My favourite books written in Greek (but read in English translation), listed in the order of the year written (from -458 to +100):
Aeschylus, “Agamemnon” (-458) – When Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War his wife plots his murder. Best part: Cassandra! People think she has gone mad, but she speaks the truth. She is a Trojan woman that Agamemnon won from the war.
Sophocles, “Antigone” (-441) – Antigone’s two brothers fight for control of Thebes. They both die. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, makes one a hero while leaving the other to be eaten by the dogs, forbidding anyone to give him a proper funeral. Antigone goes against his orders even though she knows it will mean her death. Because life is more than breathing as long as possible. The Greeks make a big deal of military courage – but this one is about moral courage. The book that got me hooked on the Greeks.
Herodotus, “History” (by -420) – a history of the world known to the Greeks – mainly Greece, Persia, Babylon, Egypt and Scythia – from about -716 to -479. The war of the Persian Empire against the Greeks is the heart of the book: Marathon, Thermopylae (“This is Sparta!”), all of that. Big on the value of courage and freedom. A window onto different parts of the world back then. Herodotus lays out what he has seen or heard and lets you come to your own conclusions. He has a respect for other societies that is rare in Anglo America.
Euripides, “Trojan Women” (-415) – yet more Cassandra! While Troy burns to the ground, its women and children stand on the shore waiting to be taken away by Greek soldiers as slaves. The other side of war, of history. Written when Athens and Sparta were locked in a disastrous war:
Thucydides, “History” (-395) – the war between Athens and Sparta. The best book ever on imperialism. Also touches on the nature of democracy, propaganda and men, of the relationship between truth, power and morals. For me it was an X-ray window onto US society, unlike television or school – or history books written in the US. I love his style of writing (at least in the Hobbes translation).
Aristotle, “Politics” (by -322) – compares the political systems of different Greek cities. Man is a political animal. Politics as rich against poor. Marx and Orwell 2,100 years before Marx and Orwell. Aristotle shows that you need to look at the facts for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Plutarch, “Parallel Lives” (by +100) – the lives of famous Greeks and Romans compared. Long as the Bible but cut up into short biographies. Studies in moral character and tons of history learned painlessly. I love to read him just to read him (at least in the Dryden translation). Best: Alcibiades, Crassus and, especially, Brutus, he who kills Caesar.
Book of Matthew (by +100) – Even when I was a Marxist I loved this book, especially the Sermon on the Mount. The world tells you one thing, but deep down in your heart you know that Jesus is right.
See also:
- Why study the Greeks
- The best American writers live north of 110th Street
- Books and authors listed above
- Reading Thucydides
- Reading the Bible – of which Matthew is a part
- Reading Plutarch
- Herodotus
- Aristotle
- Orwell
- Marx
- Jesus Christ
- Seven books that have influenced me most – but not necessarily my favourites
“Even when I was a Marxist I loved this book, especially the Sermon on the Mount.” So, what are you now? What did your “marxism” consist of?
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This is a great post, abagond (though I am not sure that the Greek classics are of much interest to most of your commentariat). I will keep my eye out for a couple of these.
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This is impressive that you can read books in Greek. I will honestly admit it’s not my skill set. But it’s impressive none the less.
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And that biff, is why many of us are in the position we are in today. Im not at all surprised ancient peoples were wiser than people today given the way knowledge used to be transmitted from person to person, and the general lack of distraction.
Today If you are white and study these books you are a f*g, and if you are black and study these books you are “acting white.”
There is nothing new under the sun.
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To all the “black people” who are looking for something higher and who are looking to evolve out of the black race and this madness. this is the final call to come home to the supreme beings. the evolution has begun in this day and time you are either with the beast (Whites, Asians, Indians) or you are with the god race ( black people who are evolving into who they were meant to be, the bright race) . it’s your choice. judgment is upon those who accept the ways of the beast and who are stuck in the past. this is the final call to come home.
http://www.thefom.org/#!about2/c13f7
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@Kiwi: I agree with your sentiments. I could always read these in English that’s true but being able to read them in Greek i am impressed.
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Many of mine, too!!! Though unfortuantely I read them in English. Just finishing Roberto Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.” Wonderful!
