Blogography

Jason remarked recently that he'd visited a blog which listed other blogs in a strict taxonomy: law blogs, literature blogs, film blogs, anthropology blogs, et al. And yet in the end they all wrote about politics.

We haven't had that problem here at the Campus, but without that political crutch posting has been spotty. So I'm challenging myself now (and hope others will follow suit, though Eric is to be commended for his excellent contributions) first to post more often, but more importantly to write meaningful posts within this blog's implied scope.

Struggling through the Epistles of Ausonius and Paulinus alone should afford enough material.

Changes at the Campus

Scroll down to see a new poll (on the left side of your screen, just past the other blogs), through which you just may be able to help me decide on a subject for my thesis.

One other piece of news: I've set up an account with SiteMeter, so I now I'll know exactly how few readers we have!

ancient and modern

did you know that '[e]very week in the London Spectator, Peter Jones compares something that has happened in the week's news with the way things were done in the ancient world'? well, he does, and you can find them here (thanks to classics in contemporary culture for the link).

i'll see your philology, and raise you a philosophy

as dennis will remember, several days ago i lamented to him regarding the following comment from allan bloom's essay 'the study of texts', which can be found in his book giants and dwarfs:

Almost all modern scholarship, beginning with classical philology, started from the assumption that its fundamental ideas were superior to those of the authors it studied and placed these authors in a context alien to them. Even such as idealist and realist, liberal and conservative are profoundly misleading although they seem to us as natural as night and day.

i was chagrined by the assertion that classical philologists, from the very inception of the discipline, saw themselves as prima facie superior to the ancients, for that, it seems, would make those scholars rather uncharitable and condescending toward their predecessors. while i am still not ready to accept this diagnosis in any holistic sense (though i am trying to keep my eyes much more open for evidence thereof), i cannot think it was mere coincidence that, almost immediately after reading bloom's words, i came across this statement in m.i. finley's book the ancient greeks (which, by clicking on the link, you may purchase for as little as $0.47) in his discussion on the dark age and the homeric poems:

Nothing can make up for the nonexistence of contemporary Greek writing, whether narrative or religious or administrative. And so we, like the Greeks, must fall back on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here again, surprising as it may seem, we know far more than the Greeks, for not only has modern philology made its contribution....

i realize the parallel to bloom's words is not necessarily a close one --there is no use here of labels for the ancients such as 'liberal', 'conservative', or anything else, and he goes on in the same paragraph to rehabilitate the poems as more than 'merely poetic fiction'. but in spirit, perhaps there is a similarity in finley's statement to the very thing which bloom criticizes, viz., that it seems strange to say that we are more knowledgeable about the greeks' own poetry than the greeks were themselves.

chalk one up for brussels

this, via drudge, about who won the olympics, is rather interesting given our conversation last night while playing cards.