Here's another scientist's perspective on the historicity of the Odyssey:
You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds. -- Eratosthenes
Speaking as someone who works on ancient Greek literature for a living (no, there's not all that many of us), I look forward to this group's publication of their discoveries of exactly which island the Cyclops lived on, the chemical make-up of the drug in the lotus that kept the Lotus-Eaters somnolent, and details on the god Poseidon's dietary habits.
Myths do, occasionally, have a historical basis; rarely, and only ever in a very distorted fashion; but, very occasionally, it happens. For example, discoveries in Hittite textual archives over the last few decades now have a number of people seriously contemplating the possibility that some kind of "Trojan War" may, in some distorted sense, actually have actually happened. But for a story to have its roots in an event from which it is separated by several centuries in which there was no such thing as writing... well, why not just announce that you've found Atlantis? That kind of announcement would have pretty much the same relationship between myth and historicity.
In addition, the "darkening of the sky" bit that they quote comes in the middle of an episode where a seer is having a vision of blood running down the walls. If you're going to look for historically verifiable events, why not look at events that the poem describes as actually happening? -- a hallucination isn't really a very convincing candidate.
Plutarch suggested the prophecy of Theoclymenus referred to a solar eclipse.
Plutarch also thought that Odysseus visited a goddess named Calypso who lived on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of a sea enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped continent. It's just not easy to have much confidence in him when he's talking about subjects about which he clearly doesn't have a clue.
One of the most intriguing things about his site is that it carefully avoids mentioning what party he's in. I guess that means he doesn't get on too well with his party -- and that probably means he'll never be running, I'm afraid.
Quite easily done via macros, and all keyboard shortcuts may be arbitrarily (re)assigned to any macro (Tools - Customise - Keyboard).
Personally when I'm typing in alphabets other than the Roman, the range of combinations of letters and diacritics is too large for keyboard shortcuts anyway, as there aren't enough keys on the keyboard. For that, I find it easiest to type into an html page that converts the Roman text with javascript; then copy and paste. If I cared more I'd probably use a Mac, since keyboard layouts can be easily customised in OS X. (I would hope that they can in the various Linuces as well.)
Indeed. I don't have a big problem with someone being penalised for violating a court order, as that's what courts are for -- to put their foot down w.r.t. interpreting the law; then if someone violates that interpretation, it's again the courts' job to tell them off.
However, while violating court orders is ipso facto a crime, I also think (1) court gag orders should be a hell of a lot rarer than they are -- there have been an awful lot of them in NZ court cases in recent years; that's a fault with the courts, though, not with the law; (2) imprisonment seems excessive (without knowing the details of the case -- yet); and (3) indefinite imprisonment is simply ludicrous and kind of pathetic. What's wrong with simply confiscating the tools used to commit the crime, or whatever other recourse is usual in other countries? Maybe NZ law doesn't actually allow for that, which wouldn't surprise me (there seem to be lots of loopholes in NZ law).
The banner link leads here: STOPPA FRA [stoppafralagen.nu].
Unsurprising, but still kind of sad, that they have to have their domain name registered not in Sweden but in a micronation like Niue. For reference, Niue has a population under 2000.
(I only comment because I actually knew someone from Niue once, which may well make me unique here:-)
The British Empire is of course Belize, the Falkland Island, Rockall, bits of Antarctica, and Gibraltar.
Actually there seems to be a bit more than that -- a few more Caribbean islands (including Bermuda of course), the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena and a few other islands in the Atlantic, a few atolls in the Indian Ocean, and a couple of chunks of Cyprus. Intriguing.
Yeah, because he sucked at navigation.
Additionally, he was an idiot: All the things the gods warned him not to do because
they would turn out to be bad, he did - and they went bad.
Not a single statement there accurately reflects the Odyssey. The actual story, as opposed to the one you've made up, relates that:
he took ten years because his men continually disobeyed his orders -- that's made clear in the first few lines --;
he shacked up with Circe for a year (voluntarily);
after he washed up on Calypso's island she basically held him prisoner for seven years. The story also relates how
any time a god told him to do something, he did exactly that; and
he is repeatedly described as having practically divine intelligence, and this is borne out by the various schemes he devises in the story. Even Athena compliments him on his deviousness.
