Welcome to the Odyssey Reading Group! Anyone is welcome to join in at any time, regardless of their Greek ability. If you’re itching to explore Homer’s epic tale of survival, adventure, love, lust, kinship, betrayal and spooky dead people, hop on in, you’ll be very welcome. People who have some Greek but have never tried reading Homer before are doubly welcome.
Please feel free to ask any question in this thread, no matter how basic you think it is, and we will try to help you with an answer.
Although the wild enthusiasm in last week’s thread was flattering, perhaps someone else would care to pick something interesting out of this week’s passage?
I think this group has probably run its natural course in that case.
I’ll continue posting threads for passages I find difficult or interesting from time to time, but this will be the last week in its present form. Huge thanks to all those who have taken part, I’ve learned an enormous amount over the past few months and people have been extremely generous with their time and knowledge.
Sean, thank you very much for organising and running this group! Participating in a reading group is a new experience for me and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I look forward to your future posts as I’m sure they’ll open doors to rooms yet unexplored in the vast castle of classical knowledge and of course, I shall never forget that there is no such thing a long ε !
Thanks Sean. But don’t despair so soon. It’s not always easy to find something interesting to say (it depends on the passage in question), and I can’t always go wildly off-topic on Finnish sauna traditions or whatever (or can I?). And of course, the amount of time each one of us can contribute to the forum varies from one week to another.
Just to kick off:
The importance given to Arete is interesting in the passage, though it seems to the exception that proves the rule that (at least mortal) women don’t really have much power in the Homeric world (καὶ ἀνδράσι νείκεα λύει “and she settles disputes even among men”).
This ἔστιν is rather incomprehensible to me. I’m sure the commentaries offer different ways around it – but I don’t know if this is the sort of thing we want to discuss.
Somewhat more interesting is δειδέχαται μύθοισι - does it just mean “greet her verbally/aloud”, or does μύθοισι some more specific meaning?
Hainesworth agrees that an adjective must be supplied and suggests τιμητή, τιμήεσσα and supplies a parallel expression from Plato Smp 195b: μετὰ δὲ νέων [ὁ Ἔρως] ἀεὶ σύνεστί τε καὶ ἔστιν [sc. νέος αὐτός].
As for δειδέχαται μύθοισι, he believes that δειδέχαται is an “athematic present, root *δεκ , ‘welcome, receive’ , with lengthened reduplication”. Its sense is of a repeated action, thus it must be a present form rather than perfect. Taking this into account, I don’t think it a stretch to read it as “…they greet her with welcoming words,”
Thank you for your responses and kind words. I didn’t intend my post above to sound like I was sadposting - if there is appetite then obviously I’m happy to keep posting these threads.
I’m just aware, as Paul says, that there isn’t always something that grabs people’s attention and it seems a shame to have fallow weeks. I’ll stay the execution for the moment and see if I can think of a way of rejigging the format. Maybe more regular Finnish sauna chat really is the way to go.