, and Wasps. Aristophanes spent the bulk of his youth and productive years living with the consequences of constant warfare, mostly between his native Athens and Sparta, with the occasional Persian bungling. The war lasted for nearly three decades, off and on. At various points this war cost Athens its men, its economy, its ships, its allies, its democracy, and much more. In Aristophanes' view, war with Sparta was ultimately pointless. Sparta was a land power while Athens was a naval power. Athens had a little empire from the black sea to Sicily which made them one of the foremost hubs of Mediterranean trade. This wealth gave them a city that Sparta's war- and slave-driven economy couldn't rival. But instead of simply enjoying what they had, Athens pursued a land war with a superior land power in that land power's own backyard when, at least in Aristophanes' view, they could have just stayed out of inland Greek politics and been no worse for it. And at several stages the Spartans--the fucking SPARTANS--tried to make peace. When a government wants war more than Sparta, something is seriously wrong. Aristophanes spends most of these plays mocking those who perpetuated the war. The main focus is one fellow: Cleon. He was apparently a rat bastard of a politician who succeeded in being present at one major military success, though he only ordered another Athenian commander to actually get the job done. He then milked that one success for all it was worth. I find it fascinating that taking credit for ordering someone else to do something was considered grounds for ridicule on the public stage. These days, we accept political leaders taking credit for the success of our generals without even thinking about the logic of it. We just take "Mission Accomplished" and "I got Osama bin Laden" at face value. He also takes time to poke fun at the arms dealers. He aptly points out that though the arms dealers are doing brisk business, the war was making it impossible to acquire luxury goods and even many staple goods from the rest of Greece. When Aristophanes was a child, Athens was a city of relative opulence and luxury. As the war dragged on, even the middle class had problems getting enough food. You could allegedly tell a servant from his master because the servant was better dressed. The implication is that there wasn't actually enough to go around but servants had strict customary rights for compensation that were established in a time of opulence. The custom did not change with the economy.

For all that depressing talk, the anti-war plays are quite funny. In Acharnians, a merchant negotiates his own separate peace with Sparta and is able to do business with all of Greece openly in his front yard as his property effectively became its own sovereign state. His business booms and the arms dealers are enraged. The point being that Athens' economy would be booming since it was a natural center of trade and only the war was hindering things. Knights is about an equestrian order that enlists a sausage dealer to confront the aforementioned Cleon for control of Athens. The rationale was that an unqualified low-born sausage dealer would be a better leader than an unqualified low-born warmongering tanner. The sausage-dealer is called "Sausageman". He fights people using a string of sausage. I really wish I could see this staged. In Peace, some enterprising fellows decide to fly a dung beetle to Mount Olympus to rescue Peace, whom Ares (War) had buried with the consent of Zeus, consent given due to Zeus' frustration with Greece's apparent boundless stupidity. Excavating Peace is no easy task but the men are able to enlist more than enough support from average people, the point being that the common people never actually want war unless they are manipulated by politicians. Wasps is not overtly anti-war. It instead looks at the effect the corrupt warmongers had on the domestic courts. Basically, while the war raged on, the courts became a farce. The rule of law was undermined. Basic rights were no longer respected. It is all depressingly familiar. There's a funny bit involving a trial of house pets and some stolen cheese.

Aristophanes also writes a number of plays about women. In two of these feminine plays, Lysistrata and A Parliament of Women, Aristophanes implies that men had let their state deteriorate so greatly that they no longer deserved to be in charge anymore and so women should usurp power. Parliament basically has the women declare a pseudo-communist state and pokes fun at the natural results of that. In Athens' state of war-induced poverty, the ideas of redistribution of wealth and communal property gained some fans. Because obviously capitalism had failed. Their poverty was most definitely not the result of three decades of being warmongering assholes. Once again, this is depressingly familiar. As we'll see later, Plato kind of went to an extreme with this in his Republic. Women at Thesmophoria Festival is mostly Aristophanes giving voice to complaints about Euripides' portrayal of women as seducers, adulterers, general whores, and murderers. There's not much to do with the war, courts, or economy in this last one.

Aristophanes gets more philosophical than political sometimes. In Clouds, he basically parodies the Sophists and insists that they are all vile atheists who give bad reasoning the semblance of good and are otherwise ruining the youth of the day. He lumps Socrates in with these guys though Socrates was not a Sophist. Frogs was written after the deaths of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. In it, Dionysus gets sick of the sad state of theater, dresses up as Hercules, and charges into hell determined to bring one of the great playwrights back. Hilarity ensues. Sophocles had only just died so he doesn't really factor much into the play. But Aeschylus and Euripides have a prolonged and amusing duel to prove which one is better. There's also a mostly silent chorus of mimes dressed as frogs in the background the whole time. Plutus is an imagining of the world without the threat of poverty. Basically, no-one has any reason to produce anything of value. Sure, if we all had our basic needs met, some of us would try to create thingsand better ourselves for their own sake. Many would not. And most of us would probably still do something but not nearly as much as we would if it weren't for the threat of poverty. In short, Aristophanes is saying that wealth makes us soft and weak while poverty spurs us on to do great things. It certainly made me take undergrad way more seriously than most of my peers.

Finally, there's Birds. In this play, Aristophanes posits what would happen if birds ruled the world. Hilarity ensues. It's largely apolitical. Basically, Aristophanes got complacent during a brief period of peace, mistakenly believing that peace was the new state of things.

All in all, Aristophanes' comedies have aged better than anything else I've read. Once you know the political figures being mocked, it is non-stop lulz. At the same time, there is biting social commentary in there that applies just as much to us today as it did to Aristophanes' audience. Like I believe I said about one of the tragedies, if you read only some of this stuff, the comedies of Aristophanes should be at the top of your list. But without all the tragedies and the Homeric stuff, you'll be missing half the fun. That was kind of Adler's point in choosing these books. They are all in a long running conversation with one another.

