How Humans Came to Know Themselves

How Humans Came to Know Themselves

“Know thyself.” ~ the pronaos of Apollo’s temple at Delphi

Jeremiah 17:9

By juxtaposing paradoxes of

Crabbed contradictions ancient Greeks called gods,

Greeks learned to know themselves, thus taught that love

And war in bed were ugly arthropods,

A sister and a brother in embrace

Of sex and seed insulting another

Unfortunate brother without a trace

Of guilt mixed in with semen, this other

Monstrosity their victim though he threw

A web of metal he had made across

Their sin, cuckolded spider, in a coup

In which Olympian gods all suffered loss.

  All decency and dignity were lost

    In arthropodic godly holocaust.

~ Phillip Whidden

Postscript:

“ ‘Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes in the Iliad?’ asks Friedrich Nietzsche. We modern readers do not even begin to understand them ‘in a sufficiently “Greek” manner’. If we understood them in Greek, ‘we should shudder’. Nietzsche does not mean in the Greek language but in the Greek spirit. Whoever reads the Iliad … has to come to terms with the profound ‘otherness’ of one of the very traditions which lie at the root of ours.”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 17

by phillipw | May 21, 2023 | AP, AR, GR, HA, SE | 0 comments