Beware Greeks Bearing Greeks

Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts

      Today marks the anniversary of the traditional Fall of Troy in 1184 B.C., thereby bringing to its culmination the Trojan War.

      The Fall of Troy is not recounted in Homer’s Iliad, the iconic epic, it rather covering only a period of ten days to two weeks within the supposed ten-year span of the war.  The Fall of Troy through the subterfuge of the Trojan Horse is briefly mentioned in the Odyssey and is referenced in several other Greek sources.  The story would not find, however, its full development until Virgil’s Aeneid.

      Some modern historians have attempted to explain the story as an analogy, suggesting that an earthquake – Poseidon, whose portfolio included horses, was as well the god of earthquakes – was the reason for the fall of Troy’s walls.  I, for one, would rather retain the literal interpretation as it affords more credit to Odysseus.  FYI, a new movie on Odysseus is in the works for release in 2026, and a new translation of the Odyssey, it by Daniel Memnelsohn, has been recently released.

      Regardless it is a great story, especially the fall of Achilles to Paris after the former killed Hector.  Speaking of which, the movie Troy misstated the story, likely because they wanted to keep Brad Pitt on the screen.  Achilles was killed before the fall of Troy; he never entered the city.

            Some might consider the Trojan War to be ancient history.  It’s all matter of perspective.  At the time of the Fall of Troy the Egyptian civilization had been flourishing already for 2000 years. 

Getting Started Again

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the last posting I made to this blog, it in 2021. Is my intention, starting tomorrow, to reinvigorate this effort.

Repeating what many of you already know, in early 2021 I was progressively feeling worse and worse, often find myself exhausted and short of breath. Finally, and at the insistence of Laura D’Angelo, I visited my physician. He ran a few test and told me I needed to go to the emergency room. I asked if I could go the next day, and he responded “If I had your numbers I would not be able to stand up.” So I did what you would expect me to do, namely go home to make sure my huskies were taken care of, and then I went to the emergency room. Then, for the first time since I was in eighth grade, I was admitted to a hospital. My initial diagnosis was severe anemia.

I was released the next day after significant blood and saline transfusions. There then started a week of tests, culminating on a Thursday afternoon bone marrow biopsy.  Friday morning my phone began blowing up with calls from the hospital telling me to get over there immediately to visit with the oncology team; it turns out I had fairly advanced AML (leukemia).

I was that afternoon admitted to the oncology unit of Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital and began chemotherapy. I would be remiss to not report that the in-patient and out-patient care I received from the doctors and nurses was excellent. Then, around Thanksgiving of 2021, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, after a week of really intensive chemotherapy intended to create a clean slate, I received a bone marrow stem cell transplant to “cure“ the leukemia. That worked, but unfortunately I came down with debilitating side effects to the transplant referred to as “graft/host disease“; essentially, I developed an allergy to the transplant. Since then I have been in treatment for the graft/host disease.

Most importantly to my already questionable mental stability, my Siberian Huskies Achilles and Hector are back with me, and although I am still not back to where I was, it seemed that this anniversary was the proper time to restart my blog. I hope you from time to time find it helpful or at least entertaining.

P.S. - Achilles and Hector are not allowed to read the Iliad, but then they can’t read Greek anyway.