Friday, August 01, 2008

*An old way of looking at the story is that stories that started in Europe are most important and that the important European story began in ancient Greece.

The earliest part of ancient Greece that counts, in this way of remembering, is the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Iliad a story about part of a war.

The first word in the Iliad, as written down, is wrath. Anger. Because the way the ancients Greeks built sentences is different than how English speakers build sentences, that isn't the first word in English translation. The first sentence of the Iliad is translated into English something like, "This is the story of the wrath of Achilles" or "I sing of the anger of Achilles," something like that.

So in the old way of telling the story the entitled and most important cultural system begins with a word for anger.