The Fox and the Hedgehog

In the last paragraph of her column yesterday, Peggy Noonan says the following:

These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Isaiah Berlin famously suggested a leader is a fox or a hedgehog. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In political leadership the hedgehog has certain significant advantages, focus and clarity of vision among them. Most presidents are one or the other. So far Mr. Obama seems neither.

I haven't attempted to track down the Isaiah Berlin reference, but, of course, the idea about the fox and the hedgehog is much older. Remember Archilochus (fr. 201 West)?

πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα.

'The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one.' (Lattimore's tr.)

Bulgarian archaeologists discover ancient chariot

By VESELIN TOSHKOV, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 13 minutes ago

SOFIA, Bulgaria - Archaeologists have unearthed a 1,900-year-old well-preserved chariot at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, the head of the excavation said Thursday.

Daniela Agre said her team found the four-wheel chariot during excavations near the village of Borisovo, around 180 miles east of the capital, Sofia.

"This is the first time that we have found a completely preserved chariot in Bulgaria," said Agre, a senior archaeologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

She said previous excavations had only unearthed single parts of chariots — often because ancients sites had been looted.

At the funerary mound, the team also discovered table pottery, glass vessels and other gifts for the funeral of a wealthy Thracian aristocrat.

In a separate pit, they unearthed skeletons of two riding horses apparently sacrificed during the funeral of the nobleman, along with well preserved bronze and leather objects, some believed to horse harnesses.

The Culture Ministry confirmed the find and announced $3,900 in financial assistance for Agre's excavation.

Agre said an additional amount of $7,800 will be allocated by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences for an initial restoration and conservation of the chariot and the other Thracian finds.

The Thracians were an ancient people that inhabited the lands of present day Bulgaria and parts of modern Greece, Turkey, Macedonia and Romania between 4,000 B.C. and the 6th century, when they were assimilated by the invading Slavs.

Some 10,000 Thracian mounds — some of them covering monumental stone tombs — are scattered across Bulgaria.

New Latin School in Philadelphia

A really interesting article on the new Boys' Latin School in the Philadelphia Weekly. Here's the beginning:

An ambitious Southwest Philadelphia charter school uses an ancient language as a new formula for learning.

There are minefields on the path to maturity for every young person in this city. But for many young male Philadelphians, the danger runs deeper.

Young men in Philadelphia public schools are more likely than most to live with one parent, have a parent in jail, reside in drug-addled neighborhoods or experience violence. Students in too many Philadelphia public schools can’t be guaranteed basic safety, let alone a decent education.

Enter the Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School, a new college prep school at 55th and Cedar in Southwest Philadelphia with an ambitious plan to avert the tragedy that defines the city’s public school system. Boys’ Latin’s first batch of students—144 ninth-graders—occupy a 10-room temporary structure as they wait for contractors to finish renovations on the building next door.

Last year there were 11 murders within five blocks of where Boys’ Latin sits. “I worry about the students,” says teacher Paula Sahm, who lives in the Art Museum area of Philadelphia. “I’ll sit and watch the news, and if I even hear Southwest Philly, I get chills.”

Next to the trailer setup is the shell of a former school, once attached to Transfiguration Church, which was destroyed by fire in 2006. Boards cover most of the windows, and pickup trucks occupy most of the adjacent lot. But by next year the school building plans to house 300 Boys’ Latin students, with plans to grow enrollment to 600 by 2010.

The school's website is here.

Ancient Brain Surgery

Just saw this on Yahoo News, though I'm sure it's been reported on other Classics sites already. Here's the intro:

THESSALONIKI, Greece - Greek archaeologists said Tuesday they have unearthed evidence of what they believe was brain surgery performed nearly 1,800 years ago on a young woman — who died during or shortly after the operation.

Although references to such delicate operations abound in ancient writings, discoveries of surgically perforated skulls are uncommon in Greece.

