'Profusely Illustrated'

I got a kick out of the title page of Rodolfo Lanciani's Pagan and Christian Rome and thought I'd post it here.
""
That's right. If you've got a lot of illustrations, own it.

On the Virtues of Keeping Your Mouth Shut

Inspired by Dennis, I was looking through the Disticha Catonis and found a few good ones on holding your tongue, and thought I'd post them here.

3. Virtutem primam esse puto compescere linguam:
Proximus ille deo est, qui scit ratione tacere.

10. Contra verbosos noli contendere verbis:
Sermo datur cunctis, animi sapientia paucis.

12. Rumores fuge, ne incipias novus auctor haberi,
Nam nulli tacuisse nocet, nocet esse locutum.

Logic(s)

'It was the myths, above all, that seemed to defy rational analysis and to give rise to the idea that their makers were rambling around in a kind of mystical fog. Yet closer observation, and the whole tendency of anthropologists to treat tribal peoples with increasing respect, have shown that most of the apparently illogical connections in 'primitive' myths are not really so. Rather, the logical systems involved are different from those standardized in western cultures. Levi-Strauss showed in La Pensee sauvage that many simple societies, far from having no category structure at all, have systems of immense range and complexity. That is fact; yet one has to guard against sentimentality at this point, for it is all too easy to add (as many now do) that these alternative logical structures are 'just as good' as the ones we happen to use. After all, they say, even Aristotelian logic has had to be replaced by different kinds in certain conditions, much as the Euclidean system, which once seemed the essence of logical geometry, is now recognized as too restricted for study of the world at large. But the truth is that for many purposes Aristotelian logic, which has established simple and consistent rules of cause and effect, is greatly superior to alternative systems depending on loose grades of symbolic association. Some aspects of myths can be appreciated more fully by these alternative systems, but there are also elements and qualities to which discursive analysis can properly be applied, at least as a preliminary stage.'

--G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, pp. 42-3

No Monolithic Theories

'My own conviction, nevertheless, is that there can be no single and comprehensive theory of myths--except, perhaps, the theory that all such theories are necessarily wrong.'

--G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, p. 38

An Interesting Take on Plato and Socrates

'Let us go back to Plato for another illustration. The one thing which has caught everyone's imagination in Plato is the figure of Socrates, the archetypal teacher and prophet, "corrupting" the youth of Athens by showing them than when they express social stereotypes about love or courage or justice or pleasure they have not the faintest idea what they are talking about. We see this Socrates, in the Apology and the Phaedo, facing martyrdom without making any concession to the ignorance and stupidity of his accusers. But Plato himself was a revolutionary thinker, and in the Laws he draws up a blueprint for his own post-revolutionary society. In that society all teachers are to be most strictly supervised and instructed what to teach: everything depends on their complete subservience to the overall social vision. Socrates does not appear in the Laws, and no such person as Socrates could exist in such a society. We should be careful to understand what Plato is doing here. He is really assuming that those who condemned Socrates were right in principle, and wrong only--if wrong at all by that time--in their application of it.'

--Northrop Frye, The Great Code, p. 132

West on Passages of Disputed Authenticity

In M.L. West's commentary on the Theogony, he remarks in his introduction to the Typhoeus passage (820-80) that it is 'one of the sections of the Theogony whose authenticity has most often been disputed', and then briefly summarizes and responds to six arguments that it is not by Hesiod. Here is the third, followed by an important critical principle:

Gaia's part in producing an enemy to Zeus' regime is at variance with her benevolence toward Zeus in the rest of the Theogony. Again, comparison of an Oriental parallel (Enuma Elis) helps to explain the anomaly: see p. 24. The assumption of multiple authorship is the most naive of all ways of accounting for contradictions in mythology.

