Antigone

Fantastic talk, there's a bit of context which makes it all the more interesting.

This lecture was delivered on 3 October, 1892, by the newly-appointed Professor of Latin at University College, London, Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936). This speech would be simply one example from hundreds of the genre, if it weren’t for three remarkable facts.

First, not only had Housman held no previous position in academia, he had spectacularly failed his examinations in Literae Humaniores (Classics) at Oxford. After a brief spell teaching at his old school, and quietly taking a mere Pass degree, he worked at the Patent Office in London, researching Greek and Latin literature in the British Museum Library whenever time allowed. For him to be appointed from outside Classics into the Chair of Latin[1] at one of Britain’s leading universities remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of academia, and indeed has merited a most remarkable book on the subject. Housman went on to become the most important Latin scholar in the world, and serving for a quarter-century as Kennedy Professor Latin at Cambridge (1911-36); when he left UCL he joked how he was “lifted out of the gutter” by his election in 1892.

Second, this is Housman’s first appearance in public as a scholar: he had little to no history of giving lectures, reading papers, or addressing academics in any capacity.[2] That he enters the fray with such clarity of purpose and conviction of voice is a mark of the…

If you come to my house and express a view I disagree with, and I ask you to stop talking, I'm abridging your freedom of speech. (I'm not violating your First Amendment rights.)

> I think your concept is "creep" that has occurred over time for some subset of people, spawned by a principle that never originally included what you now include in the concept

You've got it backwards. The Athenians believed in both "isēgoriā, or equality of public speech, which was associated with formal political institutions and democratic deliberation; and parrhēsiā, the license to say anything, even (or especially) if it went against the current" [1].

The First Amendment is based on the freedom of speech in the English Parliament [2]. Millenia older. It isn't until the Warren Court, after WWII, that the modern interpretation that the First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring speech comes into focus [3].

[1] https://antigonejournal.com/2021/04/two-concepts-of-free-speech/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Right,_1689#The_13_clauses_limiting_the_power_of_the_Crown

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States#History

Thanks for sharing this.
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Thanks for all of your interest and apologies for such a straight-up post.

TLDR:

The difficult task of reproducing the pitch accents in Greek might be a step too far for most people, but consider the following line from Homer’s Iliad 1.345:

ὣς φάτο Πάτροκλος δὲ φίλῳ ἐπεπείθεθ᾽ ἑταίρῳ

It develops beautifully from sauntering labial alliteration (of p and ph sounds) to rapid-fire dental consonance (of th and t sounds), but if we pronounce Φ and Θ as fricatives here:

https://antigonejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Iliad-1-345-with-Fricatives.wav

rather than aspirated stops:

https://antigonejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Iliad-1-345-with-Stops.wav

then the distinction between Φ and Π and between Θ and Τ becomes so great that the sound effect is lost completely. Homer, for one, would have cared.