The Poetry of Sappho of Lesbos

Sappho of Lesbos holding more paper or tablets of something than we have poems of hers.

Sappho of Lesbos is well known for her love poems (or at least the one complete and two partial ones of hers that remain) that express what life was like for Grecian women being close before marriage.  Her poetry speaks of heartbreak and the sorrow of losing close friends to their husbands, often with hints of physical attraction.  Some of it would make for an excellent few lines of a poem to woo someone with, so long as you cut out anything not in the first stanza of them.  They all tend to get a bit depressing with unrequited love, or being unable to approach one's object of affection or having had one's love already taken away.  

But seriously, the first stanza plus a few words of the second of the third poem would make an excellent wedding toast:

" Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen/ on the black earth is an array of horsemen;/ some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say she whom one loves best/ is the loveliest."  

That translates relatively easily to a wedding toast with a simple "and so I hope person X is the fairest thing you will ever see on this black earth for the rest of your life."

Aphrodite's response to the unrequited lover's prayer in the first poem:

"Though she now escape, she soon will follow;/ though she take not gifts from you, she will give them;/ though she love not, yet she will surely love you/ even unwilling."

Is exactly what someone pursuing an unrequited love wants most (except for maybe the last line, that get's a bit rape-y.

The Odyssey

Because the last thing you want to do when you get back from a trip is to take out the trash.

The Odyssey is the sequel to Homer's Illiad and it focuses on the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his son, Telemachus, while Odysseus makes his way back from Troy.  Following the defeat of the Trojans, some of the Greeks failed to make all the proper offerings-among them Odysseus and his crew.  As punishment Odysseus and his crew are blown off course and forced to wander the Mediterranean (really much more than that, unless the gates to Hell are located somewhere in that region and no one informed me).  When Odysseus fails to return home in a reasonable amount of time, his wife Penelope and son are besieged by suitors who take advantage of the fact that Odysseus is away to woo his wife and eat his food.  Eventually Telemachus gets frustrated with the ill-manored suitors and sets out to find his father's true fate.  Meanwhile, Odysseus returns to civilization and arranges a ship to his home of Ithaca.  He returns and sneaks his way back into his home so that the suitors do not know who he is.  Odysseus, his son and trusted members of his staff arrange for a trap to kill off the suitors.  The trap works and Odysseus reclaims his rightful spot as the king of Ithaca.

When people think of an exciting read that's hard to put down, two and a half millenia old epic poetry probably doesn't come to mind, but it should.  The Odyssey is surprisingly gripping.  Odysseus, the plaything of the gods, constantly finds himself in bad situation to bad situation and part of the fun is finding out how he'll get out of it with his clever wit (or divine help, but mostly the cleverness).  Seriously, he can be quite clever.  Telling people his name is Nobody, because then Nobody hurt them.  Finding a way so that he alone has weapons when he needs to kill the suitors.  He's quite ingenious. 

Penelope's character gets forgotten in the story's telling.  She has two major accomplishments in the entire narrative.  Delaying the suitors by way of her weaving and staying faithful.  And that's apparently something pretty big in Greek story telling.  Of the other  two married female characters the one that gets the most lines is an adulteress who killed her husband upon his return from Troy.  I'm going to assume Homer was not the most progressive thinkers when it came to female characters.

The Iliad

Helen, The Face That Launched A Thousand Ships

The Iliad is of course a famous piece of ancient Greek Literature that tells story of the a coalition of Greek city-states fighting with the Trojans over Helen, or at least a few weeks of that story.  It focuses on a time at the end of the war when the leader of the Grecian forces, Agamemnon, takes a woman that the Greek hero Achilles had captured in an earlier conquest.  This angers Achilles and he withdraws from the fighting and begs his mother, who is a goddess to have Zeus favor the Trojans in order to make Agamemnon pay.  Without Achilles the Greeks struggle against the Trojans and are pushed back against their ships.  Achilles closest friend, Patroclus, pretends to be Achilles but is slain by the Trojan champion Hector.  In his rage (and with some divine help) Achilles slays Hector and takes his body back to his camp and denies it burial which is a very crucial part of the Grecian rites for the dead.  Eventually the gods take pity on the slain Hector and persuade both Achilles and Hector's father, the King of Troy, to set up a trade for the father to reclaim his son for a proper burial.

The story is ultimately about a battle, but that won't be what I remember from this story.  I'm going to remember the reaction of Hector's parents to his death.  The grief that Homer (who serves as the traditional author of the Iliad and its sequel) portrays his parents as suffering is incredibly visceral and very real.  It's an incredibly tragic scene (for the most part, not so much when the King calls his other sons worthless) and one of the better mourning scenes in literature.  I think of the entire story that's what I'll probably remember the most is how grief-stricken Hector's family was when they see his death.

Actually I lied, what I'll remember the most is the use of manhood to mean something completely different than it does today.  But Achilles fond memories of and tears for the fallen Patroclus's manhood has apparently given rise to quite the cottage industry of Achilles/Patroclus fanfiction and erotic drawings.

Also Achilles/Hector.  Although that one makes less sense.  

So whatever you do, don't google an Achilles pairing.  Or Achilles, unless you want to see Brad Pitt or Greek pottery in all it nude imagery.

And that's why I have a picture of Helen for this post.

The Old Testament

Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden

It's different reading selections of the Bible in the context of reading literature as opposed to a religious reading.  Your focus changes to more of a historical reading.  Instead of reading things for moral messages and as parables you read it as an attempt to better understand the historical evolution of the Hebrew people whether it's explicitly told as a history or in poems.  It's strange, but it just goes to show you that the context in which the reader operates matters in interpreting the work.

For instance, take the story of Job.  I found at least three different possible readings.  First, there's the traditional reading of providing an example of faith in God even when an individual experiences tremendous suffering.  Then there's the step above that and an attempt to work at the problem of excessive suffering and figure out why a benevelont and omnipotent deity would allow any more suffering than is necessary.  But there's also a potential metaphor in the story for Job to serve as a symbol of the Jewish people, they had suffered tremendously, even at that point in history, and even when everyone them is telling them they have sinned against their God, they have and should maintain their faith in him.  For if they do, they will be returned to more than their former glory.

Maybe it's just because I'm older and have a bit more experience in doing some deeper reading, but I never would have noticed some of this stuff when I read the Bible when I was younger.

Ancient Egyptian Poetry

Women in ancient Egypt did two things, gossip and write poetry.

Here's a genre you don't associate much with ancient Egypt, love poems.  Or poems in general really.  And yet, I can now say I've read ancient Egyptian love poems, and boy are these some interesting poems.

My personal favorite was "I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend."  In this particular poem a girl is on her way to see Nefrus when she spies the guy she has a crush on.  She then narrates how she hides from him because she knows that if he sees her and says hello, she'll blurt out "Please take me."  And while she wants him to take her, she doesn't want to be just another of his girls.  It's rather like the self-narration of a teenage girl in a high school soap opera.  It's amusing to see how little humanity has changed in three or four millenia.

There's also a few praise poems to the main god of Egyptian society, the Sun god, who apparently has had a couple different names.  And while the purpose of the poems is to praise the Sun god, it's also to praise his descendant on Earth, the pharaoh that was either writing the poem or commissioned the poem.  But praise both they do.