WHAT I DIDN'T LEARN FROM THE  ANABASIS 

Jerry Harkins

Teachers are workers who spend a great deal of time with other people's children.  This is not as much fun as you might suppose but someone has to do it to preserve the sanity of parents.  God is amused by the whole idea of purgatory on earth and has struck a deal with the Teachers' Union:  salvation for a regular supply of slapstick.  It is not known why this is the Christian God's favorite kind of humor.  The Greek gods, after all, had much more sophisticated tastes.  You never heard a belly laugh from Mount Olympus during a performance of a play by Aristophanes.  Of course you probably wouldn't laugh either.  As any literature teacher will be happy to explain to you (at length) great literature is not about ha-ha comedy.  Instead, comedy is merely the term used to classify works in which the good guy somehow manages to be alive at the final curtain.  There is, for example, nothing humorous about the Book of Job except that the hero manages to survive God's best efforts to make him miserable.

As both student and teacher, I have had many encounters with great literature.  Stultifying encounters for the most part.  Exhibit A is The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, a novel so irredeemably boring that even the Cliff Notes should be burned as a threat to the public health.  Now this is merely my opinion and is born entirely of my narrow-mindedness with respect to leisure pursuits.  I simply cannot abide having to pay for the privilege of becoming depressed.  There is a sufficient supply of depression available free in the real world and I have no need to attend to the psychodynamic obsessions of serialist composers, British televisions dramas or French cineastes.  I stand condemned by the many Best Books published by the distinguished critics of The New York Times newspaper.  Almost never have I, a voracious reader, read a book that made their cut.  Or one of the obscure authors they interview every week.  The Times always asks, "What books are currently on your nightstand?"  Not surprisingly, the respondents seem to read mostly each other's work.  Actually I wonder if the Times knows that the original purpose of the nightstand was to conceal  a chamber pot and contain its noxious odor – a perfect example of convergent evolution and appropriate re-purposing.

 In high school I studied ancient Greek.  It was an elective which I hoped might
impress the girls.  The very first day, Father McGrail introduced himself and his next words were, “Please turn to Page One of the Anabasis. Let’s look at the first sentence.” It read, “Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης,νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος.”  Instant, total immersion.  It seems Darius II, King of the Persian Empire, and Parysatis, his principal wife, had two sons, Artaxerxes the elder, named after his paternal grandfather, and Cyrus the younger.  It takes a
while for a novice to absorb any of this information from the gibberish displayed above just as it took   poor Alan Turing a while to figure out the gibberish produced by the Enigma machine. 

Actually His Majesty had thirteen legitimate children at least seven of whom had no names –  no names that have come down to us at any rate.  He died before our story begins and Parysatis favored the succession of her younger son for reasons that are not clear.  It always struck me that there must be a good story there but we don't actually know much about any of the Persian actors except, of course, that they were the bad guys.  We do know that Parysatis was unsuccessful and her older son became King Artaxeres II.  (She later got her revenge by poisoning Art's principal wife.  He didn't miss her very much as he had 349 others who provided him with 150 sons.  An amazing achievement in the days before professional basketball.)  But the history was written by Xenophon who, while not technically on the winning side of the conflict, was part of a Greek expeditionary force of 10,000 soldiers hired by Cyrus to overthrow Artaxerxes.  Being Greek, these mercenaries were the good guys even if they were working for the bad guys.  Sadly Cyrus was killed in the climactic battle of Cunaxa (modern Baghdad) and the Greeks, now beset by the King's loyalists, were stranded far from home.  The Anabasis tells the story of how Xenophon managed to lead them north across 500 miles of foodless deserts and snow-filled mountain passes toward the safety of the Greek colonies on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea.  Harassed by the Persians loyal to Artaxeres and half starving, they reached the port of Trabzon in modern Turkey and broke out into their immortal cheer, "Thlatta, thalatta!"  The sea, the sea!  Xenophon did not stress that this great feat of generalship was a retreat much less a rout.  Rather he thought of it as an advance to the rear.  The memoirs of generals are no more reliable than any other memoirs which is why you think Julius Caesar won decisively every battle he fought in Gaul and why the British think Bernard Law Montgomery was a military genius surrounded by allies who were idiots.  By now you may also know that in spite of the lovely Libby's 45-year PR campaign to the contrary, her husband, George Armstrong Custer, was a military moron.

I know scholars think the Anabasis relates one of the great adventure stories of all time but from my point of view it only goes to show that scholars are as easily amused as God.  For one thing, almost all the swashbuckling parts take place before the book begins and, for another, the Anabasis simply does not qualify as beach or bathtub reading.  You need a scorecard to keep track of the players and the teams they play for.  For example, a few sentences into the book, Xenophon informs us about the beginning of the plot:

Still another army was being collected for him [Cyrus] in the Chersonese which is opposite Abydus, in the following manner: Clearchus was a Lacedaemonian exile; Cyrus, making his acquaintance, came to admire him, and gave him ten thousand darics. And Clearchus, taking the gold, collected an army by means of this money, and using the Chersonese as a base of operations, proceeded to make war upon the Thracians who dwell beyond the Hellespont, thereby aiding the Greeks. Consequently, the Hellespontine cities of their own free will sent Clearchus contributions of money for the support of his troops. So it was that this army also was being secretly maintained for Cyrus.