The End of Tragedy

2012-09-07T02:11:00-04:00

After many long weeks, I've finally made it to the last volume of Euripides. Though this is not actually the end the corresponding volume of the Great Books series. I still have the comedies to go. But this still feels like an important milestone. Also, there are far fewer comedies, about 11. I may or may not review them all in one go. I guess you'll find out soon enough. Anyway, this volume contains Alcestis, Medea, Helen, and Cyclops.

Alcestis is about the death of a woman who is voluntarily dying before her appointed time in place of her husband, thanks to a deal brokered by Apollo, a friend of the husband. Everything was going according to plan until another long-time household friend, Hercules, dropped by. The husband tried to be a nice host and shield Hercules from the bad news. When he learned the truth, he hatched a plan to sneak up on Death personified and beat the crap out of him. He succeeds and death leaves Alcestis alone. The payoff here is entirely in the idea of Hercules beating up Death. So, yeah, I've pretty much spoiled the one good bit. Sorry, folks.

Medea is the one play where Jason, as in Jason and the Argonauts, makes an appearance. Apparently he fell on hard times, abandoned his wife and kids, and married some princess, allegedly in a scheme to better provide for said wife and kids. His old wife, Medea, is the same girl who betrayed her father and homeland to help Jason get the Golden Fleece. She really has nowhere to go and no recourse for this injustice. But she's a crafty sort and good with poisons. So she kills nearly every except Jason, including her own children. So I guess the lesson here is two-fold: even heroes, or especially heroes, can be womanizing jerks and one should never be that level of womanizing douche if one wants to avoid mass poisonings. In any case, like the anti-Odysseus stuff I've run into in other plays, it really bums me out to see the great classical heroes fall so low. I think that was part of Euripides' evil plan from thes tart, the bastard.

Helen is another one of those wacky Trojan War retcons. Apparently, the Helen that ran off to Troy is a fake made by Aphrodite who was actually incapable of forcing Helen to love Paris, owing to Helen's extreme virtue. Virtuous and chaste Helen, that really is something new. Hermes hid the real Helen in Egypt, under the protection of the Egyptian king. Her husband and the fake Helen get shipwrecked in Egypt on the way back from the war. Well, her husband, Menelaus, meets the real her. The fake Helen poofs into nothingness. And this would be fine and dandy except the old Egyptian king is actually dead and the new one wants to marry Helen at any cost. So, Menelaus is stranded there, in rags, with only his sword and handful of battered men, and facing off against the king of Egypt. He refuses to accept defeat because to lose to anyone other than the Trojans would dishonor the Trojans and the Trojans were such a worthy enemy that Menelaus finds that idea utterly repulsive and counter to the natural order of the world. So a wacky plan is hatched and they manage to get away with a stolen ship. The shipwrecked husband who can't get home and the faithful wife are a trope that's supposed to belong to Odysseus and his wife Penelope. But I guess with the new age of the evil Odysseus that trope was up for grabs again. On the Menelaus side, it works well enough. Helen seems like a pretty weird choice as a Penelope replacement, thus the need for the crazy Hermes theft and the clone Helen. Was there really no better couple to take on this idea?

Cyclops is actually a satyr play. No, I didn't misspell satire. The concept is actually related to weird, horny goatmen. This story is basically the classic story of Odysseus and the cyclops. Except everyone is drunk, there is a limitless amount of wine fit for the gods, and there are a bunch of satyrs. Things play out like they're supposed to except the satyrs escape with Odysseus and there are way more sex jokes, including one where the satyrs basically ask Odysseus if the entire Greek army got a chance to rape Helen. Stay classy, Euripides. The idea was to provide something comic and light-hearted to take the edge off after a series of tragic plays. Normal comedies wouldn't actually work because they, as we'll soon find out, have a lot of bitter social criticism that just makes everyone kind of hate the world.

Euripides and Insanity

2012-09-06T01:37:00-04:00

Status: published

Next up is the fourth volume of Euripides, including:Herakles, Phoenician Women, and Bacchae. Yeah, onlythree in this volume so I would say it is the shortest volume of Euripides butthe physical book is actually like an inch taller than the others. This made menotice that there are a lot of little discrepancies between the various volumesin the set. They look a little weird lined up on a shelf. What the hell, OxfordUniversity Press? But if I just wanted something that looked pretty on theshelf, I probably would have bought the real Great Books series.

Herakles is a pretty strange play. Especially since I did notrealize that the wife and kids in this play are separate from the wife and kidsfound in other Hercules plays until after I finished reading it. Which is alittle awkward since the two other plays I'm thinking of involve the death ofHercules at the hands of his wife and the survival of his children after hisdeath while this play is all about how Hera makes Hercules go crazy and murderhis entire family. After he recovers his wits, he decides he wants to killhimself. But good old Theseus, freshly rescued from Hades, is there to talk himout of it. I guess he gets over it because all these dead people aren't reallymentioned in those other two plays which are later chronologically. He alsotakes a third wife after he dies and becomes a god. Incidentally, once he dies,he is in both Hades and Olympus due to his half-mortal/half-divine nature. Histen labors are also commonly explained to have become twelve because two of theoriginals "didn't count". His sidekick is also quite variable. I'm skepticalthat Hercules' story was ever as cohesive and monolithic as these playwrightsportray. I suspect they, or their literary predecessors, just crunched a bunchof oral tales into a somewhat cohesive whole. In any case, Hercules' reactionat the end is very moving. And Madness herself basically calling Hera bitch forwhat she was doing is pretty awesome.

