According to www.dictionary.com<\/a>, cacophony<\/em> means \u201charsh discordance of sound; dissonance; a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds.\u201d The etymology, according to www.etymonline.com<\/a>, is actually kind of fun: \u201c1650s, \u2018harsh or unpleasant sound,\u2019 probably via French\u00a0cacophonie<\/em>\u00a0(16c.), from a Latinized form of Greek\u00a0kakophonia<\/em>, from\u00a0kakophonos<\/em>\u00a0\u2018harsh sounding,\u2019 from\u00a0kakos<\/em>\u00a0\u2018bad, evil\u2019 (from PIE root\u00a0*kakka-<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0\u2018to defecate\u2019) +\u00a0phone<\/em>\u00a0\u2018voice, sound,\u2019 from PIE root\u00a0*bha-<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(2) \u2018to speak, tell, say.\u2019”<\/p>\n Why is it fun? Because when I hear the word cacophony, I always think \u201csounds that sound like kaka,\u201d and that\u2019s exactly what it does mean.<\/p>\n Eratosthenes of Cyrene was born in 276 BC, in Cyrene, in what today is the country of Libya, though the city was founded by Greeks. He was educated first in Cyrene and later in Athens, and he became a man of great learning, someone who has had a real influence on our world even though most of us have never heard of him. Like most of the great scholars of that era, he was a polymath. He was also chosen to be, first, a librarian at Ptolemy III\u2019s great library at Alexandria, and then the Chief Librarian there.<\/p>\n Some of Eratosthenes\u2019s accomplishments include<\/p>\n One of his works was the Chronographies, in which he determined the dates of a variety of significant dates in world history. The first of these dates, mathematically and scientifically derived, was the Fall of Troy, which Eratosthenes determined to be June 11, 1184 BCE, about 3200 years ago on this very date.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t know about the Fall of Troy, the sacking and razing of the city by the Achaeans in response to Paris\u2019s kidnapping (or seduction) of Helen, wife of Menelaus. The most famous retelling of the story of the Fall of Troy is Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em>, but there are numerous other retellings in Greek mythology and drama. According to some scholars, while the historicity of the Trojan War is questionable, the story is what, in a sense, created the Greek nation, or established among the various Greek city states (like Athens, Corinth, Sparta, etc.) a sense of nationhood.<\/p>\n So we don\u2019t know if the Trojan War ever actually happened. And there were all kinds of assertions about when it happened and when it ended, mostly based on literary\/historical sources. But in my mind, Eratosthenes\u2019s mathematical approach to determining the date of the Fall of Troy speaks clearly over the cacophony of other voices. Today is the anniversary of the Fall of Troy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The image is \u201cAeneas’ Flight from Troy\u201d (Fuga di Enea da Troia e San Girolamo<\/em>) by Federico Barocci, a painting from 1598 currently in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. In Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em>, no Trojan survives the sack of Troy, but in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em>, Aeneas manages to escape with some of his family and friends, sails the Mediterranean Sea, breaks Dido\u2019s heart, and then founds the city of Rome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Schleifer According to www.dictionary.com, cacophony means \u201charsh discordance of sound; dissonance; a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds.\u201d The etymology, according to www.etymonline.com, is actually kind of fun: \u201c1650s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3170,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3171,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169\/revisions\/3171"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n