It will be quite a while before we find out that this secret army was the very same one Xenophon eventually led to the sea.  More annoyingly, we are told that this war was aiding the Greeks which is bound to confuse the reader who knows that the army was bought by and fighting for Cyrus.  The Greeks, as usual, were at each others' throats which was an impediment to anything like a Greek consensus on the subject of Persia.  Moreover, Clearchus, was not an exile from Lacedonia but rather a fugitive under a death sentence for disobeying orders.  In fact, he was a bona fide mercenary from Sparta.  After Cyrus died, Clearchus became commander-in-chief of the whole army but was betrayed and sold to Artaxerxes who had him executed.  One final point about this story:  if you believe that the good citizens of Hellespont donated money to Clearchus willingly, you may not want to accept any more calls from Nigerian Princes.

After selling out Athens by fighting for Persia, Xenophon sold out Persia and went home but soon sold out Athens again, this time to Sparta, a crime for which he was banished.  Well, he didn't like Athens very much anyway because of its democratic philosophy (which in truth was more pretension than philosophy) but that's not important because by then the story had long since come to its end.  Mercifully.

A close reading of the Anabasis will quickly disclose that it's more fiction than history.  For example, Xenophon claims his side won the battle of Cunaxa and only had to retreat because Cyrus was killed.  He tells a cockamamie story about why Cyrus was irreplaceable but that was pure hogwash.  The Greeks did acquit themselves well although Xenophon's claim that they suffered only one casualty is nonsense. But the more compelling question is this:  having kicked Artaxerxes' ass, why did Xenophon now feel compelled to retreat?  My guess is they had run out of money but that's not a very heroic reason.  Nor is any possible alternative.  The fact is Artaxeres survived and Cyrus did not.  Aside from his mother, Cyrus didn't have many friends but, those he did have would have been hard pressed to think of him as the winner of the battle.  Had the Greeks stayed around they would have been slaughtered because their allies had already been decimated and they were virtually alone against a King who now was not only alive but really pissed off.

The moral of the story is that you don't have to feel bad about being unable to keep track of the various Peloponnesian Wars or the Punic Wars or the War of the Austrian Succession for that matter even though the latter had a local version called the French and Indian War.  By extension, you don't need to worry about your ignorance of history in general.  There is no line, fine or otherwise, between history and mythology.  As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote;  “Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”  Of course Schopenhauer was one of the most unpleasant, misanthropic, misogynist creatures God ever created.  But in this case, he was right.  And it doesn't matter.  What is important is not what is true but what people believe to be true.  Call it Libby Custer's Axiom.  Or perhaps Gresham's Anti-axiom:  myth always Trumps truth.  The only exception is the myth that studying ancient Greek is useful for impressing girls.

TRANSLATION

Jerry Harkins

Translation is the art of failure.

                                                                         –Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was onto something important but in an admiring not a pejorative sense.  Translation may always end in failure but it is glorious failure, the kind that propels fellowship and culture itself forward.  It encapsulates Robert Browning's insight that, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?"

Sic fatur lacrimans classique immitit habenas  /  Et tandem Euboicis Cumarum adlabitur oris.  At the end of Book V of The Aeneid, Aeneas leaves Sicily where the ghost of his father, Anchises, has told him they must consult together in the land of the dead before Aeneas goes to meet his destiny at Latinium.  These two lines are the opening of Book VI.  They inform the reader that the hero leaves Sicily in tears and comes ashore at Cumae near present day Naples.  Cumae is inhabited by Greeks from Euboea, the second largest of the Aegean islands.  At his father's urging, he intends to ask the Sibyl who lives there what he must do to gain passage to Hades.  Seamus Heaney, possibly the greatest-ever translator of classical poetry, rendered the two lines in three:

In tears as he speaks, Aeneas loosens out sail

And gives the whole fleet its head, so now at last

They ride ashore on the waves at Euboean Cumae.

The extra line – rendering the twelve lines of Latin into 29 words of English – is consistent with the fact that Latin is a much more concise (and therefore less precise) language than English.  

But there are several problems in Heaney's translation which reflect decisions he made and highlight a class of decisions all translators face.  To begin with, "he speaks" and "they ride ashore" are both present tense even though the leaving was in the past and the arrival is not really in the present but in a more recent past relative to the time he is writing about.[i]  A sailor would probably "let" out sail rather than "loosen" it out and the idea of giving "..the whole fleet its head" is awkward.  A good editor would have questioned him about his choices (and I have no doubt he would give persuasive answers).  In deference to Heaney's standing as both a poet and a translator, I might have proposed something like this:

In tears as he speaks, Aeneas lets out the sails,

Urging the fleet fast forward, until shortly,

They came ashore on the waves at Euboean Cumae.

The syllables in each line are the same (12, 11 and 14) although the stresses are slightly different.  Neither translation, of course, is literal.  This would be closer if less poetic:

Muttering through his tears, he gives the fleet free rein

And at length they are brought ashore at Euboean Cumae.

