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Jun. 22nd, 2006 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryI had a dream two nights ago. I wish I could remember more of it now, but all that comes to me is an oddity I remarked to myself about immediately I awkoe (no chance of writing it down when one is awakened each morning by someone crawling all over one and blowing raspberries).
In the dream I was an agoreutes, but everytime the word was used (whether in thinking, or speech, or what have you) I know it came out aguretes.
For those who don't know, agoreutes is a more techinical designation for a rhetor, or orator in Latin. Such a rhetor in late antiquity would have been a far more important person than a mere lawyer. He would have been perceived as protecting and defining Greek tradition and, through the power of his words, as possessing the ability to intervene in relations between the individual or the city and the center of the Imperial government. How else could I see myself in oneiric wish-fulfillment?
An aguretes, however, is rather the opposite. He a barbarian (Near-Eastern) who claims the miraculous power to intervene for the individual or city with heaven. He demonstrated his authority not through mastery of tradition, but through mastery of his own body, fasting and abstaining from sex (sometimes to the point of self-castration). This is the category that educated Greeks would have seen Jesus or Paul as belonging to, and indeed this type provided the elementary basis for the establishment of the familiar figure of the Christian ascetic monk. They attracted attention to themselves by performing soemthing like a modern show of stage magic. They wandered and lived by begging in return for their prayers and rituals. Any person of sophistication would have known that their claims and powers were all false (compare the fakir in British India), or, if, they did accomplish anything, it was through magic, not peity.
And that is the point of cnotact between the two. I can scarcely think of an important rhetor who some envious person did not suspect or even accuse of practicing magic and gaining his results in that way rather than through real virtue. If the reader knows who Apollonius of Tyana was, he will have some idea.
The other relation between the two words is a rather apt pun, though I cannot think of an example of it occuring in an ancient text.
The strange part is that I awoke with the conviction that I did now know the meaning of the former term (though I obviously do), and that knowledge was somehow suppressed in me until I actually looked it up in the LSJ (although I was constantly asking myself what it meant for many hours until I was able to check).
This self accusation (and I don't see how else to interpret the dream) is not hard to explain. Five years ago I published a subtantative in the most prestigious classics journal in the world (ZPE). A limitless horizon seemed to open up and I swiftly prepared outlines for a half dozen articels and a book, all of real worth. What I have to show for it five years later is a half dozen articles any one of which I could finish through a month's sustained work, a comepleted draft one novel (but still far from a final draft), and 500 pages of mss. toward another, with its narrative not a quarter completed (and two reviews for the most marginal journal imaginable written just to get the books for free--hardly worth mentioning).
But as it is, yesterday it took me about 6 hours to get into a postion where I could look up one Greek word, and just now I had to take a 90 minute break half-way through even to finsh this little journal entry. The time I could work is 90 minutes or two hours at the end of the day when my brain is already in a sate of nervous exhaustion.
On the other hand I have two childern that I love.
In the dream I was an agoreutes, but everytime the word was used (whether in thinking, or speech, or what have you) I know it came out aguretes.
For those who don't know, agoreutes is a more techinical designation for a rhetor, or orator in Latin. Such a rhetor in late antiquity would have been a far more important person than a mere lawyer. He would have been perceived as protecting and defining Greek tradition and, through the power of his words, as possessing the ability to intervene in relations between the individual or the city and the center of the Imperial government. How else could I see myself in oneiric wish-fulfillment?
An aguretes, however, is rather the opposite. He a barbarian (Near-Eastern) who claims the miraculous power to intervene for the individual or city with heaven. He demonstrated his authority not through mastery of tradition, but through mastery of his own body, fasting and abstaining from sex (sometimes to the point of self-castration). This is the category that educated Greeks would have seen Jesus or Paul as belonging to, and indeed this type provided the elementary basis for the establishment of the familiar figure of the Christian ascetic monk. They attracted attention to themselves by performing soemthing like a modern show of stage magic. They wandered and lived by begging in return for their prayers and rituals. Any person of sophistication would have known that their claims and powers were all false (compare the fakir in British India), or, if, they did accomplish anything, it was through magic, not peity.
And that is the point of cnotact between the two. I can scarcely think of an important rhetor who some envious person did not suspect or even accuse of practicing magic and gaining his results in that way rather than through real virtue. If the reader knows who Apollonius of Tyana was, he will have some idea.
The other relation between the two words is a rather apt pun, though I cannot think of an example of it occuring in an ancient text.
The strange part is that I awoke with the conviction that I did now know the meaning of the former term (though I obviously do), and that knowledge was somehow suppressed in me until I actually looked it up in the LSJ (although I was constantly asking myself what it meant for many hours until I was able to check).
This self accusation (and I don't see how else to interpret the dream) is not hard to explain. Five years ago I published a subtantative in the most prestigious classics journal in the world (ZPE). A limitless horizon seemed to open up and I swiftly prepared outlines for a half dozen articels and a book, all of real worth. What I have to show for it five years later is a half dozen articles any one of which I could finish through a month's sustained work, a comepleted draft one novel (but still far from a final draft), and 500 pages of mss. toward another, with its narrative not a quarter completed (and two reviews for the most marginal journal imaginable written just to get the books for free--hardly worth mentioning).
But as it is, yesterday it took me about 6 hours to get into a postion where I could look up one Greek word, and just now I had to take a 90 minute break half-way through even to finsh this little journal entry. The time I could work is 90 minutes or two hours at the end of the day when my brain is already in a sate of nervous exhaustion.
On the other hand I have two childern that I love.
