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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Minor mind-blowing moment for me on my re-read last night. I think it's a plausible reading. If you recall, the opening of Meno isn't Meno asking what virtue is, he asks whether or not virtue is gained through teaching, practice, or in some other way. Socrates says that neither he nor anyone else he's ever met knows what virtue is, and the two briefly quarrel over whether or not that includes Meno's teacher, the famous sophist Gorgias. When Socrates asks Meno for his definition of virtue, it boils down to skill at politics. If you read between the lines a little, it starts to sound like Meno wants Socrates to validate his teacher and reaffirm that Meno was, in fact, taught virtue. So I think it's not an accident that Plato chose Meno as Socrates' opponent for that discussion and part of what the dialogue is doing is suggesting that the followers of the sophists might have selfish motives for wanting to learn from them.
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Feb 6, 2016 02:41
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I came across ToposText today, which has the Perseus translation with clickable links for a lot of place names in the text which bring up Google Maps with where those lie on a modern map. It's not perfect (there are a lot of placenames that aren't yet links) but if you're looking for an online reading experience that's more like the Landmark editions of Herodotus/Thucydides, it might be useful.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:46
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I'm going a bit slow and have only read Book 1 so far, but I made a few notes to myself/questions to share with the thread: What do people think about Cyrus? In Greek stories, even in other histories, characters tend to be presented as either heroic figures or as tragic ones. When I was reading book 1, it struck me that Xenophon doesn't really present Cyrus as a great person in every regard. He has some characteristics that I think could be said to be heroic, sure, but what he gets singled out for is his generosity and his ability to recognize and make use of talents in others. Is that what Xenophon is suggesting is the model for heroic leadership? Cyrus's answer to most of his leadership-related problems is, more or less, "I'll make you rich when we win". Does this say anything about him as an individual, or is this just how things were done? The obvious question in the story about Orontas -- did Cyrus have him killed? Would it mean anything if he did or didn't? Related to these: Is he going to be contrasting Cyrus as a "Persian" leader with "Greek" leadership? Xenophon mentions that people took Cyrus's crossing of the river at Thapsacus as being an omen of his destiny to become king. But Cyrus fails; is this a criticism of omens? Prior to the battle scene at the climax, Cyrus tells Xenophon that omens and sacrifices were made and favorable, but those aren't mentioned in the text otherwise. I was intrigued by a bit of detail that Xenophon points out when the armies are preparing for combat -- the Persians don't wear headgear when they fight. Why not? Is this just an interesting anthropological detail, some attempt to otherize the Persians, or is it significant? Xenophon doesn't seem overly fond of 'fun facts' like Herodotus, so it kind of stuck out.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:14
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I read Book 2. Didn't think all that much was interesting narratively, but some background: Promising safety and then attacking was a taboo for the Greeks. The idea of guest-friendship is based on mitigating it. Guest-friendship was a sort-of ritual where someone in a desperate situation pledges to enter into a guest-friend relationship with someone else who can protect them and keep them safe until danger passes. This creates a tie between the descendants of the guest-friend and host. As an example of the power of guest-friendship, in the Iliad, the hero Diomedes is possessed by Athena and on a killing rampage, but when he encounters someone whose ancestor his own ancestor was guest-friends with, he snaps out of it. One of the things Zeus rules over is the guest-friendship relationship, and breaking it is the kind of thing that gets the Furies sent after you. So this book is, I think, meant to evoke a primal "THOSE PERSIAN FUCKERS!" emotional beat that isn't there so much for us. It's interesting that Xenophon mentions that Proxenus was a student of Gorgias of Leontini. Plato tells us that Gorgias also taught Menon. Gorgias was a sophist who has a Platonic dialogue named after him in which, among other things, Gorgias and Socrates discuss whether rhetoric has the power to make its practitioners just. I wonder why the Great King tortured Menon for a year. I mean, obviously he's a bad dude and so by story-logic he deserves it, but it seems like a weird thing for the King to care about doing. I also wonder why Xenophon calls out everyone's age in the post-mortem summary of their characters, except Menon.
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Feb 11, 2016 03:36
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coyo7e posted:\I've3 had this book on audio for ages but fall asleep every time i try to get into it. I think I may need to view the text to force my eyes and consciousness to stay open. For me, the ToposText version I linked above really helped me stay interested - I like maps and it was nice to be able to kind of trace the path of the expedition and see where all of these places were, geographically. One of the things that makes this book hard to approach, for me, is that Xenophon is really big in describing things in terms of units of measure, but they're all from 2500 years ago and left in the translation rather than converted to modern units. (From a translation point of view, it's an interesting question whether or not it would be faithful to the text to convert parasanges to miles, stadions to yards, etc. or whether that would be intruding.) I looked the common ones I was finding up and made a little chart for myself so I can get a quick reminder that a parasange is ~3.5 miles, but it's a totally reasonable objection that only classics nerds would do that.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:43
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I'm interested in reading Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. I've never read it so I don't know how well it meets any criteria other than "it's a book I want to read and might be able to have interesting thoughts about". As another possibility, if we want another month of ancient war stuff, March seems like the appropriate time to read Caesar's commentaries.
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Feb 20, 2016 03:54
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