Home » Sing to me again, O Diva, the sweet tongue of Homer

Sing to me again, O Diva, the sweet tongue of Homer

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If it is true that ancient Greek has imbued us all since the dawn of time, it is also true that it is distant and mysterious, and even foreign to those who do not have some scholastic notion, nor are all the Greek etymologies that we evoke every day enough to make it immediately familiar .

On the contrary, Latin appears much more connected to our lives, as an unavoidable relative. To begin with, it is written in our own alphabet; and then, even when we don’t understand it, we seem to understand it, because its lexicon is the parent of ours, and even if forms and meanings no longer correspond to the current ones, it remains an illusion of continuity and belonging.

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The differences between Latin and Greek

The history of Latin and Greek is one story when one follows their trajectories on the map of European culture. The differences, however, are not lacking. Among these we include not only the particular events of one and the other, but also the different way in which one and the other has been thought of over the centuries. The Latin suggests durability and stability; the Greek evanescence and ruin. Disappeared from the study map for centuries, it has become the very representation of nostalgia. In the modern age, after the triumphalistic recoveries of the Renaissance, the knowledge of Greek has become more and more fixed in myth, meaning struggle against the forces of disintegration, opposition to decline, recovery of vigor, return to origin, “repatriation”, or even investigation of the self. Hölderlin, Leopardi, Nietzsche, Freud teacher, to name a few notable ones.

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It is about thinking, about imagination, about life

It’s not just about language: it’s about thinking, about imagination, about life. Greek is human and divine characters, politics, myths, places, moral values, aesthetic concepts, emotions, feelings. And then it carries all the ambiguity of ancient things, whose messages are offered and subtracted at the same time, and force us to learn other codes, other categories, other intentions. There are the difficulties of expression, the refinement of saying, the overflowing lexical abundance, which our modern translations will never render perfectly. There is also a special sense of responsibility, which invests the study of a sort of emotion, because we know that, when we deal with Greek, we are dealing with our beginnings, or at least with an image of our beginnings.

Homer’s authority

The history of Greek is much older than that of Latin. Its literary beginnings, as indicated by theIliade and theOdyssey, already coincide with a very high degree of cultural and linguistic development. Not only. The Homeric poems, although archaic and fixed in a certain formularity, enjoy such good fortune that they are always contemporary with all subsequent literature, constituting the basis of a common education and a national memory. There is no outstanding writer who has not had to deal with those texts. Philosophical research itself will have to deal with Homer’s authority. And continuers and imitators of Homer will still be found many centuries after the birth of Christ. Latin missed such an influential start. Indeed, he had the opposite fate of denying his own antiquity with growing conviction, until he perfected and canonized himself in the writing of two samples such as Cicero and Virgil.

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