Site excavator Ioannis Graikos said the woman's skeleton was found during a rescue dig last year in Veria, a town some 75 kilometers (46 miles) west of Thessaloniki.

"We interpret the find as a case of complicated surgery which only a trained and specialized doctor could have attempted," Graikos said.

A bone expert who studied the finds said the skeleton belonged to a woman up to 25 years old who had suffered a severe blow to the crown of her head, Graikos said. The operation was apparently an attempt to save her life.

Graves Found in Thessaloniki

Sic incipit:

ATHENS, Greece - Greek workers discovered around 1,000 graves, some filled with ancient treasures, while excavating for a subway system in the historic city of Thessaloniki, the state archaeological authority said Monday.

Some of the graves, which dated from the first century B.C. to the 5th century A.D., contained jewelry, coins and various pieces of art, the Greek archaeological service said in a statement.

The remainder is here.

Pre-Zeus Altar in Arcadia

Read the interesting story here.

The lead:

PHILADELPHIA — Before Zeus hurled his first thunderbolt from Olympus, the pre-Greek people occupying the land presumably paid homage and offered sacrifices to their own gods and goddesses, whose nature and identities are unknown to scholars today.

But archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion, in the region of Greece known as Arcadia. The remains were uncovered last summer at an altar later devoted to Zeus.

Fragments of a coarse, undecorated pottery in the debris indicated that the sacrifices might have been made as early as 3000 B.C., the archaeologists concluded. That was about 900 years before Greek-speaking people arrived, probably from the north in the Balkans, and brought their religion with them.

Latin: The Ne Plus Ultra of Languages

A quick look by Michael Poliakoff at two new books on Latin. Here's the opening:

For generations of adults, the simple word-series "amo, amare, amavi, amatus" used to act as a kind of madeleine, calling to mind long classroom hours spent conjugating Latin verbs (including this one, meaning "love"), then exploring Gaul in its three parts and eventually trying to puzzle out the syntax of the rugged lines that followed "Arma virumque cano," the opening phrase of Virgil's "The Aeneid."

A few lucky students, in that era of required Latin, reveled in the ablative absolute and exulted at their ability to piece together the meaning of a Latin sentence from the seemingly random scattering of stems and inflections. Most students, it is safe to say, found the experience more trying than pleasant; some, like Winston Churchill, might even recall primitive pedagogy and physical brutality from their Latin teachers. But no one finished his years of Latin class without at least a grim respect for a language that could demand so much of young readers centuries after the fall of Rome.

You can read the rest here.

Throne Found in Herculaneum

Here's the story, which I've copied in from here. If you follow the link, you can also find a link to photos.

ROME (Reuters) - An ancient Roman wood and ivory throne has been unearthed at a dig in Herculaneum, Italian archaeologists said on Tuesday, hailing it as the most significant piece of wooden furniture ever discovered there.

The throne was found during an excavation in the Villa of the Papyri, the private house formerly belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, built on the slope of Mount Vesuvius.

The name of the villa derives from the impressive library containing thousands of scrolls of papyrus discovered buried under meters (yards) of volcanic ash after the Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79.

Restoration of the throne is still ongoing with restorers painstakingly trying to piece back together parts of the ceremonial chair.

While other wooden objects have been dug out in nearby Pompeii, experts have never before found such a significant ceremonial piece of furniture. Previously such pieces have only been observed in paintings or made of marble.

"The find of ancient wooden furniture is not an absolute novelty in Herculaneum or Pompeii. Organic materials in fact were preserved in these cities because of the peculiar way in which they were submerged by the Vesuvius volcanic mud," said the head of the dig, Maria Paola Guidobaldi.

"But we have never found furniture of such a significant structure and decoration," Guidobaldi said.

Little is known about how the throne would have been used but the elaborate decorations discovered on the chair celebrate the mysterious cult figure of Attis.

The most precious relief shows Attis, a life-death-rebirth deity, collecting a pine cone next to a sacred pine tree. Other ornaments show leaves and flowers suggesting the theme of the throne is that of spring and fertility.

