Latin: The Ne Plus Ultra of Languages

A quick look by Michael Poliakoff at two new books on Latin. Here's the opening:

For generations of adults, the simple word-series "amo, amare, amavi, amatus" used to act as a kind of madeleine, calling to mind long classroom hours spent conjugating Latin verbs (including this one, meaning "love"), then exploring Gaul in its three parts and eventually trying to puzzle out the syntax of the rugged lines that followed "Arma virumque cano," the opening phrase of Virgil's "The Aeneid."

A few lucky students, in that era of required Latin, reveled in the ablative absolute and exulted at their ability to piece together the meaning of a Latin sentence from the seemingly random scattering of stems and inflections. Most students, it is safe to say, found the experience more trying than pleasant; some, like Winston Churchill, might even recall primitive pedagogy and physical brutality from their Latin teachers. But no one finished his years of Latin class without at least a grim respect for a language that could demand so much of young readers centuries after the fall of Rome.

You can read the rest here.

An Interesting Take on Plato and Socrates

'Let us go back to Plato for another illustration. The one thing which has caught everyone's imagination in Plato is the figure of Socrates, the archetypal teacher and prophet, "corrupting" the youth of Athens by showing them than when they express social stereotypes about love or courage or justice or pleasure they have not the faintest idea what they are talking about. We see this Socrates, in the Apology and the Phaedo, facing martyrdom without making any concession to the ignorance and stupidity of his accusers. But Plato himself was a revolutionary thinker, and in the Laws he draws up a blueprint for his own post-revolutionary society. In that society all teachers are to be most strictly supervised and instructed what to teach: everything depends on their complete subservience to the overall social vision. Socrates does not appear in the Laws, and no such person as Socrates could exist in such a society. We should be careful to understand what Plato is doing here. He is really assuming that those who condemned Socrates were right in principle, and wrong only--if wrong at all by that time--in their application of it.'

--Northrop Frye, The Great Code, p. 132

A Nice Use of Irony

This morning on the local radio station I heard a nice use of irony (first definition). Someone had requested Bob Seger, and the DJ said, 'I almost never play Bob Seger' (which is precisely the opposite of the actual state of things). He then proceeded to play not one, but two consecutive Seger tracks.

Throne Found in Herculaneum

Here's the story, which I've copied in from here. If you follow the link, you can also find a link to photos.

ROME (Reuters) - An ancient Roman wood and ivory throne has been unearthed at a dig in Herculaneum, Italian archaeologists said on Tuesday, hailing it as the most significant piece of wooden furniture ever discovered there.

The throne was found during an excavation in the Villa of the Papyri, the private house formerly belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, built on the slope of Mount Vesuvius.

The name of the villa derives from the impressive library containing thousands of scrolls of papyrus discovered buried under meters (yards) of volcanic ash after the Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79.

Restoration of the throne is still ongoing with restorers painstakingly trying to piece back together parts of the ceremonial chair.

While other wooden objects have been dug out in nearby Pompeii, experts have never before found such a significant ceremonial piece of furniture. Previously such pieces have only been observed in paintings or made of marble.

"The find of ancient wooden furniture is not an absolute novelty in Herculaneum or Pompeii. Organic materials in fact were preserved in these cities because of the peculiar way in which they were submerged by the Vesuvius volcanic mud," said the head of the dig, Maria Paola Guidobaldi.

"But we have never found furniture of such a significant structure and decoration," Guidobaldi said.

Little is known about how the throne would have been used but the elaborate decorations discovered on the chair celebrate the mysterious cult figure of Attis.

The most precious relief shows Attis, a life-death-rebirth deity, collecting a pine cone next to a sacred pine tree. Other ornaments show leaves and flowers suggesting the theme of the throne is that of spring and fertility.

The cult of Attis is documented to have been strong in Herculaneum the first century AD.

(Reporting by Antonio Denti, writing by Eleanor Biles, editing by Silvia Aloisi and Paul Casciato)

Dictionarese and the Death of Latin

As I wrote to the colleague who forwarded a link to Harry Mount's op-ed piece in the NYT on Latin, this is painfully unreadable and barely Latin, which defeats for the most part its author's argument.

Aside from the countless errors (e.g., at age 9 Jefferson 'started learning' Latin and Greek, according to the English version, but in the Latin he 'docere coepit', which would be quite a feat), the style is virtually absent, by which I mean to say that he has written not Latin but simplified English with very little regard for Latin idiom.

Let's take briefly the opening line. Is there any student of Latin composition who would not be ashamed to write this:

'Primum, duces nostros linguam Latinam non iam studere triste non videtur.'

When he means to say this?

'At first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore.'

Let's just ignore the awkwardness of the English. One could at least make an effort in the Latin to be readable or accurate or both. For example, why primum and not primo (or a more explicit phrase)? Why this clumsy and ambiguous construction with the impersonal verb when any number of more elegant constructions present themselves readily (e.g., a conditional sounds nice to my ear)? Why triste at all when a dozen other words are more suitable (e.g., clades)?

I won't waste any more time on this, but I would like to encourage others out there to make a genuine effort to promote good Latinity and reject bad.

Latin and the Emergence of the Space-Time Continuum

Last night I attended a layman-oriented talk by Paul Davies on quantum physics and the big bang. He mentioned that, for Einstein, time and space are not two distinct things that transcend the physical universe, but are part of it, and that they are incredibly closely linked to one another. Moreover, in some recent models of the beginning of the universe time and space were at first indistinguishable and one somehow turned into the other (if I was understanding correctly. Regarding this last point, I was happy to see today while looking in Allen and Greenough for something else that the Latin language preceded quantum physics by more than a couple of millennia!

The Ablative of Time is locative in its origin; the Accusative [of time] is the same as that of the extent of space. (AG 423, Note)

Backdating Chocolate

WASHINGTON - Residents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought, new research shows.

Archaeologists led by John Henderson of Cornell University studied the remains of pottery used in the lower Ulua Valley in northern Honduras about 1100 B.C.

Residue from the pots contained theobromine, which occurs only in the cacao plant, the source of chocolate, the researchers said in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The find dates the first use of chocolate to some 500 years earlier than previously known, they said.

The style of the pottery indicates that cacao was served at important ceremonies to mark weddings and births, according to the authors.


On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

Ancient Quotation Marks?

I was startled to read the following in the article linked above (emphasis mine):

'Instone-Brewer radically reinterprets the first passage using, of all things, quotation marks. The Greek of the New Testament didn't always contain them, and scholars agree that sometimes they must be added in to make sense of it.'

I would be interested to see the places where it did contain them.

Two Words

In the entry for the Latin noun caput in Wheelock (ch. 11), several English derivatives are listed. Here are two good ones to add to your arsenal:

occiput: the back or posterior part of the head (ob + caput)
sinciput: the front part of the head or skull (semi + caput)

Also of interest is 'kerchief', consisting of 'chief' < ME chef, chief, < OF chef, chief (= Pr. cap, Sp. cabo, It. capo head):--Rom. type *capu-m:--L. caput head) (from OED entry for chief (n.)), and ker- (whole word from ME kerchef, syncopated form of keverchef, < OF cuevrechief (from OED entry for kerchief (n.)). 'Cover' ('coverchief' is an earlier form of 'kerchief'), in turn, goes back via Old French to the Latin verb cooperire.

Steven Runciman on the writing of history

From the preface to volume one of his history of the Crusades:

It may seem unwise for one British pen to compete with the massed typewriters of the United States. But in fact there is no competition. A single author cannot speak with the high authority of a panel of experts, but he may succeed in giving to his work an integrated and even an epical quality that no composite volume can achieve. Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History, as Gibbon, the greatest of our historians, was aware; and it is difficult, in spite of certain critics, to believe that Homer was a panel. History today has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialised dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work can be of the highest value; but it is not an end in itself. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. The writer rash enough to make the attempt should not be criticised for his ambition, however much he may deserve censure for the inadequacy of his equpiment or the inanity of his results.

I heartily agree. And if that makes me unfashionable, well, I just got my copy of Hardy Amies ABCs of Men's Fashion, so there's hope.

Housman's letters again

Another review of Archie Burnett's edition of Housman's letters has appeared, this time by Paul Johnson in the Literary Review. Johnson is wrong when he says that Last Poems was 'reluctantly published'. Housman had no desire to publish for decades because he had nothing to publish, but once Last Poems began to present itself to him he surprised his friends and his publisher with the news that he had something. Housman rarely did anything reluctantly. He did it of his own accord or he curtly explained why he would not.

