Truthseekers and an accomplished liar

While we are on break for the summer, I've enjoyed a couple of Dante-related resources which might be of interest.

While Dante had no access to most of Greek Philosophy, he clearly had some sense of Aristotle. I happened upon a set of lectures on Greek philosophy that are unusually fine. Professor David Roochnik of Boston University does more than survey some 400 years of Greek thought -- he interrogates it, and tracks how successive thinkers revise, refine, and recast the work of their predecessors. Murky guys like Parmenides, whose poetic works are in ruin, emerge with a clarity that seems true to the complexity and context of their approaches.

The course, Introduction to Greek Philosophy, is available from The Teaching Company. Roochnik is superb on Aristotle, and readers of Dante will benefit from his reading. But each of his predecessors from Thales to Plato receives the same high level of attention.

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Sententiae Antiquae has long been a favorite classics blog. Given that Ulysses remains a most compelling, enigmatic predecessor to the the poet of the Commedia even to the highest reaches of Paradiso, today's post about the Greek hero's contrived tales is both instructive and a pure joy. As a reminder of Homer's brilliance in portraying the multi-layered lies his hero tells -- through an analysis of his calculated fictions found in the Scholia -- it gives us one more example of the degree of human genius against which Dante chose to measure his poem, and his wholly other vision of heroic challenge and triumph.

  

Contesting worldviews, interpreted via their own legacy

Has the ancient world become the meme of the moment? Following fast upon Mary Beard's book, the WSJ offers yet another review shared by Jutta. The book is The Cave and the Light by Arthur Herman. According to reviewer Roger Kimball:

Mr. Herman takes the reader on a rollicking trip from classical Athens to 21st-century New York to make the case that "everything we say, do, and see" has been shaped—"in one way or another"—by the ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

The book covers a good deal of later ground in its 675 pages. Later in the review, the age-old contrast of the two philosophers is sketched out:

Early on, Mr. Herman cannily observes that "one of the most crucial differences" between Plato and Aristotle is that Plato is backward-looking, Aristotle forward-looking. It is striking, for example, that Plato should describe knowledge as a sort of anamnesis, "recollection." There is something deeply nostalgic about Platonism: homesickness elevated to metaphysical longing. Aristotle, though, is at home in this world. "All men by nature desire to know," he says at the beginning of the "Metaphysics," "and the proof of this is the delight we take in our senses." For Aristotle, the senses don't so much beguile us, as in Plato, as they provide a window on the world and hence a means of liberation.

And of interest to us, in light of the Hippolytus's obsessive concern with the word:

. . . what makes "The Cave and the Light" so enjoyable is Mr. Herman's command of that most uncommon virtue, common sense. "Balance"—what Aristotle called sophrosune—stands at the top of his list of virtues. And although he insists that sanity and balance require the spiritualizing impetus of Plato as well as the pragmatic outlook of Aristotle, it is clear that he harbors a partiality for the latter.

 Another notice of the book is here, courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute,with a lecture by the author. 

Euripides and Aristotle palimpsests found

ancient texts in medieval manuscripts

Using cutting-edge technology, European scientists have uncovered new fragments by Euripides and an unknown ancient commentary on Aristotle. These writings were on parchments that were washed off and overwritten in medieval times.  

Using advanced multispectral imaging methods, the Palamedes project, based out of the Universities of Göttingen and Bologna were able to see the original writings in the manuscripts, one of which is located at the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem, while the other can be found at the National Library of France in Paris. 

More here.

Moderation is less easy than it sounds

πολλὰ διδάσκει μ᾽ ὁ πολὺς βίοτος:

χρῆν γὰρ μετρίας εἰς ἀλλήλους

φιλίας θνητοὺς ἀνακίρνασθαι 255

καὶ μὴ πρὸς ἄκρον μυελὸν ψυχῆς,

εὔλυτα δ᾽ εἶναι στέργηθρα φρενῶν

ἀπό τ᾽ ὤσασθαι καὶ ξυντεῖναι.

Nurse: My long life has taught me many lessons: mortals should not mix the cup of their affection to one another too strong, [255] and it should not sink to the very marrow of the soul, but the affection that binds their hearts should be easy to loosen, easy either to thrust from them or to bind tightly.

In the simple imagery of the mixing bowl and the knot, the nurse offers a vivid emblem of Sophrosyne, in the received sense of nothing in excess. Our loves must not sink to the marrow of the soul -- μυελὸν ψυχῆς -- but should rather be relaxed, like the reins on a horse, able to be pushed away, or tightly drawn in. Images invoking the polarity of looseness / tightness -- of rope, reins, love -- are woven through the play.

To love wisely, for the nurse, is to be in balance: able to love yet to leave. The sense of an affection and an affability that reserves to itself the freedom to be more, or less, as the lover wishes. Love, here, is a mixed wine, neither too potent nor too weak. Interestingly the word she uses for "love" in line 257, στέργηθρα, carries both the sense of "fondness" as of the love of parents for children, and "love charm," suggesting an efficacious influence or power to which one might succumb. 

Thus, instead of easily mixing these elements, the nurse's language holds in suspense two kinds of eros: a love that obeys one's desire, and a desire that one must obey.

