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What do people think of Bacchus? What was the need for a hedonist among the gods?
Last edited by Buh4Bee; 07-16-2011 at 07:53 PM.
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
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Jove seemed to be a hedonist as well at least when it came to sex.
What god from the East did Bacchus come from?
It seems there are two different versions of the birth of Bacchus. We read the myth in which Bacchus is the offspring of a mortal, Semele and Zeus. With this lineages, one can consider him a semi-deity as his mother is mortal. The second version proclaims Bacchus to be the son of Persephone and Zeus, elevating him to an immortal. However, the second version is extremely similar to the myth a god named Zagreus. It is suggested that the second version of Bacchus' origin is confused with the latter god.
You can see different examples of the myth from ancient texts here:
//ancienthistory.about.com/od/dionysusmyth/qt/081609DionysusBirth.htm
I tried Mandelbaum's translation of this poem and gave up. It was in a horrible monotone voice with no rhythm whatsoever for 300 pages.
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!
(it is so much sweeter in Latin)
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ovid/ovid.met1.shtml
From what I've heard on YouTube the Latin sounds nice, but I don't know it although I can guess at some of the words. I also liked the iambic pentameter in Mandelbaum's translation.
Wait, I thought you are supposed to only read Latin and not speak it. Isn't it a dead language?
I didn't think anyone really knew what Latin sounded like. But these videos sound as if some people think they have a good idea what it must have sounded like.
How would one know without some kind of audio recording?
I was just messing around YesNo.
I believe wine as a digestible grape alcohol comes originally from Persia, Beer from Egypt, and I am sure there was a Greek variant of fermented beverage, but still, the idea of Grape wine perhaps is imported, a long with a cultural tradition that isn't written, so perhaps is harder to pin down.
Not only has Latin been spoken in an unbroken line since antiquity by the Roman Catholic Church, it was also the language of scholars for centuries, throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance. Besides that, Romans were real sticklers for pronouncing their language and wrote numerous guidebooks about the subject.
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It's interesting that they wrote pronunciation guides for speaking Latin. I guess that would be useful in determining how it sounded back then.