Amalekos of Kea committed suicide in 579 BCE, “probably at a hemlock social for superannuated geezers” (Rufus Aelianus, Realencyclopädie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, suppl. 37B, app. III, p. 1007) in accordance with the island city-state’s famous constitution, which sensibly recommended that citizens not allow themselves to get any older than 65--a highly cost-effective early alternative to Social Security and Medicare.
Or did he??? A tantalizing hint in the Suda suggests that Amalekos may actually have skipped out and joined a caravan to Cappadocia with his boyfriend Alkaeos. In any case, the actual fate of this mysterious pre-Socratic postmodernist will doubtless never be known. However, a recently discovered manuscript found buried in the desert at the oasis of Oxytocin in Upper Egypt (“The rubbish mounds were nothing but rubbish mounds, but it’s always a pleasure just to be there!”--Rush) preserves a few of his apothegms, translated and annotated here by Scholiastes of Wikipedia:
Inside every genius there’s an idiot struggling to get out.
The idiot thinks he’s a genius but his mother knows he’s a moron. Still, he’d like to get out more. He’s sick of being her maternal gaze site! See also on this maybe Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), passim.
The sheep and the shepherd beg to differ.
Meaning unclear, but probably something to do with politics. In any case, who exactly is the “Other”--the sheep or the shepherd? See, if you must, Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).
Hens don’t lay where they cackle.
In modern terms: Don’t believe Jim Cramer! Forget Geithner! The government is lying like a rug about inflation. It’s time to start overweighting Central Fund of Canada (symbol CEF), you idiots!
Too many cooks, so little time.
Your amuse-gueule is my death-in-the-pants, as Jerry used to say. Enough with the fast food already! That means you too, Nereia!
You can’t paddle twice through the same puddle.
There seems to have been a major drought in the Aegean area. Watering one’s asphodels was restricted to two hours a day. Contrary to what many foolish people think, global warming was actually already well under way BCE--although naturally no one knew about the hole in the ozone layer and stuff like that yet.
In wine is truth.
Actually, Alkaeos said this, around 600 BCE. Blatantly ripping it off is so always already a deessentializing move on Amalekos’s part! That said, these guys evidently drank a lot of wine.
Show me a poet and I’ll show you an arsehole.
Amalekos may have had a falling out around this time with the much younger Alkaeos. It is not clear why he uses English spelling though--probably just another deessentializing move.
Inside every idiot there’s a genius struggling to get out.
The genius thinks he’s an moron but his mother knows he’s a genius. Still, he’d like to get out more. (That’s the Ionian mother for you--what she gives with one hand she takes away with the other! Mothers can be annoying, can’t they! Yet we owe them so much. I find that especially annoying!)*
*The parallel here with the famous “Jewish mother” is obvious: in fact, there is reason to think that Amalekos’s parents may have been Edomite refugees--note the parallelism with Amalek, Esau’s grandson, who so totally pisses off the Lord of Hosts in the Bible: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:2-3). Cf. (always already!) the matriarchal subtext in the Ugaritic legend of Kirtu. And see also maybe, if you have the time, M. Weippert, “Semitische Nomaden des zweiten Jahrtausends,” Biblica 55 (1974): 265-80, 427-33.
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