The cult of Attis is documented to have been strong in Herculaneum the first century AD.

(Reporting by Antonio Denti, writing by Eleanor Biles, editing by Silvia Aloisi and Paul Casciato)

'The Roman World: Religions and Everday Life'/Dayton Art Institute

Not sure if this has already been posted elsewhere, but in case it hasn't...

Mosaics to highlight Rome exhibit

By Meredith Moss

Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

This Rome exhibit wasn't built in a day.

In fact, The Dayton Art Institute's first major exhibition on ancient Rome has been in the works since 2005 when Dr. Sally Struthers, a dean at Sinclair Community College, was first approached to serve as guest curator for a collection that would transport visitors back to the ancient Roman Empire.

"The Roman World: Religions and Everyday Life" officially opens to the public Saturday, with a series of preview openings slated this week for the press and DAI members.

"I like this whole idea of visual motifs that meant different things to different religions in the Roman world," says Struthers, who delights in pointing out specific symbols — the peacock, the palm leaf, the shell, the fish — that were adapted and used in ancient times by Polytheism, Judaism and Christianity.

The showcase of the exhibition is a group of colorful mosaic panels that were once part of a synagogue floor discovered in North Africa.

In order to give visitors a better appreciation of the art, the entire mosaic floor has been re-created, with the original mosaics positioned precisely where they would have been originally.

That portion of the exhibit, titled "Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire," is on loan from the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Curator Edward Bleiberg, who wrote the catalog that will be sold in conjunction with the show, will come to Dayton for a lecture Sept. 30. Ancient meets modern when Struthers and Bleiberg provide online streaming audio commentary for the exhibit and a podcast that DAI guests can download and play as they tour it.

Struthers, who visited Rome recently to photograph ancient sites for the exhibit, also has gathered favorite works from other museums dating from fifth century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. and beyond: ancient sculptures of the gods, gold jewelry, coins, vases of Roman glass and textiles so sensitive to light that DAI patrons will lift a protective cloth to view them.

The museum has developed a variety of special programs to complement "The Roman World." Kids will "Meet the Romans" at the Experiencenter, teachers can request learning guides, and there are a number of lectures and special programs.

How to go

WHAT: "The Roman World: Religions and Everyday Life" featuring the Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire"

WHEN: Saturday through Jan. 6

WHERE: Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park North

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m. Closed holidays.

ADMISSION: $14 for adults, $12 for seniors and students, $7 for youth. $12 for groups of 10 or more. Members free.

TOURS: Docent-led tours at 2 and 6 p.m. Thursdays and 2 p.m. Sundays.

INFO: (937) 223-4ART or www.daytonartinstitute.org

Two Articles on Rome

The first is about the excavation of an ancient tannery outside of Rome that now stands in the way of progress, in the form of a rail line with only 109 yards to go for its completion. Either the rail line must be stopped, or the ancient complex will have to be moved to preserve it. My money is on the latter. Here is the lead:

ROME --Archaeologists excavating an ancient tannery believed to be the largest ever found in Rome said Tuesday they might need to move the entire work site, which is being threatened by railroad construction. The 1,255-square-yard complex includes a tannery dating to the second or third century, as well as burial sites and part of a Roman road.

At least 97 tubs, some measuring more than three feet in diameter, have been dug up so far in the tannery, archaeologists said.

In other news, Italian P.M. Romano Prodi is pushing for the restoration of the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome.

THE ancient road on which pilgrims travelled from Canterbury to Rome could soon become a vibrant thoroughfare again.

The Via Francigena was first mentioned in the third century and is Europe's oldest route of pilgrimage.

After leaving England, it winds for roughly 600 miles through Arras, Rheims and Lausanne before reaching Tuscany and some of Italy's most beautiful landscapes.

