New books.

Well old books to be honest, but these are my latest finds up in the Widener stacks:

1. "The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition" by R. Klibansky, 1939. This book was referenced in Nigel Wilson's work in the context of 11th century scholar Michael Psellos and his pupils, many of whom were Platonists (and some of them Neoplatonists, as well, a somewhat big no-no for good Orthodox Christians, especially during the Middle Ages), so I just had to pick it up. Funny - Plato never really interested me much when I was a student, perhaps because he was mostly the turf of the Philosophy Department and taught only by the driest of professors in Classics or in translation as fodder for those ubiquitous Great Books courses that have sprung up in recent years. But now as I encounter him in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, where Platonism is a powerful but dangerously subversive intellectual force in not only the Greek but the Arabic and Latin traditions, I can't help but want to know more. More on this book as I dig into it, hopefully over the weekend!

2. "Hebrew is Greek" by Joseph Yehuda, 1982. Hoo-boy. That this was written by a native speaker of Hebrew is the only reason I'm bothering with a tome that is probably better relegated to the tinfoil hat section of comparative philology. The story of this book, which only had a modest print run and was excerpted in 1997 by a Greek journal called Daulos, is somewhat controversial; to this day some people claim that it is being kept out of the scholarly mainstream by conspiratorial forces (although I seemed to have no trouble finding it here in the stacks) due to its potentially-explosive thesis that the Hebrew of the Old Testament is nothing more than a corrupt dialect of ancient Greek! In fact, one of this book's more ardent supporters contends that all languages are descended - or in his view quite literally "fallen" - from Greek, so needless to say I went up to the stacks expecting to find a slender manifesto with a lot of foaming at the mouth and not much linguistic legwork. Imagine my surprise to find a 686-page doorstop of a book! This is going to take some digesting, I'm afraid. What really concerns me is how little this book has been referenced by the Classics community, or anyone at all for that matter. Google the book's title and you get about thirty hits - I expected far more of a brouhaha, like the firestorm Martin Bernal's Black Athena set off back in the 90's. Now does this mean that the work is so laughably bad that no one bothered to write a refutation of it; and if so, why did Daulos give the author space in their journal fifteen years later? Well, it's an interesting mystery at any rate. It's not every day you stumble upon a "forbidden" text, like some protagonist in an H.P. Lovecraft story. Just so long as I don't accidentally summon up Nyarlhotep or the mighty Cthulhu...