Female epigram writers and River Tam (sadly, not)

Iphigenie (1862) by Anselm Feuerbach (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our abstract for a Firefly collection was turned down (a colleague and I submitted one on sacrificial virgins, Iphigenia, and River Tam), so it's back to work in Classics.  I've submitted another abstract on female epigram-writers in antiquity; we'll see if it flies.  Meanwhile, my research files are in spectacularly good shape, and I have ported all my old Filemaker databases into .csv files so that I can actually get at the information contained therein, for the first time in several years. This might be procrastination except that it was possible that I actually needed it for the epigram abstract.  (I admit that once the work was done, I didn't find anything useful.)

Tomorrow: BC Election, and reading Iphigenia at Aulis, for a Sacrificial Virgin article.  (Another one).  Wednesday: Teaching "Cleopatra the Hellenistic Monarch" to an audience of 12 year olds.  And contemplating Alice Oswald, again, at last.  I shall begin, I think, by rereading my notes, and this blog.

River Tam, fridged (not)

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What the I Ching told me about research

Oracle shell with inscriptions This is a replica of an oracle turtle shell with ancient Chinese oracle scripts inscribed on it. Since this is a replica, the color may not be truthful to the real specimen. This photo was taken in July 2004 from an exhibit at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1989, 5 years before I finished my PhD, I asked the I Ching how I should find a thesis topic.   The answer was so extraordinarily apropos that I saved it.  I did not, however, follow it, which is why it took me five years to finish, instead of 18-24 months.

I found the response again just now, while tidying up my files and preparing to get back to work after the teaching term.  It's still good advice.  Perhaps a quarter of a century on I will have the sense to follow it.

Question:  How should I go about finding a topic for my thesis? 

Response:    Modesty

It is the way of the world to fill the empty cup.  Modesty is often rewarded in human affairs, just as valleys are filled by the erosion of great mountains.  Regardless of your position, Laurel, modesty is a very positive attribute.  If you are in a high position but are nonetheless modest, people will be drawn to you and the causes you espouse.  If your position is lowly, modesty will endear you to those of higher status.  Accordingly, true modesty is a virtue to which all should aspire. 

The most successful people are those who know how to bring each situation into balance by reducing that which is too great, and adding to that which is too little.  Such a person craves not power, but stable relations among men.  Modesty is the virtue which allows you to perceive the balancing force in each situation; humble people are not prey to the many illusions which grow out of self-aggrandizement.  If modesty is not natural to your disposition, Laurel, make a conscious effort to develop a strain of self-effacing humor.  Either that, or go into politics. 

There's an element of transformation in this situation. 

Even modesty, the most benevolent virtue, can be carried too far, Laurel.  People in humble positions can easily use false modesty as an excuse for weakness or vacillation.   True modesty does not imply humble goals, or a slack attitude regarding performance standards.  Taking pride in your work, Laurel, is very different from the pride born of self-importance.  

I'm back at work on Alice Oswald, and plan to post regular updates on weekdays.  Today I've spent shuffling files around on my computer, which (on the one hand) had to be done, but (on the other) I strongly suspect to be primarily a subtle and fiendish form of procrastination, like housecleaning - one can feel virtuous about it but it is, nevertheless, really beside the point.

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great feedback

English: Chick pea and Silene vulgaris stew. (Potaje de garbanzos y collejas) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I gave a paper on Memorial yesterday; excellent response comments and discussion later on.  I may have to rethink Asius the chickpea.  Well, I do have to rethink him.  When I'm writing up the paper I think I may just leave him out and use one of the other 100+ examples where Oswald turns the subject of a simile, in the Iliad, into the object in Memorial, or vice versa; and discuss as well, of course, why this matters.  (Because that's what she's doing in the entire poem: the objects become subjects, over and over, and that's the whole point.)

Spent an hour this evening cutting and pasting the paper into Scrivener.  But I do need to go through my notes and consider what else needs to go into the final paper. That's this week's task. Well, after I do a few administrative things I was supposed to do last week, but I was writing this paper ...

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stymied at the last, augh! (ETA: unstymied!)

Diomedes and Glaucus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have nailed down all of the Homeric references for every single thing in all of Oswald's "Memorial", except one. I cannot find one. It has rocks, water, a dam and a marsh.  None of these terms  in any form I can think of  searching for are showing up in the appropriate combination. I think I will just leave it for now.

However, I am very pleased that I think I have figured out what the last dozen pages of "Memorial" are doing. Each page has a single simile, drawn from somewhere in the Iliad. Each one begins with "like". We are done with the death scenes now – all of them are over, ending with the death of Hector – so we only have this string of similes. Each of them is a simile involving an aggregate – a flock of wild waterfowl, or of bees, or of wasps, or of flies, or of sparks. But the first of the 12 is the famous simile of the leaves:

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves

- but what is like leaves? Well, of course it's the race of men, from the famous simile when Glaucus is talking to Diomedes, desperately – and successfully – trying to save his own life; so when you read all the rest of the similes, all of which begin with "like", they are all also about the race of men, in the aggregate. Oswald has through the rest of the poem gone one man after another, name by name by name; but now, at the end, she talks about how in the aggregate all men die, In a series of similes, each one of them drawn from a passage in which the fighters at Troy are described as a group.

