A Lost Epigram

ἡμεῖς γ’ ἀρχαῖον κεραμόν τε λογόν τε φιλοῦμεν
συγκρίνειν φρονιμῶς λείψαν’ ὀρυσσόμενα

- Philologus Philadelphus

are we there yet?

no.

anyway, sorry for the dearth of posts the last couple of days. maybe something sometime soon. as journey says, don't stop believing.

Vergiliana

a few questions for pondering on the eclogues resulting from class today.

Eclogue 7: why is daphnis under the holm-oak? how did he get there? where did he come from? (see especially the first word of the poem, forte--'by chance'.) what sort of creature, exactly, is he?

i find vergil a very cinematic (if you'll forgive the anachronism) writer. In ecl.7, you can almost see the screen go fuzzy flashback-style as we move from line 20 and then clarifying in re at some unspecified point in the past as the contest gets underway.

by the way, if you've ever wondered where we get our term 'sardonic smile', see ll.41-44:

Immo ego Sardoniis videar tibi amarior herbis,
horridior rusco, proiecta vilior alga,
si mihi non haec lux toto iam longior anno est.
Ite domum pasti, si quis pudor, ite, iuvenci.

coleman points out ad loc. that 'the celery-leaved crowfoot, Ranunculus Sceleratus, though not peculiar to Sardinia, was thought to be responsible both fo the proverbial 'Sardonic smile' of those who ate it...and for the acrid flavour of Sardum mel (Hor. A.P.375)'. in other words, it's bitter.

Eclogue 8: why do we have daphnis again, when this part of the poem is modeled on Th.Id.2, where we find 'delphis' instead? does daphnis actually return at the end of the poem? or, to put in in amaryllis' words (who i take to be the 'I' of the second song), Credimus? to be sure, the dog is barking about something. but her final question leaves room for doubt--an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? ('or do those who love construct dreams for themselves of their own accord?').

Ll.36-41 are indeed exquisitely beautiful:

Saepibus in nostris paruam te roscida mala
(dux ego uester eram) uidi cum matre legentem;
alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus;
iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: 40
ut uidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!

page (ad loc.) quotes macaulay as saying the following about them: 'I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin--saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala. I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil' (Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 1.371).

Eclogue 10: why does gallus appear in 6 and 10, the beginning and end of the second half of the book? what is the significance of his playing hesiod in 6 and daphnis in 10?

on the whole, i do not understand the eclogues. either their depth or my denseness (or 'denstrosity'?)--or, more likely, a combination of the two--baffles me. what is the significance of the recurring characters? are they always the same people? is it possible to construct a narrative all ten poems as a whole? what is arcadia? when does it signify something more than a region in greece, and how do we know? and if it is a 'spiritual landscape' (cf. Snell), at what point in the book does it become such a thing? finally, why does the contemporary world continually break into vergil's idyllic domains?

Alexander, the Multiculturalist Freedom-spreading Visionary?

and speaking of bruce thornton, he's got a rather pointed review of alexander here. with the exception of a few scenes, i thought the movie was a stunning disaster. (Lvrogueclassicism.)

matters calendrical

december 7 is an important date in history for at least two reasons. first of all, japan attacke pearl harbor on december 7, 1941.

second, it is the date on which, in 43 BC, cicero was executed:

On this day in 43 BCE, the greatest Roman orator, Cicero, was executed at Formiae by order of Mark Antony. Cicero had angered Antony by his famous speeches, the Phillipics, that called for a restoration of the Republic. Mark Antony ordered his hands cut off after his death -- the hands that had written the speeches.

feel free to post any thoughts about cicero here today, be they historical, philosophical, philological, or anything else.

On Scholarship as a vacuum

This one, pulled from the unpublished archives, goes out to Eric in response to his post on "Theorese."

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Response to Doty: “The Cosmological Human Body: Biogenetic and Cultural Factors”

There are times when you have to stop and wonder whether anyone knows how to write clear academic prose anymore. Doty’s “Cosmological Human Body” reads like narratology. Abstraction is abused to no real end outside the confusion (or amusement) of the reader [thanks to Doty we can now discuss “particular parts” and “enacted performance” (as opposed to non-specific parts and latent performance)]. It is a genuine effort to carve away from his unnatural prose all the filler and senseless abstraction, and once that is done very little of value remains.

Put plainly he claims in the introduction that the human body is central to cosmology. This is hardly addressed and its ‘recognition’ gets us nowhere. Early on he claims that human physical nature both influences and interacts with the social/universal aspects of myth and ritual. The body in essence becomes a model. Culture and biology are non-exclusive determinants of what is characteristically human. Further, comparison with animal nature yields helpful data toward understanding the use of the body in ritual as both a link to and a microcosm of the universal. However, “Ritualization” among non-human animals is merely a helpful model that must not be given too much weight. Finally, the human body is correlative to one’s social structure, existing as an individualized code which makes the universal immediate. The apparent lack of ritual among moderns is an illusion: we simply have different types of ritual. So far so good. Now one should expect evidence beyond the scattered theoretical ramblings of scholars across several fields.