Phoenician Women is possibly my favorite play so far. It haselements from all of the Oedipus plays, Seven Against Thebes,Iphigenia at Aulis, nearly any play with slave women, and so manymore. It's like an action-packed summary of half of Greek Tragedy. I reallywant to see this play staged someday. It takes place shortly after Oedipusgouges out his eyes but is still before he has left the city and continuesuntil Antigone tries to bury her slain brothers. The Phoenician women of thetitle actually have very little relevance to the overall play. I would say thisis a definite must read, with the caveat that it may not really have the samethrill for someone who hasn't read most of all the other tragedies. It is apretty sweet payoff for all that work though.

Bacchae is one of Euripides' more famous plays. So I kind of wentinto this one with high expectations. In short, Bacchus shows up to Thebes,place of his birth, and tries to force them into worshiping as the god that heis, his father being Zeus. His scheme, successful in the end, mostly revolvesaround stealing all the women and getting them to dance drunkenly in themountains. It's a little silly. It is probably a lot more entertaining staged,what with all the drunken dancing women. As a read, I didn't much enjoy it. Butultimately Euripides' track record is still pretty solid with me, so I don'treally mind.

One more volume of Greek Tragedy to go, folks!

Hippolytos, the most fucked up play ever. And some other plays, too.

2012-09-01T03:12:00-04:00

Status: published

Next up is yet another volume of Euripides. This volume's plays are:Hippolytos, Children of Herakles, Suppliant Women,and Ion.

Hippolytos is one of the more fucked up things I've ever read.Basically, Aphrodite gets annoyed that Hippolytos is a merry virgin and favoredby Artemis, the virgin huntress. So she decides to make his stepmother fallmadly in love with him. Despite Aphrodite's trickery, the stepmother knows thatthis is all a really bad idea. But a nurse tells Hippolytos what is going on.And he flies into a rage, saying horrible things about women along the way. Forexample, "Damn you! I hate women. I'll never stop loathing them. Some say I'minsatiably hostile--but women are insatiably lewd. Either convert them tochaste decency--or allow me to stomp on them till I'm dead." The stepmotherhangs herself. And a suicide note that she may or may not have actually writtenclaims that Hippolytos raped her. His dad comes home and exiles him. There's achariot crash. He's near death. Then Artemis shows up to set the recordstraight. But she can't help Hippolytos because Zeus has forbidden it,apparently. But she did pledge to go riddle one of Aphrodite's favorites fullof arrows. I'm really just scratching the surface here. Read it yourself andprepare to be dumbfounded.

Sons of Herakles is pretty straightforward. Some big meany hastaken over Herakles' kingdom and exiled his sons. They are in the protection ofHerakles' nephew, Iolaos. They convince the Athenians to help them out. There'sa battle. The Athenians win. Everyone lives happily ever after. Not verytragic. But Aristotle hadn't invented the definition of tragedy yet so that'sokay.

Suppliant Women is basically the same story as Sons ofHerakles but the sons are replaced by the mothers of the commanders whoattacked Thebes in Seven Against Thebes. Creon wont release theirbodies to be buried. The Athenians come to the rescue again and everyone liveshappily ever after. These plays probably made their Athenian audience reallyfeel good about themselves.

Finally, there's Ion. Ion is a priest of Apollo who doesn't knowwho his parents are. But he ends up reunited with his mother and some guy istricked into thinking that he's the father despite the fact that Apollo isactually Ion's father. And none of this comes as any surprise whatsoeverbecause Hermes explains everything in the first two pages. I'd stronglyrecommend giving this one a miss.

Just two more volumes of tragedy to go, awooh!

Euripides, Trojan Sympathizer

2012-08-23T00:39:00-04:00

Status: published

Backtracking a little, due to the previously mentioned shippinginconsistency, I've now read the first volume of Euripides. It includesAndromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women, andRhesos. I'm going to keep this post brief.

The first three plays all deal with women of Troy after the fall of Troy.Basically, after all the men are killed, the women are taken as loot. Sometimesthey are even just piled on the loot carts alongside the inanimate loot. Itmakes the Greeks look pretty bad on the surface. But at the very leastEuripides himself was certainly sympathetic to their plight. These wouldn't beeffective tragedies if there weren't some sympathy there. The plays even show agreat deal of sympathy for the Trojans generally, not just the captured women.For example, a nice bit from Trojan Women: "Now think about theTrojans. Consider how they have by far the greater glory: they died defendingtheir homeland. And those the spear cut down were carried home by loved oneswho by right prepared the corpses for burial and buried them in their ancestralearth's embrace. And those who fought and lived found comfort day by day atday's end with their wives and children, pleasures the Greeks no longer knew.And even Hector, you think his fate so terrible and cruel? Listen, the truthis, though he's dead and gone, he wouldn't be the Hector that he is to all theworld now if the Greeks had stayed home. If they had not invaded, who wouldhave known or seen how brave he was? And Paris too--whom would he have married?Not Zeus' daughter, but some nameless wife!" When's the last time our societyever did anything but spit on our defeated enemies?

The odd man out here is Rhesos. Rhesos is a Trojan ally from Thracewho got caught up battling some Scythians. Coming in at the end of the war, hecould have easily turned the tide with his great army. Unfortunately, his firstnight there, Odysseus manages to sneak into the camp and kill him. His armygoes home. Oh well.

Euripides Retcons the Orestia

2012-08-12T16:43:00-04:00

Status: published

So, my new UPS driver has decided that he only likes delivering one packageat a time. So if I have, say, three packages coming in a day, things get alittle complicated. UPS always flags these delays as "external factors". Butit's totally just the UPS driver not searching for my packages in the truckproperly. I work from my home office pretty much all the time so I can usuallyjust harass him into grabbing my other packages when he arrives now that I knowwhat is going on.

What does any of that have to do with the great books of Westerncivilization? Well, long story short, my next few books arrived out of order.Rather than waiting around to get the first volume of Euripides, I just startedon the second volume.

