Howling Frog Books

Xenophon's Anabasis (Landmark ed.) I love looking at the Landmark editions, but I'm not so great at actually reading them, unless they are Herodotus.  But my sister was here over winter break and she inspired me to pick up something more serious than I've been reading lately, and so I have now read the Anabasis .  I enjoyed it a lot, too!  I'm not that great at reading about warfare, because I find it tedious, but reading about soldiers stuck in enemy territory and trying to get home is much more interesting. So here's the background: It's 401 BC, and Xenophon, a young and elite Athenian, decides to go along with a company of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to the Persian Empire.  He's not actually in the military, but his friend says 'if you get in good with Cyrus, you'll be in great shape for a career!' and so he goes along.  Cyrus is challenging his older brother Artaxerxes for the Persian throne, and he's promised good pay to these mercenari...

Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, by Emily Katz Anhalt What?  Why would a modern, 21st-century society need stories told by a bunch of Greeks over 2000 years ago?  Well, Emily Anhalt is here to tell you, and she is dang good at it.  I enjoyed this book a lot! Anhalt's thesis is that human beings are just the same as they always were, and the ancient Greeks gave these things a lot of thought.  She analyzes the Iliad and the plays Ajax and Hecuba for themes that hit close to home for us today.  All of them are about rage, and there's a lot of that going on right now.  She doesn't talk specifics -- there's enough rage to go around anyway The Iliad is all about rage.  Achilles and Agamemnon both have a lot of it, and it has tremendous effects -- none of them good.  Achilles' rage leads directly to the death of his best friend, and that's only the beginning. Sophocles' Ajax covers an episode just after the Iliad , in wh...

Ajax , by Sophocles I really needed just one more classic for a challenge, and it was a tricky one -- an award-winner, published before 1967.  But I wasn't in the mood for a Pulitzer or a Newbery, and prizes weren't being given out in most of my favorite historical periods.  What to do?  O gave me the answer: a Greek play!  Sophocles never got less than second place.  So I picked a play I'd never read before, and voila!  An award-winning classic. Poor Ajax.  He's the strongest and most mighty warrior around, but his pride has been hurt.  Achilles has just been killed, and Odysseus and Ajax both claimed his armor.  In the argument, the wily and smooth-tongued Odysseus naturally managed to convince all of the Greeks that the armor should be his.  The play opens after this; Ajax feels he's been dishonored, and he has every intention of killing not just Odysseus, but the leaders of the expedition who allowed the whole thing to happen....

The Histories, by Herodotus As part of Ruth's Reading the Histories project, I took over three months to read Herodotus' Histories.   I do enjoy Herodotus, but he's not exactly easy, and the fact that my copy is a huge book that can only be read while sitting down on the couch, when I remember to pick it up, made it a very long read. Herodotus, first known person to systematically collect information and deliberately set it down as a history (rather than having a bunch of propaganda or myth mixed in), did his best to verify what he learned.  When he couldn't, or when he is skeptical, or found several versions of events, he tells you so.  The main subject of his treatise is the war between the Greeks and the Persians, but he really only gets to that near the end.  First, he talks about everybody and everything, describing Lydians, Persians, Cimmerians, and any interesting anecdotes or history. Herodotus' magpie brain is what I love about him.  He is just...

Metamorphoses , by Ovid I've been doing a readalong of this, sort of, with Cleo at Classical Carousel and o at Behold the Stars , before a more ambitious readalong of The Faerie Queene , which is set to start in April.  They have been much better at it, though, with weekly update posts discussing each book, whereas I just read the thing and didn't do anything else.  So you should check out their posts, because this is going to be on the minimal side in comparison. I actually wasn't at all sure if I had read all of the Metamorphoses before, because I know I read at least some in college, but how much?  Who knows by now (not me).  I got out my old copy--which is a Penguin prose edition old enough to be priced at seven shillings and sixpence!--and found a note used as a bookmark, scribbled with phone numbers and arcane things. There are fifteen books, each a nice length to read on its own.  They are not terribly separate, really; in each book, Ovid goes thr...

Daphnis and Chloe , by Longus Longus was a Greek, living under the Roman Empire sometime in the second or third centuries AD.  Virtually nothing else is known of him, but he might have been from Lesbos, where he sets his story.  This is an early Greek romance, a sentimental little story written for amusement and even as a sort of cheer-up therapy for the melancholy, and the very archetype of a pastoral. Daphnis is 15 and Chloe 13, and they are island shepherds.  Every day, they care for their flocks, pray to the local nymphs, and play music.  They fall in love, but are too innocent to know what love is, so they are just kind of tormented.  The story is sprinkled with dramatic incidents; Daphnis is captured by pirates (and saved by divine intervention), Chloe is captured by a different set of bad guys and saved, a terrible winter separates the two, and finally the shepherds' wealthy master arrives and it is time for all to be revealed and the happy ending. ...

