the belly is a shameless dog...

After another narrow escape, Odysseus finds himself at a feast and when questioned while eating replies...

"...I could tell a tale of still more hardship,

all I've suffered, thanks to the gods will.

But despite my misery, let me finish dinner.

The belly's a shameless dog, there's nothing worse.

Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget-

destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,

sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding.

Eat, drink!' It blots out all the memory

of my pain, commanding, 'Fill me up!'

("The Odyssey" Fagels' translation)

a dubious moral authority...

This from the Fagel's translation of the Odyssey...

"Zeus harangued the immortal powers:

'Ah how shameless-the way these mortals blame the gods,

From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,

but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,

compound their pains beyond their proper share..."

True enough, though the moral authority of the gods is dubious at best...

hearts that can endure...

This from the end of "The Iliad" (Fagel's translation.) Apollo speaks to the other Gods about the rage of Achilles who keeps and parades the dead body of Hector each day.

"The Fates have given mortals hearts that can endure."  One can only hope...

a glib and twisty thing...

This from the Fagel's translation of "The Iliad"...Achilles and Aeneas  meet after Achilles has returned to the fight. He taunts Aeneas who has come to meet him. Aeneas responds:

"Come, Achilles, no more bragging on this way like boys,
standing here in the thick of a pitched battle,
Plenty of insults we could fling against each other,
enough to sink a ship with a hundred benches!
A man's tongue is a glib and twisty thing...
plenty of words there are, all kinds at it command-
with all the room in the world for talk to range and stray.
And the sort you use is just the sort you'll hear."

weak as men are now...

This from "The Illiad of Homer" (Fagels translation)...

"Aeneas sprang down with his shield and heavy spear,
fearing the Argives might just drag away the corpse,
somehow, somewhere. Aeneas straddled the body-
proud in his fighting power like some lion-
shielded the corpse with spear and round buckler,
burning to kill off any man who met him face to face
and he loosed a bloodcurdling cry. Just as Diomedes
hefted a boulder in his hands, a tremendous feat-
no two men could hoist it, weak as men are now,
but all on his own he raised it high with ease,
flung it and struck Aeneas' thigh where the hipbone
turnes inside the pelvis, the joint they call the cup-
it smashed the socket, snapped both tendons too      
and the jagged rock tore back the skin in shreds.
The great fighter sank to his knees, bracing himself
with one strong forearm planted against the earth,
and the world went black as night before his eyes."

fatal beauty...

   I am as close to a pure pacifist as one can be without being a...well...pacifist, but I was struck by this from Bernard Knox's introduction (especially in light of my last post) to Fagles' translation of "The Iliad."

"The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental,to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has it's own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers,and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter."

Thought provoking, that...

the reality of the world...

Having already been severely wounded during the Spanish Civil War, the great classicist Bernard Knox participated in WWII where:

"After D-Day he was parachuted into Brittany as part of Operation Jedburgh to coordinate elements of the French Resistance. Later he was sent to northern Italy to lead a group of Italian partisans and took part in heavy fighting during the Gothic Line and Po Valley campaigns.

It was in Italy that he rediscovered his love for classics. Holed up in a bombed-out farmhouse, he chanced upon a copy of Virgil's Georgics and opened it at random to read a passage which began: "Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil."

As he later recalled in Essays Ancient and Modern (1990): "These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war." He resolved that, if he survived, he would go back to the classics and study them seriously."