#stallings

[misatokitten]

Fishnet fun

[elladastinkardiamou]

Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed

Article by A.E. Stallings in The Spectator

We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook, to name a few. Admittedly, Greek mythology has it all: love, sex, murder, incest, cannibalism, magical transformations, pirates, monsters, miracles. Surely some readers, though, will want to go even deeper, to tap into the ancient sources, incorrigibly plural and various.

These sources include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s genesis and who-begat-whom of the gods, the Theogony. (Plus a chunk of ‘Greek’ mythology which we actually get via the Roman poet Ovid.) But much of the mythology concerning the Greek gods — not just the 12 Olympians but figures such as Hekate, Pan, the Sun and the Moon — comes to us from hymns.

In this gem of a book, Barry B. Powell gives us new translations of a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns. Organised not by chronology or manuscript but deity (starting with Zeus), it can be read straight or flipped through as a handy reference. Physically gorgeous — cloth, sewn, with a starry dust jacket and celadon-green end-papers — it would make a fine gift for a myth buff or classics enthusiast, or an ideal source book for a mythology course. With maps, sharp full-colour photographs of relevant ancient art and a glossary-cum-index (complete with pronunciation guide), the book is a pleasure to hold and easy to use, the size of a slender, well, hymnal.

Powell, a scholar and a translator who has tackled the three major epics, wears his learning as lightly as seersucker. He elucidates complex scholarly matters — manuscript traditions, Greek meter, Neo-Platonism — in layman’s language. ‘A hymn is a song to a god, originally sung, usually to a lyre,’ he begins, quietly tuning up. The hymns here are of four types: anonymous Homeric hymns; Orphic hymns associated with the legendary Orpheus; hymns composed by the Alexandrian polymath Callimachus (c. 310-c. 240 BC); and hymns by Proclus (AD 412-85), the ‘last of the great Classical Greek philosophers’, refining Neo-Platonism even as the classical world pivoted towards Christianity.

It is from the Homeric ‘Hymn to Demeter’ that we have the story of Hades and Persephone and the pomegranate seeds, so beloved of poets and artists. When Persephone, the young daughter of the agricultural goddess Demeter, is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld, we have this description:

“So long as the goddess looked on the earth and the starry sky, and the violent fish-filled sea and the rays of the sun, and she still hoped to see her dear mother and the tribes of the gods who live forever, for so long hope calmed her great heart, in spite of her anguish. And the peaks of the mountains echoed and the depth of the sea at her deathless cry.”

[lavidalex]

Things I don’t have to worry about my husband doing:

Cheating on me

Saying mean things about me behind my back

Things I DO have to worry about my husband doing:

Buying an air fryer while I’m gone to make and eat every frozen food ever produced

Maybe bringing home, like, a bunch of stray cats

Eating 36 chocolate chip cookies at 2am

Tying his clothes to the ceiling fan and turning it on to “dry his clothes faster on a budget”

[dresdenfilesincorrectquotes]

Stallings: We're not bringing Dresden in on this case, and that's final.

Murphy: But sir, that's my emotional support moron.

[doseofyourdailypoison]

~

[short-little-rhymes]

Recitative (an excerpt)

But we were young, did not need much To make us laugh instead, and touch, And could not hear ourselves above The arias of death and love. -A.E. Stallings

[elladastinkardiamou]

At the Corner of Byron and Shelley

Poetry and philhellenism at the Greek bicentennial - Post by A.E.Stallings in The American Scholar

I was walking down Byron Street one day this past spring, heading to the post office in downtown Athens (an allowable outing under the lockdown—reason #2). It is a pleasant street, with one- and two-story neoclassical buildings in various stages of renovation or dilapidation, plus the odd souvenir shop and little hotel, leading up to the square of the Lysicrates monument, which was once used as a study in the Capuchin monastery. Lord Byron and his friend John Cam Hobhouse had stayed at the monastery in 1809. Byron Street abuts Shelley Street, both not far from the road known as the Street of the Philhellenes. Normally the area would have been thronged with souvenir-purchasing tourists, but Covid had left it strangely empty.

Byron works so nicely in Greek that it even has a declension. (The “Byron” of Byron Street—Vironos—is in the genitive.) Shelley, though, cannot even be written phonetically, since Greek lacks a “sh” sound. It takes a moment, looking at the street sign, to figure out what it is: Σέλλεϋ, “Selley.” Shelley remains distinctly foreign and un-Greek.

Walking along, I paused at the window of one of the antiques shops on Byron Street. On display were early-19th-century plates commemorating the heroes of the 1821 start of the Greek War of Independence. (The plates had been sold to support the Greek cause.) Two hundred years later, Greece is celebrating its bicentennial this year—although instead of parades and galas, exhibits and concerts, we have had the hush of lockdown. Even the one parade that did happen, on March 25, Greek Independence Day, was surreal, a parade complete with colorful costumes, horses, tanks, and warplanes but without onlookers: ordinary citizens had to watch on TV, although we could hear overhead the shudder of the helicopters and the booms of fighter jets ripping through the sound barrier.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Athens Unpacked - Seventh episode: Birth and death the Athenian way

Greek Orthodoxy and its customs. Athenians remain attached to the traditions of the Orthodox Church. Prize-winning poet American poet A.E. Stallings walks us around the First Cemetery – a beautiful sculpture park that reveals the Athenian way of death. And we visit Papios, a shop selling kollyva or food for mourning the dead. Sofka calls up her koumbara (Georgina Solo, the mother of her goddaughter) to discuss why what anthropologists call ‘spiritual kinship’ is so important. Greek baptisms often involve a level of drama and UK cellist Chris Humphrys revisits the church where he experienced full immersion as an adult. Why are name days more significant than birthdays and what part do priests play in removing the evil eye?