The earliest map of the road was made in around 990 by Sigeric the Serious, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, the Via Francigena is much less famous than its Spanish counterpart, the Way of St James, which pilgrims use to visit Santiago di Compostela. Last year, around 100,000 Catholics registered with the church in Santiago but only about 8,000 people walked the Via Francigena. Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister and a devout Catholic, has vowed to restore the Via Francigena to its former glory. Before the arrival of the motorcar, the Francigena, which means "born in France", was Italy's transport spine.

I'm guessing there must be a nautical component to the road somewhere between, say, England and France. And I think everyone will agree that its first cartographer had an absolutely first-rate name. The earnestness implied by his name is evidenced in his effort in map-making--an activity which, to be sure, would never be undertaken by someone called, e.g., Gaiseric the Frivolous. I'll leave you with a quote from Mr. Prodi:

"It really makes me angry that we do not have pilgrims walking towards Rome any longer."

Museum Exhibition + Website

The Indianapolis Museum of Art will be the first U.S. city to host a travelling exhibition of Roman Art from the Louvre. Here are the first three paragraphs of the press release:

INDIANAPOLIS – In preparation for hosting the United States premiere of the Roman Art from the Louvre exhibition, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has launched www.theRomansareComing.com , a special web site that features exhibition information, images, a calendar of events and a series of 10 IMA-produced downloadable videos that will bring to life various themes in the exhibition. Roman Art from the Louvre is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Musée du Louvre and will be on view from September 23, 2007 to January 6, 2008.

Earlier this year, a team of five IMA staff members traveled to Rome and Paris to conduct interviews with Louvre representatives and to gather footage of historic monuments, buildings, and examples of Roman and Parisian culture. The IMA team then transformed the HDV footage into engaging, two- to three-minute videos called “webisodes” that will be available on www.theRomansareComing.com . The first video currently is available and more will be posted during the course of the exhibition. Upcoming video topics include the city of Paris, which is home to the Musée du Louvre; conservation techniques for antiquities; the art’s journey from Italy to the Louvre; and an analysis of the Roman influence on architecture throughout Indianapolis. An episode titled “I Love the A.D.s” investigates Roman pop culture and is patterned after the VH1 show “I Love the 80s.”

To further explore Rome and its culture, the web site also will feature lists of books and movies, a glossary of terms used in the exhibition, a calendar that includes upcoming programs and events at the IMA and teacher and school resources. Visitors may purchase advanced tickets to Roman Art from the Louvre on the web site as well. Exhibition admission is $12 for adults (ages 18-64); $6 for children (ages 7-17) and college students; $10 for seniors (65+) and groups of 10 or more. The exhibition is free for children six and under and for all school groups booked through the IMA Education Division.

You can read the rest here.

To go to the website mentioned in the release, just click.

Bath Complex Discovered

Apologies if this has already been noted elsewhere:

Archaeologists Dig Up Roman Bath Complex
Staff and agencies
19 July, 2007

By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press Writer 24 minutes ago

ROME - Archaeologists said Thursday they have partly dug up a second-century bath complex believed to be part of the vast, luxurious residence of a wealthy Roman.

Statues and water cascades decorated the interiors, American archaeologist Darius A. Arya, the head of the excavation, said Thursday during a tour of the digs with The Associated Press. Only pedestals and fragments have been recovered.

"The Romans had more leisure time than other people, and it‘s here in the baths that they typically spent their time," Arya said. "Because you could eat well, you could get a massage, you could have sex, you could gossip, you could play your games, you could talk about politics ? you could spend the whole day here."

The complex is believed to be part of a multiple-story villa that belonged to the Roman equivalent of a billionaire of today, a man called Quintus Servilius Pudens who was friends with Emperor Hadrian, Arya said. It is not clear if the baths were open to the public or reserved to distinguished guests of the owner.

Excavations at the Villa delle Vignacce park lasted a total of 10 weeks, and it is planned to continue, he said. Future decisions, including whether the site will be opened to the public, are still to be made.