This more literal version restores the passive voice of adlabitur, something that modern English stylists might object to.  Heaney's "ride ashore" is active but he nods to the passivity of the original by inserting "on the waves."  Aeneas is not the actor, the waves are.  It's a good solution.

Interestingly, Robert Fagles, another excellent poet in his own right, comes closer to the literal than Heaney:

So as he speaks in tears, Aeneas gives the ships free rein

And at last they glide onto Euboean Cumae's beaches.

If you've ever beached a boat, you might take exception to "glide" although that is the most common meaning of the verb adlabor.  "Lurch" would be more like it and Latin has a perfectly good verb meaning to lurch or to wobble, titubare.  The error is Virgil's  not Fagles'.  The poet may never have been near a boat, certainly not one that was being beached.  More importantly, as the following lines make clear, the boats did not actually come up on the beaches.  They remained in the water, firmly anchored, prows facing outward.  But he does solve the tense problem by inserting at last.

Very few translations can or should be straightforward.  One of my favorite examples occurs in the first line of Homer's[ii] masterpiece, The Odyssey.  He invokes the aid of the Muse in describing his hero to whom he assigns the epithet, polutropon.  The line in literal translation would be:

Sing to me, O Muse, of the man of many turnings who

[wandered] far and wide[iii]

Polutropon does literally mean "of many turnings" but, as used here, it is much richer and more layered.  It refers first to Odysseus' many wanderings on his way home from Troy and then to his brilliant but slightly devious cast of mind.  Many translators have opted for the English word "wily" which is too negative.  Fagles says "the man of twists and turns" and Robert Fitzgerald renders it "skilled in all ways of contending."  Even in the first line, the translator's decision is important because polutropon is one of the few places that the reader is given a clue that there is a darker side to Odysseus.  It is an important epithet and Homer immediately switches to polumetis, of many counsels, so the reader should grasp its subtle implications right here in the first line.  Twists does the trick with the same subtlety as the original.

A similar problem occurs when we have lost the colloquial senses in which expressions were used.  The word cool, for example, has several contemporary connotations that have nothing to do with the temperature.  Among other things, it can mean laid back, popular, awesome or merely okay.  A future translator who knew these variations would have to choose one while another who knew only the formal meaning would be puzzled.  We can turn again to Seamus Heaney for an example.  The first line of Beowulf in Old English is:

Hwæt wê Gâr-Dena in gear-dagum[iv]

Literally this means, "What we Spear-Danes, in [the] old days."  The problem is that as far as we know, Hwæt is an adjective meaning what which makes no sense.  Clearly the Anglo-Saxons used it in a sense or senses that have been lost, leaving modern translators with the problem of imagining what they meant.  Heaney renders the line:

So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by

J.R.R. Tolkien translates Hwæt as "Lo!" and others have used "Listen."  I particularly like "listen" although I can find no basis for it other than it seems appropriate as an attention getter at the beginning of an epic poem.  "Lo" is similar.  It means something close to "behold" as in the gospel account of the first Christmas ("And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them…" Luke 2:9 from the Latin Et ecce).  I can't think of any justification for so which derives from the Old English swa.  The term has always been rich in connotations.  I can imagine a bard saying "So" in the sense of "So let's begin the story by saying…"  But if that bard were speaking Old English he probably would have used Swa and he probably would not have punctuated it (Hwæt is not followed by a period).

In contemporary rhetoric, so is frequently used at the beginning of a statement to command attention.  In his foreword, Heaney says, "But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention."  The same can be said of Tolkien's Lo.  But it still leaves the question of what the original was implying by Hwæt and why it did not resort to Swa.

None of this is to dispute any of the decisions made by any of the translators whose work I have cited.  I can have my preferences but I cannot dispute Heaney's preference for So.  I can certainly appreciate the difficulties he faced and I have a strong impression that So is part of what gives his translation the feel of Old English in spite of its purported contemporary origin in "Hiberno-English Scullion-speak" (which seems to refer to what my Irish grandparents would call "kitchen talk" implying the conversation of kitchen workers behind closed doors).  It sounds right to me.  And that, of course, is another objective of the translator – to give the text the feel of the original.  I have a similar belief about the title Marcel Proust gave his famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu.  When Scott Moncrieff's translation was published between 1922 and 1930, the title was Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 30.  Ever since, English translations of Proust have carried the more literal title, In Search of Lost Time.  The Moncrieff version does not correspond to a single word of the French original and completely loses the sense of lost time.  But I prefer it and I suspect Proust would have too.  He, after all, took his French title from Voltaire's translation of Shakespeare's sonnet and Voltaire translated "remembrance of things past" in the second line as "à la recherche du temps perdu."

The feel of an original is important and the feel is embedded largely in the meter.  Homer sang in dactylic hexameters:  each line has six feet, each foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.  In Greek (and to a slightly lesser extent in Latin) this is a robust architecture.  It can work also in English as in the first line of Longfellow's Evangeline:

                        THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

But, because English is so readily rhymed, it can also sound sing-song.  To avoid this, Fagles' Odyssey is written primarily in iambs, mostly hexameter but with frequent excursions into three, four, five and seven feet.  This strategy gives the English a robustness it would lack if the translator simply imitated the original meter.

