RE: The Golden Age of the Greeks
March 7, 2015 at 1:28 pm
(This post was last modified: March 7, 2015 at 1:32 pm by Alex K.)
Hear hear!
First of all, kudos to you for this heroic course of study!
By sheer accident I first read the illiad and then some things by plato a coupla years ago, and what struck me was how intimately latter references the former. To me, naively picking up old greek stuff for the first time, it was more or less all the same, a monolith of really old stuff. But after reading first one and then the others, I realized how even to plato, the telling of the illiad was history, and this suddenly made seem plato and his contemporaries much more alive to me, and it created a palpable sense of time and of the people, because in a small way I had a shared reading (or listening) experience with these people living over 2000 years ago. This was helped by plato's dialogue style e.g. in the charming beginning of the monstrous Repulic, which lets you in on a conversation as if you were roving about and sitting at a table listening in on this group of friends. I don't know if that makes any sense.
First of all, kudos to you for this heroic course of study!
By sheer accident I first read the illiad and then some things by plato a coupla years ago, and what struck me was how intimately latter references the former. To me, naively picking up old greek stuff for the first time, it was more or less all the same, a monolith of really old stuff. But after reading first one and then the others, I realized how even to plato, the telling of the illiad was history, and this suddenly made seem plato and his contemporaries much more alive to me, and it created a palpable sense of time and of the people, because in a small way I had a shared reading (or listening) experience with these people living over 2000 years ago. This was helped by plato's dialogue style e.g. in the charming beginning of the monstrous Repulic, which lets you in on a conversation as if you were roving about and sitting at a table listening in on this group of friends. I don't know if that makes any sense.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition
