Delayed Resolution for the New Year

I resolve to read the other classics blogs with more regularity, starting with David Meadows's rogueclassicism.

And if that means I keep myself from posting what's already been discussed elsewhere, maybe I'll be forced to try harder.

Gow's Housman

Before Saranike and I head out to do a little book hunting I thought I'd recommend A.S.F. Gow's A.E. Housman: a sketch together with a list of his writing and indexes to his classical papers.

Why that long and odd subtitle? Because one condition of Housman's will was that no one ever collect his published papers into a single volume. He evidently didn't want his early work to stand beside what he considered his life's achievments (Manilius, for one).

Gow's sketch is brief (57 pages with the remainder taken by the bibliography and indexes), charming, and allows Housman to speak humbly about himself often. That would appear to some to be a paradox of his character, but it is perfectly reasonable that someone so well-known for his attacks on the intellectual failings and dishonesty of others would appraise himself as a pedant who counted only as one fourth a Bentley or roughly a Porson.

The harshest critic of other was his own harshest critic.

Next on my list is, appropriately, C.O. Brink's English Classical Scholarship: historical reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman. Stay tuned.

Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961)

Those with a bent toward 'theory' or, alternatively, toward 'interrogating its discourse' (to borrow a few terms) should check out the song by the Weakerthans mentioned in the subject line. Here are the lyrics:

Just one more drink and then I should be on my way home
I'm not enterely sure what your talking about
I've had a really nice time but my dogs need to be fed
I must say that in the right light you look like Shackleton
Comment allez-vous ce soir? Je suis comme ci comme ça
Yes, a penguin taught me French back in Antarctica
Oh, I could show you the way shadows colonize snow
Ice breaking up on the bay off the Lassiter coast
Light failing over the pole as every longitude leads
up to your frost bitten feet oh, you're very sweet
thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida
But I must be getting back to dear Antarctica
Say, do you have a ship and a dozen able men
That maybe you could lend me?

Oh Antarctica
Oh Antarctica
Oh Antarctica
Oh Antarctica

The lyrics alone without the poppy music don't really do it justice, and maybe others won't find it as amusing as I do, but it does make me chuckle to think of a frost-bitten, earthy, hardened old explorer chatting with Foucault about Derrida and icebergs until he has to go home to let his dogs out.

Typhoid Melanippe?

One of our field agents who goes by the name 'the Hawk' tipped us off to this Scientific American story about DNA used to identify the plague at Athens during the Peloponnesian War as Typhoid Fever:

More than 2,000 years ago, a plague gripped the Greek city of Athens. Ultimately, as much as a third of the population succumbed and the devastation, which helped Sparta gain the upper hand in the nearly 30-year-long war between the city-states. That much Thucydides--an ancient historian, general in the war and plague victim who recovered--conveys in his History of the Peloponnesian War. But he did not leave a precise enough description to decide definitively whether the disease was bubonic plague, smallpox or a host of other ailments. Now DNA collected from teeth in an ancient burial pit points to typhoid fever.

Typhus has been identified in the past as a top contender, as it has been on Indiana's Asclepion page, dedicated to the study of ancient medicine. Be on the look out for new articles supporting or refuting the findings in your favorite journals. And who knows ... maybe today we'll even see it in blogs.

The Survival of Classical Texts

In the introduction to Texts and Transmission, L.D. Reynolds helpfully illustrates the contraction and expansion of classical texts from antiquity through the Dark Ages and into the Middle Ages with the figure of the hourglass, in which the slender middle represents the almost total disappearance of classical culture from the intellectual scene during the period running from roughly 550-750 A.D. The lack of activity with respect to texts of Vergil illustrates this point. Reynolds notes that

‘[o]f the 16 manuscripts of Rome’s national poet to have survived from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, 6 are attributed to the fourth century, 5 to the fifth, 3 to c.500; then we have nothing until the late eighth century’ (xvi).

Antique and Late Antique laborers were responsible for other tasks, too, which would aid in the resurgence of classical learning in the wake of the Dark Ages, since their craftsmen developed the techniques widely used for book-making:

‘By the fifth century the roll had given way to the codex, a form of book which has never been superseded. Although the change of format had by now yielded to parchment, which was much more durable and not subject to the monopoly of the Middle East; it could be manufactured wherever there were cows and sheep and goats. The beautiful uncial script was firmly established, as was the first minuscule book-hand, half-uncial. All the arts essential to the making of books as the Middle Ages knew them were fully developed’ (xv).

For the Carolingian revival to be possible, of course, texts were needed. Reynolds conjectures that Italy was probably most responsible for the influx of texts in the north. As he states,

‘If we turn to Italy, the results are much more positive; the movement of books northwards over the Alps can be amply documented. It began long before the Carolingian period, as books were attracted to the powerful monastic foundations of northern Europe....When we come to the Carolingian period and manuscript traditions begin to blossom forth in profusion, the chances are that many of their archetypes were books imported from Italy. This is of course often impossible to prove; but it is not unreasonable to assume that many of the texts had indeed travelled by the prevailing wind’ (xxi-xxii)

The most important city for this could well have been Ravenna, since it had remained a political and cultural power into the sixth century (xxiii).

The Caronlingian revival, the first such major revival of interest in classical literature to occur in the Middle Ages, lasted for approximately 100 years, spanning the ninth century. Its major achievement was one of consolidation, and the court and monasteries played the major role (xxv):

‘The fundamental function of the Carolingian revival in the transmission of our texts was to gather in what could be found of the literature and learning of the past and generate from it the new medieval traditions which would carry the classics through the centuries’ (xxiv)

By the end of the ninth century, in fact, most of what we now possess of classical literature 'had...been copied and was enjoying some degree of circulation, however limited, localized, or precarious it may in some cases have been’ (xxvii-xxviii).

An important factor in the success of the promulgation of these texts was the development of a clear and readable script, the Carolingian minuscule. Indeed, regions of the Empire that did not use this script were not nearly as influential as those that did:

‘The comparative illegibility of ‘national’ hands might help to account for the relatively modest contribution of Ireland and Spain and the slowness with which texts written in Beneventan percolated from their base in the south of Italy...’ (xxviii).

In the years following the Carolingian reflorescence, copying activity likely began to be concentrated in the south and west. Reynolds remarks that

‘Two-thirds of the ninth-century manuscripts mentioned in this book were written in what we now know as France....[A]mid all this flux and reflux it is perhaps not too fanciful to sense a general drift towards the south and west, as the deposits of texts built up at the Carolingian court and in the abbeys of western Germany and north-eastern France were carried to other regions, where, sooner or later, they would help to stimulate fresh revivals of classical learning’ (xxix).

On Theoretical Jargon

'Modern American theorists are products of the U.S. educational system: rarely do they master a foreign language. Perhaps that is why they have invented their own.'

--Karl Galinsky, in 'Introduction: The Current State of the Interpretation of Roman Poetry and the Contemporary Critical Scene' (p. 24) (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, K. Galinsky, ed.)