A raging row (whoops, discussion) on C18-L has provided direction to an interesting essay on the Marquis and “Newtonian virtue”.

A sixteenth-century scholar, one Nicolas Cardan, saw on awakening one morning the “sun shining though shutters, showing dancing flecks of dust. Imagining he saw a monster in the dust biting off heads with its bloody fangs, he panicked, jumped out of bed and fled the house in only his shirt”. (p. 62)

Nothing new about public hysteria then.

From Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millenial Beliefs through the Ages, E. Weber, Hutchinson, London, 1999, p. 62.

From the Times Literary Supplement of October 8
“Shamateurs”, by L.G. Mitchell, a review of the lives of Pitt the Younger by Hague and Turner

“Hague identifies pragmatism as an essential Pittite virtue, and this, combined with hard work, made Britain the fiscal wonder of the world. It was the bills of credit, commercial proposals and tax reforms littering Pitt’s desk that defeated the French Revolution. Who would exchange a rising standard of living for the lowly delights of liberty, equality and fraternity?”

Perhaps a small comfort to the mourning Australians I know; you’re not alone.

No, don’t take it personally. I’ve just discovered, via Purple Pen, the delightful Shakespeare Insulter.

In case you were wondering: Giglet (n.) A wanton; a lascivious or light, giddy girl. (From Brainy Dictionary, which looks rather useful.)

Try that, thou churlish hell-hated measle!

Or alternatively, the full text of the 1970’s Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Very much of its time, but useful nonetheless.

… takes me to Greece, and Sappho.

She was one of the many women of the past about whom I knew disgracefully little, but a bit of academic remaindering should help to sort that out. A lot in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (ed. E. Greene, 1996, Uni of California Press) is too technical for my non-knowledge of Greek, or my interest in the finer points of poetry, but some chapters are brilliant, for example “Sappho and Helen,” by P. duBois (p. 79-88)

It concentrates on one fragment, as reconstructed:

Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing
on the dark earth: but I say, it is what you love.

Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all;
for she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty,
Helen, her most noble husband

Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a
though for her daughter and dear parents. The …
(Cyprian goddess) led her from the path …
… Which now has put me in mind of Anaktoria far away;

Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance
of her changing face, would I rather see than
your Lydian chariots and infantry full-armed.

It is a beautiful piece of poetry. Some expert comments:
“The poem works on the tension between desire, love, presence, and absence, and on the threat of war outside, the drama of pursuit of love. In each of the three parts of the lyrics Sappho refers to the world of war, the world of men and heroes …” (P. 82)

“Much of the energy of the poem comes from the force of her personal preference, her ability to make Anaktoria walk before us, but Anaktoria’s presence is straining to break out of a structure which gives her existence wider meaning…. Helen is an element of the old epic vocabulary, yet she means something new here.

“Sappho subverts the transitional interpretation of her journey to Troy. And in doing so she speaks of desire in new terms, circling down on a definition of the abstract force. Eros is a term insufficiently abstract; Eros is a god, Aphrodite a personification. Sappho moves towards the abstract by employing the substitutability of things, people, shops. She achieves a representation of desire by the accumulation of details, examples, personal testimony.” (p. 83)

Sappho is writing at a time of transition from myth to rationality, DuBois says. In nearby Lydia money was being invented at the same time, which Aristotle saw as allowing abstract thought, through the creation of abstract values. So Sappho is ranking by value.

In oral literatures women are usually described as objects, things to be exchanged – e.g The Iliad starts with the return of Chryseis and the seizure of Briseis – or as fixed markers that men move past, e.g. Odysseus leaving Kalypso’s island.

“Sappho, however, acts, as did Helen, in loving Anaktoria, in following her in her poem, in attempting to think beyond the terms of the epic vocabulary. Her action is possible because the world of oral culture, of a certain type of exchange, a type of marriage characteristic of such societies, is no longer dominant. … The institutions of the democratic cities have not yet evolved. The lyric age, the age of the tyrants, is a period of confusion, turbulence, and conflict; it is from this moment, this break, that Sappho speaks.”( p. 87)

No 64 Surprising and Distressing Things
While one is cleaning a decorative comb, something catches in the teeth and the comb breaks.
A carriage overturns. One would have imagined that such a solid, bulky object would remain forever on its wheels. It all seems like a dream – astonishing and senseless.
A child or a grownup blurts out something that is bound to make people uncomfortable.
All night long one has been waiting for a man who one thought was sure to arrive. At dawn, just when one has forgotten about him for a minute and dozed off, a crow caws loudly. One wakes with a start and sees that it is daytime – most astonishing.
One of the bowmen in an archery contests stands trembling for a long time before shooting: when finally he does release his arrow, it goes in the wrong direction. (p. 117-8)

No 134 Letters are Commonplace
Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, one feels as though one were seeing him face to face. Again, it is a great comfort to have expressed one’s feelings in a letter even though one knows it cannot yet have arrived. If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one’s joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life. (p. 207.)

OK. In the interests of copyright better stop now. I’d recommend buying the book; you won’t regret it!