(I still can't find the one about water, a dam, and a marsh though. I think I'll just ask the audience if anyone happens to know it...) - finally it occurred to me to ask a papyrologist, since papyrologists know everything.   It's from the fight over the body of Patroclus: the 2 Aiantes holding off the flood of Trojans.  So that is all the similes sorted. 

all the Homer things

This is not the same Polydorus.

Have been working away steadily for the last week but not updating, because I have to give a paper on Oswald next week and haven't got time to work, teach, write the paper and update too.  I've got 8 more death scenes and about 16 similes to nail down.  Whenever I see a new simile my heart sinks because I know it will likely be hard to find where Oswald has transplanted it from.  On the other hand it's rewarding work.  She did something particularly cool with the death of Polydorus as his father Priam looks for him, which she juxtaposed with the simile of Ajax guarding Patroclus' body like a lion guarding its cubs.

Still, it really is time to stop researching and start actually putting it together as a paper.  But I'm so close to being done!  This is a mistake I always make mind you - I always think that once the research is done the paper will write itself, possibly overnight while I'm sleeping, if I leave out a bowl of milk for the fairies...

In fact once the research is done the paper will take every bit as long to write as the research took to do, something Mac Wallace told me (frequently; over and over; in the hope that someday I would take note), and something I tell my students all the time as well.

 I don't know if my students pay attention.  I know I never do because there's always this One! Last! Thing! I want to find out first ... which of course will lead to another interesting thing ... but I must stop now.  It's not as if I don't have enough material.

But I'm so close!

Epeigeus the exile

English: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Achilles and Priam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm trying to follow Oswald's sequence here.  

In Homer, Hector kills Epeigeus as he's about to strip the corpse of Sarpedon, and crushes his skull with a big rock and he falls dead on the corpse.  He was a prince in Budeion, until he "stripped the corpse" of a cousin, and was sent off as a suppliant to Peleus, and then to Troy, and then died as he stripped the corpse of Sarpedon,or tried to, on the battlefield.  So his life story, in Homer, begins and ends with two corpse-strippings; one successful, one attempted.

Oswald charts this as changes - Epeigeus went from well-regarded prince to runaway, beggar, soldier, and corpse.  And then she uses the astonishing simile used of Priam when he kisses Achilles' bloody hands, and everyone was as astonished to see him, 

"as when strong folly (ἄτη) takes a man, who in his fatherland

having killed someone leaves to the country of others

into (the house) of a rich man, and wonder holds those looking at him,

so Achilles was astonished seeing Priam, like a god".  

But Oswald says "like anger that ... can change any man into a murderer" - but what's like anger? As far as I can tell, here, it's the rock; anger changes a man into something entirely different, a beggar seeking shelter, a different person, the way the rock turned Epeigeus into something different, a shade, a corpse, someone he wouldn't recognize himself as.  

But what does it bring to Oswald's poem that this is the simile used of Priam when he comes to Achilles as a suppliant? Because Epeigeus actually IS a murderous suppliant, where Priam is not; Achilles is the one who has killed, and Priam is the suppliant to him; the blood is printed on Achilles' hands. Anger changed Epeigeus into a killer and ultimately a corpse; it turned Priam into a suppliant and ultimately into a corpse; I'm still not getting this.  

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Sarpedon

Sarpedon’s body carried by Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death), while Hermes watches. Side A of the so-called “Euphronios krater”, Attic red-figured calyx-krater signed by Euxitheos (potter) and Euphronios (painter), ca. 515 BC. H. 45.7 cm (18 in.); D. 55.1 cm (21 11/16 in.). Formerly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (L.2006.10); Returned to Italy and exhibited in Rome as of January, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Detail from image:Death Sarpedon MNA Policoro.jpg, q.v. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sarpedon gets 15 lines in Oswald. No mention of who might have killed him or why.  Of course he gets lots more attention than that in Homer.  Oswald's treatment of his death draws in all the major mentions of Sarpedon throughout the Iliad; the wheat fields and apple groves from his heroic code speech to Glaucus, just before they go into the battle which will result in his death.  Sleep and Death take him back to Lykia as happens after the death scene in the Iliad.  He's called "the son of Zeus" because it matters here, because Zeus is the one who mourns.

I'm not sure why Oswald calls Troy "ungreen ungrowing ground" when it's described as "fertile" (ἐριβώλακι, 16.461) in this passage in Homer.  Perhaps there is an alternate reading and I should find out what it is.  The description of the wind shaking him out like a linen cloth and giving him his breath back - but not quite, not quite even though he's the son of Zeus and frankly, it was touch and go whether Zeus was going to save him after all - is nice.  I tried to find an association between linen and Sarpedon but didn't find one.  Still a nice image.

 The following simile comes originally from book 11, where Hector has his aristeia, and is described as falling on the Greeks as a hurricane falls on the "violet-flower" sea, dashing the clouds, roiling the waters, spraying foam up high.    Here the simile follows on in the discussion of wind; is Sarpedon's breath, or his body, the blue flower of the sea?  Bruised between two winds, broken apart, its structure broken the way Sarpedon's organization is now broken? And the battle over his body is the battle between the winds and the waves and foam and destruction caused by the hurricane; so the simile recuperates the battle, and I rather like that. 

Also, usually the object becomes subject in Oswald, but here the subject has become object; the sea = Sarpedon is our focus, battered between the opposing forces of the wind, rather than Hector as the battering storm.