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Today If you are white and study these books you are a f*g, and if you are black and study these books you are “acting white.”
No. Or (to be extremely charitable to the above expressed view) only one facet of a totality.
Here is the more encompassing view:
If you read these books, people are just confused about any philosophical need to do so. It is such a time risk to sit down with a book. What if you get half way in and still don’t feel any emotional or intellectual traction? What if you get halfway in and realize you need to read a bunch of extra supporting material because one is suffering from missing context? Isn’t there a pill a pill I can take to get all the knowledge I need for 21st century? And besides reading Thucydides, et.al., is not gonna help me pay my mortgage or get laid so why should I do it? Let me watch Game of Thrones instead. Or just read newer books.
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Mary, Abagond read these books in English.
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I will keep my eye out for a couple of these.
Which ones interest you Biff?
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Herodotus relates things in his book, some of which simply can not be true.
Example:
In Book 2 he explains an experiment ( conceived of by an Egyptian ruler named Psammetichus) with two babies who were cared for by caretakers who were forbidden to speak in the presence of the babies. Pasmmetichus wanted to see what lanuguage the babies would speak when they finally spoke of their own volition. He believed the language that the babies would eventually speak, with no outside influence of modern tongues, would prove what nation of people were the eldest of mankind.
In two years time ( so the story goes) the babies uttered a word: becos Psammetichus discovered the linguistic origin of word and thereby found out the most ancient peoples of Earth.
The problem? Babies don’t learn how to speak if not spoken to. Their language centers atrophy and they become severely brain damaged not to mention emotionally and socially damaged. The experiment was either never carried out or the results totally misreported to or by Herodotus.
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@Legion :Thanks for the clarification.
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@ Kiwi
I’m providing it as an example of how some (or a great many) may think. I wasn’t providing it as an example of how I think. I know my meaning was a little unclear, ambiguous.
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@ Kiwi
…or did you just mean it’s unusual for me to use a word like “laid” in any context? It’s a frat boy word, I’ll admit.
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@Kiwi: Thanks for the clarification as well.
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Lots of pimp game in the ancient texts; including the bible.
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@ Mary
I can read Greek, but I read these in translation.
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@ thwack
“Acting white”? You must not be talking about White people in the US: most of them do not read books except for school or work. And even when they do read books on their own it is a pretty narrow range of things that they read. At least in my experience. Most White Americans I have come across are PROFOUNDLY uninterested in other countries, much less their literature. Also, reading European non-English literature is considered intellectual, therefore they look down on it.
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Yes Abagond, I meant white Americans specifically. The male behaviors of the past that made you an aristocrat are the precise ones that get you called “gay” today.
Matter of fact, if you too particular, too refined… you often set off peoples “gaydar”
Much of contemporary white American negro worship is a response to this exact phenomenon.
“He’s not gay he’s English”
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@ Kiwi
I agree. I should at least read Matthew in Greek all the way through.
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@ gro jo
I am Catholic. I was not a hard-core Marxist, but I did have a Marxist world view: materialism, economic determinism, the world is set up to suit the interests of capitalists, not ordinary people, etc. I still believe that last one.
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It would be interesting to read Thucydides, Herodotus and Plutarch, but I don’t yet know sufficient Greek. However I was able to read the Greek NT, but mostly with the help of a parallel text in some other language.
To the books mentioned by Abagond I would add Homer(Iliad and Odyssey) and Plato(most of his dialogs). maybe also Plotinus for someone who has metaphysical inclination.
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I can read Greek, but I read these in translation.
Wow! I didn’t know that. My big mouth stands corrected.
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@ Abagond or anyone who knows
I have never, NEVER understood Malcolm X’s reasoning in his autobiography that Homer was a Moor and therefore Black. Homer was a (white) Greek, is this not substantiated?
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@ Kiwi
the reputedly urbane and suave gentleman
Haha! You’re kidding! Surely, this is King you describe.
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@Legion
Nobody knows how Homer looked like, we just know too little about him, and there are plenty of scholars who think he has not even existed:) Of course most probably he existed, but how he looked like? Of course more likely he looked like a typical mediterranian, but he of course could have had black or Egyptian slaves in his pedigree. But it is pure guesswork.
