When in Rome…..
I came across the following article that appeared in a recent copy of The Guardian. Ardent readers will appreciate!!
A would-be burglar in Rome was caught after stopping to read a book on Greek mythology in the middle of a theft, Italian media reports.
The 38-year-old reportedly gained access to a flat in the Italian capital’s Prati district via the balcony but became distracted after picking up a book about Homer’s Iliad on a bedside table.
The 71-year-old homeowner is said to have awoken and confronted the alleged thief, who was engrossed in the book.
News of the failed burglary attracted the attention of the book’s author, who told local media he wanted to send the man a copy so he could “finish” his read.
After being caught off-guard, the alleged thief reportedly attempted to make a quick getaway by escaping via the same balcony, but was arrested shortly afterwards.
He is said to have told police he had climbed the building to visit a person he knew.
“I thought I had ended up in a B&B, saw the book and started to read it.”
Giovanni Nucci, the author of The Gods at Six O’Clock, which explains the Iliad from the perspective of the gods, told Il Messaggero: “It’s fantastic.”
“I’d like to find the person caught red-handed and give him the book, because he’ll have been arrested halfway through reading it. I’d like him to be able to finish it.
“It’s a surreal story, but also full of humanity.”
The thief was reportedly in possession of a bag containing expensive clothing allegedly stolen from another house earlier that evening.
Mr Nucci said his personal favourite deity was Hermes, the god of thieves.
“He is also the god of literature. It is clear: everything fits,” he joked.
In case you are interested in the book the theif was reading, below is an article taken from “Odnako”, an on-line news source.
«THE GODS AT SIX», READ THE ILIAD… AT APERITIF TIME
By John
2023-11-06
To bring to light what is dark, we must look inside it. He knows it well Giovanni Nucci, Roman poet and writer who has been studying Greek myths for more than twenty years and making them dialogue with today, because myth has to do with the substance of human existence. Therefore, in his «The gods at six. The Iliad at aperitif time” (Bompiani), a beautiful essay-novel of gods and heroes, rereads the myth given to us by the sacred poet Homer. But the only way to do it, “to immerse yourself and not drown in the myth – as the author writes in the note at the bottom of the volume – is to let yourself go, abandon yourself to the story and let yourself be transported wherever you think best”.
And so does the reader, supporting the reading of a foundational myth such as the Trojan War, by a restless myth lover like Nucci, nourished by readings of texts – starting from the Iliad in the translation by Guido Paduano – from which it is made to support and illuminate. Nucci, however, “places the responsibility of the story on the solid and fictitious shoulders” of a second-rate narrator, Professor Goffredo Mainardi, who arrived in Paris to give lectures on the Iliad at the Collège de France. There, in the midst of the audience, he sees a beautiful woman again, «a great love to which she had not yet been able to match any possibility» and from that moment he decides to want to give a romantic reading of the Iliad, thinking that «the divine plan had come to fruition experience what was happening to them.” Since they meet up every evening for an aperitif, this thing about the gods at six comes from there.
Mainardi is convinced that it is necessary to reverse the way we think about the divine: the gods do not observe the heroes fighting from above while they have an aperitif. But they enter into their fights, they support them, they are inside them, they make themselves think, becoming their most profound behaviors. Just as Dionysus and Aphrodite had come to inhabit the gin and tonic they took every evening around six. And so the five lessons unfold, from the background, when Zeus falls in love with Nemesis who transforms into a goose to escape him; and Zeus transformed into a swan, not being able to possess all that beauty of hers, puts her in an egg which is then carried by Hermes between Leda’s legs who will give birth to Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux. Therefore, here the play of forces between masculine and feminine is staged, even if – writes Nucci – «we must not think of the masculine as that which belongs to man and the feminine as that which belongs to woman because they also belong to both if in different measures and balances”.
But if it is true that the conflict of Troy is caused by the feminine, since it arises from the clash between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena, in which Aphrodite prevails, and the conflict will lead to the end of the era of heroes, it is equally true that only the feminine will be able to offer heroes the self-awareness necessary to survive such devastation. Aphrodite, Hera, Athena, Thetis, Helen who contains within herself the beauty of the world. Hector, the hero par excellence, understands this well, and Andromache and the other women know it perfectly, aware that the fate of Troy is sealed but that they will be the only ones to survive.