The nurse continues in the same vein:

βιότου δ᾽ ἀτρεκεῖς ἐπιτηδεύσεις

φασὶ σφάλλειν πλέον ἢ τέρπειν

τῇ θ᾽ ὑγιείᾳ μᾶλλον πολεμεῖν:

οὕτω τὸ λίαν ἧσσον ἐπαινῶ 265

τοῦ μηδὲν ἄγαν:

καὶ ξυμφήσουσι σοφοί μοι.

Men say that a way of life too unswerving leads more to a fall than to satisfaction and is more hurtful to health. That is why I have much less praise for excess [265] than for moderation. The wise will bear me out.

"Too unswerving" is a fine translation of ἀτρεκεῖς, which can also be translated as "strict, precise, exact." Someone who is too exacting, too stiffly precise, is setting themselves up for a fall. The word for "fall" is σφάλλειν, a word Aphrodite also uses in her opening speech:

τοὺς μὲν σέβοντας τἀμὰ πρεσβεύω κράτη,

σφάλλω δ᾽ ὅσοι φρονοῦσιν εἰς ἡμᾶς μέγα.

I honor those who reverence my power, but I lay low (literally: I trip up) those who think proud thoughts against me.

Those whose wills can't bend will break, as it seems Aphrodite is unswerving in her demand for reverence. We might be advised to treat love lightly, but Love is too exacting to let us walk away. The ideal of self-control breaks upon the quandary of how to find a "moderate course" between Aphrodite and her antithesis, Artemis.

At the beginning and at the end of the Hippolytus, Euripides presents the two poles of love in the form of symmetrical deae ex machinae. Each is absolute, each is the negation of the other. Mortals negotiate the electrically charged space between them. It is in this atmosphere that the various models of Sophrosyne must be taken up, weighed, and examined for viability. The virtue that seemed blandly easy for us to practice in Aristotle's prosaic Ethics is ratcheted up very high in the tragic poetry enacted on Euripides' stage.

An unusual wall painting in Pompeii.

As we've often alluded to the complex relationship of the worldview of the Greeks to that of the Hebrews -- here's a painting found at Pompei that suggests at least an awareness of the Old Testament wisdom books among 1st Century AD Romans:

According to Theodore Feder, the painting depicts the scene of Solomon in judgment, and the two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, and how he decided that case. Feder says it's quite likely that the two figures on the far left, observing the scene, were meant to represent Socrates and Aristotle, thus bringing Hellenic philosophy into the chambers of Israel's wisest king.

Interestingly, Socrates's posture here is not unlike that of a satyr, which is interesting in light of a tradition stemming from Plato's Symposium. In that dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus, an ugly old satyr to all appearances, but one who contains invaluable riches within. Feder's article is here. More on Silenus on the Ovid blog here.

(Thanks to Arline for the pointer to Feder's article.)

Inferno 4

Translated into English terza rima by Peter D’Epiro
[Note: A revised version of this translation was posted on 3.23.15]

A deafening peal of thunder broke the deep
Slumber inside my head and made me start
Like someone forcibly aroused from sleep.
Standing, I let my rested vision dart
Around that place, then fixed my gaze to know
What clue to where I was it could impart.
I stood at the edge of a cliff—down below
There gaped the abysmal vale of suffering, where
The blare of countless shrieks gives voice to woe.
It was dark, and deep, and full of misty air,
And though I peered to plumb its vast extent,
I failed to see a single thing down there.
“To that blind world now let us make descent,”
The poet, deathly pale, began to say;
“See that you follow me.” And I, intent
On learning what his pallor might convey,
Said, “How shall I come if you yourself appear
Frightened, who comfort me in my dismay?”

A few supplemental links for Horace

Horace tacitly assumes his readers will be entirely familiar with Aristotle's Poetics, which he cites, alludes to, and plays off of throughout the Ars Poetica.

Many of the key oppositions in the Ars -- virtus et venus, ordo / facundia, utile / dulce - derive from Aristotle's systematic approach to speech and theater in the Poetics as well as in the Rhetoric.

Here is how the philosopher parses the modes of persuasion:

it has three divisions -- (1) the speaker's power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible (ethos); (2) his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers (pathos); (3) his power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments (logos).

The rich Greek word logos (λόγος) is set in opposition to lexis, the outward form that motions of the soul take when clothed in words. See, in the Poetics, book III, on style. Curiously, even as this distinction becomes a fundamental opposition in the Ars Poetica, its binary terms are actually forms of the same root, as Wikipedia notes:

both words, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb legō (λέγω), meaning "to count, tell, say, speak."

Finally, the question of where poets are supposed to acquire the logos:

To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well. 

            scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. 

leads to Plato:

 The Socratic papers will direct you in the choice of your subjects

For the readers of the Ars Poetica, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the Republic, at the least, would help. Behind the tension between logos and lexis stands the banishment of the poets by the Philosopher King.

Laughable otherworldliness

Apropos the deep association of silliness and philosophy, Mussy points us to this essay by Simon Critchley. A snippet:

"What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly."