Interesting tidbit: The only record of Socrates is in the writings of Plato,
No, Socrates appears as a character in Aristophanes' Clouds (and the whole point behind Attic comedies is to make fun of real people), Plato's contemporary Xenophon wrote a good deal about Socrates, and some sections of Socratic dialogues written by Aeschines of Sphettos still exist. Aristotle was born over a decade after Socrates' death, but that puts him far closer in time than us, and he never questions that Socrates existed.
See? I did actually get something out of my degree in Philosophy.
A little more history of philosophy might have helped.
Thanks for posting this (though why as AC? are you a competing scholar?).
One possibility though, would it make a difference if you excluded/included the names in the dialogue? You know how the dialogue says "Socrates:" and then what Socrates says. Your numbers seem so close...
I'm not the anonymous author of the grandparent post, but I can answer your question: in the Symposium, there are very few such tag lines. The dialogue is embedded in a conversation between two characters (Apollodorus and one of his nameless friends), but the main content (the story of Agathon's "symposium", i.e. drinking party) is related at second hand by Apollodorus (in fact, he reports the whole thing as something someone else told to him, which makes for some interestingly complex Greek grammar).
Actual: 2375 lines plus 2 characters (error: -25 lines)
25 lines in 2400 is about 1%. Given the uncertainty in knowing just where Kennedy's breaking the lines, that's pretty close. In fact, I took a few hundred lines from your version and moved the line breaks so that they always occured at a syllable (so that no line is over 35 characters, though many are less), and it moved the line count up about 2%. We don't know exactly how Kennedy's handling the line-break problem, so you may both be right, given your ways of counting lines. We also don't know what conventions Kennedy's following about breaking when a new character takes over (the Symposium is in a sort of embedded oratio obliqua, with two characters doing the talking, one of whom (Apollodorus) delivers most of the dialogue as a long indirect-speech report. Is Kennedy breaking where characters change, in either case?
Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 400, lasts 200 lines.
Actual: begins at 377 (-23), ends at 599, i.e. lasts 222 lines (+22).
With a 1% shorter line count, we'd expect it to begin at line 396 by your count. 396 - 377 gives 19, or about 5%, though the length variance is still 10%.
Eryximachos' speech
Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 600, lasts 200 lines("including the repartee over Aristophanes' hiccups": cherry-picking?).
The starting-point is within 3%; if we go with 179 for the length, it's again about 10% variance between the two of you.
Aristophanes' speech
Kennedy's claim (pp. 7-8): begins at line 800.
Actual: begins at 778 (-22).
22 out of 800 is less than 3% variance.
Agathon's speech
Kennedy's claim (p. 8): ends at line 1200.
Actual: ends at 1180 (-20).
20 off out of 1200 is within 1%.
Socrates' speech
Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 600 lines "including his conversations with Agathon and Diotima".
Actual: extends lines 1180-1833, i.e. 653 lines (+53).
53 out of 600 (9%), well above the previous variances.
Alcibiades' speech
Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 400 lines.
Actual: extends lines 1955-2302, i.e. 347 lines (-53).
This is the biggest variation in the list (13%).
So, I think it's too strong to say Kennedy has only found very approximate correlation". We need to know more about just how he's determining his lines.
It may reveal some details of how Plato himself thought of things, but it's not really any sort philosophical revelation. (From a scientist's point of view, philosophers have an odd fascination with the original sources, of which descendants are treated as degraded versions rather than improvements. Nobody would think to look in Principia or Origin of Species for special clues about the science that only Newton or Darwin would have had.)
Perhaps it's worth pointing out that this is a history of philosophy paper in a history of philosophy journal. I don't know whom you have in mind as philosophers who have an "odd fascination with the original sources", but in my experience (I'm a historian of philosophy by trade), philosophers have a perfectly good grip on the difference between history of philosophy and philosophy, just as scientists have a perfectly good grip on the difference between the history of science and science. And in this particular case, I can't imagine anyone in an academic philosophy department thinking that this paper will lead to great insights about any real philosophical issue: at most, it affects the interpretation of Plato.
Your version uses rigid 35-character lines, even when that breaks a word at a place no Greek would have (e.g. your very first line chops off a sigma from ameletêtos and puts it on the next line; a scribe would have broken at a syllabic division, surely). If the 35-character length is taken as a maximum for a line, then allowing for this will make some lines shorter than 35 characters and thus bring down the counts. Of course, you could adjust so as to get an overall average of 35. Either way, you'd need to do a lot of manual work to insert plausible breaks. I have no idea whether this would bring things more into line with Kennedy's data or whether Kennedy is allowing for it as well. It would be useful to have the details of Kennedy's algorithm.
Furthermore, as if it weren't wrong enough already, Socrates was not executed for heresy but for corruption of youth.
Actually, the charge appears to have included both of these, to judge by Plato's Apology: corrupting the youth, not worshiping the gods the state worships, worshiping "strange" gods, and for good measure "making the weaker argument the stronger".
Just to add a perspective not often seen on slashdot, my daughter is now 34, and I've been married to her mother for 41 years (neither of those is a typo). My daughter is also currently quite sane, has a good job, and hasn't depended on her parents for support since she finished her education.
There was no such thing as GPS tracking (or pocket cell phones, for that matter) when she was in high school, but if there had been we still wouldn't have considered for a moment attaching such a device to to her. We did, of course, want to know where she was, and once she was old enough to drive we learned what it's like to listen for the car coming home while trying to sleep (anyone my age with children knows exactly what I mean). However, it was her responsibility to keep us informed about her whereabouts. Had she been equipped with a tracking device, that's a responsibility she would not have learned, or at least learned as well. I also think it's a responsibility children need to learn well before they're 18.
I'm aware that there are dangers in the world. While our daughter was in college, in fact, one of her friends was abducted and murdered while driving back to school after a vacation (the murderer, a trucker, was eventually caught). Such things are horrible, and any parent would want to prevent them. However, there are limits to what one can do, reasonably. Should you prevent your daughter from leaving home to go to college in order to prevent a (quite rare) incident like this? Should you hire a bodyguard to shadow her while she's away at school?
Of course, drawing broad conclusions from a single data point is unreasonable, but I do have the advantage of several decades' more general experience than many in this forum. My general impression, based on observations of the ways others in my circle raised their children, is that those with the most obsessive concerns for monitoring their children's behavior usually produced children who, as they grew up, were more likely to resent their parents and more likely to screw up their lives. However, I also realize (as some on this forum may not) that there's only so much parents can do to influence how their children turn out as adults, and it may be that we were just lucky with our daughter. Let me know how yours are doing in 25 years (I do wish you well).
And by the way, my own reaction to those leashes some parents attach to their children is still mild horror.
"Those things were only mentioned in the Odyssey as much as WWII and George Bush were mentioned in Nostradamus."
Having actually read the article (not just the brief and somewhat inept summary from MSNBC that this thread is actually linked to), I think I'm in a position to say: hogwash. This is actually a carefully researched piece, and it makes a credible, if not conclusive, case that there's a trace record of a specific solar eclipse scattered through the Odyssey in references to Odysseus' return home. The actual article is in PNAS, but you'll need a subscription (yours or an institution's) to see it.
One point to get straight right away: most of the references to astronomical phenomena these authors talk about are straightforward and literal. They describe such things as Odysseus seeing the bright morning star on arriving at the harbor in Ithaca (pretty literal reference to Venus as morning star), or navigating by using the constellations Bootes, the Pleiades, and the Great Bear (about as literal as it gets), or multiple references to the final confrontation with the suitors being preceded by a night of new moon (again just plain literal descriptions).
The one point that does involve shaky interpretation is their seeing references to Mercury's motions in the story of Hermes being sent to the east and then back to the west. This is a major issue with their argument, since it's only with the inclusion of the requirement that Mercury have been at greatest western elongation about a month prior to the eclipse that they are able to narrow it down to a specific date. You'll have to read their argument yourself to see whether they make a plausible case for it (see reference above), but it in no way resembles seeing the future in Nostradamus.
When I had seen only the MSNBC summary, I was somewhat skeptical myself, but what I see now is that that summary is a little inept. The actual article's authors know perfectly well (as the MSNBC summarizer seems not to) that a solar eclipse can only occur at new moon. In fact, they point out that two ancient authors, Plutarch and Heraclitus the Allegorist, long ago proposed that Homer was talking about an eclipse and noted as part of their argument that several passages say Odysseus' final return took place at new moon, which is a necessary condition for an eclipse having taken place. Similarly, it's the MSNBC summarist who talks about retrograde motion; the actual article puts its argument in terms of Mercury's elongations from the sun at sunset and sunrise.
A further point, as the authors note, is that they're not selectively reading a few passages and ignoring others that might not support their view. Instead, they have included (or so they say--but this can be checked) all the passages in the Odyssey that concern what the stars and planets were doing during Odysseus' final trip to Ithaca and his confrontation with the suitors.
Before you consign this one to the trash-heap, you really do need to read it.
"There is evidence of significant historical details being preserved in oral tradition. This might be one example."
Maybe, but I'd like to see exactly what texts in the Odyssey the authors get their numbers of days from. For example, Homer most certainly does not say "Mercury was in retrograde motion 34 days before" or anything like it. The authors instead rely on a story about the god Hermes (= Roman Mercury, but of course identified by the Greeks with the planet Mercury) going from west to east and then back from east to west. We need to supply a lot of interpretation to see this as a reference to an episode of retrograde motion (i.e. relative east-to-west motion with respect to the background of fixed stars).
For the inner planets, and especially Mercury, you can't directly observe an entire east-to-west (or west-to-east) swing, since in the middle the planet's too close to the sun to be observed. What you actually see is (1) planet visible in the morning, before the sun, (2) planet appears closer to sun on successive mornings, (3) planet no longer visible for a succession of days, (4) planet visible in the evening, just before sunset, (5) planet moves farther from the sun on successive evenings, (6) planet moves back towards the sun on successive evenings, (7) planet no longer visible for a while, (8) planet visible in the morning just before the sun, (9) repeat. To get a reference to this out of a story about Hermes delivering a message to someone in the west and then coming back requires some genuine interpretive argument.
It may well be that the authors of the article (i.e. Magnasco and Baikouzis, the authors of the article discussed in the MSNBC article linked to this current thread) have supplied enough argument to make their case for this. However, I can't tell, because their article isn't available to me (it's in PNAS for June 23, and my institution's online subscription only shows the June 17 issue as available. I'll check it out when it goes online.
Incidentally, the MSNBC summary appears to have been written by someone with little familiarity with naked-eye astronomy. And as others have pointed out, there's absolutely nothing surprising about a solar eclipse happening at the time of the new moon, since that's the only time it could possibly happen (but the fact that the proposed eclipse is located at new moon in the Odyssey may be evidence that, at the very least, someone somewhere along the line of transmission had actually seen a solar eclipse and remembered that it happened at the time of a new moon--a natural thing to remember for ancient Mediterranean societies, which used the moon as a short-range calendar).
This story is yet another anecdote, but I notice that the theme is "I can almost do entirely without Microsoft." Let me provide another perspective. I've been using FreeBSD on my office desktop (as well as the machine for my departmental server) for, oh, about eight years now (it's been so long I'm not quite sure). My computer is, and has long been, entirely Microsoft-free. I use KDE for a desktop, OpenOffice, various browsers (mostly Firefox and Opera). I am old-fashioned enough that I use emacs for most of what I do (even for reports and correspondence, using LaTeX), but I have access to Lyx, OpenOffice, etc., if I wish.
This is not a home computer. Until a year ago, I was head of an academic department in a large university (I was in that position for 13 years). Doing that job required dealing with the usual ocean of Excel spreadsheets, Word files, etc., from administrators mostly living in a heavily Microsofted world. Where possible, I communicated to others with PDFs and plain-text email; where necessary, I sent them.doc or.xls files produced by OpenOffice. This was for a department of about 25 faculty, with four staff, 30-odd graduate students, uncountably many undergraduates, and a total of around 70 computers (mixed environment--*nix, Windows, Macs).
Now, FreeBSD is not likely to be anyone's first choice for a single-user office desktop, and I'm not proselytizing for it (though I've become perversely attached to it: my computing history goes back to 1968, when I had a job writing programs in 1401 Autocoder, if that tells you anything). I actually use Ubuntu on my (equally Microsoft-free) laptop. My point is instead that it's perfectly possible to meet the needs of a real office job using nothing but free software, and indeed has been possible for years. And even using FreeBSD.
It's off topic, but you did reference the link in your sig concerning your eye history. Two questions about that: (1) You say that when you were young, "contact lenses were made of glass." I started wearing contacts at the age of 13, in 1959, and the only lenses I ever heard of were plastic (acrylic, the old-fashioned non-gas-permeable hard lenses). I know there were at one time glass lenses, but I'd be surprised if you're much older than I am. (2) You say your vision was 20/400. Is that primarily myopia? If so, what's your refractive correction? I'd have been very happy to have come up to 20/400 for most of my life (-10 diopters at its worst, in my mid-20s). I've known many people with corrections worse than -8; 20/400 sounds like about a -5 to me. As for cataract surgery: had one done when I was 60, which got me to a trivial -0.75 diopter correction (waiting for the other one to get bad enough so that insurance will cover it). This was the closest thing to no surgery I can imagine (less than ten minutes in the operating room). I'll take that over a root canal any day.
I have a Toshiba Satellite U205 which has been happily running Ubuntu Linux since about 4 hours after I bought it in December 2006. The install, as is typical of Ubuntu, was completely trouble-free and required no intelligence at all (I did manually partition it first so as to leave the OEM XP system intact). Suspend to RAM doesn't work (not a surprise), and I've never taken the time to get the fingerprint reader working, but everything else is fine. And toshset works, for the most part. On the other hand, I've never tried to get the BIOS functions on the Fn keys working. I should add that my work desktop and the server I'm one of the admins for both run FreeBSD, so Linux isn't exactly my life.
Do you really believe that a 50-year lifespan was regarded
the same way a hundred years ago as a 300-year lifespan
now? You need to look up the meaning of "life expectancy".
Many people lived into their sixties, seventies, eighties a hundred years
ago, or a thousand, or three thousand (look up the
ages at death of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles,
Aeschylus, or J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, etc.). There were some people
who managed to survive to a hundred way back in, say,
ancient Greece. The big difference between then and now is
in the number of people who died before they were
five years old. By contrast, nobody now lives anywhere
near three hundred years.
You can actually have some fun with deciding the plural of `octopus' (for the
record, I say `octopuses'). It's true that the Greek
plural of `oktwpous' (w for omega) is `oktwpodes'), but
there's two ways to say `octopus' in ancient Greek: `oktwpous' and `oktapous'.
Both words are used to mean both `octopus' and `eight feet in size' (e.g. an area
of eight square feet'); as I recall, `oktapous' is actually the more
common word for the animal (in modern Greek, it's
`ktapodi', descended from this). `octopi' is formed
by treating `octopus' as if it were a Latin second-declension
noun, which it isn't. I actually don't know the classical Latin word for
octopus: there is such a word as `octipes' (plural `octipedes'), but according
to the new Oxford Latin it occurs only in the adjectival sense
`having eight feet'.
And that's why I say `octopuses', and why I'm not bothered at all if you want to say
`octopi' (or even `octopodes').
I would also recommend NOD32 for anyone running a *nix mail/file server in a mixed environment with Windows clients. We run in on a FreeBSD box handling mail, files (samba), and other things for about 60 users (currently scanning mail via amavisd, periodic scans of/usr/home). Both cheaper and better than Kaspersky, etc. Basically, the only attention it ever requires is updating the license every year.
Well, I seem to have mixed up two different comments from cogitolv. It was a different
comment that cited a web page with the misspelled versions of Heraclitus and Pythagoras: http://n4bz.org/gsr/gsr7.htm. Sorry.
'Hericlitus' is the correct english transliteration.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/heraclit.htm
Well, no: that first `i' corresponds to an alpha. You can use `Herakleitos', Heracleitus',
`Heraclitos', `Heraklitos', but not `Heri-' anything. The
web page you link is wrong (that page also refers to Pythagoras as `Pythagorus', which to a classicist
sounds extraordinarily dumb).
By the way, the `Attic alphabet' (actually the Ionic
alphabet, though it was the standard alphabet in Athens, where
they spoke Attic Greek, from 403BCE) is pretty much the
same as the alphabet taught in ancient Greek classes and, for that
matter, used for modern Greek. The forms of the capital letters are
the same as in Plato's time, though the forms used for lower-case letters
developed much later. None of this has anything at all to do with
`disambiguating' Plato or Aristotle: there's no better example of
an Attic Greek writer than Plato. You may be thinking of the accents used in writing
ancient Greek. These were introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in about 200 BCE as an aid in
teaching non-Greeks how to pronounce Greek, and their use eventually became standard; there are some instances
where a word can be disambiguated by a choice of accent. None of this, however,
was developed in the middle ages. Perhaps you're thinking of all the
recopying of older manuscripts from uncials to cursive letters
that took place in the late Byzantine empire?
"Herakleitos" is a little closer (neglecting the facts
that you haven't differentiated between eta and epsilon
in your transliteration, apart from worries about whether
you should be writing that consonant out front when his name, as
spelled in the Ionian alphabet, begins with a vowel).
Nobody who works with this stuff professionally would have
any reservations about calling Heraclitus "Heraclitus": it's a Latinization,
but well understood. Or would you insist on "Platon", "Aristoteles",
"Achilleus", "Alexandros"?
If you want to be precise in plain ASCII, use
TLG Beta Code: H(RA/KLEITOS
Greek has 8 cases? Nope, Ancient Greek has 5 (same as
in Latin except for the ablative, the functions
of which are largely absorbed by the genitive).
Greek verbs, on the other hand--now, there's some
real inflections (three voices, four moods, seven
tenses, three numbers). Perhaps you were thinking
of Sanskrit?
It's 2003, the web has images, and noone uses Lynx to browse. Stop kidding yourselves.
