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119-516: The Telegony ( Ancient Greek : Τηλεγόνεια , romanized :  Tēlegóneia ; Latin : Telegonia ) is a lost ancient Greek epic poem about Telegonus , son of Odysseus by Circe . His name ("born far away") is indicative of his birth on Aeaea , far from Odysseus' home of Ithaca . It was part of the Epic Cycle of poems that recounted the myths of the Trojan War as well as

238-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

357-532: A death and multiple weddings at the end all assorted easily with the conventions of opera seria . Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

476-426: A faithful depiction of the painting's Pre-Raphaelite mannerism but its description of Circe's potion as "distilled of death and shame" also accords with the contemporary (male) identification of Circe with perversity. This is further underlined by his statement (in a letter) that the black panthers there are "images of ruined passion" and by his anticipation at the end of the poem of passion's tide-strown shore / Where

595-474: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

714-546: A horse. By the 19th century, Circe was ceasing to be a mythical figure. Poets treated her either as an individual or at least as the type of a certain kind of woman. The French poet Albert Glatigny addresses "Circé" in his Les vignes folles (1857) and makes of her a voluptuous opium dream, the magnet of masochistic fantasies. Louis-Nicolas Ménard 's sonnet in Rêveries d'un païen mystique (1876) describes her as enchanting all with her virginal look, but appearance belies

833-473: A human endowed with reason to being an unreasoning beast might not be preferable after all, and the resulting debate was to have a powerful impact during the Renaissance . Circe was also taken as the archetype of the predatory female. In the eyes of those from a later age, this behaviour made her notorious both as a magician and as a type of sexually free woman. She has been frequently depicted as such in all

952-571: A night of love with him, she explains the characteristics of the animals in her charge: the lions are the brave, the bears are the violent, the wolves are those forever dissatisfied, and so on (Canto 6). In Canto 7 he is introduced to those who experience frustration: a cat that has allowed its prey to escape; an agitated dragon; a fox constantly on the look-out for traps; a dog that bays the moon; Aesop's lion in love that allowed himself to be deprived of his teeth and claws. There are also emblematic satirical portraits of various Florentine personalities. In

1071-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

1190-440: A quarrel with his mother-in-law and killed her; Cassiphone then killed Telemachus to avenge her mother's death. On hearing of this, Odysseus died of grief. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.72.5) cites Xenagoras , the 2nd-century BC historian, as claiming that Odysseus and Circe had three different sons: Rhomos , Anteias , and Ardeias , who respectively founded three cities called by their names: Rome , Antium , and Ardea . In

1309-569: A series of poetic dialogues, in the first of which, after a long series of incantations to the seven planets of the Hermetic tradition , most humans appear changed into different creatures in the scrying bowl. The sorceress Circe is then asked by her handmaiden Moeris about the type of behaviour with which each is associated. According to Circe, for instance, fireflies are the learned, wise, and illustrious amidst idiots, asses, and obscure men (Question 32). In later sections different characters discuss

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1428-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

1547-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1666-529: A whirlpool drowning as the mariners approach the mountain of Purgatory . No Greek source was available to Dante, only the Latin recensions of Dictys and Dares . Among the many operas based on the myths of Odysseus and those around him, there is but one based on Telegonus, Carlo Grua's Telegono (premiered in Düsseldorf, 1697) of which an aria "Dia le mosse a miei contenti" may be noted. Divine intervention,

1785-588: A year in the Odyssey (books 10-12), has borne his son, Telegonus (Τηλέγονος, "born far away"). He grows up living with Circe on the island of Aeaea . On the goddess Athena 's advice, Circe tells him the name of his father. In a detail inserted into the account in the Epitome of the Bibliotheke , she gives him a supernatural spear to defend himself, which is tipped with the sting of a poisonous stingray and

1904-478: Is H.D. 's "Circe", from her collection Hymen (1921). In her soliloquy she reviews the conquests with which she has grown bored, then mourns the one instance when she failed. In not naming Ulysses himself, Doolittle universalises an emotion with which all women might identify. At the end of the century, British poet Carol Ann Duffy wrote a monologue entitled Circe which pictures the goddess addressing an audience of "nereids and nymphs". In this outspoken episode in

2023-578: Is a mirror image of the Classical story. In place of the witch who easily seduces the men she meets, a male enchanter is resisted by female virtue. In the 20th century, the Circe episode was to be re-evaluated in two poetic sequels to the Odyssey . In the first of these, Giovanni Pascoli 's L'Ultimo Viaggio ( The Last Voyage , 1906), the aging hero sets out to rediscover the emotions of his youth by retracing his journey from Troy , only to discover that

