Siculate Sigma?

A few weeks ago Michael Hendry was wondering about certain orthographical conventions (adscript iota and the like) and was surprised to find that 'siculate sigmas' hadn't caught on.

I tried to post a comment asking for more information, but it doesn't seem to have taken (apologies if it does, and this is redundant), so I thought I'd ask our readers for input.

Does anyone know what a siculate sigma is?

The way I see it there are three possibilities:

1) A sigma which resembles a Sicilian girl (from Siculus, -a, -um)
2) A sigma which resembles a small curved dagger, with handle (final sigma, ς)
3) A sigma which resembles a small curved dagger, sans handle (lunate sigma, ϲ)

Little help? I know others (such as Caelestis at Sauvage Noble) have been wondering.

Hera has lost her head!

Statues of Athena and Hera have found at Gortyn in Crete:

The works, representing the goddesses Athena and Hera, date to between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD – a period of Roman rule in Greece – and originally decorated the Roman theatre in the town of Gortyn, archeologist Anna Micheli from the Italian School of Archaeology told the Associated Press.

“They are in very good condition,” she said, adding that the statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, was complete, while Hera – long-suffering wife of Zeus, the philandering king of gods – is missing her head.

Philandering? Not φιλογύναιος? In one sense, but not the other.

Ithaka post update

Here's the full citation for the article on the excavations of the mask and the tripods & cauldrons at Ithaka:

Benton, Sylvia. BSA (The Annual of the British School at Athens) 35 (1934-1935): 45-73.

(It was actually published in 1938 by Macmillan & Co., and 1934-1935 marks the session, but it should be catalogued under the latter.)

The description of the mask is on page 54, with a plate on 55 showing a black and white photograph and a line drawing.

The top of the mask reads horizontally
ΕΥΧΗΝ Ο
ΔΥΣΣΕΙ

while the lower portion, of which the surface is completely gone, yields only Η and Ν at the ends of two vertical lines.

Based on this the following was proposed:

εὐχὴν Ὀδυσσεῖ, [ὁ δεῖνα ἀνέθ]η[κε]ν.

i.e., 'Votive offering to Odysseus, so and so dedicated it.'

It seems to me a poor translation. If the reconstruction is at all correct it should say, '(so-and-so) set (this object) up (as) a vow to Odysseus.'

Anyone with anything to contribute? An updated bibliography? Thoughts on the controversy?

Ithaka found in Odysseus Unbound?

Roger Cox at Scotsman.com writes about the new book by businessman Robert Bittlestone, (written with the aid of geologist John Underhill and Euripides scholar James Diggle, who doesn't appear to have a decent on-line bio).

Essentially they argue that the western peninsula of Kefalonia was once an island, now joined to its neighbor by rockfalls and deposits, and that it better accords with Homer's description in book 9 than does the island now called Ithaka:

In book nine of The Odyssey, Ithaca is described as "low-lying" and "furthest towards dusk [i.e. west]" of all the nearby islands. However, the island now known as Ithaca is mountainous, and lies to the east of its neighbours.

Here's the Greek for some context:

αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμαλὴ πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται (25)
πρὸς ζόφον, αἱ δέ τ’ ἄνευθε πρὸς ἠῶ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε,
τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουροτρόφος·

History writer and 'television presenter' (sorry, but U.K. English always makes me smirk) Michael Wood isn't buying it, citing the fact that Mycenean finds have surfaced on what we now call Ithaka, so by golly it must be Ithaka!

But there's more to it than that. He cites the work of archaeologist Sylvia Benton who reportedly found tripods and cauldrons as well as a mask inscribed 'my prayer to Odysseus'

In Book 8 of the Odyssey, Homer tells how Odysseus receives gifts from King Alkinoos of Phaeacia before he sails back to Ithaca. The gifts were from "12 noble lords ... and I myself the 13th", says the king. What were the gifts? Later in Book 13 we read: "Come let each of us man by man give him a large tripod and cauldron..."

So 13 men gave Odysseus gifts, and the finds in the 1870s and 1930s add up to 13 cauldrons. When dated, they are proved to be from before Homer.

I should mention that he cites Benton without giving a citation, so I'll do it for him:

Benton, Sylvia. BSA (The Annual of the British school at Athens) 35 (1934-1935).

You're on your own for page numbers, unless I get around to finding more info once I'm on campus.

Campus Update

I've added a number of blogs to the sidebar (each of which links here):

Por las tierras de los Banu Qasi, en Español. This blog appears to cover an interesting range which includes Mongolian history, Linux, and fiction.
hobbyblog, for all you numismatists.
AVE, by a self-described 'Ancient Roman history geek' in Vancouver.
Netlex News, with posts divided among 46 categories, covers art and music among many, many other things.
Memento Vivere, which I've linked to before, now makes the sidebar: 'Classicism for the 21st Century.'
The Hellenophile, where a commercial property examiner from Ohio--with degrees in classics and history--shares his love of Greece. (Seems dormant, but blogs go that way now and then.)
Frequent Citations, 'musings and misadventures of a would-be lawyer' who must have a background in Classics if she bothers with this here blog.

That's it for now. There's no hierarchy there -- just listed in the order I found them.

Also, our e-mail address has changed: it's now campusmawrtius@gmail.

Bring on the spam!

p.s. I was too lazy to put the addresses here in the post, so you'll just have to use the sidebar. Sorry.

Archaeological Finds in Jerusalem

Who says scholarship doesn't have any impact on the real world?

Israel unveiled an underground archaeological site near a disputed Jerusalem holy shrine on Tuesday, nearly a decade after the opening of an exhibit in the same area sparked widespread Palestinian rioting.

The latest discovery included a ritual bath from the period of the second Jewish Temple, destroyed in 70 A.D., and a wall that archaeologists said dates to the first Jewish Temple, destroyed in 586 B.C. The findings strengthen Jewish ties to the shrine also claimed by Muslims.

fio magister

I am doing it! I am following Reggie's methods! They said it could not be done! All of his students would say, "The old man's impractical. You can't teach Latin like THAT to a bunch of highschoolers!" That's because they were all idiots. It is working well, and for the first time, my job seems to MAKE SENSE. My students LIKE LATIN and they understand why the cases are important. We look at the real Latin stuff and my students LOVE IT. Okay not all of them. Some kids are only pleased by stupid video games and chocolate.
quodcunque ostendas eis, increduli oderunt. Verum universa non est turba ac iam eas auras mentes vidi meis cum oculis
vita mea nunc vivit.
Hey Dennis, am I allowed to write in Latin on this blog as much as I like? Is it annoying to the readers? I like to write in Latin, and most certainly my Latin is not the best, but where else would I find an audience to critique my work or give me suggestions on word usage and finer points of grammar?

Spam no more

We've been inundated with comment spam recently, and I just noticed that Blogger has word verification to ensure that real people and not robots are entering comments.

So I apologize for the inconvenience but it's better than reading (and deleting) unwanted advertisements.

Paging Dr. House ...

James Le Fanu at the Telegraph has a column on something called the Ulysses syndrome which might have interest for classicists and which reminded me of a scene from my favorite show, House:

Medicine is full of classical allusions, a faint echo from the days when doctors knew more of the world than just the narrow horizons of science.

So, famously, we have the Achilles tendon, after the young warrior was dipped in the river Styx by his mother to ensure his immortality, while the atlas, the first of the vertebrae at the top of the spine, like its namesake, balances a globe - the skull - on the shoulders. There is the iris, after the Greek goddess of the rainbow, and the hymen, in honour of Apollo's son, so beautiful he was thought to be a girl.

More recently, the paediatrician Charles Essex, writing in the British Medical Journal, has drawn attention to the Ulysses syndrome, a reference to the Greek hero's 10-year odyssey following the Trojan war, with its many dangerous and occasionally pleasurable adventures - before he eventually returned to his point of departure. Similarly, those with the Ulysses syndrome, though healthy enough at the start, undertake a long journey with many disagreeable adventures on the way - before ending up where they started.

The conclusion here is a happy one, but the road to it isn't very pretty.