Classics Salon!

[cahn]

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Comments

Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[cahn]

I'm still alive! Really!

Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr) - Reread, but the kind of reread where I vaguely remembered the main character and absolutely nothing about what happened in the actual book. I own Tarr's other magical-Egyptian novels, Throne of Isis and Pillar of Fire and love them and have reread them at intervals and can tell you rather more about what happened in them, but I've never reread this one; when I bought those I passed on getting Lord of the Two Lands, which I know I had read at the same time. I now know why: I can summarize the whole story for you right here. Alexander conquers various places, including Tyre and Gaza when they defied him. Then he's crowned king of Egypt (as in the title). Then he has a sort of miraculous journey through a sandstorm and what appears to also be the Land of the Dead where he is acknowledged king by the various powers that be, both temporal and magical, and founds Alexandria. The end. (mildred_of_midgard, Alexander does not die in this book.) The (fictional) main character, Meriamon, who is an Egyptian priestess-doctor and daughter of the last pharaoh, is a great character and it is not surprising that she is the part I remember.

But there's not a whole lot of arc here; it's more of a travelogue than anything else. I did learn some stuff, like the rumor that Alexander killed his father (everyone in the book is like HE WOULD NEVER!) and the rumor about this Ptolemy dude being Alexander's half-brother (I actually can't remember now what the book consensus was about this). Alexander himself is wildly charismatic, etc., but has absolutely zero character arc. To be fair, I believe this was also Tarr's first foray into Egyptian historical fiction.

And I note that Jo Graham's Alexander novel Stealing Fire takes place after Alexander's death... I was going to read that one next, but Tarr name-checked the Renault Alexander novels in the afterword, thus reminding me of their existence. So I'm gonna give those a go first. (I have started the first one and already am in love with it!) And then after all those novels, maybe I will have the context to read Plutarch! :D

In the meantime, I know saying this is dangerous because it will be the signal for the universe to dump RL commitments on me, but I think I can get started on The Jewish War if you still want to do that, selenak. I think I'll write a separate post on that, actually, because I know at least one other person will be vaguely interested and may not be looking at this post.

(And after that, I will want to reread Throne of Isis and read Hand of Isis, but I think I should go with Alexander while I can, especially given that this is mildred_of_midgard's current interest in salon. Though I think she may not be available for salon stuff this week, I know, I have bad timing.)

Re: Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[mildred_of_midgard]

especially given that this is [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard's current interest in salon. Though I think she may not be available for salon stuff this week, I know, I have bad timing.)

Extremely not available this week or next week (Tucson next week!), but hoping I can squeeze something in on Sunday. I have a post I need to make about Alexander possibly maybe killing his father!

([personal profile] mildred_of_midgard, Alexander does not die in this book.)

Hmm, then what book was it I remember reading twenty years ago? I must have conflated it with this one. *ponders*

[ETA: Ah, yeah, it was Queen of the Amazons. It's 1 am here, I need to go back to bed. :P]

AAHHH, will try to salon when I can! I think about Alexander often and occasionally read something and add notes to my post draft.

Re: Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[cahn]

Ha, yeah, I have been starting to see things about Tucson and thought maybe you were already there, but I think this week is mostly dealers, etc.

I have a post I need to make about Alexander possibly maybe killing his father!

Yay! This was one of the most interesting parts of the book to me actually, the way everyone in the book was like NOPE HE WOULD NEVER and I was like, okay, everyone is SO up in arms about this that there must be some reasonable doubt here!

Ah, yeah, it was Queen of the Amazons.

Wow! I... have never heard of that book. No, I must have heard of it at the time as I am pretty sure I was still noticing when Tarr released a book (though at that point I'd stopped reading them), but I certainly never read it! Good choice by me, clearly!

Re: Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Definitely a good choice on your part. I think it may be the only Tarr book I've read, precisely because it turned me off the rest!

Re: Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[selenak]

This is one Tarr novel I haven’t read, but let me insist on you reading Jo Graham’s “Stealing Fire” (which btw has flashbacks to when Alexander is still alive) after Renault’s “The Persian Boy” and before her “Funeral Games” (set after Alexander’s death), because the last book of Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy is really where her internalized misogyny overwhelmes her writer’s instinct, and “Stealing Fire” (which is also very Renault influenced as most Alexander novels written after her books not by dude bros are) works among many other things as a better conclusion to the first two Alexander books.

If you want to check up on the history, with only a short time at hand, I can reccommend the Alexander episodes of “The Hellenistic Age Podcast”. As the title says, the podcast is about the Hellenistic Age, i.e. the post Alexander world up to and including Cleopatra’s defeat which is when it ends, but in order to set out the scene, of course the podcaster needs to summarize Alexander and his generals, and hence you get about six half an hour long eps about the life of AtG. This is a good way to update yourself on the most important historical data in an entertaining way and without it consuming much more of your time. If you listen to an episode a day, you’re done in a week. The six Alex episodes are available here:

https://hellenisticagepodcast.wordpress.com/2019/09/09/005-the-age-of-alexander-the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king/

As I haven’t read the Tarr novel, I can’t comment on it, but Ptolemy as Alexander’s illegitimate half brother is something no novelist apparently can resist (he is in Renault, he is in Graham). (The last one is why I had to use it in my Thais and AtG story for Yuletide.) It’s mentioned as a rumor in some of the sources, but a) said sources, as Mildred and self told you before, were written centuries after AtG’s death, when the Ptolemies were the last Pharaonic dynasty of Egpt and via the library of Alexandria big big patrons of most scholars, and b) some of said sources use Ptolemy’s memoirs as a primary source. I gather that the consensus among today’s historians is he probably wasn’t. (The Hellenistic Age podcaster thinks he wasn’t, and Ptolemy is his favourite among the Diadochi. His Ptolemy is a crafty magnificent bastard, btw, which is a very different characterisation from the noble sidekick from the novels.)

Did or didn’t Alexander kill his Dad or at the very least knew his Dad was about to be killed: let’s just say that back when Mildred and I discussed what would happen if Fritz and Alex switched places, I think we agreed FW would not live until 1740.

I’m still game for the Jewish War.

Re: Fiction - Lord of the Two Lands (Tarr)

[cahn]

Ahhhhh thanks for the heads up on the timing of Renault and Graham! Yeah, one of the reasons I was worried about reading Renault was that I'd heard about the misogyny (which wouldn't have pinged to me when I was so impressed decades ago) but I haven't seen it in the first book so far, anyway. Excellent, I will do that!

Ha, as you know I have trouble with podcasts over a long period of time (it's just something in my brain where it's like a buffer fills and then it can't take any more) but six half hours I think I can do, thank you!

Yessss let's try for the Jewish War! Interest post here. I'll probably do this a bit differently from Fritz!salon posts and just do a new post every week for the reading (maybe separate from the main salon post), since I think a couple of people might be interested in the posts if not in the reading itself.