Final Semester Hurrahs.

Yah my semester is winding itself up with papers, papers, and more papers. Ugh. Sometimes I almost wish that St. John's was a normal college and we had tests. Instead we have papers every two weeks. This means me as a writer has fantastically improved, but it also means we're frantic little freshmen running around like chickens in heat. (I really like that metaphor - Homer would be proud)

I've only got one more paper due before the semester is up though; Heraclitus. Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic philospher (all philosopher is divided into two sections; pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. It's like history. We date history pre-Jesus and post-Jesus) who wrote aphoristically and whose writing survives only in fragments quoted by other writers like Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, and even medieval philosophers like Geoffrey of Monmouth. He's pretty cool, but really hard to understand. He makes Plato look easy. We need to write a four or five page paper on two sentences of Heraclitus; translate them (embed the Greek text within our paper), and spend a goodly amount of time on analysis and discussion. It's sort of like a miniature seminar paper or at least a good model thereof. Here's one of the sentences I will be translating. Abby, see what you can do with it. Hahahahahahah! Maybe Mom can help you out with them:

Πολεμος παντων μεν πατηρ εστι, παντων δε βασιλευς, και τους μεν θεους εδειξε τους δε ανθροωπους, τους μεν δουλους εποιησε τους δε ελευθερους.

Here's the other one:

Ειδεναι δε χρη τον πολεμον εοντα ξυνον, και δικην εριν, και γινομενα παντα κατ΄εριν και χρεων.

Don't these look like fun? I sure think they do. In fact, these are exactly the sentences that the Greek class was translating when I was a prospie! Isn't that delicious? Not only did it make it easier to translate (I asked a freshman to translate these in my journal and remembered them for a whole year), but it made it so much more fun. Heraclitus is the man. War being common and Justice being strife... you'll grow to love him!

I'll go finish my paper now. Toodles!