2142-463: Is a very different interpretation of the encounter with Circe in John Gower 's long didactic poem Confessio Amantis (1380). Ulysses is depicted as deeper in sorcery and readier of tongue than Circe and through this means he leaves her pregnant with Telegonus. Most of the account deals with the son's later quest for and accidental killing of his father, drawing the moral that only evil can come of

2261-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

2380-421: Is buried and Circe makes the others immortal. Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus marries Circe. According to a later Hellenistic tradition, Circe brought Odysseus back to life after his death, and he arranged for Telemachus to marry his half-sister Cassiphone , Odysseus and Circe's daughter. But after a quarrell with Circe, Telemachus slew his mother-in-law, and in rage Cassiphone killed him, avenging thus

2499-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

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2618-561: Is following Hesiod 's tradition in making Circe arrive in Aeaea on Helios' chariot, while Valerius Flaccus writes that Circe was borne away by winged dragons. Roman poets associated her with the most ancient traditions of Latium, and made her home to be on the promontory of Circeo . Homer describes Circe as "a dreadful goddess with lovely hair and human speech". Apollonius writes that she (just like every other descendant of Helios) had flashing golden eyes that shot out rays of light, with

2737-473: Is more a matter of allusion and is nowhere overtly stated beyond the title. It is a reflection on contemporary gender politics that scarcely needs the disguises of Augusta Webster's. With two other poems by male writers it is much the same: Louis Macneice 's, for example, whose "Circe" appeared in his first volume, Poems (London, 1935); or Robert Lowell 's, whose "Ulysses and Circe" appeared in his last, Day by Day (New York, 1977). Both poets have appropriated

2856-624: Is most likely to have been composed in the 6th century BC. Only two lines of the poem's original text survive. For its storyline, we are dependent primarily on a summary of the Telegonus myth in the Chrestomathy of one "Proclus". The Telegony comprises two distinct episodes: Odysseus ' voyage to Thesprotia , and the story of Telegonus . Probably each of the two books of the Telegony related one of these episodes. The poem opens after

2975-431: Is one of the characters, the power of her potion is differently interpreted. The inner tendencies unlocked by it are not the choice between animal nature and reason but between two types of impersonality, between divine clarity and the poet's participatory and tragic vision of life. In the poem, Circe discovers a youth laid asleep in the portico of her temple by a draught of her ivy-wreathed bowl. On awaking from possession by

3094-592: Is questioned and beasts are proved to be of superior wisdom and virtue. Strabo writes that a tomb-shrine of Circe was attended in one of the Pharmacussae islands, off the coast of Attica , typical for hero-worship. Circe was also venerated in Mount Circeo , in the Italian peninsula , which took its name after her according to ancient legend. Strabo says that Circe had a shrine in the small town, and that

3213-500: Is that there was a wholly separate epic called the Thesprotis ; and yet a fourth possibility is that the Telegony and Thesprotis were two separate poems that were at some stage compiled into a single Telegony . The date of composition of the Telegony is uncertain. Cyrene , the native city of purported author Eugammon, was founded in 631 BC; but the narrative details may have existed prior to Eugammon's version, perhaps even in

3332-418: Is transformed into his true animal likeness. It has further been suggested that John Milton 's Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) is a sequel to Tempe Restored , a masque in which Circe had figured two years earlier, and that the situation presented there is a reversal of the Greek myth. At the start of the masque , the character Comus is described as the son of Circe by Bacchus , god of wine, and

3451-620: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

3570-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

3689-564: The Harvard Advocate . Circe herself does not appear, her character is suggested by what is in the grounds and the beasts in the forest beyond: panthers, pythons, and peacocks that look at us with the eyes of men whom we knew long ago . Rather than a temptress, she has become an emasculatory threat. Several female poets make Circe stand up for herself, using the soliloquy form to voice the woman's position. The 19th-century English poet Augusta Webster , much of whose writing explored

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3808-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

3927-520: The Telegony may have also been known as the Thesprotis (Greek: Θεσπρωτίς), which is referred to once by Pausanias in the 2nd century AD; alternatively, the Thesprotis may have been a name for the first book of the Telegony , which is set in Thesprotia . Such naming of isolated episodes within a larger epic was common practice for the ancient readers of the Homeric epics. A third possibility

4046-420: The Trojan War and she changes most of his crew into swine . He manages to persuade her to return them to human shape, lives with her for a year and has sons by her, including Latinus and Telegonus . Her ability to change others into animals is further highlighted by the story of Picus , an Italian king whom she turns into a woodpecker for resisting her advances. Another story tells of her falling in love with

