a few reflections

What I particularly like about this new material is that it is all about VOICES:

• The Odyssey itself narrates a story in which the world contains voices so beautiful and so dangerous that one must fill one's ears with wax or tie oneself to the mast lest one be ruined by them.
• Early Christian commentators reinterpret the story so these beautiful but dangerous voices become the voices of authors like Homer himself (so the voice of the siren becomes the voice of the poet).
• In so doing, some (like Clement) are listening to another voice - that of Plato. And, for Plato, the voices of the sirens, while certainly ambiguous, are singing the very music of the spheres.
• What is more, the Bible - while it does not, in its original form, mention the sirens at all - has been 'reuttered' by many other voices (in the sense that it exists in multiple translations) . And one of these voices - the Greek voice of the Septuagint - introduces the sweet voices of the sirens into the sacred text itself.

But that isn't the half of it!

• When one talks about 'the voice of Homer' one is really conflating many voices under a single name, since the Odyssey is itself the product of an oral tradition (and there was, of course, a German school of scholarship that was specifically concerned with uncovering the internal multiplicity of the Homeric texts).
• Plato's philosophy is always communicated in the form of dialogues. Thus, the myth of Er is 'uttered' by Plato but speaking through a representation of a real person, Socrates.
• And the Septuagint is itself the product of a collective project of translation. (The Letter of Aristeas (2nd century BC) says that the Greek King of Egypt (Ptolemy II Philadelphus) had 72 Jewish scholars translate the Torah for the library at Alexandria.)

So there is an extraordinary layering of voices here and what is at the centre of it is a text that can be a read as an account of the virtuous life as a life in exile.