Aristotle on Rape

This week, I learn that another of my friends has been raped. And, in a horrible coincidence, on the very same day, I learn that the "Top keywords driving traffic to speakeristic.blogspot.com from search engines" are "Aristotle on Rape." I wish I could say I am more surprised by the former.

The former makes me wonder about the long long painful silences outside of anonymous meetings - grieving, again. The latter makes me want to stop blogging entirely - hoping that men and women won't come to a blog when they can hear and interpret Aristotle for themselves.

The latter comes to my attention after reading Dr. Jim West's post on Alexa ratings. I wasn't surprised to learn that many of you find this blog, "Aristotle's Feminist Subject," from the top search words "aristotle logic essays." (In fact, some time ago, I wrote a series of long posts on "logic," and once many of you found a short post I'd composed comparing Aristotle's logic with Alice Walker's womanist essaying: "Aristotle's logic vs. Alice Walker's womanism" in which you and I considered "What does this mean for your writing?." And, indeed, some of you have come across a few posts I've labeled with the word "rape.")

But "Aristotle on Rape"? You've never read anything on that here. "Aristotle on Rape" is a dissertation. It's what translators like John Gillies get in 1823 when rendering the Greek of the Rhetoric into English this way:

"Again, If Theseus did not commit wrong in the rape of Helen, neither did Paris: if the sons of escaped punishment for carrying off the daughters of Leucippus, so neither ought the elopement with Helen to be prosecuted with vengeance."

It's what translator Ernest Barker, who really likes Aristotle and his Politics, finds he must write commentary on in 1962 when translating Aristotle's words in the treatise. Researcher Michael Davis explains:

[At the end of Book 5 of the Politics, one reads] Aristotle's long and detailed list of tyrants and their outrages, mostly sexual. We are given examples of rape, pederasty, insincere pederasty, pederasty in which the beloved is insulted by being asked playfully why he is not yet with child, wife-stealing, and castration, to name a few. So [ostensibly] uncharacteristic of Aristotle is this lurid account that one translator, Sir Ernest Barker, for the only time in his entire edition, relegates an undisputed portion of the text of the Politics to a footnote. His reasons are worth relating. The translator has omitted these passages in the text.

They are matters of scandal, or at best curiosities of history such as Aristotle with his encyclopedic habit loved to collect, rather than [Aristotle's own] matters of politics and theory.

Now, it is to be taken as a certain sign that something interesting is going on when an Oxbridge don's sense of propriety is offended. What is most peculiar about Aristotle's account of revolution is the connection he tacitly makes between sex and violence. Sexual outrages seem to be the paradigm for that hybris which

although having many parts, each of them is the cause of anger, and being angry, most men ordinarily attack for the sake of revenge and not preeminence. [Aristotle, Politics] (1311a33-36).

(Davis, "Erôs and Physics," The Politics of Philosophy: a Commentary on Aristotle's Politics, pages 90-91.)

What is staggering is how Aristotle's logic goes unnoticed. How surprised rational men like Barker and Davis can be by Aristotle's justifications for men raping women.

One only needs to start at the beginning of Aristotle's Politics to get more than hints. Aristotle is justifying his own elite Greek male dominant City State, "which is the highest of all... at the highest good." This is not just the ideal; it is the real, the status quo of Nature.

Here he explains how it must be, and how good it is:

For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest. Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say,

"It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians; "

as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says,

"First house and wife and an ox for the plough, "

for the ox is the poor man's slave. The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants....

And Aristotle goes on teaching the boys in his Aca-Demy:

Again, the same holds good between man and the other animals: tame animals are superior in their nature to wild animals, yet for all the former it is advantageous to be ruled by man, since this gives them security. Again, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal (and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming) these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority 1254b.20is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason, by apprehending it, but to feelings. And also the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike.