4165-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

4284-472: The oral tradition . There is a distinct possibility that the author of the Odyssey knew at least some version of the Telegony story (the Thesprotian episode and Telegonus' unusual spear in the Telegony may have been based on Tiresias ' prophecy in Odyssey book 11; but it is also possible that the Odyssey poet used the Telegonus story as a basis for Teiresias' prophecy). Certainly, Eugammon's poem

4403-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

4522-519: The sun god Helios and Perse , one of the three thousand Oceanid nymphs . In Orphic Argonautica , her mother is called Asterope instead. Her brothers were Aeëtes , keeper of the Golden Fleece and father of Medea , and Perses . Her sister was Pasiphaë , the wife of King Minos and mother of the Minotaur . Other accounts make her and her niece Medea the daughters of Hecate ,

4641-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

4760-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

4879-542: The Argonauts find Circe bathing in salt water; the animals that surround her are not former lovers transformed but primeval "beasts, not resembling the beasts of the wild, nor yet like men in body, but with a medley of limbs." Circe invites Jason, Medea and their crew into her mansion; uttering no words, they show her the still bloody sword they used to cut Absyrtus down, and Circe immediately realizes they have visited her to be purified of murder. She purifies them by slitting

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4998-419: The Circe episode among them. The two most common representations have Circe surrounded by the transformed sailors and Odysseus threatening the sorceress with his sword. In the case of the former, the animals are not always boars but also include, for instance, the ram, dog and lion on the 6th-century BC Boston kylix . Often the transformation is only partial, involving the head and perhaps a sprouting tail, while

5117-558: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Circe The best known of her legends is told in Homer 's Odyssey when Odysseus visits her island of Aeaea on the way back from

5236-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

5355-712: The Gryllus episode in Plutarch occurs as a chapter of Thomas Love Peacock 's late novel, Gryll Grange (1861), under the title "Aristophanes in London". Half Greek comedy, half Elizabethan masque, it is acted at the Grange by the novel's characters as a Christmas entertainment. In it Spiritualist mediums raise Circe and Gryllus and try to convince the latter of the superiority of modern times, which he rejects as intellectually and materially regressive. An Italian work drawing on

5474-558: The Italian island where Circe dwells and hears the cries of her many male victims, who now number more than the pigs of earlier accounts: The roars of lions that refuse the chain, / The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, / And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears. In Ovid's 1st-century poem Metamorphoses , the fourth episode covers Circe's encounter with Ulysses (the Roman name of Odysseus), whereas book 14 covers

5593-577: The Thesprotian queen Callidice , who bears him a son, Polypoetes . Odysseus fights for the Thesprotians in a war against the neighbouring Brygoi ; the gods participate in the war, Ares routing Odysseus and the Thesprotians, countered by Athena , ever Odysseus' patron; Apollo intervenes between the battling gods. Later, after the death of Callidice, Odysseus makes their son Polypoetes king of Thesprotia and returned to Ithaca. Meanwhile, it transpires that Circe , with whom Odysseus had an affair for

5712-620: The Tyrrhenian shore (that is, the western coast of Italy). In the same poem, Circe's brother Aeëtes describes how Circe was transferred to Aeaea: "I noted it once after taking a ride in my father Helios' chariot, when he was taking my sister Circe to the western land and we came to the coast of the Tyrrhenian mainland, where she dwells to this day, very far from the Colchian land." A scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius claims that Apollonius

5831-631: The Tyrsenoi, that is the Etruscans . The Telegony , an epic now lost, relates the later history of the last of these. Circe eventually informed her son who his absent father was and, when he set out to find Odysseus, gave him a poisoned spear. When Telegonus arrived in Ithaca, Odysseus was away in Thesprotia , fighting the Brygi. Telegonus began to ravage the island; Odysseus came to defend his land. With

5950-466: The accursed reality. Poets in English were not far behind in this lurid portrayal. Lord de Tabley 's "Circe" (1895) is a thing of decadent perversity likened to a tulip, A flaunting bloom, naked and undivine... / With freckled cheeks and splotch'd side serpentine, / A gipsy among flowers . That central image is echoed by the blood-striped flower of T.S.Eliot 's student poem "Circe's Palace" (1909) in

6069-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

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6188-522: The arts from the Renaissance down to modern times. Western paintings established a visual iconography for the figure, but also went for inspiration to other stories concerning Circe that appear in Ovid 's Metamorphoses . The episodes of Scylla and Picus added the vice of violent jealousy to her bad qualities and made her a figure of fear as well as of desire. By most accounts, she was the daughter of

