Hellenika

[sovay]

Greek text courtesy of nineweaving, who scanned it. (I am not sure whether it will display properly on a browser not configured for the font, but since it's Unicode, a quick trip to Perseus may help. If not, there's always the scanned PDF!) Bracketed text courtesy of Martin West's conjectures. Apologies for non-Greek punctuation in a few instances, because this is one hundred percent cut-and-paste, and there's bizarrely no such thing as a raised dot on Perseus. Translation courtesy of me.* Inaccuracies, the same.

ὔμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]οκ[ό]λπων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν φιλάοιδον λιγύρον χελύνναν:

ἔμοι δ' ἄπαλον πρίν] ποτ' [ἔ]οντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ' ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν:

βάρυς δέ μ' ὀ [θ]ῦμος πεπόηται, γόνα δ' [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ' ἔον ὄρχησθ' ἴσα νεβρίοισι.

τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως: ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ' οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι.

καὶ γάρ π[ο]τα Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν αὔων
ἔρωι φ . . αθεισαν βάμεν' εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,

ἔοντα [κ]άλον καὶ νέον, ἀλλ' αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι πόλιον γῆρας, ἔχοντ' ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

About the violet-lapped** Muses' beautiful gifts, children,
and the clear music-loving tortoiseshell, be serious:

but my skin that once was tender, old age has already
seized, and my hair has gone white from dark:

and my heart has turned heavy, and my knees would not bear me,
that once were dancers light as fawns.

I sigh over these things often: but what can I do?
It's impossible for a person not to grow old.***

An example: they say that rose-armed Eos, [. . . . . .]
with desire, once carried Tithonos off to the ends of the earth,

young and beautiful as he was, but in time grey age
caught up with him, who had an immortal wife.

*Very literal, or such to the best of my abilities at the moment. Go read poliphilo for poetry.
**Or "violet-breasted," in the sense of bosom, since κόλπος can mean both; any hollow, any fold.
***More literally, "it's impossible for a person to be never-aging." As differentiated from "ageless"—what never grows, as it never dies; rather than someone who may reach maturity, but never old age, never decay. nineweaving has suggested "unwithering" for ἀγήραος, and I'll buy it.

Comments

[kraada.livejournal.com]

Whoa. It strikes me as particularly odd that the same word can both be used for womb and grave. Considering how opposite they are . . . perhaps originally used as grave only as a matter of irony? Just seems really weird . . .

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Makes perfect sense to me. But I'm strange.

Nine

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

It makes perfect sense to me too!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Not irony at all, but an old old metaphor, so old that it's part of the language. Like Bede's swallow, we come out of darkness--from the place of mystery--and return to it. The earth is where seeds go.

To die in Elizabethan English is to come: "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes."

Nine

[kraada.livejournal.com]

Now you've got me building a culture in my head with these sorts of views explicitly in their society (that birth and death are so much the same process that there's only one word for it, etc.). Of course, that would mean they had much the same reactions to births as they had to deaths . . .

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Not the same: enantiomers. Mirror images.

Nine

[sovay]

Off the top of my head, I can think of only one cosmology where the earth is not female—womb and grave—and that's Egyptian. The earth is male; the sky lies over him and her body is the starry night. There must be others. At any rate, earth-as-mother is critical to Greek myth and ritual. Autochthony is a big thing.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've seen Christian writing about death as a birth into a new life.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The sun that rises with us, our life's star
Hath elsewhere had its setting
And cometh from afar.

--William Wordsworth

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

The Egyptians also believed that the eventual fate of the dead was in the stars, didn't they? I remember seeing some book quoting some Egyptian referring to the afterlife as something like "between the thighs of [whatever the sky goddess's name is]" So actually, that fits a bit disturbingly well.

[sovay]

I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the Egyptian underworld, beyond the most basic features: descent of the sun, nightly rebirth, weighing of the heart, the thing that will eat it if you flunk . . . Heavy-duty solar stuff, and don't forget to pack lots of servants. There is a student here who specializes in Egyptian books of the underworld, though, so theoretically I could ask her when she gets back from her dig.

As I learned their names, the earth is Geb and the sky is Nut. But with the annoying tendency of most Semitic languages, Egyptian doesn't write down its vowels; so I am always a little wary of pronounceable versions. Don't even get me started on Hellenized Egyptian names, which is of course what I learned in sixth grade when I decided to teach myself hieroglyphs and failed pathetically. Wait, who's this Ynpu fellow? Where's my old familiar Anubis . . . ?

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Nut was what the book used, I believe.

'Anubis' certainly sounds better to me, though 'Ynpu' sounds peculiarly appropriate for someone with the head of a jackal.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The metaphor lasts for a very long time, too. From an early fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish poem that goes back and forth between Middle English and Latin, here (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E300000-001/text017.html):

Erth gette on erth gersom and gold,
Erth is thi moder, in erth is thi mold.
Erth uppon erth be thi soule hold.
Er erthe go to erthe, bild thi long bold!

Erth bilt castles
And erthe bilt toures.
Whan erth is on erthe
Blak beth the boures.

Humus querit plurima super humum bona,
Humus est mater tua, in qua sumas dona.
Anime sis famula super humum prona,
Domum dei perpetra munda cum corona
Ops turres edificat ac castra de petra
Quando fatum capiat penora sunt tetra.

Also, thank you both very much for posting the Sappho.

[sovay]

For those of us who are not fluent in Middle English—gersom?

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Nope, it makes perfect sense. The womb as a chamber hidden in the body, the grave as a chamber hidden in the earth.