The movie Troy

The start of the Iliad

On the wedding between the Greek King Peleus and the goddess Thetis, Eres, the goddess of discord, has been invited. Out of revenge she throws an apple (once again an apple) in the festival room with the text: 'for the fairest'. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite want to claim it. As judge, the Trojan prince Paris is selected. Paris chooses Aphrodite, who promised him the most beautiful woman. The most beautiful woman is Helena, wife of King Menelaüs of Sparta. Paris 'conquers' her and takes her with him to Troy. Under command of Mycean King Agamemnon, Menelaüs brother, the Greek seek revenge.

If you can chase down a copy of 'Chopper' I deeply recommend it. Just watch with subtitles on because the Australian accents are very thick in it. Mark 'Chopper' Read was a notorious criminal here, one of those uniquely Australian charismatic hardcore thugs in the vein of Ned Kelly. And Eric Bana transformed himself to play the role, to prove that he was more than just a comedian.

I remember the first day of Greek 302 and having an old beat-up Iliad I borrowed from my HS Latin teacher and the rest of the class having their shiny new annotated $120 textbook version.

My text was based on a different manuscript or transcript from the one used by the shiny new textbook.

We were asked to read lines and translate them. When it was my turn, my lines had a different word here and there. The class came screeching to a halt.

"Say what again?"

I read the verses as they were printed in my book. The professor marched over and picked up my book.

"If you're going to use a version not supported in the syllabus, it's your funeral."

Just about fucking ruined it for me. Classmates helped me out by passing me photocopies of the current text.

This was just as the internet was becoming user-friendly. A former HS classmate of mine headed up an effort to get the classics online for our uni department. He started out entering the text manually using a windows keyboard Greek setting, then after about a year of monastic steno pool life, embraced optical character readers with enthusiasm.

We also got some help from the Middle Eastern department for text readers that work in multiple directions (right-to-left, border inscriptions, epigrams, and boustrophedon manuscripts).

If you're able to get any of a wide range of manuscript versions of the Iliad online for free in 2020, maybe thank Konrad for his work getting it there.

Ιλιάς, ραψωδία Α

Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή·
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

That's the prototype in greek. Menis is a homeric greek word that we still use in today's greek the same way our forefathers did, it's the word mania that pretty much means the same thing in most modern european languages, so both anger and rage are ok, mania encompasses both concepts, and then some.

King Agamemnon is called anax andron which translates king of men and Atreides, by his father's name Atreus, and Achilles (Peleiades son of Peleus, as was customary sort of a surname) is also called dios which translates godlike literally, because Zeus in greek becomes Dios in genitive (unlike english which is quite remarkable for its relative lack of conjugation), and the name of the chief deity of Olympus pantheon (pan=all + theon=gods) literally means Dion Zein that which gives life to everything.

Lombardo's translation respects the original structure and format, no doubt about that, and by poetic license it's... more poetic if you will, but man when you say that this certain ancient greek even sound colloquial at times, you're wrong simply because homeric greek was not a spoken language, it was just that, homeric greek, written in the Epics, and that's it; elegantly perfect language in every sense, people from all around the globe still find inspiration, ideas and concepts reading these thousands years old works of art.

But obviously with greeks having cities (=polis) all around the known at the time world, from the spanish Emporion to egyptian Naukratis, from the french Nikaia and Massalia to sicilian Syracuse, from Magna Graecia all the way to the Black Sea's Apollonia, Istros, Odessa, just to name a few (and don't get me started with Alexander's dreamlike march to India), the greek dialects were so many that even greeks at times couldn't understand each other (exactly the same thing with modern times' lingua franca, id est english). Nonetheless they all understood the Epics, because homeric greek was, and still is (thousands of years later) universal.

As for the question that countless scholars (and fools) tried to answer through the ages about the author of the epics, well there were undoubtedly oral traditions and myths going on for generations and generations, but one thing is certain they were written down at some point by one person, a person of tremendous intellectual capacity and knowledge.

The epics were encyclopaedias. They still remain. It's a privilege to read them! It's an honor to understand them! And a lifetime's challenge to master them!

I stand very much corrected!

...anyone else get a weird sudden craving for souvlaki? *shrug*