Alpha the Privative

When I was little, my favourite animal was the horse. I had a very specific idea of what a horse was, even before I ever saw a real one. I thought of a horse as a very elegant animal, graceful and beautiful, while also as an intelligent and strong one. When I visited a stable with riding horses with my father, I was able to go close to horses and feed them carrots and stroke them. The horses at the stable were very friendly and tame and I was over the moon to have seen them close up and even been able to touch them.

I remember that soon after that, towards the end of primary school, we learned in a lesson that horses were originally animals that lived in herds and that they were prey. They were quite nervous and could get scared easily of things like loud noises and sudden movements. I remember feeling a little bit confused about this information and found it hard to imagine my graceful horses being hunted down to be eaten by other animals. I also thought it strange at the time, that such intelligent animals as I thought them to be, horses were actually still governed by their primal herd instincts and could get scared and spooked easily.

In Greek, there are a few words for horse, but the most common one used today is άλογο, "alogo". Apparently this was my first word when I learned to speak, after the usual names for family members. It is also one of the simple words we learn at school beginning with Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet. One of the traits of the letter Alpha as a prefix in Greek, is of being privative. In the beginning of a word it often deprives the word of its meaning, rather as if it stood for without. Some such words also exist in English, so that a-theism means without a God, a-nonymous without a name, a-mnesia, without memory, a-nemia without blood,  a-narchy without a ruler and so on and so on. Of course not all words beginning with an A in Greek are deprived of their meaning; I do remember though thinking at the time, how strange it was that the first letter of the alphabet had such thieving qualities.

In the case of the word horse, "alogo", I was soon to find out that Alpha also played a depriving role. The word derives from a military term referring to army horses. They were called, collectively if I remember correctly, as "alogos", which meant the part of the army without logos; "logos" means word and reason, so I guess it was used to presumably distinguish them from the humans in the army. By that time, I think I felt a bit deflated about horses. My original romantic and childish vision of them was rapidly fading away, robbed by thieving letters and lessons with meticulous zoological information. I did not think of horses again till years later, towards the end of school.

We had gone on a trip with my mother to the very Northern part of Greece where some friends had invited us. I had never been so far up North before and I haven't visited this part of Greece since then either. It is very different from the dry and rocky Southern and Eastern areas I was used to. The North part of Greece is very very green, wet and cold in the winters, resembling a bit Ireland, but far more mountainous. We stayed in a rural village and during one of our excursions to the valleys around the village, we came across a wild herd of horses. They were about a hundred meters away from us. They were grazing, but when they saw us they stopped and stared at us. They were absolutely amazing. I saw them galloping away and I remembered the lesson at my primary school. Seeing them like that made good sense in my head. To completely restore my faith in horses, just a few years before the end of school, we came across them again in Homer's The Iliad. In the whole of the Iliad the horses are given an almost human dimension and often talk with a human voice and can even sense their keepers' upcoming death. I still remember, in a passage just after Patroclus is killed, Achilles' horses mourning for him, bending their long necks and crying human tears for his loss. That made me think again of horses and remember how I had originally imagined them, as a kid.

Today we made the letter Alpha with Aretousa. I drew some horses with a permanent pen on some clear sticky plastic for covering books, because she likes stickers a lot at the moment. We were making a green field for them and when we finished she stuck the horses on top. Here is how it looked.