[lit-ideas] Re: Agememnon
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:21:21 -0800
By the way, the Trojan War seems generally believed to have occurred
around 1200 BC, “whereas The first state known as "Turk" . . . was that
of the Göktürks <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks> (/gog/
= "blue" or "celestial") in the sixth century AD.” [Wikipedia] Thus,
Achilles missed being able to kill a Turk by at least 1800 years. [This
in reference to Mike Geary’s note yesterday in which he wrote, “You
learn something every day on this List. Who'd have ever guessed Brad
Pitt was Greek. and Nathan Jones -- ? a Turk, I guess.”
By the same token, Brad Pitteous would not have been called a Greek, for
there were no states called 'Greece' at that time either.
Hellenes = the name by which the Greeks called, and still call,
themselves. Originally it and the territorial name ‘Hellas’ appear to
have been confined to an area south of the river Spercheios, in the
vicinity of Thermopylae. In Homer the Greeks are called ‘Achaeans’,
‘Argives’, or ‘Danai’, but ‘Panhellenes’ (see panhellenism) appear under
Aias (2), son of Oeleus, the Locrian hero (Iliad 2. 530), and ‘Hellenes’
under Achilles (Iliad 2. 684), whose home was the Spercheios valley.
Similarly, ‘Hellas’ is a district in Achilles' kingdom (Iliad 2. 683),
though it apparently extended southwards, perhaps to Eleon in Boeotia
(Iliad 9. 447ff.).
How and why the name came to be applied to all Greeks and the whole of
Greece is uncertain, but the original centre of the amphictiony which
later came to control Delphi was at Anthela in the area where the
original Hellenes lived (Herodotus 7. 200. 2), and it is possible that
the name came to have a wider connotation as the influence of Delphi
spread, perhaps in connection with western colonization. On the other
hand, the title of the umpires at the Olympian Games, hellanodikai, if
early, may indicate that the spread of the name had something to do with
those games.
Robert Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