But Johnson does appreciate Housman as an epistolographer, and excerpts this fine specimen for his readers:

When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it means to the reader.

Not bad. But overall there's nothing new in this review, and nothing that indicates any greater familiarity with the letters than one can get from a good biography (e.g., Housman, the Scholar-Poet by Richard Perceval Graves).

Now Frank Kermode's review in the London Review of Books (which I can't seem to access at the moment)--there's one worth reading.

How do you make kids care?

Admittedly it wasn't an inspired decision, but the other day I started off some of my classes with a piece from Nuntii Latini on the reelection of Pervez Musharraf. I thought that having them work through a current event in Latin would arouse some interest, and expected at least some of the students to recognize Musharraf. Not a single student did, and they found the whole thing incomprehensible without careful guidance and a modern history lesson. One student even asked what 'Pakistaniae' meant, after he failed to find it in his Latin glossary.

So that was a failure.

Today I was reminded just a bit of some of the silly things kids like to hear about when we came across fenestra, and I taught them defenestration. There was so much joy and laughter upon learning a word that means 'to throw someone out of a window', and to be honest I was surprised no one knew the word already. I think maybe I expect too much from them and have missed out on teaching opportunities because of it.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has thoughts on things that capture the interest and enthusiasm of students, however small. Please feel free to comment here.

West on Passages of Disputed Authenticity

In M.L. West's commentary on the Theogony, he remarks in his introduction to the Typhoeus passage (820-80) that it is 'one of the sections of the Theogony whose authenticity has most often been disputed', and then briefly summarizes and responds to six arguments that it is not by Hesiod. Here is the third, followed by an important critical principle:

Gaia's part in producing an enemy to Zeus' regime is at variance with her benevolence toward Zeus in the rest of the Theogony. Again, comparison of an Oriental parallel (Enuma Elis) helps to explain the anomaly: see p. 24. The assumption of multiple authorship is the most naive of all ways of accounting for contradictions in mythology.

The dangers of the interweb

I know you really can't reduce everything to the worst if its kind, but I found this on a site purporting to help teachers and students:

Virgil’s epic ‘Aenead’ tells the story of two brothers Romulus and Remus, direct descendents of the Trojan prince Aeneas founding the city of Rome on April 21st, 753 B.C. Romulus killed Remus and became the first of the seven kings of Rome. However, another legend suggests that a woman Roma founded Rome.

Keep your students away from such sites!

Try and fly

An interesting little column in the Detroit Free Press (which should please Eric) notes too things that have occurred to me. The first (the derivation of 'flied' in baseball) I've always agreed with, the second ('and' used in place of the infinitive) is one that I considered but discounted, and now I'm reconsidering my position. Leave it to Fowler to find the poetry in a common construction. (The classical connection: hendiadys.)

Epic vade mecum

The BMCR has gotten around to publishing its review of John Miles Foley's A Companion to Ancient Epic (2005), and it's a star-studded behemoth: nearly 700 pages by the likes of Gregory Nagy, Walter Burkert, Michael Putnam, and Craig Kallendorff. The incredible range of topics, the eminence of the authors, and the lack of a single theoretical bias—a plague among most companions—mean that I will definitely purchase of this book—if they ever publish a paperback edition. Unless, of course, some dear reader wants to donate $149.

More on Gladstone

A couple of days ago I mentioned Burkert's reference to William Ewart Gladstone's noticing of the connection between the Enuma Elish and Homer in Burkert's article 'The Logic of Cosmogony'. His footnote to that passage directs the reader's attention to a place in his 1992 book The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, an English translation and revision of a work first published in German in 1984. In that book (pp. 92-3), he writes:

Ti-amat is the form normally written in the text of Enuma Elish for the mother "who bore them all." The Akkadian word which lies behind this, however, is just tiamtu or tamtu, the normal word for the sea. The name can also be written in this more phonetic orthography; but in the Enuma Elish we also find the form taw(a)tu. If one proceeds from Tawtu, then Tethys is an exact transcription. The different reproductions of the dentals, t and th, might disturb the purist; but Sophilos wrote Thethys, which, in normal Greek orthography, would automatically yield Tethys. In fact the Enuma Elish became known to Eudemos, the pupil of Aristotle, in translation; here we find Tiamat transcribed as Tauthe, which is still closer to the reconstructed form Tawtu. That the long vowel a is changed to e in the Ionian dialect even in borrowed words has parallels in Kubaba becoming Kybebe, Baal becoming Belos, and Mada known as Medes. Thus the proof seems complete that here, right in the middle of the Iliad, the influence of two Akkadian classics can be detected down to a mythical name.