Are we following what he writes (albeit through translation into our bar-bar-ic English)?

they say that it is monstrous if the person powerful enough to use force, and superior in power, is to have the victim of his force as his slave and subject; and even among the learned some hold this view, though others hold the other. But the reason of this dispute and what makes the theories overlap is the fact that in a certain manner virtue when it obtains resources has in fact very great power to use force, and the stronger party always possesses superiority in something that is good, so that it is thought that force cannot be devoid of goodness, but that the dispute is merely about the justice of the matter (for it is due to the one party holding that the justification of authority is good-will, while the other identifies justice with the mere rule of the stronger); because obviously if these theories be separated apart, the other theories have no force or plausibility at all, implying that the superior in goodness has no claim to rule and be master....

For a man's acts can no longer be noble if he does not excel as greatly as a man excels a woman or a father his children or a master his slaves, so that one who transgresses cannot afterwards achieve anything sufficient to rectify the lapse from virtue that he had already committed; because for equals the noble and just consists in their taking turns, since this is equal and alike, but for those that are equal to have an unequal share and those that are alike an unlike share is contrary to nature, and nothing contrary to nature is noble. Hence in case there is another person who is our superior in virtue and in practical capacity for the highest functions, him it is noble to follow and him it is just to obey

Lest it's lost in translation, that "very great power to use force" is that Greek man's ability to rape: βιάζεσθαι δύναται.

*He* Wins the Votes!

No, I'm not talking about American Idol. That winner, he'll be announced tonight.

This week already, the people of Greece, in another demo-crat-ic vote, elected Alexander the Great as the Greatest Greek of all times. He wins the votes of the majority. Of course, Aristotle, Alexander's teacher, was in the Top 10 with Aristotle's own teacher Plato and with Socrates, who taught Plato. Quite a patrilineage, an exclusive boy's club.

Sure, the world notices the very few women in the Top 100.

And, again, there's that omission of Helen of the Hellenes, and the absence of Sappho - Plato's Tenth Muse, and the silencing of Aspasia, who taught both Socrates and Pericles to speak well.

Which brings us back to Aristotle, who taught Alexander in his own boys club that their wives by birthing daughters had failed to birth sons - that daughters are only mutant sons. Which makes us remember Greek male histories (remember Aristotle's history?), that must have Helen as whore, Sappho as Lesbian lover, and Aspasia as a foreign call girl--each of only private consequence to men. Μεγάλοι Έλληνες . . . Μεγάλη πράγματι Έλληνες!

feminine helicopters, sons, and men

- Regarde, c'est une hélicoptère.
- Non, non, c'est un hélicoptère.
- Mais, comment est-ce que tu vois ça?
~ a joke, HT Suzanne

In Mark's Greek
[Ἀληθῶς {ὁ ἄνθρωπος οὗτος / οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος} υἱὸς {ἦν θεοῦ / θεοῦ ἦν}]
the centurion does not use an article before the word son [υἱὸς] (neither a son nor the son),
and Mark has still never told us what sense Jesus is that son.
~ Three Gospels, page 57, by Reynolds Price

all men are created equal
all men and women are created equal
~Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
~Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The epigraphs to begin this post illustrate what Aristotle despised in the lack of logic and, therefore, in bad language, especially the slyness of female-gendered language.

Aristotle taught that good Greek logic was never ambiguous. And good Greek language ought never to confuse categories, especially the masculine with the feminine. (In many of his writings Aristotle purported to show, in nature, the biological difference between males and females. He also seemed to want to teach how ostensibly, by the cold objective tool of logic, the observer could see females as mutilated males - as necessary freaks of nature that could dangerously pollute and further mutilate the superior sex of men.)

