Speaking of ancient Greek, this semester I sat in on a class in Greek tragedy. The class comprised me and one actually registered student. We were originally supposed to to do philosophy rather than tragedy, but the one actually registered student said she didn’t like philosophy, so we read Sophocles’ Antigone.
Antigone is really fucking hard.
Really. The syntax is tortuous and the vocabulary is beyond obscure. But we stumbled through, though I suspect the one actually registered student cheated far less often than I by looking at the translation.
But none of this has anything to do with this post. Recall, please, that earlier in the year we got our dog A. a friend, E. Well, E., like many very young puppies, discovered that chewing up paper was the most fun thing ever in the entire world. Given the number of trees’ worth of paper I tend to leave on the floor, you can imagine how much fun she was having. Finally I wised up and put all the paper on shelves, thereby ensuring that it would never be found again, but not before E. had stumbled upon my copy of Antigone. I had two copies, actually; this one was different from the official class edition, and I used it mostly because it had a lot of commentary that didn’t overlap with the official class edition’s commentary.
But the next day, I brought both editions into class, fair bursting with excitement, because for the first time in my life I got to say that the dog had eaten my homework.
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