Em

I'm not a classicist by any means, but I've studied a tiny bit of Greek. Though I never learned to write it I know some of the grammar. Basically the thing is the Greeks are sailing to Carthage. Camilla suggests the accusative and, long story short, is correct. When it's a destination of motion, as in this case (the Greeks were sailing towards Carthage, they weren't already on it) the accusative should be used, not the dative. Charles says something about the Greeks sailing to attack it, but tbh I have no idea why this should affect the noun case. If anything, if you attack something, the object should be accusative. Bunny suggest the ablative but that's just bullshit bc Greek doesn't have an ablative.

But the interesting thing is when Richard comes along and suggests using a Homeric suffix, a locative, a -ζδε. Now, Homer did use such suffixes to indicate motion towards certain places, but still there are several problems with the suggestion, not just limited to the fact that this is drastically off contextually. Keep reading because this became a wall of text I'm sorry to have invaded everyone's dash.

the text almosts demands application of Nietzsche's later work too. Henry is meant to be a man wandering above a sea of fog and above humanity, he is our superman, it's no mistake he kills Bunny on a cliff. There is support for Henry being sheltered, being morally 'bad' for killing this farmer and then his close friend, and maybe even some line that hints he regrets it. There is even a very popular suggestion Bunny is an embodiment of humanity. But there is none to separate these acts from his intelligence, his genius and his philosophy.

We can't know for sure to what extent other characters were meant to share Nietzsche's qualities. For instance, Nietzsche loved hiking as Bunny did in the text. We also can't know for sure how broad Donna's Nietzsche as his work was at times contradictory. It was also life affirming, there are echos of the Eternal Return in the final passage where Richard meets Henry. The Nietzsche Podcast is where I first heard the suggestion that Julian was Dionysus, using the original title for the secret history as evidence.

Finally, we cant know that Nietzsche is the ONLY genius Henry was based on, as these basic strokes are a theme in so many of the lives of enlightenment figures, and influential writers, and even political geniuses like Hitler.