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s is the culmination of a thoughtful discussion on the complementary nature of physical and mental exertion this idea of both physical and mental cultivation seems to be genuinely socratic at the very least it appears in plato as well 3 this should not be surprising socrates was a mason by trade and had fought ably when younger we too often think of socrates as an old man or more truthfully a paradigm of philosophical virtue and not enough as a flesh and blood personage d angour s biography poorly reviewed here is a good corrective to this discussing excerpts is frustrating in some real sense excerpts do violence to the whole text not just because context is lost but because any subsequent reading should it ever occur is now indelibly compromised go and read at least the entirety of xen mem 3 12 it is an interesting discussion anyway this is a clumsy segue an excuse to speak briefly about the context of these and other passages neither plato nor xenophon were anything like our fetid influencers this is not the make your bed of the day 4 they like most early philosophers where very much concerned with the makeup of the polis there are many many ways to define the polis i wait with bated breath for john ma s new book there are few more canny historians and his work is central to how i think about that institution along with hansen and oddly millar but before we consider political institutions or even mention terms like hinterland one way the greeks could be said to have thought about the polis is as a collection of citizen males a cheeky but functional shorthand is it so surprising then that socrates and co would be concerned with physical training the anecdote about the spartans not needing walls and instead trusting to their men differs only from the athenian conception in extremis not in kind 5 ἄλλου δὲ ἐπιζητοῦντος διὰ τί ἀτείχιστος ἡ σπάρτη ἐπιδείξας τοὺς πολίτας ἐξωπλισμένους ταῦτά ἐστιν εἶπε τὰ λακεδαιμονίων τείχη when someone wished to know why sparta was unwalled he agesilaus pointed to the armoured citizens and said here are the walls of sparta plutarch saying of the spartans 2 29 6 there is nothing revolutionary in this i offer no novel reading no new synthesis of passages i suspect most of the recent publications on abstracts greek beauty aesthetics ktl and concretes the body make mention of the twin import of brawn and brain but to what degree is that actually taken into account as opposed to merely noted how much are scholars really aware of how anathema would be the kind of noodle armed thinking apotheosised in that infamous guppy post ironically but not unexpectedly the best study on this phenomenon comes from outside of academia i think i might have recommended this before william giraldi s the hero s body giraldi is not the kind of person one would prima facie associate with body building ha so much for stereotypes a journalist clearly left wing a homosexual none of this screams bro but the book draws broadly from the classics it has been years since i read it but i can recall elements from the odyssey and the metamorphoses clearly g is well read and well trained look i am not one of those moronic statue avvies constantly advocating for an unlearned and uncritical emulation of the ancients but i do think the link between physicality and learning really important i cannot stress enough how much experience of things such as e g wrestling and horse riding have informed my reading 7 all the more so since i am currently dealing with a loss of physicality i shan t go into too much detail here neither the specific sports in which i grew up competing let us say generic combat sports nor the injuries one upper one lower lol lmao rehabilitation is good it is slow it is boring but it is effective i admit i have worsened things by throwing out any semblance of portion control commitment to cardio or restraint i must have re injured myself twice lololol the initial quotation from this piece often comes to mind i would not be accounted old by the greeks not yet ought i then not feel more shame oh i do i do hold on there s a big fucking wasp christ look at that thing absolute gmo motherfucker i am finding it harder than i would care to admit that i am not going to compete again intellectually i have known this for a while not least because leaving off was originally a deliberate decision as i entered the adult world i am not a citizen landowner the balance between otium and negotium is nihil i knew it in my brain at least but not my balls as socrates would say 8 ageing is a difficult thing whatever xenophon may have said memories of youth do not keep shame away from age learn your grammar read your texts but also lift that barbell coda my friends i have meandered i am sorry for wasting your time i still mourn the half finished drafts not yet recovered from the husk of my former puter and felt that odd urge to just write something i had originally planned to write out my full programme and various rehab cues but in doing so even i became bored i ll be back with something meatier soon 1 just kidding i know from twitter e mails that the done thing now is to do 2 years of pointlessly drawn out instruction followed by a career of pretending to know greek n 2 have you read waterfield s plato of athens a recent biography of the other great socratic i can t help but wish more of the genre had survived by far the most interesting bit of that book is the chapter dealing with the rest of the circle 3 e g republic 3 410e 412a is it too much to think juvenal was parodying this 4 there s a joke to be made about m aurelius here 5 the military ethos of tyrtaeus the sporting exultation of iliad 23 are not a million miles away even in the xenophon passage the use of ἰδιωτικῶς ἔχειν earlier on makes this clear what sort of person is an idiotes hm 6 why don t we call these memorabilia in english huh huh das rite 7 that s right bitch i stipulated horses to stop your puerile rejoinder 8 socrates is my greengrocer down in kipseli posted on april 14 2024 by philologicalcrocodile 0 on the death of a computer perhaps the most formulative influence on my character on my approach to scholarship such as it is has been my growing up in a working class blue collar background i do not mean any of the many vices and virtues that that background conjures up but the constant envelopment by manual labour summers spent on building sites winters spent rewriting plugs or refurbishing shopfronts i adore chainsaws and so on of course let us be honest it is only the fact that autumns and springs were spent in classrooms that i can look back on this period of my life with detachment i am free from rsis have none of the obscure but common injuries my schoolfriends suffer 1 and went into the world of fake work you will not really find much if any classical parallel for this attitude hard physical menial work was the stuff on slaves think of odyssey 11 where the ghost of achilles deems it better to be the merest living thrall than king amongst the dead admittedly a big the largest part of this is the shame of living at the compulsion of another but this is a good proxy for menial work 2 we misread severely the spirit of the protestant yeoman farmer into hesiod for whom no amount of pride and self sufficiency in ownership of one s land can mask that work is a toil think of the vocabulary that surrounds any discussion of physical labour in greek indeed the toil of farming is one to win from the