George Economou
FIVE BY GEORGIOS ARKADIOS
I am occasionally visited by this halftavistic persona who has
one foot set in the Hellenistic world and the other in our own.
Though he knows he'll never make it into The Greek
Anthology, he can't stop trying.
Count on "Air Charon," your express carrier, no matter how or where it happens to happen, crushed like a bug in your high-speed car-smash, breathing your last in your bed or under the knife, it's sure to honor the reservation booked at your zero birth-hour life sentence on the solo one-class one-way flight from wherever direct, non-stop to Hades forever. * If one man's poetry roll becomes another's junk in a rubbish mound at Oxyrhynchus, then on to funerary wrappings for another, with immortal lines asleep on mummy cartonnage, could it synch us to a new, elating Sappho? Only if the artifex of fact who fuses paths with long dead word-eating book worms, his work not exactly up the same alley as that of Mary Beard or Gregory Nagy, can hear the distant giggles of laughter-loving Muses. * Lucius Commodus lopped off a head of Herakles then topped off its trunk with one of himself-- he was centuries ahead with his trunk full of folly, yet never clipped a poem and dropped it onto a canvas like the solemnly sly synthetic Cy Twombly. * Scylla mangles and, as Aristotle argues, so do bad performers, like those flute players who manage to yank their coryphaeus' cloak as they try to play a number about Scylla's attempts to snatch Odysseus and crew to her rock . Long before the theatre's decline in Athens, Archilochos on Paros likened Pasiphile to a fig tree, the snatch among the rocks to many a crow, as she gladly puts out for strangers. To them, this Scylla's the perfect piece, for all her dangers.
VILLHELLENELLE
What Schliemann unearthed for the world to see, down and down strata to Troy VIIa, Ottomans pitch as their antiquity. Pergamum, Ephesus, and Priene, plus the towns neath Hissarlik now survey what Schliemann unearthed for the world to see. Homer's poem's home, though no wooden horsie, which they'd build if they could--and make it neigh, Ottomans pitch as their antiquity. Parts of "Priam's Prize" sneaked to Germany, pissing-off Turkey, which then tried to stay what Schliemann unearthed for the world to see. It's all been theirs since 1453, beautiful booty—better not betray Ottomans' pitch as their antiquity. Baksheesh from Byzantium, valued debris that's been claimed and renamed to make it pay, what Schliemann unearthed for the world to see, Ottomans pitch as their antiquity.