In one of the footnotes in this passage [14], we find a reference to Gladstone:

The first to see the connection between Enuma Elish and Homer, Tiamat and Tethys was W.E. Gladstone, Landmarks of Homeric study (1890), appendix... .

'The Roman World: Religions and Everday Life'/Dayton Art Institute

Not sure if this has already been posted elsewhere, but in case it hasn't...

Mosaics to highlight Rome exhibit

By Meredith Moss

Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

This Rome exhibit wasn't built in a day.

In fact, The Dayton Art Institute's first major exhibition on ancient Rome has been in the works since 2005 when Dr. Sally Struthers, a dean at Sinclair Community College, was first approached to serve as guest curator for a collection that would transport visitors back to the ancient Roman Empire.

"The Roman World: Religions and Everyday Life" officially opens to the public Saturday, with a series of preview openings slated this week for the press and DAI members.

"I like this whole idea of visual motifs that meant different things to different religions in the Roman world," says Struthers, who delights in pointing out specific symbols — the peacock, the palm leaf, the shell, the fish — that were adapted and used in ancient times by Polytheism, Judaism and Christianity.

The showcase of the exhibition is a group of colorful mosaic panels that were once part of a synagogue floor discovered in North Africa.

In order to give visitors a better appreciation of the art, the entire mosaic floor has been re-created, with the original mosaics positioned precisely where they would have been originally.

That portion of the exhibit, titled "Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire," is on loan from the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Curator Edward Bleiberg, who wrote the catalog that will be sold in conjunction with the show, will come to Dayton for a lecture Sept. 30. Ancient meets modern when Struthers and Bleiberg provide online streaming audio commentary for the exhibit and a podcast that DAI guests can download and play as they tour it.

Struthers, who visited Rome recently to photograph ancient sites for the exhibit, also has gathered favorite works from other museums dating from fifth century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. and beyond: ancient sculptures of the gods, gold jewelry, coins, vases of Roman glass and textiles so sensitive to light that DAI patrons will lift a protective cloth to view them.

The museum has developed a variety of special programs to complement "The Roman World." Kids will "Meet the Romans" at the Experiencenter, teachers can request learning guides, and there are a number of lectures and special programs.

How to go

WHAT: "The Roman World: Religions and Everyday Life" featuring the Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire"

WHEN: Saturday through Jan. 6

WHERE: Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park North

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m. Closed holidays.

ADMISSION: $14 for adults, $12 for seniors and students, $7 for youth. $12 for groups of 10 or more. Members free.

TOURS: Docent-led tours at 2 and 6 p.m. Thursdays and 2 p.m. Sundays.

INFO: (937) 223-4ART or www.daytonartinstitute.org

When Politicians Knew Homer

In his article called 'The Logic of Cosmogony', Walter Burkert writes, in a passage regarding how ancients attempted to tell the tale about 'the beginning' of 'everything' (pp. 92-3):

The most common response...is: in the beginning there was Water. This is not limited to the ancient world: it is also reported from America, e.g. the Popol Vuh of the Quiche/ Maya. The Egyptians developed water-cosmogonies in diverse variants, having the yearly flood of the Nile before their eyes; but Enuma elish too has ground water and salt water, Apsu the begetter and Tiamat who bore them all, as the first parents of everything. Surprisingly enough, this recurs in the midst of Homer's Iliad with Oceanus and Tethys, 'begetting of everything'; this may be direct influence. (It was William Ewart Gladstone, better known as British Prime Minister, who first saw this connection.)

Ben Stiller on the Ancient world

"I am really interested in Roman history so if I could travel back in time I'd take look at Roman culture and possibly some Greek biblical history as well. I'd love to check out the orgies too!"

