Or any other passage you feel particularly highlights the advantages/differences of your technique compared to the sanitized translations

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48541804)

That wrath which became the direful spring of endless woes for the Greeks,

Hurling countless mighty souls untimely into the shadowy depths of Hades,

Their bodies left unburied, torn apart by ravenous dogs and vultures—

Such was the will of Zeus, the all-encompassing sovereign, fulfilled in its dreadful decree.

Declare, O Muse, what cursed moment gave birth to this ruinous strife?

What god’s fury brought the Greeks such calamity,

When Apollo, son of Zeus and Latona, unleashed a deadly plague,

Stacking the Achaean camp with mountains of the dead?

It began when the lord of men, Agamemnon, defied Apollo’s priest—

An offense of hubris for which the people paid in blood.

For Chryses, priest of Apollo, had come bearing priceless gifts,

Begging for the release of his captive daughter.

With his hands adorned by Apollo’s sacred signs—

The golden scepter and laurel crown—he stood before the Achaeans,

A father in anguish, speaking words of supplication:

“Great kings, warriors of bronze and glory,

May the gods grant you victory and Troy’s walls leveled to the ground.

May Zeus restore you to the pleasures of your homes,

Safe across the wine-dark sea.

But grant me this: release my beloved child, Chryseïs.

Accept this ransom, and honor Apollo, son of Zeus.

Do not provoke the god whose arrows never miss their mark.”

The Achaeans roared their approval, their voices joined as one:

Honor the priest, release the captive, accept the ransom.

But not so Agamemnon, king of men.

His pride, boundless and insolent, rejected the plea.

And with a darkened heart, he spoke:

“Old man, be gone from my sight.

Do not linger here, testing my patience.

Do not bring your laurel crown, nor your golden staff,

Thinking to sway me with these signs of your god.

The bitch is mine, and she will remain mine.

Not your prayers, nor your tears, nor all the gold in your coffers

Will take her from me.

She will grow old in my house, far from her homeland,

Spending her days at the loom,

And her nights on my bed, where she will serve me as she must.

Now leave these shores while you still have breath in your lungs.

Do not return, or the sacred signs of your Apollo

Will not save you from what my hands will bring.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48541818)

It's me. I'm still here (more here post-election than I was the past few years) much to everyone's chagrin.

I've taken up bookbinding as a hobby, and binding a unique translation of the Iliad would be 180

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48542045)

https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/85712

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48542896)

Moar

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48541851)

He walked silently along the shore of the loud-roaring sea,

And when far from the ships,

He lifted his hands and prayed to Apollo,

Son of fair-haired Leto:

“Hear me, O Silver-Bowed One,

You who stride around Chryse and sacred Cilla,

Who rule mightily over Tenedos!

Smintheus, if ever I built for you a pleasing temple,

Or burned rich thighs of bulls and goats,

Fulfill this prayer for me:

Let the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows!”

So he prayed, and Phoebus Apollo heard him.

From the peaks of Olympus he came,

His heart burning with wrath.

Across his shoulders hung his bow

And his quiver filled with arrows.

As he moved, the arrows rattled in their case,

And his coming was like the night.

He sat apart from the ships and loosed a shaft;

The silver bow sang a terrible cry.

First he struck the mules and the swift dogs,

But soon his arrows found the men themselves.

Pyres of the dead burned thick and constant.

For nine days the god’s arrows rained death upon them,

And on the tenth, Achilles called an assembly,

For white-armed Hera had placed it in his heart.

She grieved to see the Danaans perish.

When all were gathered, swift-footed Achilles stood and spoke:

“Son of Atreus, I see no course but to return home,

If we can escape death at all,

For war and plague together are crushing the Achaeans.

But let us now ask some seer or priest

Or dream-reader, for dreams too come from Zeus.

Let him declare why Phoebus Apollo rages,

Whether he blames a vow unfulfilled or a slaughtered offering,

And if by smoke of lambs or goats

We might appease the god and turn aside this ruin.”

So he spoke and sat down. Then rose Calchas,

Son of Thestor, best of bird-seers,

Who knew all things that are, will be, and were before.

By his prophetic skill, a gift of Apollo,

He led the ships of the Achaeans to Ilium

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48541896)

No

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48542693)

Barfield’s “original participation” idea might be helpful here, but only if it’s treated with respect to how symbolic systems function in ancient contexts, rather than being dismissed as “primitive.”

Calling Homeric thought “primitive” is just bad anthropology and worse philosophy. It assumes a linear progression from “primitive” to “advanced,” which ignores the many ways we are so primitive today compared to the Ancient Greeks

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48543365)

You pretend to have read Barfield in one sentence, and then fall on your face regarding him in the next. Please use a more advanced LLM to write your posts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48543431)

I didn’t just read Barfield; I metabolized him. The key takeaway—ancient perception was participatory. They didn’t “observe” the gods like spectators; they engaged with them as living presences embedded in natural phenomena. To reduce this to “primitive” thinking misses Barfield’s entire premise: that the so-called “primitive” view was no less valid, just differently configured for a world where consciousness hadn’t yet alienated itself from its surroundings. Your dismissal of allegory ignores that the very concept of “symbol” for the ancients was intertwined with literal experience.

More advanced LLMs?