6307-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

6426-549: The author of Argonautica Orphica noting that she had hair like fiery rays. Ovid 's The Cure for Love implies that Circe might have been taught the knowledge of herbs and potions from her mother Perse, who seems to have had similar skills. In the Argonautica , Apollonius relates that Circe purified the Argonauts for the murder of Medea's brother Absyrtus , possibly reflecting an early tradition. In this poem,

6545-411: The chorus in place of the usual Satyrs . Fragments of Anaxilas also mention the transformation and one of the characters complains of the impossibility of scratching his face now that he is a pig. The theme of Circe turning men into a variety of animals was elaborated by later writers. In his episodic work The Sorrows of Love (first century BC), Parthenius of Nicaea interpolated another episode into

6664-595: The danger to be found in the palace, and is rewarded at the end by being given back his human shape. In most accounts Ulysses only demands this for his own men. In her survey of the Transformations of Circe , Judith Yarnall comments of this figure, who started out as a comparatively minor goddess of unclear origin, that "What we know for certain – what Western literature attests to – is her remarkable staying power…These different versions of Circe's myth can be seen as mirrors, sometimes clouded and sometimes clear, of

6783-569: The development of the mediaeval legend of Morgan le Fay . In addition, it has been argued that the fairy Titania in William Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600) is an inversion of Circe. Titania (daughter of the Titans ) was a title by which the sorceress was known in Classical times. In this case the tables are turned on the character, who is queen of the fairies. She is made to love an ass after, rather than before, he

6902-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

7021-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

7140-718: The disheveled seaweed hates the sea . The Australian A. D. Hope 's "Circe – after the painting by Dosso Dossi", on the other hand, frankly admits humanity's animal inheritance as natural and something in which even Circe shares. In the poem, he links the fading rationality and speech of her lovers to her own animal cries in the act of love. There remain some poems that bear her name that have more to do with their writers' private preoccupations than with reinterpreting her myth. The link with it in Margaret Atwood 's "Circe/Mud Poems", first published in You Are Happy (1974),

7259-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

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7378-423: The eighth and last canto he has a conversation with a pig that, like the Gryllus of Plutarch, does not want to be changed back and condemns human greed, cruelty and conceit. The other Italian author was the esoteric philosopher Giordano Bruno , who wrote in Latin. His Cantus Circaeus ( The Incantation of Circe ) was the fourth work on memory and the association of ideas by him to be published in 1582. It contains

7497-433: The end it is only the horse, formerly a courtesan, who wants to return to her former state. The same theme occupies La Fontaine's late fable, "The Companions of Ulysses" (XII.1, 1690), which also echoes Plutarch and Gelli. Once transformed, every animal (which includes a lion, a bear, a wolf and a mole) protests that their lot is better and refuses to be restored to human shape. Charles Dennis shifted this fable to stand at

7616-423: The equal of his mother in enchantment. He too changes travelers into beastly forms that "roll with pleasure in a sensual sty". Having waylaid the heroine and immobilized her on an enchanted chair, he stands over her, wand in hand, and presses on her a magical cup (representing sexual pleasure and intemperance), which she repeatedly refuses, arguing for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. The picture presented

7735-519: The events depicted in the Odyssey. According to Proclus' summary, the Telegony opens with the burial of Penelope 's suitors. Odysseus makes sacrifices to the Nymphs . He makes a voyage to Elis , where he visits an otherwise unknown figure Polyxenos, who gives him a bowl depicting the story of Trophonius . Odysseus returns to Ithaca and then travels to Thesprotia , presumably to make the sacrifices commanded by Tiresias in Odyssey 11. There, he weds

7854-536: The events that led up to and followed it. The story of the Telegony comes chronologically after that of the Odyssey and is the final episode in the Epic Cycle. The poem was sometimes attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta (8th century BC), but in one source it is said to have been stolen from Musaeus by Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene (6th century BC) (see Cyclic poets ). The poem comprised two books of verse in dactylic hexameter . In Antiquity ,

7973-402: The fantasies and assumptions of the cultures that produced them." After appearing as just one of the characters that Odysseus encounters on his wandering, "Circe herself, in the twists and turns of her story through the centuries, has gone through far more metamorphoses than those she inflicted on Odysseus's companions." One of the most enduring literary themes connected with the figure of Circe

8092-416: The female condition, has a dramatic monologue in blank verse titled "Circe" in her volume Portraits (1870). There the sorceress anticipates her meeting with Ulysses and his men and insists that she does not turn men into pigs—she merely takes away the disguise that makes them seem human. But any draught, pure water, natural wine, / out of my cup, revealed them to themselves / and to each other. Change? there

