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| Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Second, sacrificial virgins. Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.
Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point). She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:
"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar."(Perseus website translation).
Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive. In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard. In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.
And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.
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