I'm wondering if there's supposed to be a comma between Greek and biblical, or if Ben just that into the OT.

On Mythological Terminology

'Scholars have often found it difficult to distinguish between myth and other kinds of traditional tale: saga, legend, folktale, and fable. It is not always necessary or even possible to draw such distinctions. For speakers of German the term saga (Sage) is more or less synonymous with myth (Mythos): the best known collection of Greek myths is Gustav Schwab's Die schoensten Sagen des klassischen Altertums, and the most influential treatment of Germanic sagas is Jacob Grimm's Germanische Mythologie. In Grimm's usage the two terms are sometimes synonymous, though occasionally he seems to want to restrict myth (Mythus, as he writes it) to antiquity. If distinctions are drawn, they usually have to do with the cultural context in which the tale was generated.'

--Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology (p. 6)

Love of Sea Monsters?

Has anyone else thought this upon spotting a bottle of Cetaphil lotion or cleanser?

Or am I just a dork?

Don't answer that.

I am tired of scholarship.

The reason, I hope, will be plain when you read the title of a book reviewed in the BMCR and the following quotation from the reviewer: Feeling History. Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion.

Francesca D'Alessandro Behr [D.] has produced an excellent and thought-provoking study of the figure of apostrophe and its many implications in Lucan's De Bello Civili. New scholarship on the poem will now need to take account of D.'s examination of the narrator's voice in Lucan. Her basic thesis is that Lucan's narrator intervenes in his own narrative, at the expense of the reader's immersion, in order to guide his audience's interpretation of the events he is recounting.

I wonder first what the title is supposed to mean (what's wrong with 'Apostrophe in Lucan', for example?) and I'm at a loss so I'll just accept it and move on. What of the reviewer's statement?

The only reason we might need someone to tell us what the narrator was up to was if we hadn't read Lucan for ourselves. We haven't. In fact, we haven't read very much literature, have we? And because of that an endless run of PhDs does the reading for us, then pats one another on the back for telling us what they got out of it. They're always 'negotiating' or 'privileging' or talking vaguely about poetics or imputing subversion. In this case, we need more than 200 pages to learn that the poet tried to 'guide his audience's interpretation'. Wow.

This kind of scholarship wearies me, and made me stop caring about graduate school a long time ago. I don't like what it means to be a scholar, and I enjoy teaching all the more because of it.

Doin' tha running man (of many turns)

Three crews of South Korean breakdancers have scored hit shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, underlining the nation's depth of talent and showing hip-hop moves did not die out in the 1980s, an expert said Friday.

. . . . .

"Spin Odyssey" takes on a more ambitious narrative -- the Last For One group attempts a loose re-telling of Homer's Greek epic with a few dashes of slapstick humour thrown in for good measure.

Odysseus was the original beta boy.

Housman's Letters

I'm fairly certain that Dennis has already seen this, but just in case and for the benefit of other readers--David Butterfield has reviewed Archie Burnett's The Letters of A.E. Housman, a massive 960-page volume, in BMCR. Here is the lead paragraph:

The name of A. E. Housman (1859-1936) causes an instant reaction in the Classical community. The very intensity, and indeed variety, of sentiments that the letters 'A. E. H.' can evoke is startling when it is considered how few, whether scholars or not, have engaged directly with his Classical work. Housman has never lacked attention from both a deeply respectful following and a firm band, regrettably more numerous, of detractors. It is of course one of the wearying but unsurprising facts of Classical scholarship that each bold and revisionary scholar is met with a less than positive reception. Yet Housman's lot deserves particular attention: why should a man, reserved but polite in company, passionate for accuracy and excellence in print, inspire such strong feelings among academic circles even of the present day? A satisfactory answer to this question remains to be given.

The Spirit of the Anti-Classicist

I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion/Mythology/Anthropology

Sorry for my absence of late. I now have regular access to the internet again, so thought I'd throw another Google Books post here. The topic can be seen above.

Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th ed., revised), vol. 1 and vol. 2

James Frazer, Totemism

James Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship

James Frazer, The Golden Bough (2nd. ed., revised and enlarged), vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3

Otto Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte

Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States

W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series: The Fundamental Institutions

Christian Gottlob Heyne, Ad Apollodori Bibliothecam observationes

Travels with Kapuściński

I've finally gotten around to picking up Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus, which I mentioned previously. I'm 25 pages in and there's so much I could quote, but I thought I'd select the following and encourage others to pick the book up as well. The author relates how he purchased a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to work on his English once he'd settled in India:

I returned to the hotel, opened the Hemingway to the first sentence: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one that had been available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word "brown," but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: "The mountainside sloped gently..." Again—not a word. "There was a stream alongside..." The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and blocking my way, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation.

We've all felt that way, but Greek and Latin have never left us alone in a foreign land. Even Herodotus, as Kapuściński notes, had the benefit of Greek being the lingua franca, which is why English was so important for Kapuściński to learn. How he did it showed great determination and possibly courage, though he really had no choice. One bit in particular could be taken as good advice by students of Greek and Latin:

I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn't understand and read the dialogues, which were easier...

How to make Latin seem lame

Something that always drives me nuts is seeing people who care about the same things I do making those things seem lame. Like Star Trek. Watching the interaction between Spock and McCoy isn't much different for me from reading Sherlock Holmes as he invites Watson to join him on a case and says he'll be lost without his Boswell. But then some jerk has to dress up in a costume and get into debates with other jerks about the smallest things, and make me feel like I shouldn't ever confess to liking Star Trek. But there. I said it.

I also like Latin.

And sometimes Latinists make Latin seem so ... dorky.

If you're like me maybe you wouldn't mind seeing the following on a t-shirt:

LATINAM STVDEBAM
ET VNVM ACCEPI HANC
SVBVCVLAM STOLIDAM

It beats some of what I've seen, that I know my students would never be caught dead in, and I can't blame them.

The Haunts of Orthodox Bulldog?

Here's a brief notice of some recent archaeological work in northwestern Turkey, in the region of ancient Phrygia:

"Galleries, negropols, passageways and granaries, dating back to Roman and Byzantine periods, were unearthed during the excavations carried out in Han Underground City of central Anatolian city of Eskisehir," said Ahmet Oguz Alp from Anadolu University's Department of Art History.

"Although it is not clear yet, we think that the city might have been used as a military base in the past. People might have used the city as a place of shelter or to wage attacks in order to protect themselves from Arab and Turkish incursions as well," Alp affirmed.

Alp also noted that the city had a great importance, as it was used as a military route before the Ottoman Empire and a route for pilgrimage afterwards.

The excavation work at the historical site will end on August 22nd.

By 'negropols' is meant necropoleis (or, if you prefer, necropolises).

This just makes me wonder whether this 'Han Underground City' (about which I can find nothing else) is Dorylaeum (Δορύλαιον), which was the see of Eusebius of Dorylaeum, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea.

This Eusebius is remembered for his support of Catholic orthodoxy and his doctrinal battles with the Nestorians and with Eutychus who espoused something like the monophysite doctrine. The latter controversy saw him physically abused, threatened with death, condemned, and removed from office. He found solace in Rome with Pope Leo I, and later participated in the Council of Chalcedon where he was fully vindicated, he helped to author the definition of faith, and his condemnation was annulled. The Catholic Encyclopedia article ends with this:

Flavian said of Eusebius at Constantinople that "fire seemed cold to his zeal for orthodoxy", and Leo wrote of him that he was a man who "had undergone great perils and toils for the Faith". In these two sentences all that is known of him may be fitly summarized.

This is about as clever as a Nashville lyric

The Rockae, music and lyrics by Peter Mills, adapted from Euripides' The Bacchae by Peter Mills and Cara Reichel, directed by Cara Reichel.
"Pent-up King Pentheus takes on Dionysus and his frenzied female fans when the god of wine and theatre returns to Thebes. Get ready for moshing Maenads and thrashing catharsis in this rock musical adaptation of Euripides' classic, The Bacchae. Drama Desk-nominated writer Peter Mills fuses the intensity of heavy metal with the violence of ancient Greek tragedy. The Rockae will be presented as a partner event of the 4th Annual New York Musical Theatre Festival."