In his book called Rhetoric, Aristotle gives instruction on the logic of good Greek grammar, even with respect to agreement by the category of gender. He writes the following (in what we know as Book III, Chapter 5, sentences 5 and 6, on Bekker page 1407b). There are other examples, but here's one (and I'm giving you three different English translations of it):

A fourth rule is to observe Protagoras' classification of nouns into male, female, and inanimate; for these distinctions also must be correctly given. "Upon her arrival she said her say and departed (e d elthousa kai dialechtheisa ocheto)."
--translated by William Rhys Roberts

The fourth [rule is to observe] Protagoras’ classification of the gender of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There should be correct grammatical agreement: "Having come and having spoken, she departed."
--translated by George Alexander Kennedy

The fourth rule consists in keeping the genders distinct--masculine, feminine, and neuter, as laid down by Protagoras; these also must be properly introduced: "She, having come (fem.) and having conversed (fem.) with me, went away."
--translated by John Henry Freese

Now, before going further into Aristotle's argument, let me quickly just note with you how the three translators have followed Aristotle's argument (as if what Aristotle as the original author of this original text writes is all that counts). Notice how the translators are afraid to depart from Aristotle's categories.

Yes, they may be respecting us their English language audience; and they may not want to be unclear or unambiguous about what Aristotle wrote; . . . but however nonetheless . . . each of the translators misses the misogyny and gynophobia in Aristotle's writings. As if showing the phallogocentric bias of Aristotle will somehow make the translation a hardship on either Aristotle or his readers. (Do we not know that Aristotle never intended that any of us barbarians, or females, would ever read or hear what he wrote? He did not write for you. He considered you less than the elite male Greek student who may some day conquer the world.)

Translator Roberts is so careful, he actually transliterates the Greek for us. We can hear, perhaps, how Aristotle or one of his students might have read it aloud. We can be his audience.

Translator Kennedy gives us readers his 63rd footnote to explain exactly what Aristotle must mean: "In Greek, the participles modifying 'she' have distinct feminine forms."

Translator Freese marks the English translated text for us with his "(fem.)" twice. And he also gives a footnote to explain his translation of Aristotle's word σκεύη as our neuter, noting: "'inanimate things,' the classification probably being male, female, and inanimate, not the grammatical one of masculine, feminine, and neuter."

Roberts, Kennedy, and Freese participate in Aristotle's logic. And much gets lost in their phallogocentric translations. None seems to want to recognize Aristotle’s blatant sexism, his logical absolutism, and his elitist centrism in his writings in general and in this Greek grammar lesson here in particular. Each seems to insist on clear and unambiguous categories. "Either / or" logic works fine.

So let's look ourselves a little closer at Aristotle's language. Let's listen in (as Krista Ratcliffe suggests) with intent but not necessarily and only to his intent. Remember, his intent is to exclude you and me. His intent is to use logic that would classify any female as not a male and any barbarian as not a Greek, with females inferior to males and non-Greeks below Greeks. His review of the categories - the "canons" - of rhetoric was to exclude listening (notes Ratcliffe).

First, let's look at the supposedly troublesome issues in the language of the epigraphs above. Second, we'll return to what's going on in Aristotle's Greek-language lesson.

First, then, the categories in the three excerpts of language above are not so closed. Aristotle, however, wants categories in "nature" and in "logic" and in "language" to be purely one thing while absolutely not the other thing.

Women and females are troubling to Aristotle, in that regard; they are not men and are not males, not pure human beings. Likewise, as in the joke that Suzanne shares, French is troubling for many English speakers and readers (with the joke being clearly ambiguous for the French: not purely feminine-or-masculine and not the same spoken-vs-written).

Ancient biblical Greek - yes, Mark's Greek (a translation of a Latin speaker and maybe of the disciple Peter's Hebrew Aramaic remembering) is barbaric. It's barbaric because what the reader reads is not clearly a specific indefinite son (not necessary "a son"). But worse: it's barbaric because "sons" often refers to "daughters" in Mark's writings and also in the Jews' Hellene translations and writings of their scriptures. Mark's Greek uses a "both / and" logic.