Well, I use lynx (lynx with ssl, to be
precise) all the time. I only resort to Mozilla
(or occasionally Konqueror) when I absolutely have
to get something from a site designed by an idiot
so as to be inaccessible without the pretty picture.
(You do know that lynx is MIME-aware, right?)
Sometimes, I resort to
links
to see tables properly rendered. There's also w3m.
Plain text is faster (I use
dialup connections a lot), and I can still see pictures if I really need to.
I find that most of the images on web pages are just
bandwidth-absorbing decorations, with little value
as information (of course, I don't know what you
use the web for).
As for this fellow "noone",
I didn't know he used lynx, and I don't know who he is, but
glad to hear about it.
Try taking a poll of how many indie
artists heard Mozart's 5th
That would be Koechel 22, composed in
1765 (when he was 9 years old). Damn few
classical musicians have heard it either. You may
perhaps be thinking of Beethoven?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting tidbit: The only record of Socrates is in the writings of Plato,
No, Socrates appears as a character in Aristophanes' Clouds (and the whole point behind Attic comedies is to make fun of real people), Plato's contemporary Xenophon wrote a good deal about Socrates, and some sections of Socratic dialogues written by Aeschines of Sphettos still exist. Aristotle was born over a decade after Socrates' death, but that puts him far closer in time than us, and he never questions that Socrates existed.
See? I did actually get something out of my degree in Philosophy.
A little more history of philosophy might have helped.
Thanks for posting this (though why as AC? are you a competing scholar?).
One possibility though, would it make a difference if you excluded/included the names in the dialogue? You know how the dialogue says "Socrates:" and then what Socrates says. Your numbers seem so close...
I'm not the anonymous author of the grandparent post, but I can answer your question: in the Symposium, there are very few such tag lines. The dialogue is embedded in a conversation between two characters (Apollodorus and one of his nameless friends), but the main content (the story of Agathon's "symposium", i.e. drinking party) is related at second hand by Apollodorus (in fact, he reports the whole thing as something someone else told to him, which makes for some interestingly complex Greek grammar).
Total length of dialogue
25 lines in 2400 is about 1%. Given the uncertainty in knowing just where Kennedy's breaking the lines, that's pretty close. In fact, I took a few hundred lines from your version and moved the line breaks so that they always occured at a syllable (so that no line is over 35 characters, though many are less), and it moved the line count up about 2%. We don't know exactly how Kennedy's handling the line-break problem, so you may both be right, given your ways of counting lines. We also don't know what conventions Kennedy's following about breaking when a new character takes over (the Symposium is in a sort of embedded oratio obliqua, with two characters doing the talking, one of whom (Apollodorus) delivers most of the dialogue as a long indirect-speech report. Is Kennedy breaking where characters change, in either case?
With a 1% shorter line count, we'd expect it to begin at line 396 by your count. 396 - 377 gives 19, or about 5%, though the length variance is still 10%.
Eryximachos' speech
The starting-point is within 3%; if we go with 179 for the length, it's again about 10% variance between the two of you.
Aristophanes' speech
22 out of 800 is less than 3% variance.
Agathon's speech
20 off out of 1200 is within 1%.
Socrates' speech
53 out of 600 (9%), well above the previous variances.
Alcibiades' speech
This is the biggest variation in the list (13%).
So, I think it's too strong to say Kennedy has only found very approximate correlation". We need to know more about just how he's determining his lines.
It may reveal some details of how Plato himself thought of things, but it's not really any sort philosophical revelation. (From a scientist's point of view, philosophers have an odd fascination with the original sources, of which descendants are treated as degraded versions rather than improvements. Nobody would think to look in Principia or Origin of Species for special clues about the science that only Newton or Darwin would have had.)
Perhaps it's worth pointing out that this is a history of philosophy paper in a history of philosophy journal. I don't know whom you have in mind as philosophers who have an "odd fascination with the original sources", but in my experience (I'm a historian of philosophy by trade), philosophers have a perfectly good grip on the difference between history of philosophy and philosophy, just as scientists have a perfectly good grip on the difference between the history of science and science. And in this particular case, I can't imagine anyone in an academic philosophy department thinking that this paper will lead to great insights about any real philosophical issue: at most, it affects the interpretation of Plato.
Your version uses rigid 35-character lines, even when that breaks a word at a place no Greek would have (e.g. your very first line chops off a sigma from ameletêtos and puts it on the next line; a scribe would have broken at a syllabic division, surely). If the 35-character length is taken as a maximum for a line, then allowing for this will make some lines shorter than 35 characters and thus bring down the counts. Of course, you could adjust so as to get an overall average of 35. Either way, you'd need to do a lot of manual work to insert plausible breaks. I have no idea whether this would bring things more into line with Kennedy's data or whether Kennedy is allowing for it as well. It would be useful to have the details of Kennedy's algorithm.