The reason you do not understand his appeal to the ancient Greeks is because your memory of the story bears little resemblance to the actual story.
Odysseus did give the goat herd a sucker punch that cracked a bone in his face (for good reason), and the rest of what you said is simply not true
You're thinking of Iros, the beggar, in book 18 (though we're told that he too was going to get the same punishment: 18.86-87). The punishment of Melanthios, the goatherd, is in book 22 (22.474-477). If it's any comfort the OP isn't wholly correct either, as it's not Odysseus himself who does the dismembering; the context makes it sound like it was his son, Telemachos, assisted by the "good" herdsmen. It's the bit just after Telemachos hangs a bunch of maidservants for having sex with the suitors.
Oh dear gods on Olympus. Have you read the replies to that review? In particular, the replies to the guy that calls it out as snake oil? I'm dumbfounded.
Heat is work, and work's a curse
and all the heat in the universe
is gonna COOOOOOOL down
'cause it can't increase
then there'll be no more work
and there'll be perfect peace.
(That's entropy, man.)
-- Flanders & Swann
The AC was not joking. Precisely that has been done at least once, to gain public input on designing a law in New Zealand (the site, and Slashdot's not very accurate summary); the idea got a lot of interest from several other governments, including Japan, Germany, France, the US, and UK.
Time to leave this country I think. Anyone recommend a decent country
For the gods' sake, if you're a Brit you've got loads of countries in the EU to choose from. You can move any time you want. Literally any time. Go. Tomorrow. Why not? Go on -- go to France, or the low countires, or Scandinavia. The quality of life in most of those places is enormously better too.
that respects human rights, has sensible drug legislation, and fast, cheapish internet connections?
Hellooooo? Europe! EU! You're a citizen! You can go catch a plane to Amsterdam and get a flat there tomorrow morning if you want!
I'm also a kiwi and can second that recommendation for the time being, while also seconding the nanny state provisos; but (1) be ready for the fact that salaries are much lower, and (2) you can bet your life insurance that things here will be looking a lot more neo-con after this year's election (unless changes of direction in the Aus/US governments persuade the future NZ PM otherwise). For one thing the next NZ government is likely to be ready to do anything, anything, to appease the US government in order to get NZ back into ANZUS.
Also Ireland -- though that would be even better if it were reasonable to make all your international travel thenceforth via France instead of the UK.
I have friends who are avid gamers but actually end up pirating the games they buy because it's too difficult to deal with the copy protection crap.
I'm sure there's nothing unusual about that. The very first thing I do when I buy a game, even before installing -- and preferably before buying, too -- is to stop off at gamecopyworld and/or gameburnworld to make sure that there's a crack that I can apply to my legitimate (and patched) copy. It's a trend that will only continue.
I've already had experiences of electronics shops pointing to me to instructions on how to "crack" a DVD player to make it multi-region, how to unlock phones, and so on. I'm sure it won't be too long before we see game shops doing similar things; games will catch up eventually.
On the other hand I think this will eventually reach a breaking point and these normal people (who are the paying customers) will stop putting up with said crap.
That I doubt, unfortunately. As the article shows, people have been putting up with copy-prevention schemes since the advent of commercial computer software (in fact the article doesn't start nearly early enough). Some of those schemes have been much more burdensome than present-day ones -- though they're getting worse again, with "activate every time you start the game"-type schemes.
What I didn't like was that Symphony would change all OpenOffice.org file associations to itself when it was installed and every time it was run. There was no option to leave the file associations alone.
You could always try running in a non-administrator account -- though I'm aware that that's a radical idea.
