I just finished the William Hazlitt book, which was ok, but 19th century prose is a bit turgid. After that I read Catullus--he is one of the few ancient poets that almost reads like a contemporary. I just started this:
I'm just starting it, but it is a clear and concise discussion of how post-modernism came to be, tracing the intellectual history from Enlightenment figures like Bacon and Locke up to contemporary ones like Foucault and showing how each stage encountered problems that led to the next stage. For example, I had never read a really good discussion of the problems of empiricism. Anyway, so far, excellent book. I'm also halfway through the Iliad in this edition:
This is about the third or fourth time I have read it--the translation is thirty-five years old! But it reads really well. Amid all the blood and gore, Book 14, that I just read, is about the preparations Hera goes through to seduce Zeus so as to distract him from the battle between the Acheans and the Trojans. It's all about scented oils and what must be the Bronze Age answer to the pushup bra. Hera seeks Aphrodite's counsel:
Aphrodite, smiling her everlasting smile, replied,
"Impossible--worse, it's wrong to deny your warm request,
since you are the one who lies in the arms of mighty Zeus."
With that she loosed from her breasts the breastband,
pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment
woven through it . . . There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible--magic to make the sanest man go mad.
And thrusting it into Hera's outstretched hands
she breathed her name in a throbbing, rising voice:
"Here now, take this band, put it between your breasts--
ravishing openwork, and the world lies in its weaving!
[p. 260, op. cit.]
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