Meeting at communal bath houses, they would go through a series of rooms of alternating temperatures at a leisurely pace, dipping themselves in hot and cold baths. It was a social event, but also a way to purify their bodies of toxins and a form of relaxation.

Twain, Vergil, Homer, Dante, etc.

Recently in the Muskogee Phoenix by a Food columnist. As the introduction to an Italian recipe, the author, who evidently utilizes an optimistic reading of Vergil, we find the following:

Mark Twain leads us to the topmost topaz of an ancient tower in his short story “A Cure for the Blues.”

This little gem is a witty literary criticism of a leading author of his day, fictionalized as the so-called McClintock, putting forth Twain’s belief that good writing comes from the writer’s own experience and the avid reading of books. He knew that a passionate writer must first be a voracious reader.

I mention Twain’s short story because it is through the reading of books that ideas are transmitted from one writer to another, from the ancient tower to the modern one. Four works can illustrate this point. Starting with Vergil’s “Aeneid,” the epic poem of the Romans, we can easily move between centuries.

Vergil wrote the “Aeneid” to glorify Rome for Emperor Augustus. Aeneas, the Trojan hero who escaped the fall of Troy to the Greeks, is given the profound mission of establishing a new Troy in a land to the West which will become Rome.

There, the oracle has told him, he will find a troia, a white pig with baby piglets, but not before visiting the Underworld, escaping perils, and jilting Carthaginian queen Dido to fulfill his glorious mission.

If we follow this thread backwards eight centuries we arrive at Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the prototype for Vergil’s “Aeneid.” But, if we follow it forward to the late Middle Ages, we come to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” In the first part of the work Vergil serves as Dante’s guide through the Inferno.

There they encounter nine circles increasing in severity where sinners receive a punishment befitting their transgressions. Dante’ influence continues to affect literature, his dialect setting the standard for the Italian language.

Move ahead several centuries into our time and we arrive at Daniel Pearle’s “The Dante Club.” In this well researched historical thriller three friends, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes are furtively translating Dante’s Inferno into English when murders imitating the punishments in the nine circles begin cropping up in Cambridge just as the translators reach that point in the translating.

The men scramble to find the killer and help a widowed Longfellow finish the poetic translation.

And we can move beyond the ninth circle to Jodi Picoult’s “The Tenth Circle.” Comic book artist Daniel Stone and his wife Laura, a Dante scholar, struggle to save their 14-year-old daughter, Trixie, who has accused her boyfriend of rape. When Trixie runs away to Alaska, Daniel stops at nothing to save his daughter.

The novel raises the issue of not only how well we can ever know another person, but how well we are able to know even ourselves. Picoult has a devoted following; her latest novel is “Nineteen Minutes.”

These books offer a diversion from this deluge of rain. With the Romans as a foundation, they also give us an excuse to try an Italian-based menu this week, always a good cure for weather-induced blues.

Prudentius

Recently noted in a list of research grants to faculty of Dickinson College:

Marc Mastrangelo, professor of classical studies, received a $30,000 Loeb Classical Library Foundation Research Grant to support the completion of a literary and philological commentary on the Psychomachia Prudentius. This volume is expected to help establish Prudentius as one of the most significant intellectuals and artists of Late Antiquity.

As an admirer of Prudentius, I look forward to getting a look at this once it's published.

'Bebop with Aesop'

Canterbury Woods Elementary School's Summer Institute for the Arts performs masked drama:

In the school gym, students wearing animal masks rehearsed for a half-hour performance of the musical play "Bebop with Aesop" by playwrights Michael and Jill Gallina and based on Aesop's fables.

Aesop in the News

Ape research shows similarities to one of Aesop's Fables:

Orangutans are bright enough to use water as a tool, a finding that researchers say is straight out of Aesop's Fables.

Five orangutans at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany were each shown shelled peanuts. The nuts floated out of reach inside a clear 10-inch-high plastic tube quarter-filled with water.