On the whole, I preferred the UI of Symphony to OpenOffice too. I liked OpenOffice 1.x even more, and would probably still be using it if it supported ODF properly. OpenOffice is going down a very sad road of trying to make itself identical to Microsoft Office in exactly the worst possible ways. Things like
using MSO-like right-click behaviour (right-click moves selection)
having to faff through bullets/numbering when moving the cursor with left/right arrow keys (instead of treating bullets purely as paragraph-level formatting)
random autoformatting, e.g. when pressing delete at the end of a paragraph (or is it when pressing backspace at the start of a paragraph? or is it both?)
always, always forgetting which view I want to see in the stylist every time I open a file
... and stuff like that. I'd try RedOffice, but I suspect I might have some difficulties with not being able to read the Chinese UI. Honestly, it's enough to make one want to use LaTeX... except that often I need ad hoc WYSIWYG page layout...
I'm guessing you come from the New World somewhere. Yes, 1000 years is fairly recent. But you're partially right, it wasn't quite "modern" either, which is why I said "not far from" modern.
I'm not quite sure why you're bringing up Spain and East Asia; I'm perfectly happy to agree that Western Europe was a barbaric wasteland at the time, but for some reason I thought we were talking about Scandinavia. The eastern Roman empire continued to exist into the Modern period, by the way; when Constantinople fell the Renaissance had been well under way for some time in various European countries. But the Byzantine Empire was neither ancient, mediaeval, nor modern, but somewhere in between and all three at once.
Unlike the rest of your points, that one is actually kind of (tangentially) related to the basic rationale for my earlier statement, as cultural and political links between Constantinople and Scandinavia were unusually strong, as European states of the time went. Scandinavians had already discovered and were attempting to colonise three separate New Worlds (Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador), something that Italians like Columbus didn't even think of for nearly another half millennium; and it was only going to be a couple more centuries before a sort of Renaissance started in Scandinavia, long before it got going anywhere else in Europe. So, I stand by my statement: "not far from modern". In the same way that the Italy of Boccaccio's time could be considered "not far from modern".
Actually, "viking" was originally a verb (present participle). I developed into a gerund. More correct to say that "Lief went viking." than "Lief was a Viking".
That is even more inaccurate than the GP. In Old English the weak present participle ending is not -ing but -ende; in Old Norse it is -andi. -ing is an OE/ON suffix that regularly indicates a person who is a member of one kind of group or other.
(Viking literally means a person who comes from a bay or similar.)
No, that's an anachronism. Vík meant bay or inlet. Víking never meant anything other than "pirate".
In any case it's at least as likely that the Icelandic word comes from Anglo-Saxon, rather than the other way round, as the word is attested in OE from the 8th century, but in Old Norse only two centuries later. (The origin in that case would be OE wic "camp, temporary settlement".)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another scientist's perspective on the historicity of the Odyssey:
You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.-- Eratosthenes
Speaking as someone who works on ancient Greek literature for a living (no, there's not all that many of us), I look forward to this group's publication of their discoveries of exactly which island the Cyclops lived on, the chemical make-up of the drug in the lotus that kept the Lotus-Eaters somnolent, and details on the god Poseidon's dietary habits.
Myths do, occasionally, have a historical basis; rarely, and only ever in a very distorted fashion; but, very occasionally, it happens. For example, discoveries in Hittite textual archives over the last few decades now have a number of people seriously contemplating the possibility that some kind of "Trojan War" may, in some distorted sense, actually have actually happened. But for a story to have its roots in an event from which it is separated by several centuries in which there was no such thing as writing ... well, why not just announce that you've found Atlantis? That kind of announcement would have pretty much the same relationship between myth and historicity.
In addition, the "darkening of the sky" bit that they quote comes in the middle of an episode where a seer is having a vision of blood running down the walls. If you're going to look for historically verifiable events, why not look at events that the poem describes as actually happening? -- a hallucination isn't really a very convincing candidate.
Plutarch suggested the prophecy of Theoclymenus referred to a solar eclipse.Plutarch also thought that Odysseus visited a goddess named Calypso who lived on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of a sea enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped continent. It's just not easy to have much confidence in him when he's talking about subjects about which he clearly doesn't have a clue.
