Praise, Trophies, and an Ode: Rediscovering My Love for the Classics

 For nearly five years, I have read fewer than 10 books a year.  I have ever-expanding job duties now, I completed two ultramarathons (abandoned other at 36.3/50 miles), along with six marathons, before a broken left ankle and grade III ligament tear there shelved me before the pandemic delayed matters still.  If anything, the two-year pandemic left me with even less free time, as I work in the educational wing of a mental healthcare facility.  At one point, I sold or boxed up nearly 80% of my books.  It seemed like reading fiction was in the past.

And yet my love for it never truly went away.  If I had a spare 15 minutes or so, I might scour Wikipedia or Quora or other online forums for information on historical periods/regions I didn't study in depth when I earned my BA and MA in History.  Of particular interest was the later Roman Empire, that which managed to survive until the mid-15th century.  Posthumously called the Byzantine Empire, I had read a few books on it, including John Julius Norwich's popular history.  Yet I found myself every now and then wanting to know more.  What was its literature like?  I found myself distrustful of Gibbons' view of it being decadent and pale imitator of its past.

So I finally did some research into medieval Roman literature and I discovered quite an interesting epic, Digenis Akritas.  Originally a series of related oral poems, by the 12th century it had been transformed into a written epic poem, albeit one with no single authorship and with surviving manuscripts that diverge quite a bit in certain particulars.  I plan on reviewing it in the near future, but for now it will suffice to say that its theme (solitary hero of mixed ethnic background guarding the Euphrates border of the Empire against Arab raids) captured my attention.

From there, I went on a bit of a spending spree and I started to buy volumes from these Harvard University Press series:  Loeb Classical Library (pre-500 AD bilingual Greek and Latin texts); Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (500-1400 Medieval Latin, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon texts); and the I Tatti Renaissance Library.  Although I haven't focused as much on this material during the 2004-2016 period of reviews here, I did take two years of Latin in college and have maintained some fluency in reading the text.  My Greek is negligible at the moment, although I know enough from excerpts in Latin texts to compare it to the English translation and work out the meanings of a few hundred words already.

I chose to return to these languages not because of a sense of cultural superiority, but rather because for a long while I've had this nagging feeling that there is a lot of cultural wealth that is endangered of being lost to irrelevancy.  Before this past month, I was ignorant of the fact that was a Neo-Latin epic poem, the Christiad by Marco Girolamo Vida, that retells the Gospels in hexameter verses of high quality.  Nor was I aware of the late 7th century Greek text, Apocalypse, attributed to Pseudo-Methodius, that perhaps is one of the most influential apocalyptic texts after the New Testament canon had been established over two centuries before.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I suspect that over the next couple of months, usually for an hour or so before bedtime or maybe a couple of hours on weekends, I will work my way through a dozen or more of these texts and commentaries, filling in gaps in my knowledge and giving myself things to consider when it comes to form and topic.  There likely will be some reviews to be written of these works, because I believe it's more important that I write a commentaries on what can be gleaned from these works than marveling over Kickstarter records for authors (not demeaning, just noting that it's not as important in the long run) or commenting on casting choices for TV and movie adaptations of certain novels.  While I might address those topics too in the future, I think for now I'm going to focus on what intrigues me more.

Hopefully, there will be a few of you along for the ride.  It's been too long.