Greek epic and movie palaces

The Chicago Theatre, a 'movie palace'

Yesterday I was looking for theaters with 'crying rooms,' so I could go to the movies with my spouse. Right now we have an "I go one day, you go the next, then we discuss the movie" arrangement.

Crying rooms are rooms where you can take your fussy child and finish watching the movie without disturbing anyone else. Only older theaters, aka "movie palaces," have them. Movie palaces, many built during the Great Depression, were super-fancy theaters designed to make average people feel like royalty and allow them to escape their circumstances for a little while.

The movie palaces' fantasy element struck me as quite similar to the escapist overtones of early Greek epic. Early Greek epic was composed during the Dark Ages (quite as grim as the Great Depression) for a sub-elite audience. Hence the poems' grandeur, tragedy and even their mania for visual description. Stories that are too close to your everyday life are useless as a way to "escape", but you need to be able to picture what that alternative, escapist world looks like, whether it's a medieval palace or the treasure room of a Mycenaean king.

I get a kick out of imagining that nebulous group of people, the 'original audience of the Iliad,' as a bunch of downtrodden 1930s office workers going to the movies. But maybe that's just me.

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Cool Greek word

ὁμοφροσύνη
homophrosune, "unity of mind and feeling"

σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν, ὅσα φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς,
ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, καὶ ὁμοφροσύνην ὀπάσειαν
ἐσθλήν·

And may the gods grant you whatever you desire in your heart,
a husband and a home, and may they bestow unity of mind and feeling,
an excellent thing (Od. 6.180-181)


This is the kind of word I would consider putting inside my new wedding band (I lost the old one somewhere in my apartment last week). But I start thinking about explaining a Greek inscription to a jeweler in my remote Midwestern locale, and my head hurts :)

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