Paris out of Troy

In Troy, Hollywood’s recent retelling of an ancient fracas, Orlando Bloom, who plays Paris, gets to keep his prize — Helen played by Diane Kruger.

In this version the playboy prince is not killed by Philoctetes but is shown leaving the burning city of Troy with Helen. He lives to fight another day. The ending may seem unexceptionable for our ‘liberated’ times. But earlier versions all had Paris getting his ‘just deserts’. However, was Paris really to blame for his alleged crime of passion? Didn’t Goddess Aphrodite promise him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman in exchange for the golden apple? (The Goddess of Discord Eris originally created the golden globe inscribed with the words ‘to the fairest’ out of pique for not having been invited to a marriage party on Mount Olympus! She then tossed it into the party and watched the fun as three powerful goddesses fought over the fruit. Rather than risk the ire of the losing parties, the gods passed the potato to Paris who was known for his artless honesty.) It’s another matter that the shepherd-turned-prince was so besotted by beauty that he did not bother to read the fine print — Helen was already married to the powerful King Menelaus who had the backing of dozens of warrior-princes. So would Paris have been better off in choosing brains instead of what the Goddess Athena promised along with skill in war in lieu of the apple?

Or should he have been more impartial and chosen Hera, arguably the most beautiful of the three goddesses, who promised him kingdom of Asia and Europe for the apple? A bigger question relates to binary stereotypes and puritanical mind-sets that tend to pit beauty against brains or pleasure versus duty and virtue. Why couldn’t Paris have the option of choosing beauty with brains? That is the thesis of AC Grayling’s latest book The Choice of Hercules which starts with the Greek hero who said ‘no’ to a life of ease and chose the greatly harder life of a lion-killer mercenary and stable-cleaner. Grayling argues however that in the original Epicurean ideal, pleasure and virtue are not at all mutually exclusive.
Nastily effective religious propaganda separated the two. In fact, the ‘good life’ should involve both, and by identifying one’s strengths and behaving in a sensible, courteous fashion, you can get onto that ‘middle path’. Have the flashy Ferrari along with the freedom of the monk.

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What is rhetoric ?

• 
  The study and practice of effective communication.
  The study of the effects of texts on audiences.
  The art of persuasion.
  An insincere eloquence intended to win points and manipulate others.

Defined broadly in our own time as the art of effective communication, the "rhetoric" studied in ancient Greece and Rome (from roughly the fifth century B.C. to the early Middle Ages) was primarily intended to help citizens plead their claims in court. Though the early teachers of rhetoric, known as Sophists, were criticized by Plato and other philosophers, the study of rhetoric soon became the cornerstone of classical education.

Modern theories of oral and written communication remain heavily influenced by the basic rhetorical principles introduced in ancient Greece by Isocrates and Aristotle, and in Rome by Cicero and Quintilian. Here, we will briefly introduce these key figures and identify some of their central ideas.

"Rhetoric" in Ancient Greece"The English word 'rhetoric' is derived from Greek rhetorike, which apparently came into use in the circle of Socrates in the fifth century and first appears in Plato's dialogue Gorgias, probably written about 385 B.C. but set dramatically a generation earlier. Rhetorike in Greek specifically denotes the civic art of public speaking as it developed in deliberative assemblies, law courts, and other formal occasions under constitutional government in the Greek cities, especially the Athenian democracy. As such, it is a cultural subset of a more general concept of the power of words and their potential to affect a situation in which they are used or received."(George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, 1994).

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Freedom and tragedy

We can see tragedy as a specific disruption in the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The disruption takes place at the site of art’s "militarization," the point at which the medium and the mechanics of expression divide, not in indifference, but in strife. This conflict marks the emergence of a language that demonstrates its aesthetic and political authority only by undermining its very status as language.

In fact, Schelling's subsequent discussion of Greek tragedy has been viewed as the most important contribution of the Philosophical Letters, often to the point that the passage is read as a complete doctrine in its own right, in isolation from the rest of the work.
With the Greeks, explains Schelling, the hero is punished for succumbing to the power of fate. This fate is an inherently superior power, a power against which the hero fights, but in the face of which he could never hope to be successful .
For Schelling, it is this defeat and this defeat alone that constitutes the recognition of freedom. Only when the hero is lost before the fact, only when he enters into a conflict in which he is, as it were, always-already defeated, does he demonstrate that he is free.

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Digital and different metal ages

Is digital age a golden age for today ?

It is significant that in several places in The Republic, Plato makes a distinction between the "diviner metal," the 'gold' that is within everyone since "all are of the same original stock," and the "commoner metal," the gold of earth, which "has been the source of many unholy deeds" (III, 417a).

