Edith Hamilton

I'm delighted to welcome back to PNP the Distinguished Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Wilson, and to celebrate the publishing of her new book, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, Journeys Through Ancient Literature, a collection of essays that introduces readers to ancient texts with many references to translators, contemporary poets, and perhaps a hip hop artist or two.

You will find essays on Sappho, Homer, Athenian tragedy, how the Romans adopted Greek culture, the politics of Helen of Troy, the bawdy side of classics, the popularity of Edith Hamilton, many of us grew up reading Edith Hamilton, and an examination of the challenges and values of translation.

Her writing is thoughtful, well-researched, tough-minded, and fun.

According to Kirkus Review, she not only imparts the wisdom of a well-read scholar, but shows readers how easy it is to bask in these texts' storied histories and revel in their slippery wordplay.

When Wilson finds fault with a translator, she's tough-minded, even scathing, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian.

She calls out poet Robert Browning for indecipherable translations and American classics popularizer Edith Hamilton for racism, and she decries all classicists who snobbishly try to bar entry to their domain.

Gatekeeping isn't Wilson's style, and she's eager to end her field's use of Latin and Greek to keep out the plebs.

She also loves to point out how much overlap exists between the ancient world and our own, finding parallels that link Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and Aristophanes with the likes of Spike Lee and Erika Jung.

What kind of jackass are you?

But like some aspects of the Odyssey we'll talk about later, this is really sort of a – well, back in 81, a modern retelling of the Greek myths, right? This is actually quite different than if you go back and you read the sort of Edith Hamilton, Perseus, and – mythology and medusa and pegasus this story is really taking elements from a lot of things and crafting its own narrative here

yeah

but it starts out right with some greek soldiers marching along the beach carrying a casket stormy weather like the odyssey they shot

I think it's the craziest thing I've ever read, but it has no place in school.

And with that other one is the, my first one would be Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

You don't want to read Greek or Roman mythology, or-

That's not, no, I love Greek and Roman mythology.

So I read it here first, and then if I'm like, you know, I need to read this again, I didn't understand it well, I will get either Oxford World's Classics or a Penguin Classics edition.

For this one, I also read the introduction from this version here, which is Plato's Complete Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns.

I love this one just because Edith Hamilton, she did mythology.

And so what I'll do is I'll usually try to read the introduction in here because it's just one page.

But then if I really need more help with these dialogues, I will read this translation as well.

And aporetically, we don't have a nice answer, but these are some helpful ways to perhaps think about self-rescuing.

So John M. Cooper said this in his introduction, "...a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one's legitimate duties in relation to others and in relation to one's own behavior." That's what sophrosyne is.

"...a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one's legitimate duties in relation to others and in relation to one's own behavior." so he's tying a well-developed consciousness so the the internal the the knowledge the thinking and then one's duty so the external the the behavior but not only that but in relation to others and to yourself so it kind of covers all the areas there edith hamilton says this in her introduction accepting the bounds which x well actually that may be the other person's in this work, which is Huntington Cairns.

The Yellow Emperor is also considered by some scholars to be one of the five emperors rather than one of the three sovereigns.

The important thing to know, as you can tell already, there's no single, clean-cut, authoritative, Edith Hamilton Tales of Greek Mythology order about any of this.

It's all very interesting, but there are multiple versions of almost everything I've introduced thus far, and who knows what to believe.

But you can see with these three mythical sovereigns, all the basics of settled civilization, including all the necessary tools required for a people to grow and hunt food, are given by these powerful and wise people who were part god and part king.

We'll talk about this later, but Poseidon doesn't have a lot of stories where he's the main character, so he's a small part of a bunch of them.

Think of this like a chapter from Edith Hamilton's Mythology or Robert Graves' Greek Myths.

Sort of like a grand Poseidon overview.

One quick note for listeners who maybe haven't listened to every episode of the podcast or have and just, you know, there's a lot of them.