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@ Legion
From Malcolm X’s autobiography:
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@ gatobranco1
I should reread the Iliad. I was pretty young when I read it. I would probably get way more out of it now. Ditto Marcus Aurelius. Both might make the list if I read them now.
Plotinus had a big effect on me – it broke down my materialism and started to move me away from Marxism -, but his “Enneads” are not something I would want to read again! Not if I can avoid it. So I do not count it as a “favourite”.
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Homer- Omar- Moor – typical folk ethymology, I think. 3umar is an arab name, while moor is from Greek “mavros”(black). I do not understand why North African (and earlier also Andalusian) arabs and berbers had the name Moor attached to them. They do not seems particularly black although darker than those in the Northern coast of Mediterranian.
Anyway the ancestors of Semito-Khamitic group of people probably originated somewhere near lake Chad and they were indeed black. After the ancestors of Berbers went to Maghrib, Sahara became desert, there was no more influx from the Center of Africa, and they became whiter, probably due to migrations of people from the Northern Mediterranian. Semites have established in the regions even more far away from Africa, separated by Read Sea. Egyptians, another group of Semito-Khamitic peoples, never became as white as Berbers or Semites(even today), since they always had contacts with blacker peoples in Nubia, even some dynasties were of Nubian origin.
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@ Abagond and Gatobranco 1
Yes, that is it. What Abagond quoted, that is what I read that perplexed me. Ironically it’s clearer to me now, it’ the very same text!
• Peter, Pedro, Petra (and Pierre, for that matter)=Rock/Stone
• Aesop a form of Ethiopian? Intuitively this feels right. Abagond you know Greek, is Malcolm right or is he stretching or inventing?
.
.
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• Moor/Omar/Homer. He is making the same point here as with the Aesop thing. Is Homer a name we encounter among Arabs or Muslims or Egyptians, etc. today?
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Wikipedia says there was a medieval tradition to represent Aesop as an African slave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop#Physical_appearance_and_the_question_of_African_origin
A much later tradition depicts Aesop as a black African from Ethiopia.[29] The presence of such slaves in Greek-speaking areas is suggested by the fable “Washing the Ethiopian white” that is ascribed to Aesop himself. This concerns a man who buys a black slave and, assuming that he was neglected by his former master, tries very hard to wash the blackness away. But nowhere in the fable is it suggested that this constitutes a personal reference. The first known promulgator of the idea was Planudes, a Byzantine scholar of the 13th century who wrote a biography of Aesop based on The Aesop Romance and conjectured that Aesop might have been Ethiopian, given his name.[30] An English translation of Planudes’ biography from 1687 says that “his Complexion [was] black, from which dark Tincture he contracted his Name (Aesopus being the same with Aethiops)”. When asked his origin by a prospective new master, Aesop replies, “I am a Negro”; numerous illustrations by Francis Barlow accompany this text and depict Aesop accordingly.[31] But according to Gert-Jan van Dijk, “Planudes’ derivation of ‘Aesop’ from ‘Aethiopian’ is… etymologically incorrect,”[32] and Frank Snowden says that Planudes’ account is “worthless as to the reliability of Aesop as ‘Ethiopian.'”[33]
The tradition of Aesop’s African origin was carried forward into the 19th century. The frontispiece of William Godwin’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1805) has a copperplate illustration of Aesop relating his stories to little children that gives his features a distinctly African appearance.[34] The collection includes the fable of “Washing the Blackamoor white”, although updating it and making the Ethiopian ‘a black footman’. In 1856 William Martin Leake repeated the false etymological linkage of “Aesop” with “Aethiop” when he suggested that the “head of a negro” found on several coins from ancient Delphi (with specimens dated as early as 520 BCE)[35] might depict Aesop, presumably to commemorate (and atone for) his execution at Delphi,[36] but Theodor Panofka supposed the head to be a portrait of Delphos, founder of Delphi,[37] a view more widely repeated by later historians.[38]
The idea that Aesop was Ethiopian has been further encouraged by the presence of camels, elephants, and apes in the fables, even though these African elements are more likely to have come from Egypt and Libya than from Ethiopia, and the fables featuring African animals may have entered the body of Aesopic fables long after Aesop actually lived.[39] Nevertheless, in 1932 the anthropologist J.H. Driberg, repeating the Aesop/Aethiop linkage, asserted that, while “some say he [Aesop] was a Phrygian… the more general view… is that he was an African”, and “if Aesop was not an African, he ought to have been;”[40] and in 2002 Richard A. Lobban cited the number of African animals and “artifacts” in the Aesopic fables as “circumstantial evidence” that Aesop may have been a Nubian folkteller.[41]
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@ Legion
“In Book 2 he explains an experiment ( conceived of by an Egyptian ruler named Psammetichus) with two babies who were cared for by caretakers who were forbidden to speak in the presence of the babies. Pasmmetichus wanted to see what lanuguage the babies would speak when they finally spoke of their own volition.”