In poetry as in music, rhythm or meter is the most important mark of the culture of its origin.  This is why a prose translation is often unsatisfying and why Alexander Pope's rendition of The Odyssey does not work at all.  His opening lines are typical:

The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,

Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;

This is unsatisfactory for several reasons not the least of which is the heroic couplets are so forced and sound so British.  The translation itself is awkward but it does very roughly approximate the original.  Not so the attempt by George Chapman who basically re-wrote the story.  Here are his first four lines:

The Gods in council sit, to call

Ulysses from Calypso's thrall,

And order their high pleasures thus:

Grey Pallas to Telemachus[v]

In an author's preface, Chapman claimed that word-for-word translations "lose the free grace of their natural Dialect" which, of course, is true.  Translators including Cicero and St. Jerome have written scathingly of  such "pretension" and have promoted instead what they refer to as "idea-for-idea" renderings.  But to be faithful to the idea does not mean creating an alternative narrative.  The opening of The Odyssey is an invocation asking the Muse to inspire the poet.  True Calypso is the Muse of epic poetry but that is virtually the only connection Chapman has to the original.  The invocation is a prayer, not a scene setter.

Translation is an art, not a science.  It seeks to move ideas from the mind of an author to that of the reader.  The translator is an intermediary mind, a bridge builder working in a minefield of uncertainties.  Nowhere is this more evident or more important than in attempting to translate the Bible.  The difficulties are amplified by distance. Beowulf was composed no more than 1,200 years ago.  The Odyssey and The Aeneid were written about 2,800 and 2,000 years ago respectively. It is thought that the Hebrew Bible was written down beginning around 3,500 years ago and was completed about 2,500 years ago.  The earliest "writings" were fragmentary and were mainly transmitted orally.  For our purposes, it can be said that the two most important versions of the canonical Bible are Jerome's Latin or Vulgate edition completed around 385 CE and the King James English version published in 1611.

Many Christians still believe that the Bible, by which they usually mean the King James version or the Revised Standard Version, is the inerrant word of God "without error or fault in all its teachings."  Some such believers apply strict inerrancy only to the "original autograph" books which do not exist and did not exist at any point shortly after they were written.  The fact remains that every Bible ever circulated contains a substantial number of major errors and contradictions.  For example, it is a major error to think that the world or the universe was "created" in six days of twenty-four hours only six thousand years ago.  The earth was never flooded to a depth of thirty cubits and Jesus did not walk on water.  Such stories are myths and metaphors which have had profound influence in Western culture but which are not "true" in any literal sense.

In 1862, Robert Young, a self-taught Scottish printer, published a remarkable Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, not to displace commonly used translations but to "place the reader in the position…side by side with the writer to think as he does, to see as he sees, to reason, to feel, to weep and to exalt along with him."  At first blush, the modern reader may feel that Young has simply made the Bible less accessible and many simply disregard his work.  But once you are able to relax into it, you can be rewarded by the illusion that you are indeed at one with the writers.  Take for example the first two lines of Genesis.  Young's version is: 

In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth – / the earth hath existed waste and void and darkness is on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters

Compare this with Everett Fox's masterful rendition:[vi]

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of the Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters

Another contemporary, Robert Alter, says:[vii]

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters

And compare these with the original King James version:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Or with my favorite modern Bible:[viii]

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The crucial question, of course, is exactly what did God create?  Young clearly says that at least the earth pre-existed (hath existed) the first day.  Certainly it was a dark and empty wasteland but the land and the sea were not created by God.  Fox implies the same thing and so does Alter although less explicitly.  You can read pre-existence into the King James but the New International is more ambiguous.  What does being "formless and empty" mean?  The way I read it is that on day one, God created a formless and empty earth.   Again, no one is trying to deceive the reader.  But Young is perfectly clear:  On the first day God set about preparing both the pre-existing heavens and the earth (by creating light and separating the night from the day as we will learn shortly).  Preparing, not creating.  You cannot avoid feeling that you have come very close to the thinking and the sense of the author.

This sense of being in tune is what Harold Bloom admires in the David Rosenberg's translation.  He adds a great deal of ornamentation to the first two verses of Genesis:[ix]

Before a plant of the field was in earth, before a grain of the field sprouted – Yahweh had not spilled rain on the earth, nor was there man to work the land – yet from the day Yahweh made earth and sky, a mist from within would rise to moisten the surface.  Yahweh shaped an earthling from clay of this earth, blew into its nostrils the wind of life.  Now look:  man becomes a creature of flesh.

This is obviously not the Genesis we know but a re-write or reconstruction of a precursor to Genesis that Bloom attributes to a woman historian, J, at the court of King Solomon.  In Bloom's telling, our received version is in part an edit of a text very much like this.  It is a conceit but a brilliant one.  It belongs in the fiction section but, then, so does most of the Bible.