And American English speakers (of the USA variety) want so badly for Thomas Jefferson, the original author of the extant Declaration of Independence, to be clear. The Declaration says one thing, and is not to be watered down into just anything. But "all men" must surely mean to Jefferson more than all men - because all men surely means more than blackslave-and-blackfemaleslave-owning males, who are irked at the King of England for not, among other things, helping them fight "the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Is the English phrase "all men" inclusive of "women" and of "black men and women" and of "red women and men" and so forth?

Second, now, how about Aristotle and his would-be un-ambiguous Greek? What we may need to know is that Aristotle's notes on rhetoric are for his male-only, elite Greek students (being trained, among other things, for politics and world conquest).

Aristotle uses an example for these young men from the language of Protagoras. This is downright strange. Protagoras is a sophist, a slippery rhetorician, someone whose language and logic is about as polluted as a woman's, according to Aristotle. Historian Edward Schiappa says that "Protagoras used a both/and logic. . . . To him experience was rich and variable enough to be capable of multiple—and even inconsistent—accounts" (Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, page 193). Aristotle, in contrast, taught directly against "Protagorean relativism"; Aristotle taught that one must "argue from an either/or logic" of dominant singularity so that "if two parties disagree about what-is and what-is-not, one of the parties must be mistaken ([Metaphysics] 1063a)" (page 191). On the very principle of non-contradiction, it is strange that Aristotle uses a quotation from Protagoras (who has bad writing and bad logos) to demonstrate the logic of grammatical gender agreement in Aristotle's own lessons of Good Greek by Good Logic.

What is not immediately clear is whether Aristotle is attempting irony when he says that Protagoras sets the good-Greek rules about grammatical agreement with respect to gender. Or perhaps his quotation is from Protagoras but the rule is Aristotle’s applied to the sentence. And maybe Protagoras creates the rule, which his sophism renders meaningless in its contradiction of Aristotle’s logic.

WHEW!

So, what if we translated a bit to show how Aristotle fails to be air-tight with his categories and with his logic?

Here's what Aristotle writes below what I've rendered into English language. Both the English and what Aristotle writes are playful (despite Aristotle's attempts to control and to eliminate the play - what he considers undesirable illogical barbarism and feminism):

Four, as Protagoras does:
the birth-family of the
naming-words by sex:

male and female and thing.

One ought, in fact, to give this out straight:

"having femininely arrived

having womanishly talked
so loquaciously

she left . ."

τέταρτον, ὡς Πρωταγόρας:
τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων διῄρει:

ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ σκεύη

δεῖ γὰρ ἀποδιδόναι καὶ ταῦτα ὀρθῶς:

"ἡ δ' ἐλθοῦσα

καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα

ᾤχετο"

To be clear, all speakers and readers of Greek would not view Aristotle’s grammar problem to be any real problem at all. Very obviously the feminine parts (i.e., the suffixes) on each of the verbals imply a feminine subject so that the three verbals agree in gender. By Aristotle’s anti-Protagorean implication, the feminine gender cannot be both feminine and not feminine (i.e., either masculine or neuter). Thus, this sentence by Protagoras is hardly Aristotle's argument for good Greek grammar as much as it is Aristotle’s own rhetoric for non-contradictory logic. It's an unwittingly sly argument against being sly in language. Whoops, it's an aristotelian contradiction. Whoops.

In addition, since Aristotle is naming Protagoras to argue against the sophist's messy relativism, then Aristotle is doing something else. He seems to be arguing against Plato, Socrates, Pericles, and the woman Aspasia as well. Without too much of a stretch, the reader can see how the feminine verbal διαλεχθει̂σα (transliterated "dialechtheisa"), in Protagoras's sentence, falls within the same semantic range as the feminine nominal διαλεκτική (transliterated "dialektike"). And Aristotle parts ways with his teacher Plato on the point of dialectic, the very loquacious feminine method that Aspasia herself uses and teaches as good uses of logos and Hellene language, to men such as Socrates and Pericles and Protagoras. Aristotle's language plays with dialectic by (perhaps unwittingly and punningly) invoking dialectic--his intention presumably (and the intention of most of his logical English translators too) is to avoid feminine categories unless he can determine what they must be. Aristotle doesn't want listening and interactive talking. He wants no gendered play on words. No feminine helicopters, no feminine sons, no feminine men.