Furthermore, as if it weren't wrong enough already, Socrates was not executed for heresy but for corruption of youth.
Actually, the charge appears to have included both of these, to judge by Plato's Apology: corrupting the youth, not worshiping the gods the state worships, worshiping "strange" gods, and for good measure "making the weaker argument the stronger".
From my FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE box:
Looks like a binary to me.
Just to add a perspective not often seen on slashdot, my daughter is now 34, and I've been married to her mother for 41 years (neither of those is a typo). My daughter is also currently quite sane, has a good job, and hasn't depended on her parents for support since she finished her education.
There was no such thing as GPS tracking (or pocket cell phones, for that matter) when she was in high school, but if there had been we still wouldn't have considered for a moment attaching such a device to to her. We did, of course, want to know where she was, and once she was old enough to drive we learned what it's like to listen for the car coming home while trying to sleep (anyone my age with children knows exactly what I mean). However, it was her responsibility to keep us informed about her whereabouts. Had she been equipped with a tracking device, that's a responsibility she would not have learned, or at least learned as well. I also think it's a responsibility children need to learn well before they're 18.
I'm aware that there are dangers in the world. While our daughter was in college, in fact, one of her friends was abducted and murdered while driving back to school after a vacation (the murderer, a trucker, was eventually caught). Such things are horrible, and any parent would want to prevent them. However, there are limits to what one can do, reasonably. Should you prevent your daughter from leaving home to go to college in order to prevent a (quite rare) incident like this? Should you hire a bodyguard to shadow her while she's away at school?
Of course, drawing broad conclusions from a single data point is unreasonable, but I do have the advantage of several decades' more general experience than many in this forum. My general impression, based on observations of the ways others in my circle raised their children, is that those with the most obsessive concerns for monitoring their children's behavior usually produced children who, as they grew up, were more likely to resent their parents and more likely to screw up their lives. However, I also realize (as some on this forum may not) that there's only so much parents can do to influence how their children turn out as adults, and it may be that we were just lucky with our daughter. Let me know how yours are doing in 25 years (I do wish you well).
And by the way, my own reaction to those leashes some parents attach to their children is still mild horror.
Petrushka said:
His name's actually Er (though I think all we get is the genitive êros at 614b3). But I'll bet you knew that.
Colonel Korn said:
Having actually read the article (not just the brief and somewhat inept summary from MSNBC that this thread is actually linked to), I think I'm in a position to say: hogwash. This is actually a carefully researched piece, and it makes a credible, if not conclusive, case that there's a trace record of a specific solar eclipse scattered through the Odyssey in references to Odysseus' return home. The actual article is in PNAS, but you'll need a subscription (yours or an institution's) to see it.
One point to get straight right away: most of the references to astronomical phenomena these authors talk about are straightforward and literal. They describe such things as Odysseus seeing the bright morning star on arriving at the harbor in Ithaca (pretty literal reference to Venus as morning star), or navigating by using the constellations Bootes, the Pleiades, and the Great Bear (about as literal as it gets), or multiple references to the final confrontation with the suitors being preceded by a night of new moon (again just plain literal descriptions).
The one point that does involve shaky interpretation is their seeing references to Mercury's motions in the story of Hermes being sent to the east and then back to the west. This is a major issue with their argument, since it's only with the inclusion of the requirement that Mercury have been at greatest western elongation about a month prior to the eclipse that they are able to narrow it down to a specific date. You'll have to read their argument yourself to see whether they make a plausible case for it (see reference above), but it in no way resembles seeing the future in Nostradamus.
When I had seen only the MSNBC summary, I was somewhat skeptical myself, but what I see now is that that summary is a little inept. The actual article's authors know perfectly well (as the MSNBC summarizer seems not to) that a solar eclipse can only occur at new moon. In fact, they point out that two ancient authors, Plutarch and Heraclitus the Allegorist, long ago proposed that Homer was talking about an eclipse and noted as part of their argument that several passages say Odysseus' final return took place at new moon, which is a necessary condition for an eclipse having taken place. Similarly, it's the MSNBC summarist who talks about retrograde motion; the actual article puts its argument in terms of Mercury's elongations from the sun at sunset and sunrise.
A further point, as the authors note, is that they're not selectively reading a few passages and ignoring others that might not support their view. Instead, they have included (or so they say--but this can be checked) all the passages in the Odyssey that concern what the stars and planets were doing during Odysseus' final trip to Ithaca and his confrontation with the suitors.
