As someone expensively educated in an imperialist state recklessly convinced of its innate superiority and entitlement, whose once-promising career was derailed by embarrassing failure, I have a far better instinct for Thucydides’ ethos and political sensibilities than do most moderns. I was once regularly threatened with violence by a member of the school’s Combined Cadet Force to extort the nicer elements of my packed lunch, so can personally attest to the prevalence of the mentality depicted in the Melian Dialogue within the officer class. And I visited Amphipolis once, gaining a powerful sense of quite how long it takes to get there… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Homer’
Message Personnel
Posted in Musings, tagged autoethnography, class, Homer on March 7, 2024| 1 Comment »
Leadership for Dummies
Posted in Musings, tagged Boris Johnson, classics, Homer, politics on December 24, 2019| 2 Comments »
Suddenly the idea that political power should be allocated on the basis of legitimate descent from generations of ruthless thugs, or even on the whim of a strange woman in a lake handing out swords, doesn’t seem so bad, because apparently the alternative – the unanswerable reason why Labour politicians are unfit for government – is the ability to recite a large chunk of material in a foreign language, learnt by heart back at school.
Not just any material, of course. (more…)
It’s Complicated
Posted in Musings, tagged Emily Wilson, Homer, Odyssey, translation on November 4, 2017| 7 Comments »
I’m still awaiting my copy of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but on the basis of passages circulating on social media and this New York Times Magazine interview it’s going to be well worth it. Certainly it’s already setting off some fascinating discussions of issues in translation: the particular choices that have to be made in trying to express concepts that don’t have an exact equivalent in the target language, and in particular words that have multiple senses and associations in the original. This is a problem in the very first line of the poem, with the word used to describe its main character, polytropos: (more…)
Solid Gold Classics II
Posted in Podcasts, tagged Homer, music, Odysseus, Radio Abahachi, sirens on October 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I’m celebrating today submitting a substantial (in both senses of the word) funding application for the next phase of the Thucydides project, which has involved several days’ worth of staring at figures wondering why they were refusing to add up. It really doesn’t help that the university’s Full Economic Costing system and the Je-S application system use different categories for expenditure, so it’s more or less impossible to input exactly the same information in the same format into each – and neither of them really suited my purposes so I produced my own master costings spreadsheet, and hence at times found that I had three different versions of what was supposed to be the same bit of the budget. Anyway, the application finally reached the “that’ll do” stage last night, and this morning I checked the last financial anomaly and pressed the ‘submit’ button on each of the systems (having spent five minutes wondering whether it would make a difference which one went first – this sort of thing does get to one eventually…); I’ve therefore spent a chunk of this afternoon indulging in a bit of light relief, and this podcast is the result; it’s ages since I did one, so it’s definitely a bit rough round the edges, but it’ll do…
http://www.podbean.com/media/player/gnyhg-5cd4c8?from=yiiadmin
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