This volume starts with Euripides own version of Electra. Ingeneral, the story is basically the same as ever. Electra is unhappy with beinga women and wants to get all stabby until Orestes shows up. Then Orestes savesthe day. The only major difference in this version is that Electra has beenmarried off by Aigisthos, her mother's lover and co-conspirator in Agamemnon'sfather. He married her to a farmer. His reasoning was that it would keep herfrom finding some noble lover who could help her get revenge. The poor farmer,fearing that Orestes would kill him when he gets back, never touches Electra inany remotely sexual fashion. When Orestes shows up, he thinks that the farmer'sbehavior bespeaks a hidden nobility that sometimes crops up among those ofbaser birth. It's good news for us filthy peasants that that is even possible.But Orestes still marries Electra off to his best friend. Oh well.

Then there's Iphigenia in Tauris. So, if you'll recall, the allegedreason Agamemnon's wife killed him in the first place was because he hadsacrificed their daughter Iphigenia because some prophet told him the godsdemanded it if they were to get the winds needed to make it to Troy. As itturns out, she was actually swapped at the last second by the goddess Artemisfor either an animal or the god Pan in animal form. She was then sent off to bea priestess in some barbarian land. Through a wacky series of bizarre demandsfrom the gods, Orestes ends up unintentionally stumbling upon his long lostsister and rescues her. All that trouble and the girl had been safe the wholetime. The end.

Euripides Orestes fills in the gaps between the murder ofClytemnestra by Orestes and his eventual exile during which he is chasedrelentlessly by the Furies. During these few days, Orestes is mostly catatonicfrom grief. But he recovers shortly after the opening of the play. Now, otherplays tell us seemingly conflictingly that Orestes is either exiled or chasedoff by Furies after the murder of his mother. As it turns out, both are true.And the reason for his exile isn't just that he killed his mother. No, there'smore. Shortly after Orestes' recovery, Agamemnon's brother Menelaos and hiswife Helen show up to morn the death of Clytemnestra who is Helen's sister andthus Menelaos' sister-in-law twice over. Orestes begs for Menealos' help indealing with the people's anger over the murder of Clyemenestra. He saysthere's no suppressing a whole city of angry people. So Orestes is forced toflee. But before he does, he gets some revenge for Menealos' refusal. He killsHelen, just sort of on his way out the door. It's pretty intense and sudden. Ilike it.

Finally there's Iphigenia at Aulis. This play is pretty amazing.The dialogue is intense. The plot has a rapid succession of interestingdevelopments. The story is basically that of Iphigenia's "sacrifice" as a childto please the gods. It opens with Agamemnon having second thoughts about thewhole plan. Before the start of the play, he had written a letter toClytemnestra. The letter states that Iphigenia is to be married to Achilles andthat she should be sent to Agamemnon's army immediately. He has composed asecond letter which tells her to ignore the first. He sends his slave off withthe letter. Menealos intercepts the slave and flips out on Agamemnon. Aftermuch arguing, Menelaos eventually sees that killing a child just to get Helenback in pretty monstrous. But the two of them come to the conclusion that ifthey don't do it, Odysseus will use their inaction as a means to seize controlof the army. This is a pretty impressive change in character for a fellow whohad to be tricked into joining the campaign. As with Sophocles' Odysseus, Ican't say I much hold with this notion of Odysseus as some kind ofMachiavellian monster. It just does not fit with the Homeric stuff at all. TheGreeks are just grasping for their Loki. So they decide to go through with it.Then Iphigenia shows up, along with Clytemnestra, which Agamemnon stupidly didnot expect. Before long, Achilles bumps into Clytemnestra and she beginsfawning over her son-in-law to be. Except Achilles has no idea what the hell isgoing on. When they figure it out, Achilles is angered that his name has beenused in treachery and that someone wants to kill an innocent girl. So he vowsto defend the girl with his life. But soon the camp learns of the plan and thegods' wishes. They openly revolt against Achilles, even his own Myrmidons. Thesituation is defuse when Iphigenia decides that she wants to be sacrificed.Through a very heart-wrenching speech, she explains that if she lets herself besacrificed, she can basically take credit for the destruction of Troy. Everyoneis persuaded, even Achilles. Achilles goes as far to insist that he never wantsto marry any woman who isn't just like Iphigenia. The sacrifice goes forward.Iphigenia is swapped for what appears to be a deer. And everyone sees this.Even Clytemnestra knows the truth. This play kind of undermines the whole "Ikilled my husband because he killed our daughter" bit, leaving her as justbasically evil. Oops.

Overall, I find Euripides a much better read than Sophocles and worldsbetter than Aeschylus. Euripides has really toned down the chorus such that hisplays resemble modern plays a great deal and thus are much more accessible inwritten form. It's worth giving Euripides a shot even if you've read otherGreek tragedies and couldn't stand them.

And to end, here's a classic Euripides joke that some of you may never haveencountered: Euripides goes to the tailor looking to buy a new toga. He trieson one that is far too small and rips it in the process. The tailor says,"Euripides, you-buya-dees."

Sophocles Gets Homeric

2012-08-06T00:51:00-04:00

Status: published

Sophocles' remaining plays all have some connection toHomer's stuff. Unfortunately, they are all horribly depressing and I don'treally have a lot worth saying about them. But I did enjoy them quite alot.

First up is Aias/Ajax. In it, Ajax flips out and goes on amurdering spree because Achilles armor was given to Odysseus rather than him.But Athena, cunt that she is, tricks him with illusions. He ends up killingsome cows and kidnapping the herdsmen. But he's totally convinced that he offedOdysseus. We he figures out what happened, he can't live with the shame anymoreand kills himself. It is such an awful way for Ajax to die. It's like Sophoclesjust wants to up the utter pointlessness of the Trojan war.

Then there's Women of Trachis. Which, despite the name, is aboutHerakles/Hercules. Hercules took some women as loot during one of his crazyadventures. His wife became jealous of one of the slave women. She then useswhat she thinks is a centaur-blood love potion on Hercules' robe. Turns out,the centaur really just told Hercules' future wife that it was a love potionbecause he was bitter that Hercules had just mortally wounded him with anarrow. So, when Hercules puts on the robes, it fucking melts him. Centaur bloodis apparently demi-god-dissolving acid. That's some nasty shit. And a prettyawful way for Hercules to die. On the bright side, we "know" from other"sources" that he just pops up on Mount Olympus and has since spent the rest ofhis immortality having a jolly good time. That's something, I suppose.

Sophocles does his version of the downfall of Agamemnon in Electra.Basically, he retells the time of Orestes' exile from Electra's perspective andsuggests that if Orestes had not shown up when he did, Electra was about toshank a bitch. The story deals heavily with the misery of helpless women. Whileher household falls into depravity, she is unable to actually do anything aboutit because she is a woman (her words, not mine). She has to stand by and donothing. Orestes, in contrast, is off elsewhere and only briefly witnessesElectra's miserable world. He doesn't even have to endure that brief taste ofher misery for long. Unlike Electra, he can just move straight to the goodrevenge bits. I find it kind of surprising that this misery of women due tobeing non-actors is such a rare trope. I guess male authors just don't thinkabout it that much. Other than Sophocles, the only good examples I can think ofare Tolkien's Eowyn and Ophelia of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Finally there is Philoctetes. In Homer's stuff, there is mention ofa guy whom the Greeks had to leave on an island because the snake bite hereceived was so disgusting. Turns out, the guy had a really cool bow andOdysseus decides to go back with the son of Achilles, Neoptolemos, to try tosteal it. This seems to be an early example of Odysseus' transition from wisehero to trickster villain. The Romans knew him mostly as a total bastard.Medieval Europe continued that interpretation. Dante has him in Hell in asection reserved for false counselors. This character assassination is in manyways worse than the previous Homeric hero suicide and acid melting.

In short, Sophocles is a fucking dick.

Sophocles' Theban Plays

2012-07-20T20:27:00-04:00

Status: published

Shimmying down the list brought me to Sophocles. I started off with hisTheban plays, beingAntigone, Oedipus the King (or Rex), and Oedipus atColonus.

Antigone picks up roughly where Aeschylus' Seven AgainstThebes left off. The sons of Oedipus have killed each other. [K|C]reon,Oedipus' brother-in-law/uncle ends up king. Antigone wants to bury both of hersbrother properly but Kreon forbids such a burial for Polyneikes, the brotherwho attacked Thebes. Antigone does it anyway. Kreon has her killed. But, wackytwist, Kreon's son was in love with her and kills himself because he can't livewithout her. To top things off, Kreon's wife offs herself as well when shediscovers that her husband's tyranny has caused so much death. It wascounter-productive to say the least. Basically, the gods really like funeralrights. Kreon got in the way of what the gods want, so bad things had to happento him. That's textbook Greek tragedy. On the bright side, at least the girlwho is her father's sister didn't end up marrying her double-cousin.

Oedipus of Oedipus the King is probably the most famous characterof Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, thanks to Freud, people have some pretty funnyideas about Oedipus' appetites. Oedipus doesn't actually want to kill hisfather and sleep with his mother. This just sort of happens because Apollo saidso. This is unfortunate because Oedipus is generally a pretty awesome king who,before becoming king, saved Thebes from that damned Sphinx in a play that issadly now lost. Rather, Freud argues that the continual retelling ofOedipus-related stories by the Greeks was a symptom of a Greek preoccupationwith murdering one's father and fucking one's mother, a preoccupation thatOedipus himself did not share. He killed his father in self defense. The twodid not recognize each other since Oedipus was abandoned as an infant. And hewas abandoned because his parents heard Apollo's prophecy about what Oedipuswould eventually do. Prophecy's a bitch like that, I guess. In fact, Oedipus isso appalled by what he has done that he gouges out his own eyes when he findsout. And he tries to have himself executed since he had vowed to bring thekiller of the previous king, his father, to justice. His demand for executionis refused and he is later exiled. Now, I can't really fathom Freud's idea thatsome people are preoccupied with fucking their mothers. The father thing,however, makes sense at a lot of points in history. Generally, a prince can'tbecome a king until his father is dead. And poor ancient Roman guys weren'teven real adults until their fathers died. They had no role in politics andcouldn't marry. I can easily see how being a 40-year-old unmarried "adolescent"could induce murderous rage.

Oedipus' exile is told in Oedipus at Colonus. The blind king isescorted by his daughter, that classy dame Antigone. In opposition to Oedipusinsane sons, Antigone is the epitome of virtue. The plot of the play revolvesaround a whacky new prophecy: keeping Oedipus and eventually Oedipus' corpsewould mean prosperity for Thebes. Now, when the Thebans change their mindsabout exiling Oedipus, he has already made it to Colonus, the Athenianequivalent of a suburb. And because the Thebans wouldn't execute him like hewanted and instead exiled him, Oedipus really doesn't give two fucks about whathappens to them. As such, he refuses to go back. So Kreon kidnaps Antigone andOedipus' other, less awesome, daughter. The king of Athens puts a stop to thisnonsense. As repayment, Oedipus blesses Athens by immediately deciding to dienear Athens but where no-one can ever find his corpse. Thus, Athens got all theprosperity and good luck and such that the gods told Thebes they could have. Soif anyone asks why ancient Athens was great, don't say philosophy or democracyor math or any of that stuff. No, it's because they once helped out a blinddude. I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice to the blind; I'm just saying thatthere were likely other factors at play.

Remaining Aeschylus

2012-06-06T02:39:00-04:00

Status: published

Next on my list was [the rest of Aeschylus](\%22http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195373286/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fraver-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0195373286\%22)![\\"\\"](\%22http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fraver-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0195373286\%22){width="\"1\"" height="\"1\""}. The remaining plays being*Persians*, *Seven Against Thebes*, *Suppliants*, and*Prometheus Bound*.

