I'm used to hearing papyrus referred to as a writing surface, sort of a precursor to paper; it was news to me that it was a bit of a wonder plant with countless uses, from being edible to being used in religious practices to being used to caulk boats to being used for tampons or for paper or to make boat sails or to (somehow) hold up bridges.
Talk about a miracle plant—just from the introduction to The First Poets. Pretty dense tome, in my eyes, but still: even with a history degree, I had absolutely. no idea of just how versatile papyrus was/is.
Going off from there: in my effort to read more poetry, I recently finished If Not, Winter, a collection of Sappho's fragments. While there's something enticing and intriguing about the scraps of her poems we have left, it is a shame we don't have more. She was talented as hell, and, of course, there is the well-known link between Sappho, Lesbos, and her homoerotic poetry; this does not do justice to the masterful snippets we've unearthed from her. What we do have is a bit like a memory of a taste as it fades.
The First Poets is more a selection about the poets rather than their poetry, but reading that will come with time (a book of Homeric hymns I picked up seems fun on this note, as do, frankly, a lot of religious texts which I tend to find quite beautiful when read as poetry. The Hymn of the Pearl comes to mind, for just one example here).
At the moment, I'm finding myself daunted and excited by the amount of poetry I'm excited to read/catch up on as well as a bit bummed I'm so far behind. I'm working my way through a collection of Maya Angelou, recently finished off some Langston Hughes and Rupi Kaur among others, and intend to probably tackle Christina Rossetti next.
So far, I've found The First Poets a bit dense for more than a few pages at a time, which has taken a hit into time I'd normally spent on that poetry. This is due to the fact it's more a historical placing of many of the poets, especially in the context of Greece (which would make sense, a focus on Greece in a book about Greece).
Those dusty ancient cities are, in my experience, not covered too deeply in school and most people don't return to or find much interest in. Given I dozed through a significant chunk of my ancient Greece history class, this is understandable—you can only hear about Linear A and Linear B, potsherds, and paintings so long at eight in the morning.
Still, it never fails to be interesting to trace the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice I learned in elementary school to the elusive and mysterious Orphism of Ancient Greece, which appears to have either evolved alongside or in response to the wilder Dionysian religion. The more you know, or, rather the less, perhaps: to my most recent understanding, the Derveni Papyrus is still quite the enigma and also our best insight into the mysterious belief system of Orphism.
Tracing this earliest of poets, who even Pythagoras* likely wrote under the name of, forward into the Homeric Hymns—which I had never realized the interesting aspects of, particularly regarding the setup of the Iliad's relationships—and then into the Trojan Cycle itself is an enjoyable journey.
And it brings me back to Carol Thomas' class and the explanation of how we could pinpoint the eclipse mentioned in the Odyssey to around 1177 and metaphorically read the tale of Odysseus' return as an allegorical retelling of a man returning home through a crumbling Greece headed into a period of dark ages thanks to the Sea Peoples.
Homer, of course, wasn't likely to be a single person who lived several hundred years and compiled this comprehensive set of poems—we're more likely talking about a situation like, best I can do, is like the Marvel movies: different actors, different scripts, different directors, all that, but ultimately they all fall into the same overarching 'canon' of a story. The same goes for Homer as the entire tapestry of Greek myth is woven together, thus the slight variations, seeming retcons, and contradictions of various stories.
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*Yes, that Pythagoras with the theorem from math class. Guy led a peculiar cult of his own, very unlikely he discovered the theorem with his name (though, like Pythagoras likely putting his own poetry out under Orpheus' name to make it about the poetry, not the person, many Pythagoreans would allegedly attribute their accomplishments to Pythagoras), or and he thought fava beans might contain the souls of the dead, leading to him forbidding from contact with them, especially eating. One story actually has his death brought about in part due to Pythagoras refusing to cut through a field of beans, instead insisting on going the long way 'round.
Given this, it's also hard not to wonder if this little tidbit might have inspired Hannibal Lecter's infamous line about "fava beans and Chianti" and whether there's a subtle allusion to Pythagoras, or the more likely probably that it's just an odd coincidence.
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