The armor of Achilles in Euripides' Electra

Here is the second stanza of the chorus of Euripides' Electra singing the divine delivery of Achilles' new armor:

Χορός

Νηρῇδες δ᾽ Εὐβοῖδας ἄκρας λιποῦσαι
μόχθους ἀσπιστὰς ἀκμόνων
Ἡφαίστου χρυσέων ἔφερον τευχέων,
445ἀνά τε Πήλιον ἀνά τε πρυ-
μνὰς Ὄσσας ἱερᾶς νάπας
†Νυμφαίας σκοπιὰς
κόρας μάτευσ᾽, † ἔνθα πατὴρ
ἱππότας τρέφεν Ἑλλάδι φῶς
450Θέτιδος εἰνάλιον γόνον
ταχύπορον πόδ᾽ Ἀτρείδαις.

Chorus

The Nereids, leaving Euboea's headlands, brought from Hephaestus' anvil his shield-work of golden armor, [445] up to Pelion and the glens at the foot of holy Ossa, the Nymphs' watch-tower . . . where his father, the horseman, was training the son of Thetis as a light for Hellas, [450] sea-born, swift-footed for the sons of Atreus.

Comment:

Euripides' chorus sings of Achilles being educated by Chiron atop Mt. Pelion - a richly suggestive setting. 

It was on this mountain, named after Achilles' father, Peleus, that the wedding of Peleus and Thetis took place, and Eris tossed the fateful apple into the party, generating the Trojan War.

It was also here that Otos and Ephialtes, the giant Aloadae, piled Pelion upon Ossa in their effort to conquer Olympus. Their story involves the kidnapping of Ares, the unprecedented offer of sex from Artemis, and other remarkable moments of divine trickery before the Olympians could prevail.

Below: 

A fresco from Pompeii shows an earlier moment: Thetis comes to Hephaestus to gather the shield and armor for her son:

Thetis comes to Hephaestus

 

A translator's thoughts on making a new Iliad

Arline shared this interview with Caroline Alexander, whose new translation of the Iliad recently was released to high expectations, including her own:

“I know this sounds arrogant,” Ms. Alexander said, but she couldn’t imagine taking on the project “unless you believed you could do a better job.” She spent five years on her translation. Her goal is for her version to become the “translation of record.”

Alexander's discussion of her decisions in this translation are worth reading. Some have to do with diction (lexis):

I worked hard for restraint, and my mantra was “trust Homer, trust Homer.” I knew that if I could find the simple English word for his simple Greek, work for cadence—spoken cadence, not the cadence of “high” poetry—it would work.

Asked about a recent Hollywood treatment featuring Brad Pitt, she moves to another level of the work of the translator -- this not so much on the lexical level as on the level of thought (logos):

I didn’t watch the whole film. But I did see his first big kill in the opening 10 minutes. A stunning bit of stunt-work, very athletic and adroit, and totally un-Achillean. It implied that Achilles’ greatness as a warrior lay in his skill. Having just finished working on a documentary about tigers, I would venture that confronting Achilles would be more like coming face-to-face with a tiger than with a tricky swordsman.

This too is reading -- translating lived experience and that of the poem into a new vernacular of living images.

A bit of knitting

It might be useful to bring together at this point a few of the many rich threads we've been following over the past year or so. The David story in Samuel is clearly about change -- from local tribal rule to the establishment of a nation under a king, for one.

We've talked about some parallels and differences between the Biblical narrative and Homer: Saul-David and Achilles-Odysseus.

In Plutarch we read the lives of Cato, Caesar and Alexander – all three narratives concerned central characters caught up in resisting, or bringing about, large scale changes to the state, society, and government. These stories involved relationships to power, human and divine.

· Cato – the quasi-prophet citizen who saw the inevitability of what flowed from Caesar. Critic of accumulated power. Shepherd of the common people.

· Caesar – agent who effected, but did not live to administer, the transition from Republic to Imperium. Gambler ("Toss the dice high"), strategist, huge risk taker, always calculating.

· Alexander – king who conquered and seduced kings, queens, all the powers of the known earth into the fragile harmony of the cosmos.

And in Plato we've looked at the vision of the philosopher king, whom we might at some point contrast with David, the warrior-poet king. (Something to think about: Plato intends to banish the poets, while David is Israel's chief poet.)

But the overarching story told in Samuel traces the transition from a loose confederation of tribes instructed and governed by priests, judges and perhaps prophets to the establishment of a house – a royal dynasty. What are some of the salient ways in which the basic "plot" of the Bible tale differs from those of Plutarch? The relation of human civil order to God in the Bible vs. that order vis a vis the gods of the Greeks and Romans?