*Persians* is a recounting of a Persian defeat at the hands ofthe Greeks from the perspective of the Persian count when they first hear thenews. Interestingly, Aeschylus was actually present during the conflict and soit is generally assumed that his portrayal of events is at least somewhataccurate. It reads like some elaborate ancient theatrical equivalent oftea-bagging. The only thing that really caught my eye was a brief segment whereit is explained that Persia and Greece are sister nations, born of the sameparentage. Linguistic evidence certainly supports this, Persian and Greek bothbeing Indo-European languages. I just find it somewhat surprising that theywere still vaguely aware of their common ancestry and that they were willing toacknowledge such a kinship with a nation they were continually at war with.

*Seven Against Thebes* is the story of Oedipus' sons' fight forcontrol of Thebes. They were unable to rule together peacefully on account oftheir cursed parentage. The bulk of the play is spent describing who willdefend which of the seven gates against a corresponding number of enemycommanders in elaborate detail. The actual battle is mostly skipped over in thetext. The story resumes after the battle, the defenders having won but the twobrothers having killed one another. Because of the characters involved, Iprobably would have gotten more out of this if I had already read Antigone andthe Oedipus plays first. Fortunately, those are all first up when I move on toSophocles next. On a sad note for any Japanophiles who may read it, however,this play definitely undermines a lot of the claims regarding the stunningoriginality of *Seven Samurai*. But classic literature does that topretty much everything.

*Suppliants* picks up the story of Io, the girl who was turnedinto a cow by Hera so that Zeus wouldn't sleep with her only to have Zeus turnhimself into a bull simply to sleep with her anyway, several generations later.Io had wandered to Egypt in cow form where she was made human again. She hadZeus human-ish child. Several generations later, one of her descendants returnsto Greece with his daughters in order to avoid forced marriages to Egyptiannoblemen who happened to be their cousins. The people of Argos and their kingchoose to defend them when the Egyptians show up and they all presumably livehappily ever after. The story is a pretty strong condemnation of involuntarymarriage. It also serves as a kind of founding myth for Argos as well as anexplanation of Greece's supposed kinship to Egypt.

*Prometheus Bound* opens with, well, the binding of Prometheusin "unbreakable" chains by order of Zeus. Though he helped Zeus in his gloriousrevolution against Cronus and the other Titans, Zeus became enraged whenPrometheus gave mankind knowledge of fire and mastery over his own thoughts.The bulk of the story is told by means of Prometheus recounting his story to Iowho just happened to wander by in cow form. Zeus is described as something of apower-mad tyrant and a fool who would not have won against the Titans withoutPrometheus' advice. Given how strongly this clashes with normal depictions ofZeus, even Aeschylus' own depictions in his other plays, I really wonder howwell this played with its contemporary audience. On the surface it seems likeblasphemy. But can a society that continually reworks the stories of its godsas popular entertainment really have a sense of blasphemy like us sillymoderns? Probably not.

The Oresteia

2012-05-03T05:43:00-04:00

Status: published

Next up on the list was Aeschylus' Oresteia. In summary, it is a trilogyof plays recounting Agamemnon's death, his son Orestes seeking vengeance, andthen Orestes seeking absolution by a court of law convened by the goddessAthena. I chose a translation from a new series from Oxford University Press.It is a verse translation. I'm usually more of a fan of literal prosetranslations but I found this edition surprisingly readable and sensical. Andit definitely livens up the Chorus sections of the plays.

On the topic of the Chorus sections, they do certainly need livening up.Whenever possible, it is preferable to see a play rather than read it. This istrue of all theater, not just ancient Greek theater. You simply lose too manyelements reading the text alone. The Chorus, for example, would have originallyinvolved singing and dancing. On the page, you lose that and are instead leftwith large, long-winded sections of the play that seem to convey veryinformation per line and generally just bog the play down. Unfortunately,unless some serious revival of Greek theater happens, the text is the best mostof us will ever get.

And regarding the actual narrative, the first two plays of the trilogy,being Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, do little to fleshout the story beyond what was summarized in passing in the TheOdyssey. It is a simple retelling with little embellishment. Keep in mind,however, that The Odyssey had already been an established part of theGreek canon for approximately 600 years and it is unlikely thatOresteia was even the first to revisit the fate of Agamemnon and hishousehold. And even today, adaptations of known stories are often balked atwhen they try to stay as true to the original as possible. This was likely trueto at least some degree in Aeschylus' time.

The final play in the trilogy, The Eumenides is definitely thecreative heart of the trilogy. It deals with the practical and ethical issuessurrounding revenge, polytheism, and "zero tolerance" punishment. Agamemnonkilled his daughter, his wife killed him, his son killed her, and then theFuries attempt to kill him. Seeking one's own justice simply encourages othersto do the same, potentially creating an endless web of retributions, ashappened in several cities in Renaissance Italy and the medieval IcelandicCommonwealth. Such a cycle could even grown into a civil war. The more powerfulthe parties involved, the more dangerous revenge is to the social order.Humanity's solution for this problem seems to typically be the creation ofcourts. And with the help of the goddess Athena, Orestes is able to receive ajudgement and end the revenge cycle.

The trial reveals a practical problem of polytheism: the god Apollo advisedOrestes to kill his own murder while the Furies outright condemn the slaying ofany mother. Morality is not uniform across the pantheon. What pleases one godmay displease another. And before you know it, the gods are divided and you arestuck fighting besieging Troy for a decade. On the other hand, acknowledgingthe fickleness of the gods as a whole does a lot to undermine any potentialtheocracy and the influence of augurs on political matters.