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)

The Gender of Sound

[I want so badly to post on Sarah Palin’s rhetoric, and Barack Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s, John McCain’s, and Joe Biden’s. What might we say about how we listen to them, about our part in judgment? Don’t have time for that today. So you get this.]

The following is the first page and a half of the last chapter of Glass, Irony, and God by translator and poet Anne Carson. She knows history and culture too, you know. Please stop reading now if, well if you don’t; well, as a blogger friend writes today “(Warning foul language).” Now this too from me: (Warning body-part language). I don’t mean to offend anyone with any words, and my apologies to Carson (and Praxagora and Aristophanes) for the way this has to look on a blog post. Here goes:

It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”). The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get fucked a lot.”

This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights. In Hellenistic and Roman times doctors recommended vocal exercises to cure all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in men, on the theory that the practice of declamation would relieve congestion in the head and correct the damage that men habitually do to themselves in daily life by using the voice for highpitched sounds, loud shouting or aimless conversation. Here again we not a confusion of vocal quality and vocal use. This therapy was not on the whole recommended to women or eunuchs or androgynes, who were believed to have the wrong kind of flesh and the wrong alignment of pores for the production of low vocal pitches, no matter how hard they exercised. But for the masculine physique vocal practice was thought an effective way to restore body and mind by pulling the voice back down to appropriately manly pitches. I have a friend who is a radio journalist and he assures me that these suppositions about voice quality are still with us. He is a man and he is gay. He spent the first several years of his career in radio fending off the attempts of producers to deepen, darken and depress his voice, which they described as “having too much smile in it.” Very few women in public life do not worry that their voices are too high or too light or too shrill to command respect. Margaret Thatcher trained for years with a vocal coach to make her voice sound more like those of the other Honourable Members and still earned the nickname Attila the Hen. This hen analogy goes back to the publicity surrounding Nancy Astor, first female member of the British House of Commons in 1919, who was described by her colleage Sir Henry Channon as “a queer combination of warmheartedness, originality and rudeness . . . she rushes about like a decapitated hen . . . intriguing and enjoying the smell of blood . . . the mad witch.” Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. . . .

[UPDATE: Another related post by Jim Aune]

Let the Reader Understand

Mike Aubrey posted a few days back on “knowing” a language. He said, “Knowing a language as in fluency and knowing a language as in linguistic description are very different.” And Mike led off by pointing us to Eric B. Sowell’s post in which he said, “One of the verbs for ‘knowing’ something in Greek is γινώσκω. . . The word is ambiguous. . . ”

Now, with all the humility that Eric calls for,
(and with all the humility that Mike suggests by saying there are “very different” ways of “knowing a language”),
I’d like to turn to another Greek word.

The word is ἀνάγινώσκω. It’s what we know in English as “read.” But it’s a funny word because in Greek it’s a compound word that suggests metaphorical meanings. It’s the combo of γινώσκω [ginOskO, or “know”] and the prefix ἀνά [ana-, or “re-” or maybe “top down”]. So it could be “know from the top down” or “know all over again.” Even for ancient Greek readers, it’s not a precisely defined and precisely “known” word. Nonetheless, the context, the application, has to do with digesting written or visually constructed or pictorial or graphic materials. In English today, we try to tidy that up by using our ambiguous but all-important words from Latin, “literacy” and “literature.”

Now let me show three instances, the three, in which Aristotle uses ἀνάγινώσκω in the Rhetoric. And then let’s “read” the four contexts in which a similar word is used by translators and authors in the Bible. (The Bekker pages and lines are 1407b 11; 1413b 13; and 1414a 19. The Bible references I’ll give below.)

First, Aristotle prescribes the following as he rails against the ambiguities in the writings of Heraclitus:

ὅλως δὲ δεῖ εὐανάγνωστον εἶναι τὸ γεγραμμένον καὶ εὔφραστον· ἔστιν δὲ τὸ αὐτό·

George Kennedy translates that this way:

“What is written should generally be easy to read and easy to speak—which is the same thing.”

(I think Kennedy loses the wordplay, which shows how much Aristotle unwittingly writes like Heraclitus, also ambiguously. But that’s another post for much later.)

Second, Aristotle prescribes “knowing how to speak good Greek” (which is how Kennedy translates τὸ μὲν γάρ ἐστιν ἑλληνίζειν ἐπίστασθαι); he writes to define and to classify the different acceptable and unacceptable styles:

βαστάζονται δὲ οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί, οἷον Χαιρήμων (ἀκριβὴς γὰρ ὥσπερ λογογράφος), καὶ Λικύμνιος τῶν διθυραμβοποιῶν.

“But [poets, translates Kennedy] who write for the reading public are [also] much liked, for example, Chaeremon (for he is as precise as a professional prose writer [logographos]), and Licymnius among the dithyrambic poets.”

Third, Aristotle is denouncing what Kennedy says is “demegoric style” of Greek, which is “like shadow-painting” in which “exactness is wasted work and the worse.” In contrast, Aristotle prescribes another style of speaking Greek:

ἡ μὲν οὖν ἐπιδεικτικὴ λέξις γραφικωτάτη· τὸ γὰρ ἔργοναὐτῆς ἀνάγνωσις·

(Kennedy “reads” that this way: “The epideictic style is most like writing; for its objective is to be read.”)

Now we fast forward several decades, to Alexandria (the namesake of conquering Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil), where the Hebrew scriptures are being translated. The commissioned translators take the Hebrew of Habakkuk (2:2) and put it into Greek as follows:

καὶ ἀπεκρίθη πρός με κύριος καὶ εἶπεν Γράψον ὅρασιν καὶ σαφῶς ἐπὶ πυξίον, ὅπως διώκῃ ὁ ἀναγινώσκων αὐτά.

“And the Lord answered me and said,
Write a vision,
And clearly on a tablet,
so that the reader might pursue them.”
(George E. Howard, NETS)

“And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision, and [that] plainly on a tablet, that he that reads it may run.”
(Sir Lancelot Brenton)

Then we fast forward several more decades, to Jerusalem. Here’s Mark (13:14) translating Jesus with his own writerly commentary and instruction to the reader:

ὅταν δὲ ἴδητε τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως ἑστηκότα ὅπου οὐ δεῖ--ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω--τότε οἱ ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ φευγέτωσαν εἰς τὰ ὄρη

“When you see the ‘abomination of desolation’' standing where it should not--let the reader understand-then let those in Yehuda flee to the mountains,”
(Willis Barnstone)

Likewise, there’s Matthew (24:15) translating Jesus translating Daniel, with the writer's commentary and instruction:

ὅταν οὖν ἴδητε τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου ἑστὸς ἐν τόπῳ ἁγίῳ (ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω)

“So when you see the abomination of desolation
standing in the holy place,
foretold through Daniel the prophet
(let the reader understand),”
(Barnstone)

Finally, there’s Revelation (1:3), with John translating a prophecy, with instructions and promises and warnings to the reader:

μακάριος ὁ ἀναγινώσκων καὶ οἱ ἀκούοντες τοὺς λόγους τῆς προφητείας καὶ τηροῦντες τὰ ἐν αὐτῇ γεγραμμένα ὁ γὰρ καιρὸς ἐγγύς

“Blessed is the one who reads and blessed are they who hear the words of this prophecy and who keep what is written in it. For the time is near.”
(Barnstone)

Can we know from the top? Have we let the reader understand? Who is ὁ ἀναγινώσκων? Are we blessed οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί?