As Seen in From Dawn to Decadence

The new degree of Bachelor of Science does not guarantee that the holder knows any science. It does guarantee that he does not know any Latin.

--Dean Briggs of Harvard College (c.1900)

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

In the average Greek we encounter the qualities of genius without originality--in short, all the dangerous qualities of spirit and character.

Magister Coke is all around in big trouble!

Besides shirking my duties on this website, I have been extremely neglectful concerning graduate school. I got an email a few days ago from Bryn Mawr's bow-tied Godfather, Darby Scott, scolding me for not responding to any emails from professors regarding my UNFINISHED THESIS. I know, I know, I am BAAAAD. Sed quid dicam? I mean seriously, in my first year of teaching, when will I have time for writing? When I am not planning lessons, I am sleeping and maybe even eating. Nonetheless, I haven't emailed him back, which is definitely in bad form.

On a lighter note, I have written two songs to help my students with the cases. I'm sure that this will help all of you Latin tutors out there. Maybe I should put out an mp3 with the songs recorded.

The first song is from the Adam's Family theme song:
They're crazy and they're KOOKy
they're marvelous and spooky
it won't be long 'till you see
the case as family!
nominative (click click)
the genitive (click click)
dative and accusative, the ablative (click click)

The second song takes its melody from The Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg: "Singular is US A UM, I AE I, O AE O..." and so forth. It gets complicated with the plurals, so you'll have to wait until I come out with a CD to hear the rest of it.
Kids love it. 9th graders are finally getting a handle on the cases. You'd be surprised how differently a 9th grader's mind works from the mind I was using when I learned Latin my junior year of college. Maybe if they were not taking seven or eight other classes, it would be easier for them to focus!

Calling Magister Coke

guess what? someone found the campus today by googling 'aaron kook'. and i don't blame them.

i figured this was the explanation: aaron forgot the address of the blog to which HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE CONTRIBUTING, and googled himself to find it. well done.

but then i wandered over to the dave, the other blog into which i insinuate myself, and someone had found THAT by googling '"aaron kook"'!

this, friends, i cannot explain.

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

It is not true that culture can be acquired only from the classics. We can get something from them, but not "culture" as that word is understood nowadays. Our own culture is based upon a completely castrated and mendacious classical curriculum. To see how little effect this curriculum has, just take a look at our classicists. Thanks to the classics, they should be our best educated men: are they?

More on Scarborough

via rogue classicism, i came across this interview in the chronicle of higher education with michele ronnick, responsible for the publication of william sanders scarborough's autobiography, mentioned previously on the campus.

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

My purpose is: to create complete hostility between our modern "culture" and classical civilization. Whoever wants to serve the former must hate the latter.

What's In a Name?

i'm becoming more and more glad that we have a wider variety of names to choose from in modern times than did the ancient romans.

for example, constantine, whose father was named constantius, had three sons besides crispus. their names were constantine II, constantius, and constans.

seriously.

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

One of the greatest values of classical antiquity is the fact that its writings are the only ones which modern men still read carefully.

Overstraining of the memory--very common among classicists--and underdeveloped judgment.

Ruling the Later Roman Empire

here is michael kulikowski's review of christopher kelly's book Ruling the Later Roman Empire. here are the first two paragraphs:

This book has been awaited since Kelly's contribution s on the subject to the Cambridge Ancient History and Bowersock, Brown and Grabar's guide to late antiquity. Very much a book of two parts, Ruling the Later Roman Empire deals chiefly with the administrative and bureaucratic elites of the late empire, first through the prism of the De magistratibus of John Lydus, then through three long chapters on the symbolic and actual meaning of late Roman bureaucracy and its contrast with the early empire. Kelly's sources are familiar, at least until the short epilogue in which he adduces sermon literature envisaging heaven in imperial terms. His approach is expository and analytical, resolutely traditional: the shrine of Bourdieu is by-passed without modish genuflection, and a topic seemingly made for thick description does not get it. All of which is to say that, to those for whom such things matter, Ruling the Later Roman Empire will seem woefully under-theorized.

But the book is conceptually modern in other ways. Kelly is laudably unwilling to surrender administrative history to German dissertations and gigantic French thèses exhaustively cataloguing the legal minutiae of individual departments. Instead, he searches to find the personal and affective side of Roman bureaucracy, with great success: this is a fundamentally humane book. Kelly can show imaginative feeling both for an invented ageing bureaucrat, gasping with relief when the emperor insists on promotion strictly by seniority, and for canny operators slowly weaving intricate webs of shadowy power and perquisites. Time and again, the book conjures the image of a late Roman Sir Humphrey Appleby, ranging self-interestedly through bureaux every bit as tiresome as the Department of Administrative Affairs, lacking only a sense of humour to complete the picture.

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

the following is (in)appropriate, since we just talked a little about the history of classical scholarship.

Ah, it's a miserable history, the history of classical scholarship! The most nauseating erudition; the sluggish, passive indifference; timid acquiescence.--Who has ever possessed any freedom?

Stephanme, Stephanyou, Stephanus

ever wonder why texts of plato have that funny page-numbering system? you know, 'stephanus pages'? well, i wondered, too.

they are due to the edition of scholar and printer henricus stephanus (henri estienne) (1528-31--1598), son of scholar and printer robertus stephanus (robert estienne). henricus has a number of notables to his credit, including discovering ten new books of diodorus while on a trip to italy, which were printed in 1559, the same year in which he took over his father's business in geneva.

moreover, he was responsible for the printing of editions of myriad ancient works: 58 in latin and 74 in greek, of which 18 were editiones principes. his aeschylus, edited by victorius (1557), was the first to include the complete Agamemnon.

he is perhaps best-known for his Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which, as of 1908, was still unsurpassed as a Greek lexicon on a large scale, and for his edition of Plato, issued in 1578, which held its ground for two centuries until the bipontine edition of 1781-87.

(the foregoing information is taken from sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol.II.)

Centralization and Its Discontents

Centralization in the end defeated itself. The clerks of the central ministries were by no means proof against corruption and would, for a consideration, draft and submit illegal petitions to their chiefs. The ministers of the comitatus themselves, even if they were incorruptible--and they were, it would appear, often susceptible to influence and bribes--found it difficult to keep a check on the vast mass of business which passed through their hands. The emperor himself, snowed under with papers, could not examine every document submitted to him. He regularly threatened with penalties the clerks who prepared illegal rescripts and sometimes the ministers who submitted them. But he openly admitted his impotence by declaring invalid in advance any special grants in contravention of the law, even if they bore his own signature.

(A.H.M. Jones, The Decline of the Ancient World, p.153)