When we recall the age in which Plato was writing, with the fall of Athens (404 B.C.) and the death of Socrates shortly thereafter still fresh in memory, we can appreciate the depth of his inquiry into first principles. It was all too clear to him that Athens had suffered defeat primarily from within, and only secondarily from without. Where had the education of its youth gone wrong? Paideia -- that beautiful Greek word for the nurturing of the soul from childhood on -- had lost its luster. He sought, therefore, to restore it by formulating a scheme whereby children from infancy would be reared with the noblest ideals of honor, justice, and with frugality of mind and body, in order that they might become "true saviors and not the destroyers of the State" (IV, 421b).

In his ideal government, the real guardian is he who "sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself" (IV, 443d), and because of this, in both his private and public responsibilities he will act wisely and for the good of all under his protection.

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Retention of knowledge

Walter J. Ong's devotes most of his second chapter of his book Orality and literacy to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry's investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Homeric poetry, Ong states that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier- to put it more bluntly, the cliché" .
According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily remembere d forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost.

Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture. In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche".

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Golden apple

In Troy, Hollywood’s recent retelling of an ancient fracas, Orlando Bloom, who plays Paris, gets to keep his prize — Helen played by Diane Kruger.

In this version the playboy prince is not killed by Philoctetes but is shown leaving the burning city of Troy with Helen. He lives to fight another day. The ending may seem unexceptionable for our ‘liberated’ times. But earlier versions all had Paris getting his ‘just deserts’. However, was Paris really to blame for his alleged crime of passion? Didn’t Goddess Aphrodite promise him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman in exchange for the golden apple? (The Goddess of Discord Eris originally created the golden globe inscribed with the words ‘to the fairest’ out of pique for not having been invited to a marriage party on Mount Olympus! She then tossed it into the party and watched the fun as three powerful goddesses fought over the fruit. Rather than risk the ire of the losing parties, the gods passed the potato to Paris who was known for his artless honesty.) It’s another matter that the shepherd-turned-prince was so besotted by beauty that he did not bother to read the fine print — Helen was already married to the powerful King Menelaus who had the backing of dozens of warrior-princes. So would Paris have been better off in choosing brains instead of what the Goddess Athena promised along with skill in war in lieu of the apple?

Or should he have been more impartial and chosen Hera, arguably the most beautiful of the three goddesses, who promised him kingdom of Asia and Europe for the apple? A bigger question relates to binary stereotypes and puritanical mind-sets that tend to pit beauty against brains or pleasure versus duty and virtue. Why couldn’t Paris have the option of choosing beauty with brains? That is the thesis of AC Grayling’s latest book The Choice of Hercules which starts with the Greek hero who said ‘no’ to a life of ease and chose the greatly harder life of a lion-killer mercenary and stable-cleaner. Grayling argues however that in the original Epicurean ideal, pleasure and virtue are not at all mutually exclusive.

Nastily effective religious propaganda separated the two. In fact, the ‘good life’ should involve both, and by identifying one’s strengths and behaving in a sensible, courteous fashion, you can get onto that ‘middle path’. Have the flashy Ferrari along with the freedom of the monk.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Metabole and tragedy

The word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet. 1452a 22-23), which Anton F. Harald Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie.1991) regards as somehow connected with Dionysus.

He is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets, or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already sprung up by the time of HF (143 n. 88, 225). This word, Bierl thinks, signals metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just before he kills his children). According to Bierl, Heracles unites the two sides of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he becomes their murderer.
In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might
(a) serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a subsequent turn of events. It might
(b) induce the audience to experience vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might
(c) call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal, which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF 735], eleos and phrike [Phoen. 1284-87], phroimion [HF 753]) can suggest the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical communication).

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Knowing Greek antiquity

When we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, which is what people have called humanism, we mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism, mainly decorative.

‘I call all teaching scientific,’ says Wolf, the critic of Homer, ‘which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied in the original languages.’ There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly right, that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is scientific.

But when I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors, in the Greek and Latin languages. I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we get from them, and what is its value. That, at least, is the ideal; and when we talk of endeavouring to know Greek and Roman antiquity as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of it.


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Falls from heaven

A whole day...

Hephaestus was lame in his legs because he fell at sunset after a whole day fall on Lemnos when Zeus cast him out of heaven. This happened because Hephaestus came to the rescue of Hera when Zeus chained her because of the storm she sent against Heracles 1 when the latter was at sea. [See Lemnos, an island where Hephaestus is particularly worshipped.]

Hephaestus fashions strange creature

Zeus gave Talos 1 to Europa to be the warder of Crete, but this creature made of bronze was, according to some, the work of Hephaestus.

Curiously enough, some have represented Hephaestus as son of Talos 1, and Talos 1 as son of Cres. But, as it has been remarked:

"The legends of Greece generally have different forms, and this is particularly true of genealogy." [Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.53.5]

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