The Furies have something of a zero tolerance policy for matricide. If youkill your mother, revenge ghosts will hunt you down and kill you. This soundsfairly reasonable at first. Why kind of sick bastard kills his own mother? Thecomplication lies in the fact that it does not matter how awful of a person themother may have been. This effectively leaves children no recourse against evilmothers. The point Aesychlus makes, through his characterization of Athena, isthat circumstances and motive matter in judging a crime.

A Brief Introduction

2012-04-28T08:51:00-04:00

Status: published

So, I've set out to read the long list of the most significant works in theWestern canon as judged by the venerable Mortimer J. Adler. I have two majorreasons for doing this: First, you cannot take part in the great discussions ofthe Western Civilization(tm) without familiarizing yourself with the backgroundfirst. Second, most of this stuff, in my opinion, is just fun to read. I willnot, however, be reading the editions in Adler's Great Books of the WesternWorld series. This is primarily because the editions in that set were limitedby the cost of reprinting rights which resulted in a generally inferiorselection compared to what one might buy individually.

The Odyssey

2012-04-28T07:16:00-04:00

Status: published

Next up on the list is the Odyssey. This was actually my first time aroundfor this one. It has been a long time coming. This being my first time, I optedfor the more traditional Fagles translation: The Odyssey Also, while StephenMitchell is planning an edition of the Odyssey, it doesn't have a release dateyet. And the repetition of the Odyssey seems a lot milder than that of theIliad, thus somewhat lessening the effect of Mitchell's approach. Anyway, inroughly the same rambling format of the Iliad entry, onward!

The Odyssey consist of about one third in which Telemachus tries to find outwhat happened to his father, Odysseus, who never made it back from the TrojanWar despite having survived the war which ended about ten years before theopening of the Odyssey, one third in which Odysseus tries to get home, and onethird in which Odysseus is back home and masquerading as a hobo in order tobetter murder all the guys hanging around his house trying to get into hiswife's pants. This provides ample opportunity to discuss the relationshipbetween a host and his guests or a lord and his suppliants. Sometimes thecommentaries are quite overt, "The rights of suppliants are sacred." And it isalso stated that Zeus is the zealous defender of said rights. Other times, thenature of the relationship is merely demonstrated as in the case of the suitorswho hang around eating all of Odysseus' food while he's away. Their deaths atthe hands of Odysseus suggest that greedy guests who overstay their welcome arelikely to get a good stabbing. I had one professor, J- M-, who always insistedthat, combined, the Iliad and Odyssey taught a Greek everything there was toknow about life. Not being an ancient Greek, I can't really say whether or notthese works succeeded; as a modern reader, it seems obvious that the author(s)at least made a damn good try of it. On the other hand, aren't wandering blindpoets often guests of a sort? If so, the Odyssey provides some pretty stronghints that gifts and booze are expected.

Telemachus is quite interesting compared to certain other youngIndo-European heroes. Other heroes, like Sigurd and Cuchulain are described ashaving exceptional features when they are children, such as flowing beards orsuper-human strength. Telemachus is a teenager by this point of the story, justbarely reaching adulthood. But he is unable to deal with the suitors occupyinghis household. He's not a great hero who can hold back dozens of men all byhimself. He cannot even pull back his father's bow. But this is seen as okay.Odysseus, Menelaus, Nestor--still alive but finally taking it easy after 120 ormore years--and others acknowledge that Telemachus is well on the way to beingthe equal of his father. This may seem perfectly natural to the modern reader,but having read other Indo-European epics, I was kind of shocked by thisrealistic concept that even heroes need time to mature and grow into their fullstrength.

Overall, I found the Odyssey to be a much more "modern" work than Iexpected. By that I mean the story was far less repetitive and much moreplot-driven than the Iliad. Further, its story is non-linear in that much of itis told in parallel, switching between Telemachus and Odysseus duringoverlapping time periods. Scholars often tout the Iliad's "revolutionary"method of beginning the story in media res. However, that assertionentirely ignores the fact that the Iliad is just a single story in the largerEpic Cycle, most of which is now lost to us outside of the Iliad and Odyssey.But who knows what counted as a truly revolutionary literary device then? Ourknowledge of Greek oral literature before the Epic Cycle is very limited and weare almost entirely ignorant about its proto-Indo-European precursors. Thepeace-time setting of the story also helps prevents one of the Iliad's majorproblems: introducing characters simply so that they can be murdered. To extentthe suitors present a similar problem but the named suitors are kept to two orthree and they pop up frequently enough that they do have some definitecharacter to them. It may not be a lot, but it is certainly more thanTrojan-dude, son of Trojan-dude, who gets stabbed through the nipple at the endof the paragraph.

I guess that's about it. Surprisingly, I didn't find the Odyssey nearly asthought provoking as the Iliad. But damn if it wasn't way more fun, and theIliad was pretty fun in itself.