A minor pernickety correction: that's Herakleitos, not Plato. Plato just quoted it.
One of the most intriguing things about his site is that it carefully avoids mentioning what party he's in. I guess that means he doesn't get on too well with his party -- and that probably means he'll never be running, I'm afraid.
After listening to the playing in the video, I really think you've got that the wrong way round ...
Quite easily done via macros, and all keyboard shortcuts may be arbitrarily (re)assigned to any macro (Tools - Customise - Keyboard).
Personally when I'm typing in alphabets other than the Roman, the range of combinations of letters and diacritics is too large for keyboard shortcuts anyway, as there aren't enough keys on the keyboard. For that, I find it easiest to type into an html page that converts the Roman text with javascript; then copy and paste. If I cared more I'd probably use a Mac, since keyboard layouts can be easily customised in OS X. (I would hope that they can in the various Linuces as well.)
I agree about the resource hog thing, though.
Indeed. I don't have a big problem with someone being penalised for violating a court order, as that's what courts are for -- to put their foot down w.r.t. interpreting the law; then if someone violates that interpretation, it's again the courts' job to tell them off.
However, while violating court orders is ipso facto a crime, I also think (1) court gag orders should be a hell of a lot rarer than they are -- there have been an awful lot of them in NZ court cases in recent years; that's a fault with the courts, though, not with the law; (2) imprisonment seems excessive (without knowing the details of the case -- yet); and (3) indefinite imprisonment is simply ludicrous and kind of pathetic. What's wrong with simply confiscating the tools used to commit the crime, or whatever other recourse is usual in other countries? Maybe NZ law doesn't actually allow for that, which wouldn't surprise me (there seem to be lots of loopholes in NZ law).
-- yours etc., an NZer
Unsurprising, but still kind of sad, that they have to have their domain name registered not in Sweden but in a micronation like Niue. For reference, Niue has a population under 2000.
(I only comment because I actually knew someone from Niue once, which may well make me unique here :-)
I couldn't possibly comment.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. After all, I've never talked to you before, and I've been around for over 35 years.
Actually there seems to be a bit more than that -- a few more Caribbean islands (including Bermuda of course), the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena and a few other islands in the Atlantic, a few atolls in the Indian Ocean, and a couple of chunks of Cyprus. Intriguing.
Not a single statement there accurately reflects the Odyssey. The actual story, as opposed to the one you've made up, relates that:
The reason you do not understand his appeal to the ancient Greeks is because your memory of the story bears little resemblance to the actual story.
You're thinking of Iros, the beggar, in book 18 (though we're told that he too was going to get the same punishment: 18.86-87). The punishment of Melanthios, the goatherd, is in book 22 (22.474-477). If it's any comfort the OP isn't wholly correct either, as it's not Odysseus himself who does the dismembering; the context makes it sound like it was his son, Telemachos, assisted by the "good" herdsmen. It's the bit just after Telemachos hangs a bunch of maidservants for having sex with the suitors.
Oh dear gods on Olympus. Have you read the replies to that review? In particular, the replies to the guy that calls it out as snake oil? I'm dumbfounded.
Heat is work, and work's a curse
and all the heat in the universe
is gonna COOOOOOOL down
'cause it can't increase
then there'll be no more work
and there'll be perfect peace.
(That's entropy, man.)
-- Flanders & Swann
The AC was not joking. Precisely that has been done at least once, to gain public input on designing a law in New Zealand (the site, and Slashdot's not very accurate summary); the idea got a lot of interest from several other governments, including Japan, Germany, France, the US, and UK.
For the gods' sake, if you're a Brit you've got loads of countries in the EU to choose from. You can move any time you want. Literally any time. Go. Tomorrow. Why not? Go on -- go to France, or the low countires, or Scandinavia. The quality of life in most of those places is enormously better too.
that respects human rights, has sensible drug legislation, and fast, cheapish internet connections?Hellooooo? Europe! EU! You're a citizen! You can go catch a plane to Amsterdam and get a flat there tomorrow morning if you want!
You can read the best (and only!) ancient literary version of the story (Ovid's) here.
Not the best translation in existence, but I think it's the best one available online; it's very difficult to convey Ovid's dry wit in translation.
I'm also a kiwi and can second that recommendation for the time being, while also seconding the nanny state provisos; but (1) be ready for the fact that salaries are much lower, and (2) you can bet your life insurance that things here will be looking a lot more neo-con after this year's election (unless changes of direction in the Aus/US governments persuade the future NZ PM otherwise). For one thing the next NZ government is likely to be ready to do anything, anything, to appease the US government in order to get NZ back into ANZUS.
Also Ireland -- though that would be even better if it were reasonable to make all your international travel thenceforth via France instead of the UK.
I'm sure there's nothing unusual about that. The very first thing I do when I buy a game, even before installing -- and preferably before buying, too -- is to stop off at gamecopyworld and/or gameburnworld to make sure that there's a crack that I can apply to my legitimate (and patched) copy. It's a trend that will only continue.
I've already had experiences of electronics shops pointing to me to instructions on how to "crack" a DVD player to make it multi-region, how to unlock phones, and so on. I'm sure it won't be too long before we see game shops doing similar things; games will catch up eventually.
On the other hand I think this will eventually reach a breaking point and these normal people (who are the paying customers) will stop putting up with said crap.That I doubt, unfortunately. As the article shows, people have been putting up with copy-prevention schemes since the advent of commercial computer software (in fact the article doesn't start nearly early enough). Some of those schemes have been much more burdensome than present-day ones -- though they're getting worse again, with "activate every time you start the game"-type schemes.
You could always try running in a non-administrator account -- though I'm aware that that's a radical idea.
On the whole, I preferred the UI of Symphony to OpenOffice too. I liked OpenOffice 1.x even more, and would probably still be using it if it supported ODF properly. OpenOffice is going down a very sad road of trying to make itself identical to Microsoft Office in exactly the worst possible ways. Things like
... and stuff like that. I'd try RedOffice, but I suspect I might have some difficulties with not being able to read the Chinese UI. Honestly, it's enough to make one want to use LaTeX ... except that often I need ad hoc WYSIWYG page layout ...
Ye gods and little fishlets! Let Badgers, Rats, and Moles everywhere watch out.
I'm guessing you come from the New World somewhere. Yes, 1000 years is fairly recent. But you're partially right, it wasn't quite "modern" either, which is why I said "not far from" modern.
I'm not quite sure why you're bringing up Spain and East Asia; I'm perfectly happy to agree that Western Europe was a barbaric wasteland at the time, but for some reason I thought we were talking about Scandinavia. The eastern Roman empire continued to exist into the Modern period, by the way; when Constantinople fell the Renaissance had been well under way for some time in various European countries. But the Byzantine Empire was neither ancient, mediaeval, nor modern, but somewhere in between and all three at once.
Unlike the rest of your points, that one is actually kind of (tangentially) related to the basic rationale for my earlier statement, as cultural and political links between Constantinople and Scandinavia were unusually strong, as European states of the time went. Scandinavians had already discovered and were attempting to colonise three separate New Worlds (Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador), something that Italians like Columbus didn't even think of for nearly another half millennium; and it was only going to be a couple more centuries before a sort of Renaissance started in Scandinavia, long before it got going anywhere else in Europe. So, I stand by my statement: "not far from modern". In the same way that the Italy of Boccaccio's time could be considered "not far from modern".
That is even more inaccurate than the GP. In Old English the weak present participle ending is not -ing but -ende; in Old Norse it is -andi. -ing is an OE/ON suffix that regularly indicates a person who is a member of one kind of group or other.
No, that's an anachronism. Vík meant bay or inlet. Víking never meant anything other than "pirate".
In any case it's at least as likely that the Icelandic word comes from Anglo-Saxon, rather than the other way round, as the word is attested in OE from the 8th century, but in Old Norse only two centuries later. (The origin in that case would be OE wic "camp, temporary settlement".)
TFA is right, you are wrong. Burn!