u/Kingshorsey

I've seen a few different versions of a viral post about Shakespeare. The basic idea is that Shakespeare liked using high-brow Latinate words that would not have been common in most registers of spoken English ("inkhorn" words). But when he did so, he usually glossed them in a subsequent line.

This Quora post traces this observation to literary scholar Ted Hughes. Here's an excerpt of that post:

"A really obvious example of this is from Macbeth, where the title character says:

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‘Incarnadine’ is the kind of fancy word that the upper-class would have relished, but Shakespeare immediately ‘translates’ it as ‘making the green one red’, so that the groundlings understand that Macbeth’s hand is so bloody that it will turn the sea red, rather than be washed off by the sea."

This is a pretty neat observation, but I wasn't aware of this practice having any foundation in ancient literature. And maybe it doesn't. But in my Iliad reading today I came across something like this phenomenon in one of Hektor's speeches (Il. 8.526-528):

ἔλπομαι εὐχόμενος Διί τʼ ἄλλοισίν τε θεοῖσιν

ἐξελάαν ἐνθένδε κύνας κηρεσσιφορήτους,

οὓς κῆρες φορέουσι μελαινάων ἐπὶ νηῶν.

That third line looks like it's just a gloss of κηρεσσιφορήτους, as it doesn't add any additional information. It's a hapax legomenon, so presumably Homer made it up.

This made me curious as to whether we see this pattern in other passages or even other authors. I would not count a character explicitly explaining the meaning of a word, like recounting the story behind a proper name or giving an etymological allegory. Nor would I count a very obvious authorial explanatory note breaking the flow of the narrative. Like here, the gloss would have to avoid calling explicit attention to itself.

In this passage of the Iliad (8.268-272), the archer Teucer (Τεῦκρος) seems to be darting out from behind Ajax's shield to fire arrows, seeing if they hit, then darting back behind the shield for cover as he redraws. Or maybe he's firing blind from behind the shield, darting out to see where the shots land as a way of calibrating his aim, then darting back to fire again.

In any case, the description seems to me to start a sentence, get a bit lost in subordinate clauses, then pick back up again.

ἔνθʼ Αἴας μὲν ὑπεξέφερεν σάκος· αὐτὰρ ὅ γʼ ἥρως

παπτήνας, ἐπεὶ ἄρ τινʼ ὀϊστεύσας ἐν ὁμίλῳ

βεβλήκοι, ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὄλεσσεν,

αὐτὰρ ὃ αὖτις ἰὼν πάϊς ὣς ὑπὸ μητέρα δύσκεν

εἰς Αἴανθʼ· ὃ δέ μιν σάκεϊ κρύπτασκε φαεινῷ.

If I understand correctly, there's a clause starting αὐτὰρ ὅ γʼ ἥρως παπτήνας. Then, before we get a finite verb, we get these explanatory clauses (ἐπεὶ ...βεβλήκοι, ὃ ὄλεσσεν,). Then, Homer restarts the sentence, and finishes it this time (αὐτὰρ ὃ αὖτις ἰὼν ... δύσκεν εἰς Αἴανθʼ). So, there is a syntactical break where the  ὅ γʼ ἥρως παπτήνας never really connects to its own finite verb.

So visually:

ἔνθʼ Αἴας μὲν ὑπεξέφερεν σάκος· αὐτὰρ ὅ γʼ ἥρως

παπτήνας -- ἐπεὶ ἄρ τινʼ ὀϊστεύσας ἐν ὁμίλῳ

βεβλήκοι, ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὄλεσσεν --

αὐτὰρ ὃ αὖτις ἰὼν πάϊς ὣς ὑπὸ μητέρα δύσκεν

εἰς Αἴανθʼ· ὃ δέ μιν σάκεϊ κρύπτασκε φαεινῷ.

Did I get this right? If so, would you call this anacoluthon? It doesn't feel like an exact fit, but I don't know a better descriptor.

(By the way, I found the imagery in this passage lovely, and it's a great example of Homer using the -σκ- infix to indicate iterative past action.)

I recently stumbled across Elizabeth Bear's White Space trilogy. By that I mean I plunged into it without any prior research. I was expecting a sprawling galactic scale and hard-ish futuristic world building, and the books delivered, but I was not prepared for the intensely introspective narrative voice.

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For the first 50 pages or so of Ancestral Night, I was somewhat irked by how preoccupied the main character was with her own internal state. Plotwise, the book gets into action and mystery pretty quickly, but it doesn't feel fast-paced because every event is accompanied by a minute account of how it is affecting the main character psychologically.

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When I say psychologically, I don't mean just subjectively or emotionally, but also biologically. We're told about hormones and neurotransmitters as much as or maybe even more than emotions. A lot of the prominent technology in the series is tasked with moment-by-moment fine-tuning of biological parameters to maintain emotional regulation and optimize performance.

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I was not thrilled with this at first, but Bear was going somewhere substantive with all this. Without giving spoilers, I can say that the major theme of this series is that human psychology is insufficiently evolved for cooperative well-being at the planetary or greater scale. So, technological assistance of various kinds is a necessity for getting along at a galactic scale. This isn't Star Trek: TNG, where everybody is just so well socialized that luxury space communism naturally emerges. (It's closer to Iain M. Banks's Culture, where benevolent AIs handle a lot of the decision-making that meat brains can't be trusted to perform.)

