Greek Poetry and Geography

Robin Lane Fox, Homer and His Iliad (London: Penguin Books, 2023), p. 54:

Throughout antiquity, Greek poetry and cult show a strong connection to particular sites and landscapes in the real world. The Iliad already exemplifies it. Homer had visited windy Troy on a clear day when distant Samothrace was visible. He had identified vantage points for the gods and visited them too on either side of the bay on whose shore he placed the Greek ships. I like to think he had walked south, like Chryses, beside the shore of the booming sea and come to the promontory called Chryse and to the sanctuary a little way inland where, for him, Chryses was the priest of Apollo. From there, I take him in my mind’s eye on an uphill walk for several hours on a crisp day in early spring, up through the crocuses which were carpeting the slopes with gold below Gargaron and on to the foot of its grey peak, where he stopped, checked the view back to Troy and made an offering to Zeus.

Summer Fruits

δενδρέων δὲ νομὸν Διόνυσος πολυγαθὴς
αὐξάνοι, ἁγνὸν φέγγος ὀπώρας.

May Dionysus joy-bringer swell the trees
with fruit, the pure light of the serotinal season.

Pindar. Fragment 153. My translation.

Notes:
ὀπώρα, the season between the rise of Sirius and the rise of of Arcturus ends tonight.

Marriage

οὐ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ γε κρεῖσσον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἢ ὅθ᾽ ὁμοφρονέοντε νοήμασιν οἶκον ἔχητον
ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή: πόλλ᾽ ἄλγεα δυσμενέεσσι,
χάρματα δ᾽ εὐμενέτῃσι, μάλιστα δέ τ᾽ ἔκλυον αὐτοί.

For indeed, nothing is nobler or better than
When a man and woman with a single heart
keep home together: bringing many griefs to their enemies
And sharing joy, which they know best of all, with their friends.

Homer, Odyssey, 6.182-185. My translation.

Accept One's Fate

χρὴ δὲ πρὸς θεὸν οὐκ ἐρίζειν, ὃς ἀνέχει τοτὲ μὲν τὰ κείνων, τότ᾿ αὖθ᾿ ἑτέροις ἔδωκεν μέγα κῦδος.

One must not spar with a god, who on one hand raises the fortunes of some men, and on the another gives great glory to others.

Pindar, Pythian Ode, II.88-89. My translation.

Longing for Home

ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς ἐθέλω καὶ ἐέλδομαι ἤματα πάντα
οἴκαδέ τ᾽ ἐλθέμεναι καὶ νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἰδέσθαι.
εἰ δ᾽ αὖ τις ῥαίῃσι θεῶν ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ,
τλήσομαι ἐν στήθεσσιν ἔχων ταλαπενθέα θυμόν:
ἤδη γὰρ μάλα πολλὰ πάθον καὶ πολλὰ μόγησα
κύμασι καὶ πολέμῳ: μετὰ καὶ τόδε τοῖσι γενέσθω.

Yet even so every day I desire and long to reach my home and to see the day of my return. And if some god would break me on the wine-red sea, I shall endure it, as I hold in my breast a soul that endures great afflictions: as before this I have suffered much and endured much in waves and in war; let this be one of those thing.

Homer, Odyssey, V.219-224. My translation.

Wonder

 σέβας μ᾽ ἔχει εἰσορόωντα

wonder takes me as I look on

Homer, Odyssey, VI.161. My translation.

Living in a Foreign Country

ὑμεῖς δ᾽ ἐς ἀλλόφυλον ἐλθοῦσαι χθόνα
γῆς τῆσδ᾽ ἐρασθήσεσθε· προυννέπω τάδε.

If you travel into some land of foreigners,
I warn you, you shall come to love their country.

Aeschylus, Eumenides 851-52. My translation.

Aesop’s Crow and the Pitcher

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), p. 86:

Whether New Caledonian crows have leaps of insight remains to be determined, but these experiments suggest that these birds do have an extraordinary ability to notice the consequences of their own actions, says Taylor, and to pay attention to the way objects interact. These are mighty useful mental tools when it comes to making and using material tools. THE AUCKLAND TEAM IS also attempting to figure out whether the crows understand basic physical principles.A “crow-appropriate paradigm” for this, as Taylor puts it, is an experimental version of the old Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.” In that fable, a thirsty crow comes across a half-filled jug of water. Unable to reach the water to drink, the crow drops pebble after pebble into the pitcher until the water level rises enough for him to drink. As it turns out, this is not just a folktale. New Caledonian crows will do exactly that—drop stones into a water-filled tube to raise the water level. And, as Sarah Jelbert discovered while working with the Auckland team, if given a choice between heavy objects and light ones, solid and hollow ones, the crows will spontaneously pick objects that will sink over those that will float. They know how to pick their materials and will select the right option 90 percent of the time. This suggests that the crows understand water displacement, a fairly sophisticated physical concept, on par with the comprehension of a child five to seven years old. It also suggests that they’re able to grasp the basic physical properties of objects and make inferences about them.

Ancient Poems about Loneliness and the Moon

Two ancient poems: both are about sleeplessness, erotic loneliness and lunar movements. The first poem is sometimes attributed to Sappho (Voigt 168B) and sometimes regarded as a fragment of a folk song:

δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες· μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾿ ἔρχετ᾿ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

(‘The moon and Pleiades
sink down, it is the middle
of the night, time passes,
and I sleep alone.’)

The second is the final poem in the anthology Nineteen Old Poems (古詩十九首), preserved in the Wen Xuan (文選, c. 520-530 AD), though it likely dates further back to the Han dynasty:

明月何皎皎，照我羅牀幃。
憂愁不能寐，攬衣起徘徊。
客行雖雲樂，不如早旋歸。
出户獨彷徨，愁思當告誰？
引領還入房，淚下沾裳衣。

(‘The white moon shines brightly, illuming the weaves of my bed-curtains.
Sorrowful, I cannot sleep; taking my clothes, I rise up and walk.
The guest’s journey is said to be a good one, but it is not as happy as the return home.
Alone and indecisive I leave the house, to whom can I relate my sadness?
I look forward, but return to my room; falling tears moisten my robes.’)

Notes:
The narrator of the Greek poem is a woman, indicated by the gender of the adjective μόνα ('alone'). In the Chinese poem, the speaker could be a man or a woman.

My translations.