A Cat Story
Let me start this saga by saying I am not a cat person. Oh, we had cats when we were growing up. But those are sad stories, like most cat stories. Read more
Jun 28
4 Comments
Jun 27
Greece for the Greeks? Pt. II Conversations with a Greek Philosopher
At the end of our time in Athens, I posted here about the marginalization of modern Greeks in the last several centuries of global work in Ancient Greek philosophy. That post sparked a long and lively debate over on my Facebook wall with another philosopher that encouraged me to think more carefully about how ‘ancient philosophy’ has come to be constructed. Last weekend, in the middle of our good times in Neapoli which you can read about here and here, I raised this question about the relationship between modern Greeks and ancient Greek philosophy, literature and tradition generally with our friend Kosmas Raspitsos, whose book on the Latinization of ancient Greek thought is not unrelated to this question. Kosmas works on German philosophy and ancient Greek philosophy and the history of the philosophy of language and translation, and he’s a modern Greek who is interested in the question of how the disconnect between ancient and modern Greek has been produced, so he was perhaps the perfect person to ask. We spent a good chunk of our time talking about this issue so I’m writing this follow up post to share some of what I learned. Read more
Neapoli, Pt. II: Local Guides, Byzantine Towns, and the Southernmost Point in Europe
In my last post I was singing the praises of the local host and guide over a guidebook. Fittingly, I suppose, I spent the rest of the day working on the debate Aristotle stages in the Politics between those who support the rule of law and those who would advocate the rule of human beings. Read more
Neapoli, Pt. 1: The Case for Local Guides over Tourbooks
We’ve been pretty happy with our guide books to Greece — Rick Steve’s Athens and the Peloponnese and the Blue Guide for Greece — but there’s just no comparison to a real live local who knows and loves a place and its people. This weekend, we drove to Neapoli. Read more
Nafplion: Greece’s Venetian City
Sometimes it’s nice to just do some plain old sight-seeing and not think about how it fits into my understanding of ‘the Greeks.’ Last Saturday, we walked around Nafplion / Nauplion (Drop the ‘o’ if you so desire, no one seems to mind. Note that upsilons often become ‘f’ in modern Greek; find this particularly strange as a pronunciation of ‘autos,’ the ancient and modern Greek word for self). By walked, I mean climbed. And by around, I mean up. 999 steps lead up the Palamidi Fortress that we can see from our terrace. The steps begin about two tenths of a mile away. Legend has it that the the fortress / castle, which
has 9 separate bastions, originally had 1000 steps that led up to it but some horseman was really excited when they defeated the enemy and charged his horse up the hill breaking the first step. It’s not clear there actually are 999 steps — we didn’t count, we were too busy walking. Read more
Gendered Pantheons or My goddess doesn’t want to beat up your god
I’ve been reading the novel Phaedra by June Rachuy Brindel (St. Martin’s Press, 1985) about the story of Phaedra and thinking more about the transition of the worship of Gaia, the earth goddess, to the Olympian pantheon that I talked about in my first and second posts on Delphi. Brindel sets up the action of the novel, the confrontation between Phaedra and Theseus, as a confrontation between the life-giving power of the earth goddess and the kind of world that worshipped the earth goddess to the war mongering of those who keep the cult of the Olympians. Even Zeus must keep justice with violence. Read more
Mycenae: Sites, Stories and Political Structures
One thing that is becoming clear by visiting ruins and archaeological sites in Greece is that the ancient Greeks thought a lot about how what they were going to build fit into the landscape. I talked about that in my first Delphi post, and it was even more striking to me at Mycenae, where the citadel that holds the palace is set between Mt. Aghios Ilias and Mt. Zara. This first picture is the view from the top of the citadel of the valley below which stretches to the Gulf of Nafplion. When you visit, you can see why the Mycenaeans would have chosen this location: from the front, they have a view that stretches over the entire area so they could say any potential invaders from afar, and the back of the citadel is set into the crags of rock that line the lower parts of the mountains that make the citadel almost impossible to scale. Read more
Delphi, Part I: The Gods Must be Near
Legend has it that Martin Heidegger was walking in the Black Forest with friends when he came across a country shrine and crossed himself. Knowing that Heidegger had given up his Catholicism, the friend asked what he was doing. Heidegger responded something like, “Many have prayed here, the gods must be near.”*
We arrived in Delphi and looked over the valley that cuts through the mountains up to the water and thought, the gods must be near. Read more
The Trott Line 