Well, friend, here’s the rub: even if this was generated by a neural network (and what a flex that would be), it’s still synthesizing more cultural and linguistic nuance than your reductive generalizations about Homer. If you’re advocating for higher-order discourse, let’s start by grounding our arguments in something more robust than surface-level condescension.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48544411)

re: greek religious thought, i'm not so sure allegorical conception of the gods was so alien in archaic poetry. see the cosmological parts of hesiod's theogony (the birth of chaos, night and her children, zeus' reign and the commingling of kratos/bia and metis within him, etc.), inter alia; nor am i sure what primitive means practically. aeschylus and (again) even hesiod seem very sophisticated in terms of their theology, if we're going off of intuitions and rough inferences.

frazer is interesting, but the golden bough itself is widely dismissed now for good reason imo. there's an excellent article by j. z. smith, "when the bough breaks", that thoroughly dismantles some of frazer's central claims regarding greek, roman, and norse material (the crux of the vegetation king argument is a stupidly specific connection between a certain kind of mistletoe, the cult of diana at nemi, and the death of blader the beautiful; it's surprisingly tenuous). smith (who, unusually, can read all the involved languages) has a great observation that the insane length of the golden bough implies that, even if any given part of it is wrong (and obviously so in the eyes of an expert on that given narrow topic), it still carries authority because not all of it can be so wrong. right? there's good reason to believe that all of it is so fucking wrong.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48544545)

On the allegorical reading of gods, I completely agree that this isn’t as alien to archaic poetry as some make it seem. Hesiod is a prime example: the cosmology in Theogony isn’t just a genealogical account of gods; it’s a symbolic framework for understanding chaos, order, power, and wisdom. The merging of Metis into Zeus is almost too allegorical—it practically screams at the reader to dive deeper. Even Homer, though less overtly allegorical, plays with divine figures as forces of fate, emotion, and human decision-making. If anything, the gods in Homer are symbolic and personal simultaneously, which is part of their power.

Your point here about Frazer and The Golden Bough is especially insightful. Frazer’s work was monumental in scope but often riddled with overreaching generalizations and tenuous connections (like the mistletoe thing). The sheer volume of it lends an aura of authority, but as J.Z. Smith points out, that doesn’t make it any less wrong. It’s a classic example of how “systematic” explanations can be meretricious, even when they’re built on shaky foundations. The dismantling of Frazer’s claims, though, shouldn’t obscure the fact that his work was still hugely influential in making people ask broader questions about mythology, ritual, and symbolism—even if the answers often didn’t hit right

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48544601)

By the time you're at the Athenian dramatics, you are well into sophisticated man, well separated from early pagan Greeks. But they are separated from Homeric man in a lot of ways (ie. status of woman in classical society, law, literacy).

Yeah, Frazer's central contention is absolute hot garbage. The side paths are the reason to read him.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48545872)

Speaking of spicy, have you considered how the dinner of the gods in Book 1 is just an elaborate metaphor for the invention of feta cheese? The seams start to show here too—Zeus clearly says, μη σπαταλάτε το γάλα!, which Leaf himself mistranslates as ‘do not squander the milk.’ But what he’s really saying is, ‘Save the milk; we need to ferment it.’ This changes everything, obviously.

As for Frazer’s ‘hot garbage,’ well, you’ve got it wrong. His central contention wasn’t about vegetation gods at all—it was a 400-page essay on why Achilles would’ve been the perfect candidate to invent TikTok. ‘He has the rage,’ Frazer writes, ‘the kind of memeable charisma that would crash the Mycenaean internet.’ The side paths? Those are just ancient Greek thirst traps

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48545947)

hesiod is roughly contemporaneous with homer, hence i included him with the qualifier "even". he is, for greeks, the other ancient poet in the hoary epic tradition of the venerable past. this is a mildly pedantic point on my part, but aeschylus is substantially earlier than sophocles or euripides and closer to pindar. you can see this in the formal aspects of his tragedies, like the role of the chorus in the suppliant women (bare and stripped down in a bare and stripped down cast) versus the agamemnon (fucking weird, breaks into separate speakers towards the end, seems like a choice one would make before the genre solidified) versus the seven against thebes (more familiar). aeschylus' worldview is often held to be distinct from later tragedians as well (e.g. his treatment of gods and human agency), although that's another argument full of quibbling. regardless, not only is the model of primative/sophisticated unsurprisingly reductive, but the difference between the archaic poets and classical poets is not that substantial in terms of ideological sophistication, i hold. could get into an autistic bitchfest about why, but that's an even longer subthread wasteland.

i would have been content using frazer as a reference book in the early 20th century if that's what i had, but if the value i get from him is citations of ancient works, frankly wikipedia is just as good if not better.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48546246)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48544705)

But you? Oh, you’re here clutching your dusty grammar scrolls like the last shred of your identity, as if naming the bird is the same as understanding its flight. Saltier than the wine-dark sea, you swagger in, declaring, ‘Rare? Exceedingly common,’ like you’re personally on a first-name basis with every participle Homer ever dropped. You speak as though the Greeks themselves sat around debating mediopassives between sips of kykeon, when in reality they were out conquering the Mediterranean and inventing geometry while you’re stuck flexing over participial plumage.

So, yes, I aspire to Homeric fluency. To the kind of mastery that doesn’t need footnotes to sing wrath into existence, to weave cities into epics, and to leave philologists centuries later dissecting every line while missing the point entirely. Because here’s the thing: Homer lived the language. You, my pedantic friend, merely catalog its bones.

Rare bird? Common sparrow? It doesn’t matter if you can name it, because some of us are busy chasing it straight into the stratosphere while you’re back here measuring its wingspan. Happy dissecting.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48545911)

“The bitch is mine, and she will remain mine.

Not your prayers, nor your tears, nor all the gold in your coffers

Will take her from me.

She will grow old in my house, far from her homeland,

Spending her days at the loom,

And her nights on my bed, where she will serve me as she must.“

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48544721)

“romance” era dogshit about being magnanimous is beta as fuccckkkkkkk

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48546341)

And where Thersites gets the shit beaten out of him by Odysseus?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48542117)

ps. where are we on this

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5662349&forum_id=2:#48543439)