All of the orangutans collected water from a drinker and spat it inside the tube to float the peanuts high enough to grab them, averaging three mouthfuls before success. In their first attempts, the apes on average took nine minutes before they got the nuts, but they only needed just 31 seconds by their tenth try.

The researchers had to make sure the tube was strong, "because the jaw power of orangutans is enormous," recalled Natacha Mendes, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "After so much work constructing tubes, it can be heartbreaking to see it getting destroyed so easily."

The findings reminded Mendes of the fable of the thirsty crow, which threw stones into a pitcher to raise and drink the otherwise unreachable water.

Another account is here. Or here.

And Aesop is apparently still relevant to sportswriting as well:

For those struggling to understand why Brian McClennan is no longer coach of the Kiwis, consider an Aesop fable, one that may have been running around in Bluey's head.

A scorpion and a frog meet on the banks of a stream. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him to the good eating for both of them on the other side of the stream.

"But you scorpions have a death sting. How do I know you won't sting me?" the frog asks. "Because both of us would die," the scorpion responds, promising not to sting the frog.

Halfway across to land, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog asks "Why did you do that? You promised not to and now we're both going to die." The scorpion answers "I couldn't help myself - it's in my nature."

The fable provides parallels to the saga being played out between McClennan and the New Zealand Rugby League this week.

When in Rome

Constance Bodurow, an urban designer/planner, compares civic life in Rome and Detroit, which has its own Campus Martius (and, of course, one should not forget that Detroit Metro Airport is in Romulus).

Also, Timothy Farrington's review in the New York Sun of Shadow of the Silk Road, in which author Colin Thubron gives an account of his journeys on the ancient trade routes between Rome and China. The closer:

In Mr. Thubron's depiction, the Silk Road provides a cautionary tale of mutual misunderstanding. Although tightly bound by trade, he emphasizes, Rome and China were deeply ignorant of each other. Goods made their way from one terminus to the other in "an endless, complicated relay race," and so "no Romans strolled along the boulevards of Changan; no Chinese trader astonished the Palatine." In the absence of direct contact, secondhand reports blossomed into myth. The Romans believed that silk came from a pacific kingdom free from crime, while the Chinese imagined a splendid city in the west governed by philosophers. The metaphoric lesson for the present is clear, but Mr. Thubron is pessimistic: On the Mediterranean shore, his journey complete, he sees that "to the west and east the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows."

Bakhtin Again

In the first part of his review, Eagleton gives a sketch of Bakhtin's difficult life under the Stalinists. At one point, he writes:

Here [in St. Petersburg], as always, he was surrounded by a close group of anarchically minded writers and eccentric polymaths. Indeed, the story of his life is the tale of one such coterie after another; they seemed to form spontaneously around him in whatever godforsaken backwater he happened to wash up. He was a man who practised dialogism as well as preached it. By the late 1920s, however, the kind of religiosity which his circle promoted [a form of Russian Orthodoxy] was in increasing disfavour with the state; and in 1929 Bakhtin was arrested for membership of a religious circle, anti-Communist proclivities and corrupting the young by his teaching.

If you think this sounds suspiciously like an ancient gadfly featured in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, you'd be right, for that is the connection Eagleton goes on to make explicit:

The thinker whose notions of dialogism, subversive irony and indirect speech ran back to Socrates now seemed about to suffer his predecessor’s fate.

But he didn't. To find out why, you can read the rest here.

'Our Thermopylae'?

So says Al Gore:

Testifying to the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning, Al Gore said that climate change presented America with its Thermopylae moment. You can't say he doesn't try to catch the zeitgeist...

Bruce Metzger, R.I.P.

Bruce Metzger, an expert on the text of the New Testament (and a Ph.D. in Classics to boot!), has died. Anyone who has used the reddish-covered New Testament text published by United Bible Societies will be familiar with his name. One of the pre-eminent names in the field of biblical studies has departed from this earth.

May he rest in peace.