It is true that many translators are biased and, therefore, unreliable.  The same thing is true of authors and, if a reader is not literate in the author's language, a biased translator is in the business of shooting sitting ducks.  A good example is Martin Luther's German translation of Jerome's Vulgate.  As all four evangelists report, Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of the Passover.[x]  The word in Hebrew is Pesach and it is the basis for the word used in other languages.  The German is Passah.  But that is not the word used by Martin Luther when he translated the New Testament into German.  His word is Ostern or Osterlamm which, among other things, means Easter.  He had to know it was absurd to think Jesus was about to celebrate Easter a week before the resurrection but Luther was an anti-Semite.

Fortunately most translators work faithfully to transmit ideas from person to person, place to place and time to time.  Many are more careful than the author and more solicitous of the reader.  Their work is intellectually heroic and should be more honored than it often is.

Afterword

A surprising number of readers have taken me to task for failing to mention the blank verse translation of The Odyssey published in 1871 by William Cullen Bryant.  Shame on me!  It is, in fact, an excellent and very readable telling of the story and a good example of the point I was trying to make about the decision-making processes of all translators.  The problem for me concerns the specific example I have been interested in since I first encountered the poem, the epithet polutropon.  Bryant has it as "sagacious" which is simply inadequate even if it is often used to convey the idea of shrewdness.  "Wily" comes closer to suggesting something less admirable, something that I think is clear in polutropon, of many turnings.  Indeed I might make a case that he misses entirely the less appealing aspects of Odysseus' personality.  (I also admit that I went to a lot of trouble memorizing the equivalent names of the gods and goddesses in Latin and Greek and it annoys me that Bryant uses the former in a poem written in the latter.  At least he does not call the poem "Ulysses.")

Still Another Afterword

Since publishing this essay, I have encountered a new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2018) and am happy to report it is a masterpiece, maybe the best version I have ever read.  She renders it in contemporary American English idiom without sacrificing the robustness of the Greek and while remaining faithful to the narrative choices Homer made.  Here are her first three lines:  Tell me about a complicated man. / Muse tell me how he wandered and was lost / when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.  That complicated is perfect.  It makes me think polutropon may not have been intended as an epithet and that would explain why Homer switched to polumetis which means of many counsels.  It may also be that both Dr. Wilson and Homer think more highly than I do of Odysseus' character.  In any event, she discusses her choice of "complicated" at fascinating length in "The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English" by Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.

And A Third Afterword

I am not the only writer obsessed by the word Hwæt as it occurs in the first line of Beowulf.  Ruth Franklin, in her review of the new translation by Maria Dahvanna Headley ("A 'Beowulf' for Our Moment," The New Yorker, April 31, 2020) devotes two paragraphs to dealing with her rendition of it as "Bro!"  Headey, she writes, sees it as "not only humorous and attention-grabbing" but as consistent with her belief that, "The men of "Beowulf" –– not least the protagonist –– are preoccupied with definitions of masculinity:  what makes a man, or how a man can make himself."  Headley's focus is on Grendel's unnamed mother in a way reminiscent of the treatment of Elphaba in the modern Broadway musical, Wicked.  Speaking of her choice of Bro, she asserts it forces us to think of "...the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men." 

---

Notes

[i] It is about 250 miles by sea from Sicily to Naples.  With favorable winds, ancient sailing ships could make about 6 miles per hour so we're looking at a minimum of two days.

[ii] Let's not waste time discussing the academic theory that Homer never existed.  The Greeks, including Plato, thought he was not only real but a great poet, the "first teacher" of the Greeks.  Every copy of The Odyssey and The Iliad I've ever seen attributes the work to a fellow named Homer.  Like all good stories, these probably improved with time but the underlying style seems remarkably coherent.  There are very few passages that stand out as anomalous.  Like Shakespeare's soliloquies, Homer's epithets seem to be all of a piece, suggesting, to me at least, common authorship.

[iii] The "wandered" in the original is the first word of the second line.  Fagles renders it, "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course…"  The placement of Muse after man seems awkward in English.  The "driven" off course is very different from "wandered far and wide" and is more accurate because the hero's wadering was not voluntary.  The Greek word is plagxthe which does carry the impression of roaming.  The word odegete means driven.  Finally, twists and turns is closer to what I imagine Homer meant but the twists part is not obvious in polutropon. 

[iv] Not exactly.  Anglo-Saxon was not written in the Roman alphabet until the eleventh century, probably after the Norman invasion.  Beowulf was probably composed long before then.  Also the circumflex accent was not used and both shown here should be macrons or straight lines.

[v] Chapman's Odyssey was published in 1598 and is the version that opened the eyes of John Keats to the glories of ancient Greece.  In his famous sonnet, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" he tells us, "Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold."

[vi] The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Books, 1995.

[vii] The Five Books of Moses, W.W. Norton and Company, 2004.

[viii] New International Version, International Bible Society, 1973

[ix] The Book of J, Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, Interpreted by Harold Bloom, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

[x] Matthew 26:18, Mark 14:14, and Luke 22:8 actually put the word Passover in Jesus' mouth.  John 13:1-2 uses the same word but not in a quotation.