Instead we are told that the colors white, red and black have symbolic significance because they represent presumably sperm, blood and excrement, each of which (in some indeterminable way) relates to an intensity of emotion and hence power. The body is the source of all expressions of the social and universal (somehow, though he never quite says how or relates the sperm-blood-excrement triad with the rest of this disconnected section). He feels content then to move on to the social ramifications of what he has failed to prove.

Social themes develop from the human life cycle, of which themes three shall be considered: 1) suckling; 2) gender differences; and 3) the family’s role in establishing social class. All three are treated carelessly and there is no real reference to the body as cosmological symbol. Breasts show up in stories, boys and girls play differently—possibly because of their genitals—, and the ‘family’ of gods is at odds on gender lines. Never mind that his mythological facts are wrong [Gaia, not Hera bore Typhon. Hephaestus is the product of virgin birth at Hesiod 927, but is fathered by Zeus in Homer. And to call the leg of Zeus (in the account of Dionysus) his “genital region” is quite a stretch], and that his choice of evidence seems randomly selected. The real question is what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

The answer shall never be found. Myth is simply a response to the tensions and complexities of society in bodily terms. Doty does not feel the need to tell us how. Further, his claim at last that myth is a medium of communication is not new, and is not derived from anything he has said. Again, the disconnected conclusion of this section bears no relation to what precedes, but seems forced to connect myth and ritual somehow with the modern world.

‘Ludic liminality’ is the same. Doty believes that “play” is an essential component of life, and that sports and hobbies are pale substitutes. ‘Real’ play is an active participation in myth and ritual. There is no justification for this, and no connection with the chapter as a whole. Again, what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

Perhaps we must explore the personal/individual/restricted code by which liminality is universalized, whereby one might perhaps envisage, in essence, a peremptory acting-out of the transpersonal modes of what one might indeed call ritualistic polarities.

Or something.

the closing of the american mind?

QF45 pays homage to (a certain type of) closed-mindedness. i reproduce it here:

I had a conversation about the DaVinci code yesterday. I was unabashed in denouncing it as a pile of pseudo-scholarly garbage. The girl I discussed it with wasn't so sure. She thought I should at least be open to the possibility of its being correct, and found its implications fascinating. She didn't say it outright, but there was an air of presumption that I was being close-minded.

And so I have come to a conclusion: there is such a thing as being too open minded, and it is a pervasive form of intellectual shallowness. Almost every patent falsehood that presents itself is possibly true. It is not impossible that crystals cure cancer, that astrology is valid, and that 'true' Christianity is an eroticist mysticism.

But a mind with true depth isn't seduced by mere possibility- it demands probability, plausibility and evidence. A mind with depth is closed to most of the noise and clatter that pretends to bear the mark of truth. A mind with depth doesn't welcome in anything that cannot stand up and prove itself worthy of belief.
In other words, intellectual depth demands that one be close-minded to a substantial degree. Ideas do not have an inherent right to be taken seriously. It is a privelege- they must earn it first. To be an egalitarian in the world of ideas is to become the shallowest and most pathetic sort of thinker in the world.

discuss. any thoughts?

criticism 3

following tangentially on the last couple days, i came across an article by rainer friedrich in Arion 11 (2003) 33-50 called 'Theorese and Science Envy in the Humanities: A New Take on the Two Cultures Divide'. it is very interesting, and he does a nice send-up (though with serious intent) of the type of obfuscating jargon that currently muddles much so-called 'postmodern' criticism (though i do not agree with his defense of the word 'deconstruction'; for the process of reducing something to an ash-heap of meaninglessness, we already have a perfectly good and descriptive word in english, 'destruction'). here is the second paragraph:

Theorese

Theorese is the name of the beast. Among the justifications its apologists offer for the spawning of its neologisms, there is one that gives the game away. If there ever was an unnecessary one, it is narratology. Its cointers, apparently commanding small Latin and less Greek, must have assumed a Greek word by the name of 'narratos,' to which they unabashedly added the suffix -logy, thereby creating a linguistic monstrosity (topped only by another pseudo-Graecism, homographesis, claiming to denote 'gay writing'--which also proves that a little Greek can be a dangerous thing). Narrotology, in turn, gave birth to 'focalization,' 'focalizer,'focalisee,' 'narratee,' 'intradiegetic'--terms that fascinate for their sheer ugliness. Why these replellent neologisms when workable terms--'narrative theory,' 'perspective,' 'point-of-view,' etc.--are available? Because, as the apologists, when challenged, assure us with a straight face, 'narratology' possesses a more scientific air and sounds more recherche than unpresumptuous 'narrative theory.' This is the inadvertent caricature of a legitimate concern: like the natural sciences, the humanities need a differentiated and complex nomenclature, a technical terminology that distinguishes scholarship from belletrism. Fair enough. But we have that nomenclature already. It is an ensemble of the terminologies of poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and literary criticism, to be easily enriched if need be by the occasional neologism and by borrowing from the terminologies of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and other social sciences. No need therefore of the current tidal wave of ugly and pretentious jargon words that disfigure the critical idiom.