Good to know, there is the exact same legend about the medieval emperor Frederick II. Herodotus relies heavily on hearsay and his worth at as a source mainly comes from not having much competition.
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It seems that some Western authors claim that the ethymology of Aesopus from Aethiops proposed by Maximus Planudes is incorrect, even if Planudes was himself Greek, very knowledgeable in grammar of Greek, and quite probably knew Greek better than Western men;)
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@”Herodotus lays out what he has seen or heard and lets you come to your own conclusions. ”
I have profound respect for Herodotus because he got historical information from various local sources before coming to his own conclusions. For example he said, “Moreover I visited both Thebes and Heliopolis for this very cause, namely because I wished to know whether the priests at these places would agree in their accounts with those at Memphis.”
His research was very advanced for its time, and yet Eurocentrists somehow discredit him because they don’t like what his research revealed.
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^ But he also says things that clearly make no sense, like the account about the babies.
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I am Catholic….the world is set up to suit the interests of capitalists, not ordinary people, etc. I still believe that last one. Like Marxism, Catholicism means many things to many different people. Based on the last part of your answer, I’ll guess you are a liberation theology Catholic.
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@Legion
Not sure what you’re referring to.
Assuming you mean the Psamtik story about the newborns, he is purportedly conveying what he was told. If it sounds nonsensical to you, don’t “kill the messenger” as they say. He also said he heard different accounts that contradict this.
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I did take a couple of courses in theater and we did study Greek tragedies and Greek comedies i do remember us doing something from the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, where we made mask and had to get in groups and perform it as a choral piece. I do recall enjoying that. If my memory serves me right i think it was about Oedipus who was a king. I think there was something else in the story about him having some kind of sick affection for his mother and being jealous of his father and gouging his eyes out. That was a very long time ago when i took these courses. I am not completely ignorant about some of this topic thread.
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I think that’s were the term “Oedipus Complex comes from.
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@ resw
Yes. Of course you’re “not sure what I’m referring to”, because after all I was unclear when I mentioned the “babies” because at current count their are 1000 other comments in the thread about babies in various situations, recounted by Herodotus, aren’t there? You’re right I’m hard to follow. Sheesh.
Get a grip resw.
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^ LOL!
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@Legion
I didn’t happen to read the “thousand other comments in the thread” prior to responding to you. But my response wrt the Psamtik story still applies.
Get a life, Legion. sheesh.
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@ resw
So! You didn’t happen to read those thousand other comments about the babies, you just read my comment about the babies. But you still didn’t know for sure what I was referring to. And so, your original response should still stand. Okay.
I’ll take “Things that make you go, ‘hmm’, for a $1000 Alex!”
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I’m wasting my time with you. I should expect intransigence on the most banal matters from a known liar like yourself.
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@Legion
” you just read my comment about the babies”
It was at the bottom of the page, just above grojo’s comment and the “Leave a Reply” box. I read it because it was in plain sight, so don’t flatter yourself.
“But you still didn’t know for sure what I was referring to. And so, your original response should still stand. ”
Since what I had suspected is what you were referring to, my response wrt the Psamtik story is still applicable. Get it now?
“I’m wasting my time with you.”
It’s clear you’re also wasting your life.
” I should expect intransigence on the most banal matters from a known liar like yourself.”
And an example of a lie I’ve told would be what?
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