THE TIME HAS COME

Jerry Harkins

…to repeal the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and replace it with the Twenty-eighth, to wit:

           1.  The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby
           repealed.

2.  Nothing contained in this Constitution shall be interpreted to restrict the right of the federal government and the duly constituted governments of the several states to regulate the manufacture, sale, purchase, bearing or use of arms of any description.  Congress shall have the power to regulate the transportation and sale of such arms in interstate commerce.

3.  Nothing contained in this Constitution shall be interpreted to restrict the right of the federal government and the duly constituted governments of the several states to raise and maintain armed forces or armed law enforcement agencies.

Please note the proposed amendment does not actually require anything or prevent anyone from doing anything lawful.  Texans would still be able to carry their .357 Magnums openly in churches, nursery schools and bars (in those counties that have repealed prohibition).  They could still hunt deer with howitzers, buy grenade launchers with which to stand their ground and use Apache helicopters to round up the cattle at branding time.  And they could own as many AK-47's as their little hearts and minds desired even if their names appeared on terrorist watch lists.  At least they could do all these things as long as their pusillanimous politicians continue to kowtow to the NRA.  As discussed below, the proposed amendment would clarify the confusion that beset the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller.

While we're at it, there are a few other changes I'd like to see.  For one thing, I wish the media would stop referring to massacres as geographic phenomena:  Sandy Hook, Orlando, Fort Hood and so forth.  It is an easy solution for editors and pundits but it forever tarnishes the good name of some pretty nice places without adding any insight to the storyline.  Wouldn't it be more meaningful to name massacres in honor of those who promote them?  For example, we might refer to the slaughter of 20 six- and seven-year old children and 6 of their teachers on December 12, 2012 as the Wayne La Pierre Massacre.  The carnage at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 could be named in memory of Charlton "Over-my-dead-body" Heston.  The shootout at the San Bernadino Regional Center on December 2, 2015 could henceforth be known as the Mitch McConnell Bloodbath.  And, of course, the mass execution in Orlando of June 12, 2016 has to be the Donald J. Trump Liquidation.  These and other identifications would memorialize the logic and rhetoric of those who have so successfully advocated for the right to bear arms up to and including multiple warhead thermonuclear missiles.  I would make at least one exception to the naming convention.  I would name one particularly grisly case the Thoughts and Prayers Masacree to honor the mindless politicians who instruct their PR flacks to issue a statement based on the "T and P Template."

There were 372 mass murders in the United States in 2015 – incidents in which four or more innocent people were killed – and we're on track to exceed that in 2016.  And Mr. La Pierre keeps repeating his mantra, "Guns don't kill people;  people kill people."  Which, of course, is true.  People who can easily buy Kalashnikovs with 30-round magazines are able to kill multiple human beings indiscriminately.  Donald Trump has a slightly different take.  "If you take the guns away from the good people, the bad ones are going to have target practice."  Brilliant!  So the solution is to arm every man, woman and child in America.  The AK-47 was designed and is universally known as an assault weapon.  Its only function is to kill human beings by pumping a prodigious number of bullets over a wide area in a short time.  There is no other reason to own such a weapon.  Like any rifle, it is not a good choice if the object is self defense.  You can use it to hunt deer as long as you don't care about a clean kill.  It isn't even very accurate unless you're firing at point blank range. 

The problem is the founding fathers were asleep at the switch when they drafted the Second Amendment and failed to give it a copy edit.  It says:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This 27-word sentence is divided into two clauses, the first of which argues that the maintenance of a well regulated militia is essential to the security of a free state.  The second says the people can keep and bear arms.  To some these ideas imply the keeping and bearing of arms by the people is essential to the security of the nation.  But the sentence does not define the terms "well regulated militia," "the people," "keep and bear" or "arms."  Fortunately, Justice Scalia did so in a remarkable Explication de Texte which became the opinion of the Supreme Court in the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).  In essence he argued that history and grammar support every individual's right to buy, carry and use pretty much any weapon they want.  Even nuclear hand grenades?  Do convicted felons have the right of concealed carry while proudly serving terms in Texas state prisons?  The late Justice Scalia said there was plenty of time to consider such questions.  Not enough time to save the babies and teachers slaughtered in 2012.

Americans have a high tolerance for logical fallacies and mendacious rhetoric offered in support of their preferred mythologies.  It is, for example, a myth that scientific theories are pure speculation.  Thus, millions of Americans are comfortable claiming that evolution is only a theory or that climate change is only a theory.  Ask them about fossils and they are likely to tell you that they are manufactured and sprinkled around the globe by the devil to confuse people.  Conspiracy theories play a large part in shaping public opinion.  Vaccines are part of the strategy of the pharmaceutical industry to promote epidemics and thereby increase the sale of other medications.  It is not only the uneducated and discontented that believe such nonsense.  Ideology is pervasive.  One of the most destructive is the doctrine of "original intent" promoted by many in the legal profession.