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Of course, once mind-altering technology is introduced into the setting, that raises a host of questions about the ethical implications of "rightminding" people for the common good. Behind the ethical dilemmas are even deeper philosophical questions about personal identity and responsibility. If you have the power to change yourself to be better, shouldn't you? But how much can you change yourself before you're not the same person you were before?

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About a third of the way through the first book, it became clear that this exploration of human nature in the face of advanced personality modification technology was the real subject of the series. At this point, I fully bought in to Bear's obsessively introspective narration. The real plots of the books are the internal journeys taken by the main characters, so the setting has to be largely internal as well.

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I don't expect everyone will enjoy this kind of narrative style, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as a mere quirk of the author. It's a deliberate choice that strongly supports the main themes, a superb marriage of matter and form.

Diomedes is speaking:

γνωτὸν δὲ καὶ ὃς μάλα νήπιός ἐστιν

ὡς ἤδη Τρώεσσιν ὀλέθρου πείρατʼ ἐφῆπται.

I think the meaning here is clear, but I'm curious about how the relative clause seems a bit free-floating.

I see the basic kernel as (ὡς ... ἐφῆπται) [ἐστιν] (γνωτὸν). But how to account for the relative clause? γνωτὸν seems like it would take an ethical dative specifying to whom the thing is known, so I could see the relative clause as connecting to that elided dative.

That's my best guess anyway. Any other explanations?

In this line (Il 7.344), Nestor has just finished a speech, and the Achaian leaders end up agreeing with him:

ὣς ἔφαθʼ, οἳ δʼ ἄρα πάντες ἐπῄνησαν βασιλῆες.

My question is whether there is any way to tell whether the original reading was οἳ (plural nominative) rather than οἱ (singular dative), since both seem to work grammatically. [In case it's hard to read the Greek font, the second version lacks the accent mark.]

I mean, the plural nominative does make sense, signaling the change in subject, so I'm not objecting to the reading as it stands. I'm just wondering if there's something I've overlooked that definitively rules out the second option.

In this passage, Nestor recalls his duel against Ereuthalion, a very large man. Here's how Nestor describes the ending:

τὸν δὴ μήκιστον καὶ κάρτιστον κτάνον ἄνδρα·

πολλὸς γάρ τις ἔκειτο παρήορος ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα.

As I understand the second line, πολλὸς τις is the subject phrase, ἔκειτο is the verb, and παρήορος is a predicate nominative. I found the πολλὸς τις interesting.

Cunliffe covers this in a rather free way:

• Some sort or kind of, some : μνημοσύνη τις γενέσθω Il. 8.181. Cf. Il. 8.521, Il. 23.103.
• With an adj., etc., giving a notion of indefiniteness : πολλός τις (like some monster)

The most direct translation appears to me to be something like "some big guy." Is that correct semantically?

Rhetorically, I'm wondering if this is a kind of euphemistic circumlocution? Perhaps this is a gentler or more respectful way for Nestor to speak of the deceased?

In this passage (Il 6.527-529), Hektor acknowledges Paris's indiscretions but suggests moving on from them and concentrating on the task at hand.

ἀλλʼ ἴομεν· τὰ δʼ ὄπισθεν ἀρεσσόμεθʼ, αἴ κέ ποθι Ζεὺς

δώῃ ἐπουρανίοισι θεοῖς αἰειγενέτῃσι

κρητῆρα στήσασθαι ἐλεύθερον ἐν μεγάροισιν

ἐκ Τροίης ἐλάσαντας ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιούς.

I'm curious about the accusative participle phrase in the final line. How is it connected syntactically to the rest of the sentence? Is it loosely circumstantial, even absolute? Or is it a second object of δώῃ?

Also, why is ἐλάσαντας active? Are we to imagine a subject, like "we the Trojans", or is it intransitive?

In M David Litwa's Marcion, in the chapter "Marcion's View of Christ," he discusses early debates about the nature of Jesus's incarnate (not post-resurrection) body.

Litwa says that "all interpreters of Paul had to reckon with two verses," Rom 8:3 and Phil 2:7. Both of these contain the language "in the likeness of", and Philippians additionally describes Jesus as "in appearance as".

Litwa then gives an interpretation of Paul's thought:

“Paul’s consistent use of Christ’s “likeness” or “appearance” in flesh is important. The Tarsian evidently thought that Jesus was “born of woman” (Gal 4:4) and that he had something that strongly resembled human flesh, but he was not exactly human in the way that all other humans were. One cannot expect the body of the incarnate son of God to be identical with the default flesh of common humanity. Being a god logically made a difference to one’s bodily constitution—as seen in the Transfiguration story (where Jesus’s flesh literally glows). At the very least, Christ’s flesh was not tainted by human sin and throttled by base desires.” (176-177)

If I'm reading him correctly, Litwa interprets Paul as saying that, while Jesus was truly a human being, he was also gifted with certain unusual properties and capacities at a biological/physical level.

I'm just not familiar with this line of interpretation in Pauline studies, and Litwa drops what seems to me to be a very large claim into the body of his text without much argument or elaboration. Litwa has a footnote referencing Francis Watson, "Pauline Reception and the Problem of Docetism," but I'm interested to know where else in the literature I could find a discussion of this issue.