Because a fire was in my head

[sovay]

One of my favorite fragments of Greek lyric is Anakreon fr. 398:

ἀστραγάλαι δ’ Ἔρωτός εἰσιν
μανίαι τε καὶ κυδοιμοί.

Which is a short declarative sentence you can give to anyone who has learned to recognize the first two cases of classical Greek nouns—the verb is helpful, but not strictly necessary—except that μανία is a migraine of a word to translate.¹ It is generally rendered as madness or frenzy, but it's specialized. You can be ἄφρων, out of your mind, or ἠλεός, distraught, and still not be μαινόμενος, in the grip of μανία. Its connotations are possession, being god-ridden. Plato in the Phaedrus distinguishes four kinds: prophetic, which comes from Apollo; telestic (initiatory, ritual), from Dionysos; poetic, from the Muses; and erotic, from Aphrodite and Eros. νῦν δὲ τὰ μέγιστα τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἡμῖν γίγνεται διὰ μανίας, θείᾳ μέντοι δόσει διδομένης, he asserts, in fact the greatest of good things come to us through μανία, when it is given, of course, as a gift from the gods.² What he does not mention, because he was Plato and his anxieties about mimetic art are legendary, is that we might also kill someone with it. Μανία is what animates Agave when she wrenches off her son's head and calls it ἕλικα νεότομον, μακάριον θήραν, a fresh-cut vine-shoot, blessed prey. She is a woman μαινόμενα, one of the μαινάδες. It is not a domestic state of mind.³ These are the games played with our hearts. So I can translate:

The knucklebones of Eros are
frenzies and fighting

without losing points on my pop quiz, but that does very little for the sense of uncontrol, that our lives are a game of chance in a boy-god's hands. He tosses and catches indifference or passion for his amusement, carelessly destructive as a child, or perhaps we set ourselves to gamble with him each time we fall in love: and being mortals, are bound to lose. Anything can happen, the physical shock of κυδοιμός, the furious fancies of μανία.

The dice Eros plays with
are ecstasies and riots.

But that's not quite right, either. There must be articles, if not dissertations on the taxonomies of madness in classical Greek, but since none of them seem to have created a functional single-word translation for μανία, they don't help me very much. I put it in a poem anyway. But I'm still thinking.

1. I don't want to shortchange kudoimos, which is an uncommon word in lyric: it appears in Homeric epic, where it means the din and chaos of battle, commotion and uproar. If you want to know what astragaloi (Anakreon uses the feminine form) look like, here are some in their players' hands.

2. He is careful to differentiate between μανία caused by human illness (νοσημάτων ἀνθρωπίνων) and μανία which is a god-sent alteration from the everyday (θείας ἐξαλλαγῆς τῶν εἰωθότων νομίμων), to which category the four above-named kinds belong. Plato's is not a universe where the gods can casually fuck you up, which is one of the reasons I prefer archaic Greek lyric and Euripides.

3. It is not, however, the same as λύσσα, the rabid madness which, personified in Euripides' Herakles, drives the hero to murder his wife and children, fatally unable to distinguish them from his sworn enemies. There is some overlap; the Chorus in the Bacchae refer to the θοαὶ Λύσσας κύνες, the swift hounds of madness that will chase the daughters of Kadmos down and set them on their disguised nephew/son. But in Herakles, Lyssa's choreography of the killings plays not like Dionysos in Thebes, but like a brutal parody of his mysteries right down to the Chorus' horrified description—πρὸς αἵματ᾽, οὐχὶ τᾶς Διονυσιάδος βοτρύων ἐπὶ χεύμασι λοιβᾶς, all tearing flesh and no godhead.

Comments

[alankria.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating post and word.

[sovay]

This is a fascinating post and word.

Thank you. I never write any of this sort of thing down.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sovay, I love this entry so much that I'm putting it in memories. I wish I could make my own brain hold on to it that freshly, but at least this way I'll have easy access to it.

Being god-ridden. --a divine infestation instead of visitation or manifestation. Fascinating. The concept just slides right into the mind. The gods being really not so indistinguishable from demons, really. Yes, I can see that.

Plato's taxonomy is going to have me thinking all morning. Also, I prefer the brutality of divine possession to the sick manipulations that demand mad behavior without relieving the poor mortal of responsibility by possessing them (I'm thinking of the story of Isaac. One of my least favorite Bible stories.)

perhaps we set ourselves to gamble with him each time we fall in love: and being mortals, are bound to lose. Anything can happen, the physical shock of κυδοιμός, the furious fancies of μανία.

Oh man, yes. (And okay, you've shown me that μανία is pronounced "mavia"--how is κυδοιμός pronounced?)

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

The fear of classical Greeks for the disorder of strong emotions is nakedly visible in their works, starting with Sapfó. Enthousiasmós also had the connotation of godly possession and of course manía and ménos (mínis in its Homeric equivalent, which opens the Iliad) are siblings.

Francesca: keetheemós (th as in "this", soft dhelta!)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[goliard.livejournal.com]

Though in ancient Greek, probably more like küdoimós (with ü as in German, or French tu).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you--cool to see how pronunciations change.

[sovay]

Thank you--cool to see how pronunciations change.

I remember running a sentence in classical Greek past one of my father's friends who speaks modern Greek, who said that it sounded to her like Greek with a British public-school accent.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Oh God, I hurt myself trying to do that sentence. I never did get the Greek - it's like tacking into the wind. Where physics tells you it should work and be easier, but you end up sweaty and with blisters anyway.

Also, this is a fascinating glimpse into the workings of your brain.

[sovay]

Also, this is a fascinating glimpse into the workings of your brain.

It does this sort of thing a lot. I just don't usually write about it.

[rosefox]

Hm. Mania?

[sovay]

Mania?

I don't think so; the modern-day clinical connotations don't really map. This is part of the problem, that the word itself has come into English as something different.

[goliard.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Plato and mania, there's also his bitterly beautiful epitaph for Dion (which Mary Renault used as the epigraph for The Mask of Apollo), ending:

κεῖσαι δ‘ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν πατρίδι τίμιος ἀστοῖς,
ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων.

[sovay]

Speaking of Plato and mania, there's also his bitterly beautiful epitaph for Dion (which Mary Renault used as the epigraph for The Mask of Apollo)

I love that poem so much. It was the first piece of real Greek I ever translated.

[eredien]

Because a fire was in my head

This is one of my favorite poems ever--I can recite it aloud without thinking about it, which I can't even do with all my own works--partly because the poem totally captures, for me, the feeling of being God-brushed when I write, as if by a wing.

The more I think about it, the more a lot of ancient Greek philosophical distinctions make a lot of sense to me. The ideas of different but similar madness categories (Dionysus, and the Muses, Eros, and Prophecy) really really rings true AND works well for me.

Possibly this shouldn't be surprising.

I am emailing you a poem.

[sovay]

This is one of my favorite poems ever--I can recite it aloud without thinking about it, which I can't even do with all my own works--partly because the poem totally captures, for me, the feeling of being God-brushed when I write, as if by a wing.

I wish it were set well to music; I know two tunes for it, but neither of them feels true to me.

The ideas of different but similar madness categories (Dionysus, and the Muses, Eros, and Prophecy) really really rings true AND works well for me.

And so often they overlap.

I am emailing you a poem.

It's a wonderful poem.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing this.

Something that just came up tonight*: Do you happen to know how/why Thebes in Egypt came to be called Θῆβαι?

*My father was interrogating the lovely daughter** of the local diner's owners about it--she took it well, but I think it was slightly confusing to her.

**Her people are from Εύβοια, as I understand it. It sounded like Enia when she said it, and I was imagining it might be spelt Ενια, but I suppose it's a sound-shift rather than a name change?

[goliard.livejournal.com]

Wiki says, 'The name Thebai is the Greek designation of the ancient Egyptian opet "The Karnak Temple" (from coptic ta-pe, Ta-opet became Thebai).'

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

That quote seems to make a little more sense now than it did reading it last night on Wikipedia, although I'm still a little bit confused about how it all works--"opet" presumably equals something like "temple", I gather, but how does Coptic factor in, that being, as I understand, the descendent of Egyptian?

[goliard.livejournal.com]

I think the idea is that the Coptic (or rather Egyptian, since Coptic, as you say, usually refers to a later form of the language) name "Ta-opet" sounded to the Greeks something like "Thebai", or at least similar enough that they equated it with the Greek placename they were familiar with.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Ayup, I get that bit.

I'm just a bit puzzled by the phrasing, which seems odd/clumsy in a way that tends to make me suspicious; I've seen similar awkwardness when somebody's offering a dodgy explanation of a word or a concept that lies within my own field. It seems a reasonable explanation, but I'd feel better if the Wikipedia entry had a citation and I could trace it back to a reliable scholarly source.

[goliard.livejournal.com]

I now share your suspicion, having looked it up in the online Pauly (http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/uid=1506/entry?entry=bnp_e1207080&fields_1=heading&refine_editions=bnp_bnp&search_mode_1=%2B&row_id=1&result_number=3&search_text_row_1=thebes#hit), which gives an altogether different Egyptian name as the source (Coptic Čēme; Egyptian something or other which the character encoding garbles).

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thanks!

Alas, I can't view the Pauly, as it doesn't seem as if any institution I've a claim on has a right to access it.

[goliard.livejournal.com]

Here's the relevant paragraph (though I can't find the right coding to make the characters display):

Actually Ws.t ('the strong'), from which derived, no later than the 17th dynasty, a female personification Ws.t nḫt.tj ('victorious Thebes'). Beginning with the Middle Kingdom (c. 1990-1630 BC), often called simply njw.t, 'the city (par excellence)' - from which also the Hebrew form no (Ez 30:14 f.; Jer 46:25; Nahum 3:8) and Assyrian Ne [10. 260] -- or in more detail 'the southern city' (in contrast to Memphis). In addition, there is also the expression Jwn.w rsj ('southern Heliopolis'). The Greek Θῆβαι/Thêbai first in Hom. Il. 9,381-384 as 'hundred-gated T.' (in contrast to the seven-gated T. [2] in Boeotia). This form may stem from the adaptation of an Egyptian form which sounded similar to the well-known Greek city; the starting point is probably the Egyptian č̣i̯-m, Coptic Čēme, actually the name for the area on the west bank around Madīnat Hābū. Due to the equation of the chief god Amun with Zeus, T. was often called Diòs Pólis ('City of Zeus') by the Greeks, frequently with the addition ἡ μεγάλη/hē megálē ('the great'); beginning in the 1st cent. AD, also officially a mētrópolis [2].

[sovay]

Her people are from Εύβοια, as I understand it. It sounded like Enia when she said it, and I was imagining it might be spelt Ενια, but I suppose it's a sound-shift rather than a name change?

Yes; the spelling is unaltered except for the loss of a rough breathing mark, which went out with Katharevousa after 1976. Évia is I believe the modern pronunciation, but the person to check with in this conversation would be helivoy.