The Iliad

2012-04-28T07:03:00-04:00

Status: published

This is my second time reading the Iliad, having read through it under theguidance of one Professor D- R-. during my undergrad years. Since this was mysecond time through, I picked a new, rather unorthodox edition "translated" byStephen Mitchell (not the Old Norse guy at Harvard): The Iliad: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) I put the word "translated"in quotes because Mitchell may not actually know Homeric Greek at all. In anycase, this edition is based on some real scholarly work which has tried toexcise the repetitive and superfluous parts which have crept into the story asa side effect of the story's original oral nature. Under normal circumstances,I would say that all that cruft is fairly essential to understanding Homer andepic poetry in general. Without it, you can't really have a good discussionabout orality and Homer is the only author in the Great Books who straddles theworlds of oral and written transmission. This is partly because the Great Booksentirely ignores medieval Scandinavian literature which occupies a similarspace in the oral versus written spectrum as Homer. The reasoning behind thisomission being that while the Western canon influenced Scandinavian literature,Scandinavian literature did not really influence the Western canon. But since Ihave personally spent many years obsessing about issues of orality, it was kindof refreshing to give the Iliad another look without wondering whether or notAchilles is "swift-footed" for narrative or metrical purposes in any giveninstance. This allow me to concentrate more on the larger, more enduringthemes, or "ideas", as Adler would call them. But if this is your first timereading the Iliad, definitely go with a more traditional translation like theFagles: The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Being set in the middle of the Trojan War, war itself is obviously a majortheme in the Iliad. It depicts a time when every soldier had a name and lineageknown both by his compatriots and his enemies. Kings and commanders led theirtroops personally. Each loss was mourned and every corpse recovered wheneverpossible. But as much as the armies valued the corpses of their own, theyequally reveled in the desecration and looting of the corpses of the enemy. Onecan easily see how either practice increases the necessity of the other. It wasalso a time of an emphasis on one-on-one combat. There's even a point wherethey try to decide the whole outcome of the war based on the results of asingle duel, only to be thwarted by the intervention of the goddess Aphrodite.They also had a clear and simple objective: retrieve Helen. While this type ofwarfare may very well never have been an accurate depiction of Greek warfare atany stage of development, one cannot help but feel that, corpse desecrationaside, this is how wars ought to be fought. Today, our ruling class takes nopart in warfare. The ability to declare war and the responsibility to do theactual fighting are wholly divorced from one another. We box up our dead by thehundreds and thousands, giving a handful a tiny mention once in a while. Theenemy dead are wholly anonymous in their staggering hundreds of thousands. Wedon't dedicate our entire army to a decade of conflict just to overcome theenemy's defenses. We casually fight multiple wars at a time, crushing the enemyin a matter of weeks, and then insanely linger for years because we had noclear reason or purpose for fighting the war in the first place, thus deprivingus of the ability to determine whether or not we had achieved that purpose. Warhas become both easy and pointless. Afghanistan started out straightforwardenough: revenge. But then we wholly lost of sight of the objective and onlyachieved it a decade later. And having lost sight of the objective, actuallyachieving it had little effect on our decision to stay or leave. Iraq wasutterly pointless. One might argue that it was an attempt to tie up loose endsfrom the Gulf War. But why did we even fight that war? Some argue it was aboutoil and profiteering. Except virtually none of the oil resources ended up inAmerican hands and what little did nowhere near compensated us for the cost ofthe war. Honestly, I'd prefer shameless pillaging and annexation to that weirdclusterfuck of a war.

One curious thing about the text is that it takes place in a semi-mythicalpast, straddling between the worlds of pure fable and actual history, much inthe way that it straddles oral and written culture. While the modern scholarlyopinion is that the Trojan War happens, the Iliad has links to a more obscurepast. Nestor is arguably the strongest of these links. By the time of the war,Nestor is well over a hundred years old. He survives from the time of theArgonauts and the War Against the Centaurs. Even in his old age, he is one ofthe mightiest Greek warriors, out-matched by only some of the other commanders.He often laments that his abilities are not what they once were and that men ingeneral were not as great as the men of a generation or two before. It isplausible that a youthful Nestor, being from this mythological past age ofgreater men, would severely overshadow all others in the war. Without hobblingNestor with old age, these two eras could not overlap with any plausiblenarrative consistency. Even the mighty half-god Achilles falls short of therenowned half-god of Nestor's generation, Hercules. I'm not really sure ifthere is any deeper significance to this but I definitely have a soft spot forstories of old heroes long past their prime. Though, perhaps Nestor simplyserves as a reminder that the old were not always so and that the frailty ofold age can mask a past of ability surpassing that of those that cameafter.

Perhaps the most overt theme of the Iliad is the danger of immodest anger.Achilles remains out of the fighting for most of the story because of his angerat Agamemnon. Further, he leverages his influence with his goddess mother toget Zeus to punish the Greeks, Achilles' own people, because of this anger. TheGreeks are nearly utterly destroyed, overwhelmed so suddenly at one point thatretreating on their ships was simply not feasible. Achilles only returns to thefighting because his cousin/bestfriend/secret gay lover takes pity on hisfellow Greeks and enters the fight without Achilles, only to be killed byHector. In the end, Achilles and Agamemnon are reconciled. Achillesacknowledges at length that his anger ultimately achieved nothing. Many Greeksdied needlessly and the extent of his anger prevented him from acceptingreparations from Agamemnon when they were offered. Anger in itself achievesnothing. Simply being angry wont fix the problem that originally inspired theanger. And holding on to that anger in defiance of any attempt to amelioratethe situation only harms the angered party.

It is hard to know what to make of the gods in the Iliad. Taken literally,the gods overtly intervene at nearly every stage of the conflict. Theyphysically stand beside warriors and deflect spears. They pull wounded soldiersfrom the fighting. Zeus hurls lightning bolts at the Greeks. This can seemsomewhat jarring to a modern audience. What is the point of man's choices andfree will if the gods consistently dictate fate so blatantly? Achilles knowsfull well that he will die after killing Hector. Hector likewise knows when hisend approaches. Fate seems fixed. Perhaps the literal interpretation is thewrong one? Rather than a god physically deflecting spears, perhaps a spearmisses in the normal way and it must be attributed to a god out of a beliefthat the gods are responsible for all things? And the seeming immutability ofAchilles' fate may merely be a symptom of the literary mode, prophecy beingmerely a crude form of foreshadowing, not a reflection of general Greek beliefsabout fate.

On a minor note, this translation opted to describe the two Ajaxes as "Ajaxthe Tall" and simply "Ajax". It also tried very hard to keep the two Ajaxesfrom being confused. In some translations, the impression is that Ajax the Tall(usually Ajax the Greater) is the one doing all the great deeds while the otherAjax (usually Ajax the Lesser) is some kind of lame sidekick. In thistranslation, the impression is more that they are both total badasses and oneof them just happens to be tall. This definitely improves the Ajax/Ajaxdynamic, in my opinion.