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A little bit of a weird one, today: I have compiled digitized versions of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. These are UTF-8 plaintext files, consisting of the book number (2 digits), followed by a period, followed by the line number (3 digits), followed by a tab, followed by the line of the text (in Epic Greek). It is meant to make it easy for me to look up specific lines from the texts using standard UNIX tools (e.g. grep) for a future project. Being faithful reproductions of a work several thousand years old, these are obviously in the public domain.

I can't imagine anyone but myself is super interested in these, but on the off chance you are, have fun?

Do you like ghost stories? Of course you do!

I think the best ghost stories come from Japan—Lafcadio Hearn's books are just such an amazing treasure trove, and I've both been entertained and educated by the many stories he recounts. (My daughter really likes The Legend of Yurei-Daki and Mujina, though my favorites are perhaps The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi and The Story of a Tengu... but it's so hard to pick! One should just spend a cozy winter reading all his Japanese books.)

However, I recently stumbled across an ancient Egyptian ghost story that gives Hearn's tales a run for their money. It has everything you could want: magic spells and mummy's curses, treasure hunters and grave robbers, True Love™ and salacious priestesses, games with the dead and the vengeance of gods. I wasn't feeling well this week, so while I was laid up in bed, I took the time to transcribe Gilbert Murray—yes, that one—his very entertaining verse adaptation of the story in the hopes that it might make for entertaining weekend reading for someone.

As always, it is in the public domain and you can find the PDF in US Letter and A4 paper sizes.

I've been sick—on top of the last few weeks of bad summer allergies, I caught a pretty bad cold a few days ago—and since Proclus is pretty tough going at the best of times, I've been turning to Plato for light reading. (Yes. Yes, I know. I know. Shut up.) People have been reading Plato for a long time and for all that time they've had opinions on the best order to read his books in. (On the one side we have Thrasyllus, from ~100 BC, and Albinus, from ~AD 100; on the other side, the list I selected to work from was from a few years ago.) I started by reading them in such an order, but man oh man was it boring. The point of this is to be fun, right? So why waste time on pesky politics or ethics (or even Alcibiades, sweet treat though he was), when what I really care about is metaphysics?

So I gave up on the reading order (I'll get back to early dialogues eventually—maybe) and jumped right into the books that Plotinus references. So right now I'm reading the Phædo (a better title would be On the Immortality of the Soul) and I'm enjoying myself. It's good.

But that's not why I'm writing right now. While I'm reading a modern translation (Jowett's, as it happens), I of course have Thomas Taylor's copious notes to hand, and it is of little surprise to find gems in there. Since I just went back over Plotinus on Suicide, it was convenient (to use no stronger or more mystical term) to find a four-page long footnote containing Olympiodorus' and Taylor's thoughts on the same. Since it's interesting, I figured I'd transcribe it for you all:

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I have another transcription for you all today: Saint Synesius of Cyrene on Dreams, as translated by Isaac Myer. Synesius was an odd duck, being both a Christian bishop and as Neoplatonist-y a Neoplatonist as one can get, but I found the essay—on the nature of imagination and an apology for dream divination—of interest and thought others might as well. As always, it is in the public domain and you can find the PDF in US Letter and A4 paper sizes.

Interestingly, we somehow have a number of Synesius' letters. In one that he wrote to his teacher Hypatia (yes, that one) we have a brief account of how this essay came about (as translated by Augustine Fitzgerald):

[Regarding On Dreams,] God ordained and He gave His sanction to it, and it has been set up as a thank-offering to the imaginative faculties. It contains an inquiry into the whole imaginative soul, and into some other points which have not yet been handled by any Greek philosopher. But why should one dilate on this? This work was completed, the whole of it, in a single night, or rather, at the end of a night, one which also brought the vision enjoining me to write it. There are two or three passages in the book in which it seemed to me that I was some other person, and that I was one listening to myself amongst others who were present.

Even now this work, as often as I go over it, produces a marvelous effect upon me, and a certain divine voice envelops me as in poetry. Whether this my experience is not unique, or may happen to another, on all this you will enlighten me, for after myself you will be the first of the Greeks to have access to the work.

(I'm amazed he could have wrote this in a single night—it took me an entire week merely to transcribe it!)

The next chapter of the Enneads is about Love, and in it, Plotinus repeatedly refers back to Diotima's discourse on Love, as quoted by Socrates, as quoted by Plato in the Symposium. I thought it worthwhile to quote it here (Benjamin Jowett's translation), since it seems a necessary prerequisite to that chapter, and it's be good to take some time to digest it before we get to Plotinus:

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(To be honest, I find quite a lot of fault with it. So, too, does Plotinus, and he goes to some length to distill the overarching principles from it.)

I've two transcriptions for you all today: Plato's (US Letter, A4) and Xenophon's (US Letter, A4) accounts of Socrates' trial. As always, these are in the public domain.

I was familiar with Plato's account but not Xenophon's, and given Xenophon's generally cool critical reception, I was surprised to find that he painted a, to my mind, much more mature, wise, and sympathetic picture of Socrates than Plato himself did.

Another transcription for you all today: Porphyry's sweet letter to his wife, Marcella, urging her to piously bear life's misfortunes so that they might be reunited in the All.

This one is from Alice Zimmern's 1896 translation, and is as usual available in PDF format in US Letter and A4 paper sizes.

In gratitude to the Most Beautiful, whose giggling melts heaven and earth, on this Her day, I offer up another transcription from Thomas Taylor's translation of Apuleius: the story of Her son's marriage to Psyche, as it appears in Books IV through VI of The Metamorphosis, or The Golden Ass. Also included are Taylor's footnotes, particularly his lengthy interpretation of the myth.

You can find the PDF in US Letter and A4 paper sizes.

As always, these transcriptions are in the public domain: all I ask is that, if you find any typos or mistakes, that you please let me know about them so that I might correct them!