It is insane to think that we need to bind ourselves to whatever interpretation Justice Scalia and four of his colleagues decided was the precise meaning of the men who wrote the twenty-seven words of the Second Amendment.  Scholars can probe the language of the Bible or of Shakespeare or of James Madison without agreeing on their meaning.  Maybe the framers were worried that the government would disarm them and become dictatorial, that the state's militia would be used as an instrument of repression.  They had, after all, had experience with King George III.   It is an article of Tea Party faith that the jackbooted minions of the government are out to disarm them.  Maybe the states imagined calling up farmers in times of emergency and telling them to bring their own rifles and ammunition.  Who knows?  It worked at Lexington and Concord.  Maybe the "people" did not include women or slaves or felons or even white men who didn't own property.  We can be fairly sure that our founding fathers were not worrying about AK-47's or Uzi submachine guns.

The founding fathers clearly did want to insure "…the right of the people peaceably to assemble."  They did not draw a fine line between peaceably and whatever might be considered non-peaceable by Justice Scalia.  Today you are more likely to see the local Chief of Police standing ready to defend the right to peaceful assembly which is not precisely the same thing as peaceable.  The former means you won't riot or start shooting.  The latter is an early Quaker usage derived from the eleventh chapter of Isaiah describing the social contract after the coming of the Messiah:  "The wolf will live with the lamb, /  the leopard will lie down with the goat, / the calf and the lion and the yearling together; / and a little child will lead them."  However you read this, the wolf and lamb metaphor probably would preclude not only opening fire but also open carry which is inherently threatening.  During the Civil War, the Quakers themselves had extensive debates about the boundaries and limits of pacifism.  There is probably more consensus today and it is difficult to envision any Quaker approving of armed vigilantes guarding the border with Mexico or claiming to protect the Republican Convention in Cleveland.  Vigilantes may be peaceful but they are surely not peaceable.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has never been asked to weigh in on the differences between peaceful and peaceable.  It has, of course, dealt with assembly and association cases but has almost always spoken in terms of peaceful assembly.  Not that it makes much difference.  Justice Scalia told us that the two clauses of the Second Amendment are not related to each other which is the same sort of warped logic as the Mad Hatter's assertion that guns don't kill people.

The Wild West is a defining part of the American origin mythology.  Swinging saloon doors, frontier justice, Boot Hill, the O.K. Corral and forty-five caliber "Peacemakers" worn on both hips.  Early in his career, Sam Colt said, "The good people in this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemaker."  He died eleven years before the Peacemaker ® was introduced.  Ever since Cain slew Abel, people have killed other people.  God may have said they shouldn't but the NRA and its political toadies beg to differ.  They believe that governments exist to make it easy.

Subsequently

On March 28, 2018, in the aftermath of a horrendous school massacre in Parkland, Florida, retired Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens published an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times suggesting that gun control advocates should press for repeal of the second amendment.  Justice Stevens had been the author of the principal dissent in the 2008 Heller case.

STUCK IN REVERSE

Jerry Harkins

It was Thomas Riley Marshall, one-time Governor of Indiana and two-term Vice President of the United States who said, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  He was being sarcastic about politicians who like to bloviate about all the problems facing the nation.  Today he might add that the cigar should be non-toxic, non-polluting and non-addictive.  It should smell like lilacs in the early morning and help users lower bad cholesterol. 

Make no mistake about this:  the American people today are in a real funk.  A lot of them are getting ready to vote for the least qualified, most dangerous candidate that has ever been nominated for dog catcher never mind President of the United States by a major political party.  They will be voting for and expecting radical change in pretty much every department of their lives, hoping but not really expecting that things will get better.  Others have lost all hope.  The suicide rate has increased by 24% since 1999.  College students want "trigger warnings" about assigned readings that might disturb their delicate sensibilities.  Several states want teachers to carry guns in the classroom.  Twenty-three states have passed "Stand Your Ground" laws which seem to be a variation on the theme of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later.  New York, California and Michigan now require college students to obtain "affirmative consent" from each other before sexual activity commences and again before it advances from one stage to the next.  This involves teaching them that "Yes Means Yes" and "No Means No" which apparently many of them did not learn at their parents' knees.  Mr. Trump wants to build a twenty-foot high wall along the border between the United States and Mexico which is 1,989 miles long.  The Great Wall of China is nearly seven times longer and five feet higher but it was instantly overrun by the Mongols and, later, by others.  Mr. Trump has never read Robert Frost's poem that begins with the line, "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall."  Then there's Bernie Sanders who would like to provide free college tuition to everyone.  He proposes to pay for this by adopting the platform of the children who brought you Occupy Wall Street.  The reasons for this mass psychosis are many and you already know the litany which includes but is not limited to four major social dislocations:  the information revolution, the global economy, the death of God and institutional religion, and the spoliation of the natural environment.

·         Through economic thick and thin, the middle class has been dwindling ever since the oil embargo of 1973.  Average family income has declined substantially in spite of the facts that productivity has been rising steadily and we are working longer hours.   For the first time in our history, the prospects of our children are not nearly as promising as were those of their parents and grandparents.  They won't be able to get a mortgage until they pay off their student loans which will be just in time to help their own kids through college and then their aging parents through retirement.   To a lot of people, it seems the American Dream is dead.

·        Our institutions have failed us.  The government is paralyzed at every level by ideological bankruptcy and blatant corruption.  We face major challenges but are beset by failure and/or procrastination.  The trillions of dollars we have invested in military assets cannot defeat a ragtag group of terrorists.  Airport security has become an exercise in impenetrable regulations, mismanagement and interminable delays.  Major segments of the business community have become anti-social cabals focused exclusively on generating private wealth by defrauding the public.  Our schools are unable to teach either basic skills or the kinds of knowledge we need in the post-industrial economy.  Our churches promote absurdist, medieval doctrines and preach hatred and exclusion.  Our news media revolve around celebrity gossip, lurid crimes, titillating sex and "virtual" reality instead of truth.  It is, of course, essential to note that we are our institutions.  We have, as Pogo said, "…met the enemy and he is us."

·        Everyday life is tough, tougher than it used to be.  Airline travel has become torturous.  The carriers compete to see who can provide the worst service at the highest cost and the greatest hassle.  You get medical bills you have no hope of understanding and notices from your insurer that are equally dense in explaining why they won't cover the costs and why they want to second guess your physician.  Your automobile comes with air bags designed to spray you with deadly shrapnel and software designed to produce deceptive mileage and pollution reports.  Meanwhile, we are choking on our own traffic.

·       The Information Revolution has backfired.  We have lost whole categories of decent, family-friendly jobs, replacing them with robots which assure us that our call is important to them but the waiting time is at least fifteen minutes and we might be better off "visiting" them on their web site.  Customer service has been outsourced to remote corners of the world where people speak languages we never heard of.  Social media have transformed us into isolated actors whose dreams and aspirations must be expressed in 140 characters or less.  Everybody is spying on us.  The government monitors our phone calls.  Businesses monitor our purchasing and web sites keep track of our internet searches.

Nor is our American discontent unique.  All over the world, people are fed up with things as they are.  They rant and rave and riot in the streets and fulminate on the so-called social media but the solutions they propose are simplistic.  Ignorance and mendacity are the order of the day everywhere;  greed has overwhelmed the social contract;  the world is pervaded by a sense of alienation and the fact of withdrawal into smaller and smaller tribal entities protected by walls of suspicion and indifference.  The British vote to withdraw from the European Union is a case in point.  At the very least, it was a backward decision, a yearning for a time long gone when Great Britain really was bestriding the world and ruling the waves.  That Brexit was brought about by the inanities of a comic opera bureaucracy in Brussels is true but irrelevant.  For all its many faults, the EU was a progressive movement which held out the hope of reversing two thousand years of constant and savage warfare.  Instead, Europe seems to be opting for separatism and political fragmentation.  The mood is reminiscent of the aftermath of World War I:  shock, disbelief and disillusionment.  The unthinkable has come to pass.  Tranquility and contentment have gone out of the world.  As William Butler Yeats wrote in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

At the present moment, it is hard to imagine what could happen that might bring about a turnaround in either realities or perceptions.  From an American perspective, the historical evidence is not promising.  The great empires of the past are all gone, having collapsed into long periods of decline and irrelevance­­.  Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mongolia, China and, more recently, the Ottoman and British empires and the Soviet Union all rose and fell dramatically.  Lesser entities including Spain and Portugal occupied major portions of the globe for brief periods before decaying.  The Thousand Year Reich lasted less than twelve years and reached its peak only twenty-five months before its ruination.

Te be sure, any enumeration of our discontents would be incomplete if we failed to pay homage to the historical truth that Americans have been here before and have prevailed.  We must constantly remind ourselves that even with the slavery, Indian removal, Know Nothingism, anti-unionism and jingoism that litter our history, we have made overall progress toward the ideals of our Declaration of Independence.  Until recently we have always been resilient in pursuing the American Dream.  If, for example, during the Great Depression our popular anthem was "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" that is not the song we associate with it today.  Rather, as President Obama reminded us in his first inaugural address, it is the Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields 1936 show tune:  "Nothing's impossible, I have found / For when my chin is on the ground / I pick myself up, / Dust myself off / And start all over again."  With the twenty-twenty hindsight of eighty years, we can see the Depression as an era of creativity and renewal.  Time after time in our history we have bounced back from the brink.  Lincoln preached "a new birth of freedom" and Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated a "New Deal."

As he took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, the United States was experiencing a calamitous economic disaster.  As he said:

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.  More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.  Only a foolish optimist can deny the realities of the moment.

But he had already made his famous remark about fear being the only thing we have to fear and he had prefaced that with the bold assertion that, "This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper."  It did.  First the government stopped the bleeding with its plethora of alphabet soup job creation programs:  AAA, CCC, CWA, FHA, NIRA, SSA, TVA, WPA and all the rest.  War came and with it the jobs that created the wealth that fueled the post-war boom.

History, of course, is not destiny.  We cannot take comfort from our own past resilience any more than we should take dread from the collapse of the Roman Empire.  We are predestined to neither renewal nor decay.  We cannot see the future but there is one certainty:  we are our own worst enemy and our own best hope.