8211-435: The first two sections. The Circe episode is viewed by him as a narrow escape from death of the spirit: With twisted hands and thighs we rolled on burning sands, / a hanging mess of hissing vipers glued in sun!... / Farewell the brilliant voyage, ended! Prow and soul / moored in the muddy port of the contented beast! / O prodigal, much-traveled soul, is this your country? His escape from this mire of sensuality comes one day when

8330-504: The goddess of witchcraft by Aeëtes, usually said to be her brother instead. She was often confused with Calypso , due to her shifts in behavior and personality, and the association that both of them had with Odysseus . According to Greek legend, Circe lived on the island of Aeaea . Although Homer is vague when it comes to the island's whereabouts, the early 3rd BC author Apollonius of Rhodes 's epic poem Argonautica locates Aeaea somewhere south of Aethalia ( Elba ), within view of

8449-405: The gods and the giants , one of the giants, Picolous , fled the battle against the gods and came to Aeaea, Circe's island. He attempted to chase Circe away, only to be killed by Helios, Circe's ally and father. From the blood of the slain giant, a herb came into existence; moly , named thus from the battle (malos) and with a white-coloured flower, either for the white Sun who had killed Picolous or

8568-502: The gods, return home safely and recover his kingdom. Circe also advises him on how this might be achieved and furnishes him with the protections he will need and the means to communicate with the dead. On his return, she further advises him about two possible routes home, warning him, however, that both carry great danger. Towards the end of Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BC), it is stated that Circe bore Odysseus three sons: Agrius (otherwise unknown); Latinus ; and Telegonus , who ruled over

8687-588: The head of his translation of La Fontaine, Select Fables (1754), but provides his own conclusion that When Mortals from the path of Honour stray, / And the strong passions over reason sway, / What are they then but Brutes? / 'Tis vice alone that constitutes / Th'enchanting wand and magic bowl, The exterior form of Man they wear, / But are in fact both Wolf and Bear, / The transformation's in the Soul. Louis Fuzelier and Marc-Antoine Legrand titled their comic opera of 1718 Les animaux raisonnables . It had more or less

8806-522: The intervention of Circe, the victims find their natural condition as soon as they set foot on the island. The philosopher here is not Gelli's elephant but the bat that retreats from human contact into the darkness, like Bruno's fireflies (VI). The only one who wishes to change in Gozzi's work is the bear, a satirist who had dared to criticize Circe and had been changed as a punishment (IX). There were two more satirical dramas in later centuries. One modelled on

8925-503: The island of Eea is deserted. What in his dream of love he had taken for the roaring of lions and Circe's song was now no more than the sound of the sea-wind in autumnal oaks (Cantos 16–17). This melancholy dispelling of illusion is echoed in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938) by Nikos Kazantzakis . The fresh voyage in search of new meaning to life recorded there grows out of the hero's initial rejection of his past experiences in

9044-518: The island to her home with her lovely singing while weaving on an enormous loom, but later drugs them so that they change shape. One of her Homeric epithets is polypharmakos , "knowing many drugs or charms". Circe invites the hero Odysseus' crew to a feast of familiar food, a pottage of cheese and meal, sweetened with honey and laced with wine, but also mixed with one of her magical potions that turns them into swine. Only Eurylochus , who suspects treachery, does not go in. He escapes to warn Odysseus and

9163-546: The last animal, a philosopher in its former existence, wants to. The work was translated into English soon after in 1557 by Henry Iden . Later the English poet Edmund Spenser also made reference to Plutarch's dialogue in the section of his Faerie Queene (1590) based on the Circe episode which appears at the end of Book II. Sir Guyon changes back the victims of Acrasia's erotic frenzy in the Bower of Bliss, most of whom are abashed at their fall from chivalric grace, But one above

9282-441: The later 5th-century CE epic Dionysiaca , its author Nonnus mentions Phaunus, Circe's son by the sea god Poseidon . Three ancient plays about Circe have been lost: the work of the tragedian Aeschylus and of the 4th-century BC comic dramatists Ephippus of Athens and Anaxilas . The first told the story of Odysseus' encounter with Circe. Vase paintings from the period suggest that Odysseus' half-transformed animal-men formed

9401-430: The murder of her mother. The 1st-century AD Roman fabulist Hyginus differs from Proclus in adding a few details. First, it is both Odysseus and Telemachus who engage Telegonus in combat. Hyginus then adds that Odysseus had received an oracle to beware his son. Finally, Hyginus attributes to Telegonus a son named Italus , the eponymous founder of Italy; and to Telemachus he attributes a son named Latinus , whose name

