![]() The makers of the modern movie Troy starring buff Brad Pitt could not resist: they added a final line to the truncated couplet which ends the written text of Homer. Its ending-for my examples, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid-always unravels. Of course the epic, the story of the founding of empires, cannot survive time. ![]() One reason why of Homer’s military epics we have thousands of pages but of Sappho’s anarchic tunes we earned only shreds. The pathless expressions of ecstasy, abandon, and dissolution are meant to be controlled.Īpollo, the slayer of Python, controller of prophecy, is the god of art and not Bacchus, sexed up and drunk, ready to tear his way through the towns, ready even to be himself torn up. So traditions are by definition imperial tools meant to circumscribe expression. What was honored and carried through canon-makers like universities and governments. “Tradition” is what made it through war and the depredations of history. ![]()
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