Posts Tagged ‘Iliad’
“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…
Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.
But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…
In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…
“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.
* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3
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As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.
“I didn’t lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”*…
Anybody who writes, directs, or consumes any form of entertainment owes a debt of gratitude to Homer. Had the ancient poet not written two of the best—and earliest—epic dramas in Western history, the Iliad and the Odyssey, who knows where our culture would be or what works of art we would cherish.
Would Shakespeare have become the genius bard? Would Cervantes, Faulkner, and Joyce have created the diverse masterpieces that they did, all with Homeric ancestry? Would we have cinematic gems like O Brother, Where Art Thou?
It’s impossible to know because our boy Homer (or whoever he was—more on that later) pulled through and set the foundation for modern day drama and tragedy. But what would have happened if he had written the first ever comedy?
That question is a siren song for scholars, though the work of comedy often attributed to the Greek poet was lost millennia ago. But while the text of Margites may have disappeared, we’re not completely in the dark about the form Homer’s comedic style may have taken…
Before The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer’s very first work—if Homer actually existed—is named Margites, after its main character who was nothing short of a bumbling idiot: “Before The Iliad, Did Homer Write The World’s First Comedy?“
* Homer
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As we honor humor, we might recall that it was on this date in 1687, during the Great Turkish War (1683-1699), that Venetian bombardment ignited an Ottoman gunpowder magazine stored in the Parthenon and nearly destroyed the temple to Athena that is the crown jewel of the Acropolis.
Uh-oh…
The shortwave radio station UVB-76 is known to DXers (serious shortwave listeners) as “The Buzzer” because it has been broadcasting a short, monotonous buzz tone (hear it here), repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, 24 hours per day, since 1982… that is, until this past weekend, when it stopped.
Satellite photo of the UVB-76 transmitter near Povarovo, Russia
Many believe that UVB-76 was being used to transmit encoded messages to spies, as is generally assumed for the many numbers stations that populate shortwave frequencies…. though no nation’s government will confirm or deny the existence of the stations or their purpose. Or the constant transmission of its characteristic sound may have been signaling the availability or readiness of some kind of installation– a kind of “dead man’s switch” of a military or other installation– possibly for the infamous Dead Hand system.
But a more benign explanation is that the constant buzz was a High-Frequency Doppler used for ionosphere research of the sort described in the Russian Journal of Earth Sciences, in which radio waves are reflected from ionosphere inhomogeneities. (This method involves comparing a continuous radio transmission which is reflected by the ionosphere with a stable basic generator.) As it happens, the continuously-transmitted carrier frequency currently used for this research is the same as that of the UVB-76 (4.625 MHz).
Rest in peace (and quiet).
TotH to Above Top Secret.
As we keep our ears to the ground, we might note that this date, June 9, was a big one for the fifth and final Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Nero: On this date in 53 CE, he married his step-sister, Claudia Octavia. Then on their anniversary in 62 CE, he had her executed. And on this date in 68 CE, Nero committed suicide, after quoting Homer’s Iliad. (On hearing the approach of horsemen who’d been dispatched by the Senate, which had declared Nero a public enemy, the deposed Emperor declared “Hark, now strikes on my ear the trampling of swift-footed coursers!”)
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