earth the gifts the gods have bid be hidden kρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ βίον ἀνθρώποισιν no surprise then that i can think of no apposite quotation for the joy brought by a good tool the first the only thing that comes to mind is seneca s torturous reflections on the humanity of slaves rather than the inhumanity which to be honest seems to have a lot more rhetorical weight when it reflects what must have been the communis opinio it s in de beneficiis somewhere near the beginning so anyway guys my computer died it was sudden but not entirely unexpected the once mighty machine had been doing the job since 2016 after all and whilst i can swap out one more part try one more repair it scarcely seems worth the cost now to what degree can an υπολογιστής be a mentula i can t help but think and compare with the tools i have inherited from near ancestors here are one great grandfather s woodworking tools here are the custom smithy tools of another here a cavalry sabre and so on a burnt out motherboard seems a poor and pathetic comparandum but then who knows they were none of them protestants perhaps they were closer in attitude to the ancients and see nought but praise in being free from such toil such ponos i am not joking by the way when i point out how much the reformation has fundamentally defined the way we read the classics pathetic or not i can t help but be sad humans have the odd habit of imputing anima to the in it s why so many are so affected by that scene in castaway when tom hanks draws a face on a ball or something i ve never watched it it s why idiots pay so much for items touched by celebrities or hypothetically find themselves utterly unable to dispose of one of the worst made jumpers ever simply because there is some lizard brained hope it retains the faintest imprint of a lost parent it is not just misplaced sentiment a computer now represents a majority of our working life long time readers well 2 of the three at least will notice the sheer chunkocity of this post so far without being littered peppered with greek the apparent paucity of classical references it s because the every day tools we take for granted the ability to type in greek diogenes my preferred ides etc all are gone i don t even have a banner image since i do not know how to use the image manipulation software here and damn it i refuse to learn gone too until i salvage one of the hard disks are dozens of a bortifacient half finished pieces i have not been posting much this year but i have been writing writing lies with my mouth that is when i tell you i have been writing truly there were some pieces but most of them no more than a thousand words or so the larger ones being book reviews which i shall have to get back to soon that is at least enjoyzble the reviewing of books but twitter over the past few years has felt damp i think we autodidacts we hemilykoi ektos ths akadamias kid ourselves immensely with any pretence to a republic of letters oh it is exists it exists in part but it is a big club and you yes you are not a part of it 3 there are no patronage networks no invitations to write for publications straight out of undergrad no invitations to whatever there was a time a brief time when you could write and be read and be written to in turn but the last few years have felt increasingly barren i have always felt a distinct sense of unbelonging in the classics which fools often take to mean a lack of a sense of belonging please and there is freedom in that i can be as unfashionable as i want in my methods and outlooks i can take critoboulos as seriously as you pretend to take thucydides i can scupper writing in favour of endless reading and re reading this is the first year i have read homer through twice and we re not half way done is this entirely a boon this is not a segue into working class classicism whatever the hell that might be nor indeed the place for me to mention how commerce and industry has been infinitely more accepting you add to the bottom line and can execute a proper cross field kick than the so called intelligentsia i do not even know to what degree working class classicism even exists as a concept there is ofc that hall and steadman edited volume but it has all the voyeuristic taint of the jcr i like attenborough but i rather hear from the lions etc i am not sure no longer sure perhaps never was sure why i continue to write however seldom that now is there is a pithy saying that painters enjoy painting and writers enjoy having written but i have never really felt that even now despite the sheer cringing shame i feel at how badly my prose style has dropped off still not enough shame to proof and edit though lol i do enjoy the process i enjoy the taste and shape of words rolling around coating the insides of one s mouth and their slow unfurling onto screen and scroll 4 have you read eco s baudolino it was i think the first of his i read as a boy there is much to appeal to any budding classicist it is one hell of a farce there is a bit near the beginning when our titular character is being taught to read and if i am recalling correctly decides to finish his education before the eh amorous abbot can teach him how to write why write he asks if i write i can only tell you what i know but if i read i can read what anyone knows and then there s some bit about being screwnicorn you are welcome yet writing is not simply just recording what one knows look i have never ever done research for a piece that is some shudra tier behaviour i read profusely rarely make notes and try to think about whatever i have read writing is the process of recording what one thinks about what one knows in this sense i suppose the loss of all those drafts is a blow but less of a blow than the loss of all that reading material i no longer have access to jstor or academic libraries have not for years yet all those carefully categorised downloads and scans are now cast unto dust ouch so is that the way forward lector tantum ignosce mihi iuvenali sed facilius erat subripere versulum tuum quam fustum herculi maybe i do not mind an audience of one or two who actually understand and appreciate joking aside i do have that in abundance here but increasingly the dichotomy between a small understanding audience and a large uncomprehending one is immaterial not in some pseudo aesopic sour grapes but because this often feels like being on a soapbox rather than anything discursive those who have not read plato make jokes about socrates tendency to monologue his interlocutors reduced to mere interjections but even so there is something to be envied in the give and take of it all there is something to be said in how writing is really re reading and that alone is a reason to keep it up everyone thinks they have mastery until forced to articulate and explain and blogs are like more ephemeral versions of the old common place book but eh maybe the death of my little computer is a sign whether that be for a proper break and a refreshment a move to somewhere near how is substack guys seriously or simply una nox dormienda i do not know it is of course the fact that this question is utterly unimportant to anyone other than myself which lends it such weight the death of a computer is a mean and silly thing of course that is why it can be written about i have never promised weight things never had the courage to commit them to anything but the unfinished moulds of shoddy thoughts that s not what either of us are here i suppose ...