he goes on to discuss later what he calls 'postmodern science-envy' in its linguistic pretensions, creating an odd paradox with postmodernism's characteristic ride on the last train departing from science and reason (or 'reasonicity', as they might say). he ends with a suggestion:

Here is an immodest proposal for the reform of the academy. Corresponding to the two cultures, the proposed division should be that between the Faculty of Science (in the broad sense of Latin scientia and German Wissenschaft), with its three traditional branches of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, each enjoying as much autonomy as desired, but all united in the espousal of the notion of objective knowledge; and a faculty comprising the postmodern discourses, whose appropriate name would proceed from postmodernism's notorious scorn of the very idea of scientia: the Faculty of Nescience.

insofar as this essay is a reaction to recent trends in the humanities, it is reminscent of camille paglia's 'junk bonds and corporate raiders', also published in Arion, though i don't have the volume number/year with me.

i should also point out that i finished the auden essay, and i think it's well worth reading. he sets criticism in the context of two types of societies--the totally open (which i take to correspond, more or less, to his later discussion of social democracy) and the totally closed (which i take to correspond to his later discussion of fascist totalitarianism)--of which he gives platonic idealizations as a way of illustrating and differentiating their views of the world and of the meaning of human experience. he does not make the case that all criticism should prioritize the political or should be the expression of a political agenda; i assume we've all seen the danger that lies down that path. but he wants to give the critic a sense of his responsibility to his fellow citizens and the importance of good criticism in an open society. also of great interest in the volume (to me, anyway) was norman foerster's essay 'the esthetic judgment and the ethical judgment'.

One more thing a classical education is good for

I watched Fox's "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" tonight with two of my fellow Bryn Mawr fellows, and as it turns out it's fun to watch people humiliate themselves.

But better than that the fictional company on the show is called IOCOR. That's Latin for "I'm joking."

Of course they pronounce it 'eye-oh-core', but how great is that?

more criticism

continuing with the discussion that is not yet a discussion begun yesterday on the place and function of criticism, i thought i would pass along a couple of excerpts from gian biagio conte's essay 'empirical and theoretical approaches to literary genre' (in The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, K. Galinsky (Ed.), P. Lang 1992). the first has to do with the huge success of deconstructionist criticism; i think the parenthesis in the middle, though relegated only to parenthesis, is perhaps the most telling statement herein (p.114) (all translations are those of glenn w. most):

As you certainly know better than I, hermeneutic criticism in its deconstructionist version is enjoying increasing success in many places, if for no other reason than because it answers to a widespread need. Many people seem in fact to believe that our relation with the classic texts is running the risk of becoming tired, static, unadventurous. The idea that these texts have shot all their bolts of meaning and have been definitively understood is truly frightening: we would then be left with sluggish readers on the one hand, and texts that are no longer interesting on the other. Deconstructionist hermeneutics responds to this crisis with a new movement that gives an undeniable impression of vitality: it draws its motto from a recognition that "there is no peace in the texts." As a struggle against conformism this is certainly positive (and also--but let us not say this too loudly--because it promises to provide a living for a larger number of interpreters, a promise all the more attractive for classicists, who are obliged to work on a finite body of material--a source of energy which cannot be renewed!). As a pre-deconstructionist critic, I wish these developments good luck; but I refuse to limit myself to a static and rigid vision of my own hermeneutic practice. I do not believe that literary criticism, as I understand and practice it, needs this medicine.

later in the essay, he slips into a place i cannot go, or where my miniscule brain will not allow me (to be fair, i allow the caveat that i am reading this in translation; perhaps there are nuances to the italian vocabulary and sense that i simply am not understanding in english):

What we should avoid is thinking of reality naturalistically, as though it were a simple datum. In fact, reality is nothing but a system of perceptions determined by cultural codes and is therefore itself a construction, even if one at a different level from literature.

am i really supposed to believe this? to take a very simple example--if i were to stand on top of a 20-story building and to send a collection of derrida's writings plummeting toward the earth, i am under the impression that it will fall at 9.8 m/s/s (excluding drag from wind, etc.)--but according to the foregoing, that would merely be a perception i had determined by a cultural code. forgive me for saying so, but i think it rather beyond the scope of a cultural code to create something like, say, gravity. i am confident that the book would fall at the same rate regardless of whether i dropped it in america, japan, or the hindu kush of the 4th century BC. and, at any rate, how do views of reality such as that cited above really help the critic in his task? how does it help us understand roman poetry? if the romans' view of reality is completely conditioned by their own cultural codes, now lost to those of us who do not have the (radically alien) lived experience of a roman of (say) the augustan period, why should we trick ourselves into thinking we're actually discovering anything meaningful about roman poetry? and if we're not, how is criticism anything more than a narcissistic exercise in self-gratification?

ISI Guides

via rogue classicism, i found out that ISI has a bunch of 'student's guides' for various disciplines that can be downloaded in PDF here. the one on classics is by bruce thornton. other disciplines include philosophy, literature, liberal learning, history, core curriculum, u.s. history, economics, political philosophy, and psychology.