Kindle Notes & Highlights
It behoveth to seek from gods things meet for mortal souls, knowing the things that are in our path and to what portion we are born. Desire not thou, dear my soul, a life immortal, but use the tools that are to thine hand.
Again warning of hubris
farther-shining light than any heavenly star.
Did he literally think that a navigable distance between two lands is greater than the distance between earth and stars?
It’s possible. Maybe he thought of the astral distance as similar to the height of a mountain, which is much more quickly gained than travel to a far land.
Moreover, the fact that a distant land is invisible whereas the stars are visible could give the impression that the stars are relatively close.
But this could just be metaphor.
The immortals deal to men two ill things for one good. The foolish cannot bear these with steadfastness but the good only, putting the fair side forward.
if on any man hath mighty Destiny looked favourably, surely it is on a chief and leader of a people.
they beheld the sons of Kronos sitting as kings on thrones of gold, and they received from them gifts
to lament aloud, when his body was burning in fire.
Instance of burning the dead
Small will I be among the small, and great among the great.
the Hellenic colony of Kyrene in Africa,
Thebes, where Pindar wrote this ode,
B.C. 466, when Pindar was fifty-six years of age,
unsurpassed in his extant works, or indeed by anything of this...
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Zeus Ammon’s
?
mother-city
Like אם used in נביאים אחרונים
Zeus confirmed it with a peal of thunder.
A common trope in movies
bronze-fluked
god, having put on the splendid semblance of a noble man;
earth-embracer,
labour-lightening servants
stranger-wife
the rich Nile-garden of the son of Kronos7.’
Greece imputes Egypt with prosperity much as it thought of Crete as in midos’s golden touch.
Cf biblical garden of eden as possibly a reference to Mesopotamia
at the central stone of tree-clad mother Earth,
brazen
couches,
Poseidon of the Rock,
too ready are the minds of mortal men to choose a guileful gain rather than righteousness,
This includes following fad and unscientific medicine
bronze-edged
Why is bronze mentioned 500 years after the Greece Iron Age.
Maybe the story is meant to have happened earlier while still in the Bronze Age.
But other, seemingly contemporary people are imputed with bronze accoutrement.
even though bronze was a less useful material than steel, maybe it became a celebrated material with a connotation of celebrity and stories heroes by dint of its having been, naturally, associated with the great heroes and celebrities of the bronze age
the Earth-shaker,
Sounds like north. Maybe that’s why he is king of the winds. Maybe north was the strongest of the winds for Greece. Cf above hyperborea was beyond the north wind and prosperous
men both with bright wings shooting from their backs.
sacred lots,
sacred close
red herd of Thracian bulls,
Cf parah adumah
altar of stone with hollo...
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What’s the hollow top for? Is the one in the end of exodus also described as hollow?
dark-faced Kolchians
plough of adamant,
Is this a synonym for steel, esp compared to weaker bronze?
God guide the ruler’s hand.
Proverbs the heart of a ruler is in the hand of the Lord
cave supposed to be a mouth of Hades.
A cave as the entrance to the underground realm of the dead
The purport of this
This speaks to a sense of destiny and divine interest and decree for the development of this polis
Probably a tradition of icebergs survived in this story.
forget not, while at Kyrene round Aphrodite’s pleasant garden thy praise is sung, to set God above every other as the cause thereof:
my own dear famous race[10]:
Thebes? Athens?
who came to Thera, my ancestors,
not without help of God; but a certain d...
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Two themes of wariness from hubris and of divine right
groves of gods,
a paved road[14]
even now perchance they hear, with such heed as remaineth to the dead,
Speculationinto the nature nof the afterlife
golden sword,
Whats golden mean
the favour of God perfecteth his might,
Surely the mighty mind of Zeus guideth the destiny of the men he loveth.
Hashgachah pratees
Pausanias says that Battos, the founder of Kyrene, was dumb when he went to Africa, but that on suddenly meeting a lion the fright gave him utterance.