9520-467: The myth to make a personal statement about their broken relationships. Several Renaissance epics of the 16th century include lascivious sorceresses based on the Circe figure. These generally live in an isolated spot devoted to pleasure, to which lovers are lured and later changed into beasts. They include the following: Later scholarship has identified elements from the character of both Circe and especially her fellow enchantress Medea as contributing to

9639-558: The new title of Homines voluptatibus transformantur , men are transformed by their passions. This explains her appearance in the Nighttown section named after her in James Joyce 's novel Ulysses . Written in the form of a stage script, it makes of Circe the brothel madam, Bella Cohen. Bloom, the book's protagonist, fantasizes that she turns into a cruel man-tamer named Mr Bello who makes him get down on all fours and rides him like

9758-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

9877-522: The others who have remained with the ship. Before Odysseus reaches Circe's palace, Hermes , the messenger god sent by the goddess of wisdom Athena , intercepts him and reveals how he might defeat Circe in order to free his crew from their enchantment. Hermes provides Odysseus with moly to protect him from Circe's magic. He also tells Odysseus that he must then draw his sword and act as if he were going to attack her. From there, as Hermes foretold, Circe would ask Odysseus to bed, but Hermes advises caution, for

9996-599: The people there kept a bowl they claimed belonged to Odysseus. The promontory is occupied by ruins of a platform attributed with great probability to a temple of Venus or Circe. Giovanni Boccaccio provided a digest of what was known of Circe during the Middle Ages in his De mulieribus claris ( Famous Women , 1361–1362). While following the tradition that she lived in Italy, he comments wryly that there are now many more temptresses like her to lead men astray. There

10115-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

10234-430: The poetic frenzy it has induced, he craves for it to be continued. With the Renaissance there began to be a reinterpretation of what it was that changed the men, if it was not simply magic. For Socrates , in Classical times, it had been gluttony overcoming their self-control. But for the influential emblematist Andrea Alciato , it was unchastity. In the second edition of his Emblemata (1546), therefore, Circe became

10353-460: The rest in speciall, / That had an hog beene late, hight Grille by name, / Repined greatly, and did him miscall, / That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall. Two other Italians wrote rather different works that centre on the animal within the human. One was Niccolò Machiavelli in his unfinished long poem, L'asino d'oro ( The Golden Ass , 1516). The author meets a beautiful herdswoman surrounded by Circe's herd of beasts. After spending

10472-473: The rest of the body is human. In describing an otherwise obscure 5th-century Greek bronze in the Walters Art Museum that takes the form of a man on all fours with the foreparts of a pig, the commentator asks in what other way could an artist depict someone bewitched other than as a man with an animal head. In these scenes Circe is shown almost invariably stirring the potion with her wand, although

10591-451: The same scenario transposed into another medium and set to music by Jacques Aubert . Circe, wishing to be rid of the company of Ulysses, agrees to change back his companions, but only the dolphin is willing. The others, who were formerly a corrupt judge (now a wolf), a financier (a pig), an abused wife (a hen), a deceived husband (a bull) and a flibbertigibbet (a linnet), find their present existence more agreeable. The Venetian Gasparo Gozzi

10710-437: The sea" (i.e., the poison of the ray). (In another respect, however, Odysseus' death contradicts the prophecy of Tiresias, who predicted ( Od . 11.135) that a "gentle death" would come to Odysseus "in sleek old age.") As Odysseus lies dying, he and Telegonus recognize one another, and Telegonus laments his mistake. Telegonus brings his father's corpse, Penelope , and Odysseus' other son Telemachus , back to Aeaea , where Odysseus

10829-471: The sea-god Glaucus , who prefers the nymph Scylla to her. In revenge, Circe poisoned the water where her rival bathed and turned her into a dreadful monster. Depictions, even in Classical times, diverged from the detail in Homer's narrative, which was later to be reinterpreted morally as a cautionary story against drunkenness. Early philosophical questions were also raised about whether the change from being

10948-406: The sight of some fishermen, a mother and her baby enjoying the simple comforts of food and drink, recalls him to life, its duties and delights. Where the attempt by Pascoli's hero to recapture the past ended in failure, Kazantzakis' Odysseus, already realising the emptiness of his experiences, journeys into what he hopes will be a fuller future. Scenes from the Odyssey are common on Greek pottery,

