Footnotes to the week: Greek readings
What have I been reading this week? I finished The Voyage Home, the most recent in Pat Barker’s wonderful series re-imaging episodes from the Trojan War. This time, it’s Agamemnon’s voyage home after the war, and his death at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, which is re-told (mostly as seen through the eyes of a captive maid to Cassandra, the Trojan princess taken by Agamemnon as a trophy concubine). But you very probably know that, and won’t at all need me to tell you just how good Pat Barker’s trilogy is. So let me say something instead about a different book, which you might not know about.
I am a great admirer of A.E. Stallings poetry — the way her enticing surface formal play with rhyme and metre is married to depth and insight, the way she often gives new life to ancient voices (Persephone, Daphne, Penelope, …) yet her poems “come out of life’s dailiness”. Her This Afterlife: Selected Poems (2022) is full of subtle inventiveness, and — as a reviewer put it — she “demonstrates that in the right poet’s hands, the putative everydayness of the hic et nunc can be transformed into something every bit as rich and strange as even the most ancient myths.”
But you probably know that too! However I only recently noted that Stallings’ had a new book out in April. Her Frieze Frame is on the rich and strange history of the Parthenon Marbles, and how “poets, painters, and their friends framed the debates around Elgin” and his acquisition (or should that be ‘looting’?) of the Marbles. I have just finished this too, and warmly recommend it.
The book began as a short lockdown essay, and has grown to become a quite fascinating scrapbook full of picaresque detail — ridiculous, infuriating, distressing, touching in turn. And as you’d expect, the writing can be wonderful. How about this, on the actress Melina Mercouri who became Greek Minster of Culture, and a passionate advocate for the return of the Marbles: “The Greeks loved her for this campaign and activism, quite apart from her acting; the Acropolis Metro Station is decorated with a famous photograph of her holding a summer bouquet, standing below the Parthenon on the Acropolis, so that she seems of a piece with one of the sturdy corner columns. In her fawn-colored trench coat, the same pale tawny color as the Pentelic marbles, with her weathered statuesque beauty, she could be a Caryatid on holiday, letting the wind run through her faded blonde hair and clutching the fresh flowers of the eternally recurring Greek spring.” Even if you know the basic story, this is just a terrific read.
I mused here a few weeks ago that it would be really good if there were a student-orientated(?) book which “played through some of the greatest hits from logic’s back catalogue” with zip and zest, engendering rather more excitement than e.g. the dutiful efforts in The History of Philosophical and Formal Logic (Bloomsbury 2017). Which got me wondering what an enticing chapter on Aristotle’s logic might look like. So the man himself has provided my other Greek reading this week. Along with a stash of hugely illuminating related articles, in particular by the estimable Jonathan Barnes.
Which has been pretty enjoyable — though it has certainly distracted me from what I was planning to be doing (getting back to updating the Study Guide) while also leaving me even more unsure how you’d do justice to Aristotle in a reasonably short piece.
It did strike me, though, that something that might be fun to do is to it take the often telegraphic lecture-notes that comprise the dozen pages of APr 1,2, 4–7 and — as it were — write out the lectures in a modern-reader-friendly way (or at least lectures as might have been given by a counterpart of Aristotle in some not too remote possible world). A devoted ancient philosophy student, with the translations and lengthy commentaries of Robin Smith and of Gisela Striker to hand (and ideally the original text too), can work things out. However that’s a big ask for someone whose first interest is in logic but who would be intrigued to get a real sense of how things started though without putting in too much time and energy.
A cheering small (very small) moment at the end of week. A mini Amazon review of the category theory book arrives online. “A superb introduction!” OK: I can raise a glass to that.
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