I liked this one, attributed to Plato: ῾Ο αὐτὸς ἔφησε τὸν μὲν ὕπνον ὀλιγοχρόνιον θάνατον, τὸν δὲ θάνατον πολυχρόνιον ὕπνον.

Wondering if the shrinking of the Greek Chorus (n the 5th century bce) was analogous to the shrinking of the jazz orchestra in the early-mid 20th century. Costs maybe.

I don’t understand how this line works grammatically — looks like three singular accusatives, one feminine, two neuter — maybe πλατᾶν is an accusative of respect — but I liked Lattimore’s translation: “the oar blade’s fading footprint.” Agamemnon 695: … κατ᾽ ἴχνος πλατᾶν ἄφαντον.

Polyxena (“the Trojan Iphigenia”), Deidamia (consort of Achilles, mother of Neoptolemos.)

Also in Seneca’s Agamemnon, quite a good description of the storm that destroyed the returning Grecian fleet. Aeschylus treats of this in about ten lines while Seneca, in a much shorter play, gives it well over a hundred.

Just to say, encountering Seneca’s Agamemnon for the first time, the ghost of Thyestes was giving me definite Hamlet’s ghost vibes. Some parallels between the stories too : quarreling brothers, vengeful son, unfaithful conspiring wife…. Not mentioned, though, in sources for Hamlet.

Reviewing the size of a Greek chorus, I’m surprised by how many there were — 12 to 50 says wikipedia. “The chorus consisted of fifty members at the start of the 5th century B.C. It was likely Aeschylus who lowered the number to twelve, and Sophocles who raised it to fifteen. The size stayed at fifteen to the end of the 5th century B.C. Fifteen members were used by Euripides and Sophocles in tragedies.There were twenty-four members in comedies.”

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I was telling some friends today that no matter how many times I look up rebarbative I never recall its meaning — and in fact, I couldn’t recall it after having brought it up. So here it is again — rebarbative.

τό θ᾽ ὑπέργηρων φυλλάδος ἤδη
κατακαρφομένης τρίποδας μὲν ὁδοὺς
στείχει, παιδὸς δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἀρείων
ὄναρ ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. (*)

Smyth: so extreme age, its leaves already withering, goes its way on triple feet, and, no better than a child, wanders, a dream that is dreamed by day.

Wheelhorse, good word. Come across in Missionary Stew: “And as one party wheelhorse in Boston had once told Haere, ‘When old Dave cuts your throat, Draper, you don’t smell no fuckin’ magnolias.”

Noting, in Missionary Stew, that Ross Thomas has a Pynchonesque style of naming characters, similarly playful, not as over-the-top. (Well, “B.S. Keats” is pretty over-the-top. This was published in ’83 so Pynchon could have been an influence.)

Refreshing my memory on the difference between fascists and Nazis. Broadly, it seems that Nazis were a type of fascist, German and more racist.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 364-366:

τείνοντα πάλαι τόξον, ὅπως ἂν
μήτε πρὸ καιροῦ μήθ᾽ ὑπὲρ ἄστρων
βέλος ἠλίθιον σκήψειεν.

Literal translation: “Long he pulled his bow so that/ neither prematurely nor beyond the stars/ the arrow vainly fell.” Lattimore’s is good: “[Zeus] bent the bow with slow care, that neither/ the shaft might hurdle the stars, nor fall/ spent to earth short driven.”

Idea is that Zeus took his time bring justice to Paris in order to get it right. Seems like there is some similarity — both in the content and imagery — to MLK’s remark about “the arc of the moral universe is long…” which appears to be a paraphrase of a statement by transcendentalist Theodore Parker.

Post: “Academics who study the subject have consistently found the value of many hospitals’ good work pales in comparison with the value of their tax breaks. Studies have shown that generally nonprofit and for-profit hospitals spend about the same portion of their expenses on the charity care component.”

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 74-75: ἰσχὺν/ ἰσόπαιδα νέμοντες ἐπὶ σκήπτροις.

Smyth: “… supporting on our canes a strength like a child’s.”

Lattimore: “… to prop up on staffs the strength of a baby.”

Again, the wiktionary entry for the word I was looking up quotes the very passage in which I came across the word I’m looking up — typewriter to mean typist in Kipling’s Captains Courageous.

I haven’t uncovered yet any hard information about precisely when typist overtook typewriter to mean a person who types, however. Here is typist, typewriter on ngrams. Perhaps the drop-off in mentions of typewriter that begins in 1914 owes something to typist gaining more prominence.

I had always imagined a windlass was something vaguely nautical, and as something so technical I could never possibly understand it — an obscure type of sail, perhaps — both of which notions are totally fatally wrong, I find today.

I also supposed that the name was derived from wind, the airy noun, not from wind, the revolving verb, which is also wrong, though the noun and verb are themselves related.

Hilarious. These people want to replace great books with good books, it seems to me.

I knew that Faulkner had worked at a book store in NYC and knew that he had struck up a friendship with Sherwood Anderson but until reading the foreword to the copy of Soldier’s Pay I picked up the other day I hadn’t known these two facts were related: Anderson’s wife owned the book shop Faulkner had worked at and it was through her that he came to know Anderson himself.