11067-409: The spot where Scylla usually took her bath, and poisoned the water. When Scylla went down to it to bathe, dogs sprang from her thighs and she was transformed into the familiar monster from the Odyssey . In another, similar story, Picus was a Latian king whom Circe turned into a woodpecker. He was the son of Saturn , and a king of Latium . He fell in love and married a nymph , Canens , to whom he

11186-431: The stories of Picus and Glaucus. Plutarch took up the theme in a lively dialogue that was later to have several imitators. Contained in his 1st-century Moralia is the Gryllus episode in which Circe allows Odysseus to interview a fellow Greek turned into a pig. After his interlocutor informs Odysseus that his present existence is preferable to the human, they engage in a philosophical dialogue in which every human value

11305-543: The story of her encounter with Ulysses appears as a verse epic in three cantos. This takes its beginning from Homer's account, but it is then embroidered; in particular, Circe's love for Ulysses remains unrequited. As "Circe's Palace", Nathaniel Hawthorne retold the Homeric account as the third section in his collection of stories from Greek mythology, Tanglewood Tales (1853). The transformed Picus continually appears in this, trying to warn Ulysses, and then Eurylochus, of

11424-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

11543-475: The terrified Circe who turned white; the very plant, which mortals are unable to pluck from the ground, that Hermes would later give to Odysseus in order to defeat Circe. In Homer's Odyssey , an 8th-century BC sequel to his Trojan War epic Iliad , Circe is initially described as a beautiful goddess living in a palace isolated in the midst of a dense wood on her island of Aeaea. Around her home prowl strangely docile lions and wolves. She lures any who land on

11662-445: The throat of a suckling pig and letting the blood drip on them. Afterwards, Medea tells Circe their tale in great detail, albeit omitting the part of Absyrtus' murder; nevertheless Circe is not fooled, and greatly disapproves of their actions. However, out of pity for the girl, and on account of their kinship, she promises not to be an obstacle on their way, and orders Jason and Medea to leave her island immediately. The sea-god Glaucus

11781-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

11900-478: The time that Odysseus was staying with Circe. Pestered by the amorous attentions of King Calchus the Daunian , the sorceress invited him to a drugged dinner that turned him into a pig and then shut him up in her sties. He was only released when his army came searching for him on the condition that he would never set foot on her island again. Among Latin treatments, Virgil 's Aeneid relates how Aeneas skirts

12019-632: The transformation of Odysseus' companions when, though Head, face and members bristle into swine, / Still cursed with sense, their mind remains alone . Dobson's " The Prayer of the Swine to Circe " (1640) depicts the horror of being imprisoned in an animal body in this way with the human consciousness unchanged. There appears to be no relief, for only in the final line is it revealed that Odysseus has arrived to free them. But in Matthew Arnold 's dramatic poem "The Strayed Reveller" (1849), in which Circe

12138-663: The transformation theme was the comedy by Ettore Romagnoli, La figlia del Sole ( The Daughter of the Sun , 1919). Hercules arrives on the island of Circe with his servant Cercopo and has to be rescued by the latter when he too is changed into a pig. But, since the naturally innocent other animals had become corrupted by imitating human vices, the others who had been changed were refused when they begged to be rescued. Also in England, Austin Dobson engaged more seriously with Homer's account of

12257-477: The treacherous goddess could still "unman" him unless he has her swear by the names of the gods that she will not take any further action against him. Following this advice, Odysseus is able to free his men. After they have all remained on the island for a year, Circe advises Odysseus that he must first visit the Underworld , something a mortal has never yet done, in order to gain knowledge about how to appease

12376-411: The type of the prostitute . His Emblem 76 is titled Cavendum a meretricibus ; its accompanying Latin verses mention Picus, Scylla and the companions of Ulysses, and concludes that "Circe with her famous name indicates a whore and any who loves such a one loses his reason". His English imitator Geoffrey Whitney used a variation of Alciato's illustration in his own Choice of Emblemes (1586) but gave it

12495-420: The use of images in the imagination in order to facilitate use of the art of memory , which is the real aim of the work. French writers were to take their lead from Gelli in the following century. Antoine Jacob wrote a one-act social comedy in rhyme, Les Bestes raisonnables ( The Reasoning Beasts , 1661) which allowed him to satirise contemporary manners. On the isle of Circe, Ulysses encounters an ass that

12614-482: The use of sorcery. The story of Ulysses and Circe was retold as an episode in Georg Rollenhagen's German verse epic, Froschmeuseler ( The Frogs and Mice , Magdeburg, 1595). In this 600-page expansion of the pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia , it is related at the court of the mice and takes up sections 5–8 of the first part. In Lope de Vega 's miscellany La Circe – con otras rimas y prosas (1624),

12733-428: The war between the sexes, Circe describes the various ways in which all parts of a pig could and should be cooked. Another indication of the progression in interpreting the Circe figure is given by two poems a century apart, both of which engage with paintings of her. The first is the sonnet that Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in response to Edward Burne-Jones ' "The Wine of Circe" in his volume Poems (1870). It gives

12852-728: The weapon Circe gave him, Telegonus killed his father unknowingly. Telegonus then brought back his father's corpse to Aeaea, together with Penelope and Odysseus' son by her, Telemachus . After burying Odysseus, Circe made the other three immortal. Circe married Telemachus, and Telegonus married Penelope by the advice of Athena. According to an alternative version depicted in Lycophron 's 3rd-century BC poem Alexandra (and John Tzetzes ' scholia on it), Circe used magical herbs to bring Odysseus back to life after he had been killed by Telegonus. Odysseus then gave Telemachus to Circe's daughter Cassiphone in marriage. Sometime later, Telemachus had

12971-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

13090-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

13209-441: Was another Italian who returned to Gelli for inspiration in the 14 prose Dialoghi dell'isola di Circe ( Dialogues from Circe's Island ) published as journalistic pieces between 1760 and 1764. In this moral work, the aim of Ulysses in talking to the beasts is to learn more of the human condition. It includes figures from fable ( The fox and the crow , XIII) and from myth to illustrate its vision of society at variance. Far from needing

13328-580: Was given to the Latin language . Numerous Latin poets make Telegonus the founder of Praeneste or Tusculum , important Latin towns. In Dante 's Divine Comedy , in the eighth bolgia of the Inferno , Dante and his guide meet Ulisse among the false counsellors, and receive a variant accounting of Ulisse's death "from the sea", in a five-month journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules , that has ended in

13447-552: Was her ability to change men into animals. There was much speculation concerning how this could be, whether the human consciousness changed at the same time, and even whether it was a change for the better. The Gryllus dialogue was taken up by another Italian writer, Giovan Battista Gelli , in his La Circe (1549). This is a series of ten philosophical and moral dialogues between Ulysses and the humans transformed into various animals, ranging from an oyster to an elephant, in which Circe sometimes joins. Most argue against changing back; only

13566-440: Was in love with a beautiful maiden, Scylla , but she spurned his affections no matter how he tried to win her heart. Glaucus went to Circe, and asked her for a magic potion to make Scylla fall in love with him too. But Circe was smitten by Glaucus herself, and fell in love with him. Glaucus did not love her back, and turned down her offer of marriage. Enraged, Circe used her knowledge of herbs and plants to take her revenge; she found

13685-473: Was included in her collection The Path of Dreams (1900), the first stanza of which relates the usual story of men turned into swine by her spell. But then a second stanza presents a sensuous portrait of an unnamed woman, very much in the French vein; once more, it concludes, "A Circe's spells transform men into swine". This is no passive victim of male projections but a woman conscious of her sexual power. So too

13804-447: Was made by the god Hephaestus. A storm forces Telegonus onto Ithaca without his realizing where he is. As is customary for Homeric heroes in unfriendly land, he commits piracy, and unwittingly begins stealing Odysseus' cattle. Odysseus comes to defend his property. During the ensuing fight, Telegonus kills Odysseus with his unusual spear, thereby partially fulfilling Tiresias' prophecy in Odyssey 11 that death would come to Odysseus "out of

13923-469: Was no change; / only disguise gone from them unawares . The mythological character of the speaker contributes at a safe remove to the Victorian discourse on women's sexuality by expressing female desire and criticizing the subordinate role given to women in heterosexual politics. Two American poets also explored feminine psychology in poems ostensibly about the enchantress. Leigh Gordon Giltner's "Circe"

14042-403: Was once a doctor, a lion that had been a valet, a female doe and a horse, all of whom denounce the decadence of the times. The ass sees human asses everywhere, Asses in the town square, asses in the suburbs, / Asses in the provinces, asses proud at court, / Asses browsing in the meadows, military asses trooping, / Asses tripping it at balls, asses in the theatre stalls. To drive the point home, in

14161-399: Was utterly devoted. One day as he was hunting boars, he came upon Circe, who was gathering herbs in the woods. Circe fell immediately in love with him; but Picus, just like Glaucus before him, spurned her and declared that he would remain forever faithful to Canens. Circe, furious, turned Picus into a woodpecker. His wife Canens eventually wasted away in her mourning. During the war between

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