Having finished the Odyssey (and still recovering from the coldblooded hanging of the household staff) I returned to Campbell’s Greek Lyric poetry. I have two questions:
First:
κήδεα μεν στoνόεντα, Περίκλεες, ούτε τις αστών
μεμφόμενος θαλίῃς τέρψεται ουδε πόλις
τις ἀστων and πόλις are the subject of this sentence and on the same level. Am I right in taking πόλις as a totum pro parte? …someone/ anyone from the towns nor the city (=someone/ anyone from the city)…
Congratulation on finishing the Odyssey! Now what?
The hanging of the maidens is really something, isn’t it? Not readily reconcilable with our own values. I think there’s a Hollywood film on the Odyssey coming, how much would you bet that they won’t be hanging any maidens in the film?
I take τις αστών to mean individual citizens (ἀστός), πόλις an entire community.
Yes, I think it should be translated about like that, though I don’t think I’d call it accusative of respect. I think this is analogous to the Greek use of neuter adjectives as adverbs, e.g. πολύ, πρῶτον etc – τι “some”, or in this case “at all”. “It’s not a beautiful place by any means”, literally something like “It’s not something of a beautiful place”.
The hanging of the maidens is on par with the human sacrifice during Achilles’ burial in the Iliad, a stark reminder of the difference between ancient Greek culture and ours.
Okay, I hadn’t looked at it in that way. I read it as a juxtaposition of two topographical entities, 'towns/ ἀστός versus ‘city/ πόλις’ → no one in the towns wil frown upon our mourning nor anyone from the city etc…
In your reading the contrast is between individuals and community and, if I understand you correctly, towns and polis actually point to the same thing; i.e. the polis is made up of towns → no one in the towns will frown upon our mourning nor the city-state/ community as a whole etc.
Interesting. I have to think about that.
Right, adverbial accusative it is called if my memory serves me right. It’s not easy though to see the difference with an accusative of respect in this case.
Thanks!
I was lucky enough to find a second hand copy of West’s commentary of Hesiod’s Works and Days for a very reasonable price, so that’s certainly on top of the to read pile for next year.
I think you’re mixing up ἄστυ “city” and ἀστός “citizen”, “city inhabitant”.
ἄστυ → ἄστεων, a strange accentuation which must be due to an analogy with the singular ἄστεως, which in turn comes from an quantitative metathesis of ἄστηος (i.e. the lengths of the last two syllables swapped places but the accent didn’t shift). (I tried googling actually, and ἀστέων is apparently attested in Pindar, so the analogy with the singular accentuation doesn’t occur in all dialects. But still, if ἀστέων were to contract, it would be to ἀστῶν and thus still remain distinct from ἀστών).
There’s one important difference though: Achilles’ human sacrifice is clearly excessive and shows that he has exacted his revenge beyond all moderation, it’s not represented as something we should emulate. The hanging of the maidens, on the other hand, is cool, the bitches had it coming — or that’s how the poet represents it.
According to Campbell the first line is uncertain and he discusses several variants (inter alia τίθει τὰ πάντα, ῥεῖα πάντα), but his version of choice has εἰθεῖ’
Now, I’m probably overlooking something simple here, but what, for crying out loud, is εἰθεῖ’? I thought about the aorist passive of ἱήμι, or some weird form of ἐθω or ἐάω, but it just won’t fit.
Nice fragment by the way, what a great poet and what a pity we have only a fraction of his work.
Don’t spend any more time on trying to figure out the verb form. It’s a crux: as transmitted, the text is unintelligible here. That’s why various scholars have proposed different solutions. But the meaning of the verse is clear.
the exclusive European edition
I managed to smuggle a bootleg copy of that edition into the US so I could read about the human sacrifices. Best lines in the Iliad!
Having to deal with this level of textual uncertainty is new territory for me. Homer is relatively straightforward in this respect, and I didn’t pay much attention anyway to variations in the transmitted text. Things are definitely different in early Greek lyric poetry.
Once again I have a question, this time about fagment 64
How would you translate χάριν δὲ μᾶλλον τοῦ ζοοῦ διώκομεν οἱ ζοοί?
I hesitate between ‘we the living above other things pursue the joy of what is alive’, or ‘we the living rather pursue the favour of who’s alive’. The first option makes it a kind of vitalistic poem (don’t you care about the dead, just enjoy living), the second is more cynical: the reason people don’t care about the dead is because they can’t profit from them. But maybe there are other options.
Oh, and just as an aside: the paperback edition of Campbell’s Greek Lyric Poetry by Bloomsburry is no good at all. The thing is disintegrating under my very eyes.
It’s the second. του ζοου masculine like οι ζοοι, and as opposed to the dead man of the first and last lines. You get no respect once you’re dead.
In excerpts quoted by later authors, which is the case with nearly all the Archilochus fragments in Campbell, there’s often a lot of textual corruption. In this one, for example, transmitted via Stobaeus, the given text has καὶ not οὐδὲ in line 1 (variously emended), ζώου in line 2, ζώοι (without article) not οἱ ζοοὶ in line 3, and δέει not δ’ αἰεὶ after κάκιστα. This is not untypical.
Restoring the true text can be challenging. In fr.58 editors dagger the text where the Stobaeus manuscript (the only source of the fragment) has τ’εἰθεῖάπαντα, meaning the corruption can’t be convincingly mended—editors simply throw up their hands over it. What you referred to as “variants” are rather conjectures by modern scholars. You were not alone in being baffled by εἰθεῖ’!
