Helen, The Greek Woman of Troy

Perhaps one of the most famous Greek names is so eponymous that we seldom give it any thought. That would be Helen of Troy (Elene Iliou, in Greek). Remember that Helen was kidnapped by Paris (also called Alexandros), the son of Priam, King of Troy, and carried back to Troy. She was born and raised a Greek.

Carlyle said that Helen was "The face that launched a Thousand Ships", hence the metaphorical (if not metaphysical and metamorphic) importance of Helen of Troy in that she not only caused the launching of a thousand ships (see Iliad, Book II, The Roll-Call of Ships) but was the object of the ships, both in the reason for their setting out, but as the target of their journey. We should note that the Greeks called themselves (sometime after the tenth century BC as they do today) the Helene -- thus, Helen of Troy is actually "The Greek Woman of Troy."

What Helen’s real name was, has been lost. Oddly enough, Helen might never have had a real name (in our sense of a name). Why was that? Well, Helen even though she was the wife (one of the first tier concubines) of Menelaos, King of Sparta, and Agamemnon’s brother, like many women of that time, may not have had a personal name at all! I sometimes stop in the middle of my Greek readings and try to imagine a culture so remote and so strange that even the wives of Kings did not have birth names but were only given their techne semetos ("work" or "skill") names, when they reached puberty and thus became valuable pieces of the household property.) So if Helen was kidnapped by Paris before she was thirteen, but after she was sold to Menelaos (since she was known to be his wife), she would not have had a name, only a patronymic designator. In Mycenae Greek (around the twelfth century BC) the patronymic was indicated by a special ending, -ides, attached to the father’s name. Thus the great hero of the Iliad, Achilles, son of Peleus, was known as Akhilleus Peleides. Hektor, the eldest son of Priam, was Hektor Priamides. But women were different. Unlike Achilles or Priam or Paris or Hektor, they might not be given a personal name at birth. If Helen’s father was, say, Heracles, she would be known simply as ho Heraclidas -- the daughter of Heracles (‘ho’ is the Greek definite article, "the", and daughter is indicated by the use of the feminine ending (-idas) on the patronymic). If Heracles had two daughters, they would be A Heraclidas and B Heraclidas (that is Alpha and Beta, or first and second daughters and most likely, around the house, would just be called Alpha and Beta).

Thoughts on Zen Emails

It suddenly occurs to me that an email without a subject is the perfect Zen email. Of course, once you say that it is a Zen email then you have acknowledged the artificiality of the email and its contrivance to be a Zen email in which case it cannot be a Zen email for the essence of a Zen email would be a self-effacing email without a subject that did not realize that it was subjectless, rather, that did not announce that its was subjectless but was subjectless only because it transcended the idea, the concept, of subject without ever becoming the subject of the subject (announced or not) or the by-product of an email that, being without a subject, is itself the subject of its message (we would thus have an eponymous Zen email which is a dreadful tautology indeed!)

The Semiotics of the Greek Language

110010 101111 111001 111110
11111 1011111 111011 101000
001101 010000 000110 000001
00000 0100000 000100 010111
001110 101010 111001 110001

001011101101 101010 101010
000011 111010 111111 110000
00101 1001101 101110 111101

Prebulo Ovidion
Songs of the Exclusive OR
(Leitz, 1880)

The rhyme of binary numbers transcends the melancholy of simple arithmetic. Ah that I could explain how to parse irrational expressions using only the tools we carry in ordinary life. What! You scream. Ordinary life!! Who the hell ever heard of ordinary life? What was it that St. Jerome once said: quo usque tamdem abutere. Or maybe not. Is that maybe or may be? Does it matter? In Homer's day, of course, the hexadecimal number system was considered the language of the Gods. I have the fragments of a long lost letter written by an unnamed relative who was actually a harbor master at Troy and she swears to me on the Oath to Athena that the Greek alphabet is really a secret code devised by Irish balladeers in the fifth century as a means of passing fermentation recipes up and down Mesoamerican villages.

Flesh Eaters of the Greek World

Sarcophagus [n]  a limestone box used by the Greeks as a coffin; thought to consume the flesh of the dead.

During my first course in classical Greek (a few dozen decades ago), I stumbled on the derivation of this word and thought it was amazingly prescient and wonderful in its metaphorical as well as literal interpretation. Sarcophagus comes from two Greek words: sarc – flesh, and phageein (fageein[1]) – to devour or to eat (of something). Hence a sarcophagus is a flesh eater – the abode of spirits who prey on human flesh. The Greeks, of course, didn’t bother to make their tombs water-tight. Thus rain would mix with the limestone to produce carbonic acid which, in turn, would dissolve the corpse leaving clean, white bones.

In the pantheon of Greek theology (as weakly structured as it was!) the world was inhabited by unseen spirits who sucked the life out of children (sudden infant death), possessed bodies and ate them from the inside out (cancers), and struck down healthy men for the effrontery to the Gods (heart attacks and plagues – one only has to read the first book of the Iliad for a clear depiction of a spreading plague, brought down on the Greeks by Apollo for Agamemnon’s treatment of a priest). That such spirits would be waiting for the remains of the dead was a clear fact of the natural world.

[1] For those familiar with classical Greek, you will note that this word is derived from early Ionian Greek (thus the double eta in the infinitive).