between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Today, a milestone happened.

Today, I have 3,000 words of notes for my thesis. All from just three books, mind you, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to take twice or four times as many notes as there will be actual words in the finished object, but this is significant (I haven't written up my notes for the Plato or Theocritus yet, nor yet the dramatists). This is a magic number.

I can believe in the reality of my thesis now. Three thousand words is more than a twentieth of fifty thousand, which is the minumum requirement of a master's thesis. If I can take three thousand words' worth of notes a month for the next six months, I will account myself happy with my progress.

And then all I have to do is convince my supervisor that this thesis was made for a PhD.

Books 2010: 134

134. Aristophanes, Frogs and Other Plays. Translated by David Barrett, revised with an introduction and notes by Shomit Dutta. Penguin, London and New York, 2007.

This lively translation comprises Aristophanes' Wasps, a play about a man addicted to jury-service; Women at the Thesmophoria, a play of cross-dressing and dramatist jokes; and Frogs, in which Dionysus descends to Hades, accompanied by his slave, to judge a competition between Aeschylus and Euripides. Barrett renders some parts of the work in a bouncy rhyming verse.

It's not very much use to me, seeing as it only mentions Aesclepius once, but (providing you take the Greeks on their own ground) it's funny, energetic, and alive to humour.

Books 2010: 128

nonfiction

128. G.E.R. Lloyd, In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

Lloyd has a long and distinguished career behind him in investigating Greek science, medicine, and philosophy. In recent years he has published a number of works which compare and contrast ancient Chinese science, medicine, and thought with their Greek equivalents, and in many ways his work focuses on the history of thought as much or more as on the history of actions.

In the Grip of Disease highlights this preference in his research interests. Like most books on Greek antiquity, it is heavily weighted towards the early period, with only one chapter (not counting the epilogue) dealing with developments after Aristotle.

The book is divided into nine parts. "Anthropological Perspectives," an introduction to ways of conceptualising how disease was involved with the Greek imagination; "Archaic Literature and Masters of Truth," which starts off with Homer; "Secularisation and Sacralisation," which discusses the concurrent rise of both "sacred" and "natural" ways of thinking through disease; "Tragedy," which is a brief survey of disease in the Attic tragedians (and by no means as lucid and detailed as Mitchell-Boyask's monograph, which I have already mentioned on this lj); "The Historians," which mainly concerns itself with Herodotos's and Thucydides's orientation to disease; "Plato," which is all Plato, all the time, with particular attention to the teleology of the Timaeus; "Aristotle," for which likewise but with Aristotle; and "After Aristotle: Or Did Anything Change?" which mentions Aelius Aristides but in general does not deliver any particularly new or detailed contribution. The concluding "Epilogue" reflects briefly on attitudes to sickness both ancient and modern, and how the rhetoric of disease is employed.

At the end of each chapeter, the relevent texts are given in both the original Greek and in translation. That's a useful learning tool, but it must have been a copyright nightmare.

Scholarly reviews are available here and here. My conclusion is that Lloyd has written an unusual and engaging book, which nonetheless does not go as far into detail concerning Greek attitudes to disease and sickness as the topic could stand.

Which is kind of good for me, because it means there's probably still room for my thesis topic to make an original contribution to knowledge. I hope.