Before you consign this one to the trash-heap, you really do need to read it.
sfsp said:
"There is evidence of significant historical details being preserved in oral tradition. This might be one example."
Maybe, but I'd like to see exactly what texts in the Odyssey the authors get their numbers of days from. For example, Homer most certainly does not say "Mercury was in retrograde motion 34 days before" or anything like it. The authors instead rely on a story about the god Hermes (= Roman Mercury, but of course identified by the Greeks with the planet Mercury) going from west to east and then back from east to west. We need to supply a lot of interpretation to see this as a reference to an episode of retrograde motion (i.e. relative east-to-west motion with respect to the background of fixed stars).
For the inner planets, and especially Mercury, you can't directly observe an entire east-to-west (or west-to-east) swing, since in the middle the planet's too close to the sun to be observed. What you actually see is (1) planet visible in the morning, before the sun, (2) planet appears closer to sun on successive mornings, (3) planet no longer visible for a succession of days, (4) planet visible in the evening, just before sunset, (5) planet moves farther from the sun on successive evenings, (6) planet moves back towards the sun on successive evenings, (7) planet no longer visible for a while, (8) planet visible in the morning just before the sun, (9) repeat. To get a reference to this out of a story about Hermes delivering a message to someone in the west and then coming back requires some genuine interpretive argument.
It may well be that the authors of the article (i.e. Magnasco and Baikouzis, the authors of the article discussed in the MSNBC article linked to this current thread) have supplied enough argument to make their case for this. However, I can't tell, because their article isn't available to me (it's in PNAS for June 23, and my institution's online subscription only shows the June 17 issue as available. I'll check it out when it goes online.
Incidentally, the MSNBC summary appears to have been written by someone with little familiarity with naked-eye astronomy. And as others have pointed out, there's absolutely nothing surprising about a solar eclipse happening at the time of the new moon, since that's the only time it could possibly happen (but the fact that the proposed eclipse is located at new moon in the Odyssey may be evidence that, at the very least, someone somewhere along the line of transmission had actually seen a solar eclipse and remembered that it happened at the time of a new moon--a natural thing to remember for ancient Mediterranean societies, which used the moon as a short-range calendar).
This story is yet another anecdote, but I notice that the theme is "I can almost do entirely without Microsoft." Let me provide another perspective. I've been using FreeBSD on my office desktop (as well as the machine for my departmental server) for, oh, about eight years now (it's been so long I'm not quite sure). My computer is, and has long been, entirely Microsoft-free. I use KDE for a desktop, OpenOffice, various browsers (mostly Firefox and Opera). I am old-fashioned enough that I use emacs for most of what I do (even for reports and correspondence, using LaTeX), but I have access to Lyx, OpenOffice, etc., if I wish.
This is not a home computer. Until a year ago, I was head of an academic department in a large university (I was in that position for 13 years). Doing that job required dealing with the usual ocean of Excel spreadsheets, Word files, etc., from administrators mostly living in a heavily Microsofted world. Where possible, I communicated to others with PDFs and plain-text email; where necessary, I sent them .doc or .xls files produced by OpenOffice. This was for a department of about 25 faculty, with four staff, 30-odd graduate students, uncountably many undergraduates, and a total of around 70 computers (mixed environment--*nix, Windows, Macs).
Now, FreeBSD is not likely to be anyone's first choice for a single-user office desktop, and I'm not proselytizing for it (though I've become perversely attached to it: my computing history goes back to 1968, when I had a job writing programs in 1401 Autocoder, if that tells you anything). I actually use Ubuntu on my (equally Microsoft-free) laptop. My point is instead that it's perfectly possible to meet the needs of a real office job using nothing but free software, and indeed has been possible for years. And even using FreeBSD.
That's bowdlerize.
It's off topic, but you did reference the link in your sig concerning your eye history. Two questions about that: (1) You say that when you were young, "contact lenses were made of glass." I started wearing contacts at the age of 13, in 1959, and the only lenses I ever heard of were plastic (acrylic, the old-fashioned non-gas-permeable hard lenses). I know there were at one time glass lenses, but I'd be surprised if you're much older than I am. (2) You say your vision was 20/400. Is that primarily myopia? If so, what's your refractive correction? I'd have been very happy to have come up to 20/400 for most of my life (-10 diopters at its worst, in my mid-20s). I've known many people with corrections worse than -8; 20/400 sounds like about a -5 to me. As for cataract surgery: had one done when I was 60, which got me to a trivial -0.75 diopter correction (waiting for the other one to get bad enough so that insurance will cover it). This was the closest thing to no surgery I can imagine (less than ten minutes in the operating room). I'll take that over a root canal any day.
I have a Toshiba Satellite U205 which has been happily running Ubuntu Linux since about 4 hours after I bought it in December 2006. The install, as is typical of Ubuntu, was completely trouble-free and required no intelligence at all (I did manually partition it first so as to leave the OEM XP system intact). Suspend to RAM doesn't work (not a surprise), and I've never taken the time to get the fingerprint reader working, but everything else is fine. And toshset works, for the most part. On the other hand, I've never tried to get the BIOS functions on the Fn keys working. I should add that my work desktop and the server I'm one of the admins for both run FreeBSD, so Linux isn't exactly my life.
Do you really believe that a 50-year lifespan was regarded the same way a hundred years ago as a 300-year lifespan now? You need to look up the meaning of "life expectancy". Many people lived into their sixties, seventies, eighties a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or three thousand (look up the ages at death of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aeschylus, or J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, etc.). There were some people who managed to survive to a hundred way back in, say, ancient Greece. The big difference between then and now is in the number of people who died before they were five years old. By contrast, nobody now lives anywhere near three hundred years.
And that's why I say `octopuses', and why I'm not bothered at all if you want to say `octopi' (or even `octopodes').
I would also recommend NOD32 for anyone running a *nix mail/file server /usr/home). Both cheaper and better than Kaspersky, etc.
in a mixed environment with Windows clients. We run in on a FreeBSD
box handling mail, files (samba), and other things for about
60 users (currently scanning mail via amavisd, periodic scans of
Basically, the only attention it ever requires is updating the license every year.
Well, I seem to have mixed up two different comments from cogitolv. It was a different comment that cited a web page with the misspelled versions of Heraclitus and Pythagoras: http://n4bz.org/gsr/gsr7.htm. Sorry.
cogitolv says:
Well, no: that first `i' corresponds to an alpha. You can use `Herakleitos', Heracleitus', `Heraclitos', `Heraklitos', but not `Heri-' anything. The web page you link is wrong (that page also refers to Pythagoras as `Pythagorus', which to a classicist sounds extraordinarily dumb).
By the way, the `Attic alphabet' (actually the Ionic alphabet, though it was the standard alphabet in Athens, where they spoke Attic Greek, from 403BCE) is pretty much the same as the alphabet taught in ancient Greek classes and, for that matter, used for modern Greek. The forms of the capital letters are the same as in Plato's time, though the forms used for lower-case letters developed much later. None of this has anything at all to do with `disambiguating' Plato or Aristotle: there's no better example of an Attic Greek writer than Plato. You may be thinking of the accents used in writing ancient Greek. These were introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in about 200 BCE as an aid in teaching non-Greeks how to pronounce Greek, and their use eventually became standard; there are some instances where a word can be disambiguated by a choice of accent. None of this, however, was developed in the middle ages. Perhaps you're thinking of all the recopying of older manuscripts from uncials to cursive letters that took place in the late Byzantine empire?
"Herakleitos" is a little closer (neglecting the facts that you haven't differentiated between eta and epsilon in your transliteration, apart from worries about whether you should be writing that consonant out front when his name, as spelled in the Ionian alphabet, begins with a vowel).
Nobody who works with this stuff professionally would have any reservations about calling Heraclitus "Heraclitus": it's a Latinization, but well understood. Or would you insist on "Platon", "Aristoteles", "Achilleus", "Alexandros"?
If you want to be precise in plain ASCII, use TLG Beta Code: H(RA/KLEITOS
Greek has 8 cases? Nope, Ancient Greek has 5 (same as in Latin except for the ablative, the functions of which are largely absorbed by the genitive). Greek verbs, on the other hand--now, there's some real inflections (three voices, four moods, seven tenses, three numbers). Perhaps you were thinking of Sanskrit?
Snow in New Mexico? Quite a lot, actually. Much of the state is mountainous, and most of the north is above 5000 feet even in the valleys.
Well, I use lynx (lynx with ssl, to be precise) all the time. I only resort to Mozilla (or occasionally Konqueror) when I absolutely have to get something from a site designed by an idiot so as to be inaccessible without the pretty picture. (You do know that lynx is MIME-aware, right?) Sometimes, I resort to links to see tables properly rendered. There's also w3m.
Plain text is faster (I use dialup connections a lot), and I can still see pictures if I really need to. I find that most of the images on web pages are just bandwidth-absorbing decorations, with little value as information (of course, I don't know what you use the web for).
As for this fellow "noone", I didn't know he used lynx, and I don't know who he is, but glad to hear about it.
That would be Koechel 22, composed in 1765 (when he was 9 years old). Damn few classical musicians have heard it either. You may perhaps be thinking of Beethoven?