More on Gladstone

A couple of days ago I mentioned Burkert's reference to William Ewart Gladstone's noticing of the connection between the Enuma Elish and Homer in Burkert's article 'The Logic of Cosmogony'. His footnote to that passage directs the reader's attention to a place in his 1992 book The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, an English translation and revision of a work first published in German in 1984. In that book (pp. 92-3), he writes:

Ti-amat is the form normally written in the text of Enuma Elish for the mother "who bore them all." The Akkadian word which lies behind this, however, is just tiamtu or tamtu, the normal word for the sea. The name can also be written in this more phonetic orthography; but in the Enuma Elish we also find the form taw(a)tu. If one proceeds from Tawtu, then Tethys is an exact transcription. The different reproductions of the dentals, t and th, might disturb the purist; but Sophilos wrote Thethys, which, in normal Greek orthography, would automatically yield Tethys. In fact the Enuma Elish became known to Eudemos, the pupil of Aristotle, in translation; here we find Tiamat transcribed as Tauthe, which is still closer to the reconstructed form Tawtu. That the long vowel a is changed to e in the Ionian dialect even in borrowed words has parallels in Kubaba becoming Kybebe, Baal becoming Belos, and Mada known as Medes. Thus the proof seems complete that here, right in the middle of the Iliad, the influence of two Akkadian classics can be detected down to a mythical name.

In one of the footnotes in this passage [14], we find a reference to Gladstone:

The first to see the connection between Enuma Elish and Homer, Tiamat and Tethys was W.E. Gladstone, Landmarks of Homeric study (1890), appendix... .

When Politicians Knew Homer

In his article called 'The Logic of Cosmogony', Walter Burkert writes, in a passage regarding how ancients attempted to tell the tale about 'the beginning' of 'everything' (pp. 92-3):

The most common response...is: in the beginning there was Water. This is not limited to the ancient world: it is also reported from America, e.g. the Popol Vuh of the Quiche/ Maya. The Egyptians developed water-cosmogonies in diverse variants, having the yearly flood of the Nile before their eyes; but Enuma elish too has ground water and salt water, Apsu the begetter and Tiamat who bore them all, as the first parents of everything. Surprisingly enough, this recurs in the midst of Homer's Iliad with Oceanus and Tethys, 'begetting of everything'; this may be direct influence. (It was William Ewart Gladstone, better known as British Prime Minister, who first saw this connection.)

On Mythological Terminology

'Scholars have often found it difficult to distinguish between myth and other kinds of traditional tale: saga, legend, folktale, and fable. It is not always necessary or even possible to draw such distinctions. For speakers of German the term saga (Sage) is more or less synonymous with myth (Mythos): the best known collection of Greek myths is Gustav Schwab's Die schoensten Sagen des klassischen Altertums, and the most influential treatment of Germanic sagas is Jacob Grimm's Germanische Mythologie. In Grimm's usage the two terms are sometimes synonymous, though occasionally he seems to want to restrict myth (Mythus, as he writes it) to antiquity. If distinctions are drawn, they usually have to do with the cultural context in which the tale was generated.'

--Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology (p. 6)

The Spirit of the Anti-Classicist

I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

QOTD

I can't remember if I've posted this here before, but don't feel like checking and came across it again today. It comes from Kathleen Jamieson's article 'Jerome, Augustine and the Stesichoran Palinode' (Rhetorica 5 [1987] 353-67). On the verbal war between Rufinus and Jerome, she writes:

Reading the apologiae of Rufinus and Jerome leaves one with the sense of having helplessly witnessed the bludgeoning of a child. (p. 359)

Classical Languages as 'Delicate Instruments of Communication'

'The ancient paideia was founded upon the literary classics. School-boys did not merely read them, they studied them with the utmost intensity, they savored in them the more recondite allusions, and they committed great portions of them to memory, with lastingly beneficial consequences, both for their own Greek and Latin style, and for the maintenance of the classical languages as uncommonly delicate instruments of communication among men.'

Arthur F. Stocker, 'Servius Servus Magistrorum' (Vergilius 9 (1963) 9-15), p. 9

Interpretation and Theory

I believe, then, that the classicist should see interpretation and theory as interdependent activities. But the interdependence is not symmetrical. Interpretation without theoretical reflection may be limited in scope and is vulnerable to various kinds of muddle; that certainly makes it worth less. But theory that is not rooted in our existing interpretative skills is at risk of being vacuous speculation; and that would make it worthless.'

Malcolm Heath, Interpreting Classical Texts (London: Duckworth, 2002), p. 21

Vergil the Same, despite the Praises or Rebukes of Critics

So says Macrobius' Symmachus:

haec est quidem, Euangele, Maronis gloria ut nullius laudibus crescat, nullius vituperatione minuatur... .
Saturnalia 1.24.8