Spring 2008 CLAS-E116/W April Exchanges

This page shares e-mailed questions, conversations — exchanges — bewteen students and Professor Nagy and the TFs on topics related to class Dialogues. The e-mails are edited for format only.

On April 25 Nik Galanis wrote:

By the way, following dialogue 15, the system used by Agamemnon to notify Mycenae for the fall of Troy, is called fryktories.

I also attach a map of Greece from the OTE (Hellenic Organization of Telecommunications) Museum, showing the fryktories.

Concerning also Claude Chappe's semaphore system mentioned by Greg, I am almost certain there is a reference in a Three Musketeers adventure, as light signs between Calais and Dover, but I am afraid I can not remember in which. Of course the events in Dumas' play are around 1630AD, but Dumas himself introduced the Three Musketeers in 1844, the same year Morse invented the telegraph.

I am attaching the fryctories.jpgs. The sites depicted on the map are the same as mentioned by Aeschylus: *Troy (mount Idi) - Ermaio Limnou - Athos - Makisto Euboias - Messapio Biotias - Kitheronas - Aegiplagto - Arachneo - Mycenae.

Nik

Click below for the images:
fryctories.jpg fryctories_2.jpg

On April 23 Nik Galanis wrote:

Dear Kevin,

Regarding Dialogue 17: 'Man is the dream of a shade' reminds me of the poem of 24 verses by E.A. Poe:

A dream within a dream
'Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?'

and Prospero's words in Shakespeare's Tempest:
'...
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.- ...'

Walt Witman's dreaming of present and future reminds me of Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath when Tom Joad utters:

'*Ma*: Then what, Tom?
*Tom*: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready and where people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build. I'll be there, too.
*Ma*: I don't understand it, Tom.
*Tom*: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about.'

Allen Ginsberg's reference of Charon perhaps reminds of Chris de Burgh's 'Don't pay the ferryman' ?

My best
Nikiforos

Click here for Nikiforos' Paper 2. (PDF format)