Justinian The Secret History, by Procopius Procopius was an official in the Byzantine government under Justinian and Theodora, who reigned from 527 - 565 AD.  He wrote a lot of history--that is, he wrote official histories for the court, which of course flattered Justinian.  On the side, though, he was working on a more personal project--a 'secret history' in which he spoke about his real opinions.  And Procopius did not think much of the Emperor and Empress. This is a short book that is filled with invective.  Procopius paints Justinian and Theodora as endlessly grasping and cruel tyrants.  Theodora's youth sounds like the most scurrilous gossip, and I don't see how Procopius could possibly have known what was true and what was false, but much of the rest of the material is what he himself would have witnessed.  He portrays Justinian as voracious for cash, but a spendthrift; as weak and indecisive, unconcerned about the welfare of his subjects, an...

All right, fellow Greeklings, it's the end of 2012 and time to wrap up the Greek Classics Challenge.  Did you meet your goal?  Write up a post, put the link in the comments, or just tell us all about it here.  I read a bunch of things--I did manage to get to the final level--and though I wanted to read more, I am pretty happy.  I got quite a few plays read, and some philosophy.  I am not pleased that I didn't manage to finish Herodotus, and I have this beautiful Thucydides on my shelf--I'm sad I didn't get to that.  I still plan to read those things, though.  Thucydides is very intimidating to me; I read it in college and didn't understand a word.  I never do well with battles, really, especially in ancient wars.  (I tried to read Caesar's Gallic Wars last year and gave up in despair; it was incomprehensible and boring too.  And it's supposed to be easy!) Here are the titles I read: The Oresteia, by Aeschylus Th...

Electra and Orestes Orestes , by Euripides I haven't managed to finish Herodotus, but I thought I'd round out the year with another Euripides play.  Somewhere, recently, I saw someone comment that Orestes is a very misogynistic play, and I thought I'd see for myself. The play opens as Orestes is being tormented by the Furies for killing his mother, Clytemnestra.  His sister Electra is caring for him, Helen is present (and very selfish and shallow she is), and all of Argos has turned against their royal family--what's left of it.  Euripides has changed the whole tenor of the play by setting the story in his own day; instead of mythic standards of morality that pave the way for the law of man, Orestes lives in a society with an established system of law.  He could have accused his mother in court, but instead he killed her himself, and now his city is going to put him to death for murder. Orestes is not going to put up with that, though.  As the play con...

On Sunday I got very comfy on my couch and read all of Book VI of the Histories . Book VI starts off with a rather depressing litany of Persian victories over small peoples.  I was worried that the whole book would be like that, but happily Herodotus moved on to a very interesting discussion of Spartan customs and history.  He spent most of the book in Greece, various city-states, especially the wars between Aegina and Athens.  The Battle of Marathon also takes place here, so that was neat. The plain at Marathon Three more to go! I hope I can do it by the end of the year. I feel like I've been posting fun stuff that's not book pieces for days, and meanwhile I have a pile of books to post about.  Things have been a bit busy in real life, I guess.  But stay tuned as I try to write up all these books!

Hello fellow Greeklings, it's getting down to the wire!  If you're going to read any more Greek literature this year, you'd better do it soon!  Did any of you read some Greek over Thanksgiving?  Post it here.  Greek harvest festival of Karneia My Mr. Linky subscription has expired, and I'm not sure it's worth re-subscribing, so just go ahead and put links in the comments. I read The Republic and Book V of the Histories .

Herodotus and I are back together again and I've read Book V of the Histories .  It was nice to get back into my giant book. We start off with a description of the Thracian people, who are numerous enough to conquer everyone else if they would just get their act together (he says), but they are too divided up.  There's a really terrible story about the Paeonians and how they were conquered and dragged off to the Persian empire.  Then a couple of very famous stories: one about a Macedonian prince who kills all the Persian envoys (probably not true, since there were no reprisals) and about how the Greeks got their writing system from the Phoenicians, which is apparently quite accurate. After that there is quite a lot about Sparta and its kings, and Athens and its tyrants, and both of their wars.  It was really quite confusing and I could have used a diagram.  I think Herodotus expects his readers to know a good deal about these people already, as of course t...

Socrates and Plato: a medieval portrait The Republic , by Plato One of Plato's most famous works shows Socrates in an incredibly long dialogue with friends, the main one being Glaucon.  Together they discuss the nature of justice and plan out the ideal city-state, one ruled by philosopher-kings.  They also cover some other topics such as different forms of government, the theory of Forms, and the immortality of the soul.  "The Cave" is also part of the dialogue, as Socrates illustrates how men see the world and then how a philosopher sees truth. This work has had an immense effect on Western civilization.  I find this rather worrying, since there was almost nothing in the whole book that I agreed with, not even the definition of what justice is.  I kept feeling like Kermit the Frog in The Great Muppet Caper :  "You know, that's amazing.  You are 100% wrong.  I mean, nothing you've said has been right." After much discussion, Socrates and...

"Aristotle" by Francisco Hayez.  Finally, I've actually completed a book from my own challenge!  It's taken me ridiculously long to finish this not-very-long book; I kind of got bogged down in the dull middle section. Aristotle starts out defining different types of rhetoric and what they are for.  Those guys really liked to get everything categorized very carefully, and while I rather appreciate that, they take it awfully far!  For quite a while, he analyzes different feelings or actions--who feels them and why--such as happiness, pity, anger, enmity, and so on.  That got pretty old, but then he moved on to much more interesting material about how to argue a court case.  Nearly everything he said applied to judicial rhetoric, really, and he didn't say much about the other two categories. I know this is the foundational rhetorical textbook, and that lots of people still recommend it.  I don't really think it's useful for moderns as a book to te...

I was so taken up with Gothic October that I forgot to post a wrap-up for September.  However, I've also been slacking in the Greek department lately, so I haven't got much to report anyway.  I'm going to have to read a lot in the next two months!  I really am reading Artistotle's Rhetoric right now.  Just very slowly, on account of it's pretty tedious.  I miss Herodotus.  And I want to read Plato's Republic , too.  My 12-year-old daughter actually has to read Antigone next week for school, ha ha! How have you been doing with your reading?  And, happy Halloween!

Hello there studymates, it's the end of the month; have you read any Greek literature to finish off your summer?  This month I tried to play some catch-up and so I read Plato's Symposium and four plays by Euripides.  I started Aristotle's Rhetoric , but Euripides was more fun, so I still have a way to go in that book. How about you?

Helen , by Euripides Helen was performed in 412 BC and may have been a companion piece to Iphigenia in Tauris .  Their plots are virtually identical! Helen, Queen of Sparta, was not carried off to Troy by Paris after all.  Hera gave Paris a magic phantom and spirited the real Helen off to Egypt, where she was placed under the protection of the king.  Helen has been waiting ever since for Menelaus to come and rescue her, and her time is running out; the old king has died and the new king wants her for his wife.  It's now been 17 years since she arrived in Egypt, so hope is fading, and she has taken refuge at the old king's tomb. Menelaus, meanwhile, has been wandering for 7 years, trying to get home.  Shipwrecked on the coast of Egypt, he hides his companions and his (phantom)wife and arrives at the palace.  Once they recognize each other and Menelaus is convinced, Helen hatches a plan for their escape.  It is a very similar plan to Iphigenia's. ...

Now that I've covered three plays, let's learn a little something about Euripides.  He is the third great ancient Greek playwright, and younger than Sophocles and Aeschylus, though not by much.  More of his plays survive, partly because he stayed in fashion longer.  Euripides produced 92 (or perhaps a few more) plays during his lifetime, and we have 18 or 19 complete texts and fragments of quite a few more. Aeschylus and Sophocles both made important innovations in Greek drama, expanding the number of actors onstage and so on.  Euripides built upon this and developed still more innovations.  His plays are more psychological and reveal more of the characters.  He played with form; some of his productions aren't really very tragic and can better be called comedies (in our sense) or problem plays.  He doesn't always put a chorus in.  His audiences must often have been shocked!  On the whole, his plays feel much more like modern plays--they a...

Iphigenia, priestess, meets her brother Iphigenia in Tauris , by Euripides Hey, good news everyone!  Iphigenia was not horribly slaughtered by her father Agamemnon as a sacrifice after all!  At the last second, Artemis substituted a deer and whisked Iphigenia off to the ends of the earth (the Crimea), where she has been serving as a temple priestess ever since.  She has been pining for her Greek home for a good twenty years, it seems.  Now she is in mourning because she has had a prophetic dream that she believes tells her that Orestes, her brother and her one hope for rescue (however remote), is dead. But Iphigenia is wrong!  Orestes is still being chased by some Furies and he has arrived in Tauris to try to get rid of them once and for all.  (Only some of them were pacified by the whole Eumenides maneuver in Athens.)  Apollo has let him know that if he can steal the image of Artemis from this temple and take it back to Athens, he'll be free....

Medea escaping Corinth in her dragon chariot Medea , by Euripides This one is a real tragedy, with nothing but blood and horror.  Medea is a foreign princess from Colchis and a great sorceress besides; she is not Greek and seems therefore to be prone to violence.  Medea and Circe both must have carried many ancient nightmares about powerful and alien women, and black magic, and so on.  Medea is like a Greek man's worst nightmare: cunning, powerful, and vengeful, a womanly character gone horribly wrong.  (Alcestis, the ideal Greek woman, is her opposite number.) The original audience would have known all of the backstory well: Jason arrived in Colchis on his ship the Argo, and Medea helped him get the Golden Fleece.  In order to escape with Jason, she killed her own brother and scattered pieces of him around the harbor to delay pursuit (as everyone had to collect the pieces for a proper burial before chasing Jason).  They went to Iolchus, where Jason...