Two Articles on Rome

The first is about the excavation of an ancient tannery outside of Rome that now stands in the way of progress, in the form of a rail line with only 109 yards to go for its completion. Either the rail line must be stopped, or the ancient complex will have to be moved to preserve it. My money is on the latter. Here is the lead:

ROME --Archaeologists excavating an ancient tannery believed to be the largest ever found in Rome said Tuesday they might need to move the entire work site, which is being threatened by railroad construction. The 1,255-square-yard complex includes a tannery dating to the second or third century, as well as burial sites and part of a Roman road.

At least 97 tubs, some measuring more than three feet in diameter, have been dug up so far in the tannery, archaeologists said.

In other news, Italian P.M. Romano Prodi is pushing for the restoration of the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome.

THE ancient road on which pilgrims travelled from Canterbury to Rome could soon become a vibrant thoroughfare again.

The Via Francigena was first mentioned in the third century and is Europe's oldest route of pilgrimage.

After leaving England, it winds for roughly 600 miles through Arras, Rheims and Lausanne before reaching Tuscany and some of Italy's most beautiful landscapes.

The earliest map of the road was made in around 990 by Sigeric the Serious, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, the Via Francigena is much less famous than its Spanish counterpart, the Way of St James, which pilgrims use to visit Santiago di Compostela. Last year, around 100,000 Catholics registered with the church in Santiago but only about 8,000 people walked the Via Francigena. Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister and a devout Catholic, has vowed to restore the Via Francigena to its former glory. Before the arrival of the motorcar, the Francigena, which means "born in France", was Italy's transport spine.

I'm guessing there must be a nautical component to the road somewhere between, say, England and France. And I think everyone will agree that its first cartographer had an absolutely first-rate name. The earnestness implied by his name is evidenced in his effort in map-making--an activity which, to be sure, would never be undertaken by someone called, e.g., Gaiseric the Frivolous. I'll leave you with a quote from Mr. Prodi:

"It really makes me angry that we do not have pilgrims walking towards Rome any longer."

Latin Rules in Jingles

From the same issue, sent in by one Eva Johnson, a first year student at Ballard High in Seattle, we find a helpful set of rhyming couplets to memorize the dative with special verbs:

Credo, credere, to believe or trust
Faveo, favere, to favor all just,
Pareo, parere, to obey and do right,
Noceo, nocere, to injure in fight.
Studeo, studere, to be eager for a's,
Resisto, resistere, to resist low grades,
Persuadeo, persuadere, to urge or persuade.
To memorize these will be of great aid,
With all these verbs the Dative is used,
But by students of Latin they are often confused.

Any suggestions for other verbs?

The Pedagogical Value of Parody

This exceddingly entertaining time capsule is excerpted from B.L. Ullman's Hints for Teachers (CJ 19.5, p. 330):

Parodies
In the "Hints" for June, 1922, I pointed out that parodies had a distinct teaching value, in addition to that gained from the interest created by them, because they presupposed a thorough knowledge of the passages parodied and thus encouraged reading for thought. Miss Helen S. Conover of the Hillsboro, Ohio, High School sends the following Ciceronian parody by a junior in her school:

How long, O flapper, will you try our patience? How long will your wildness elude us? For what purpose do you display your lip stick so publicly? Do the laments of your mother, the growls of your father, the horrified countenance of your grandmother, and the bold glances of many men move you not at all? Do you not see that your tricks are known and your wishes are made harmless by the knowledge of all who know you? Do you think any one of us is ignorant of what dance hall you visited night before last, what time you came home last night, where you were, who was with you and what exciting lark you planned?

O the times, O the customs! The town knows these things, the families see them, yet they continue. Do they continue? Nay, they even grow worse and worse. Chic flappers draw flasks from wondrous corsages and mark with their eyes what man they are going to lure to ruin. But the brave fathers and mothers lift not one finger to prevent and think they have done enough for their children's souls if they give them more money than they ask for and more clothes than they can wear.

With a few changes it might be relevant today.

Teaching oratio obliqua: A to B, X to Y

In the April 1921 edition of B.L. Ullman's 'Hints for Teachers,' once a regular feature of the Classical Journal, I found the following in which we see that a current pedagogical concern (movement and active learning) was current nearly a century ago as well.

Ullman cites the 'difficulty in the understanding of continuous indirect discourse as we find it in Caesar' which is rooted in 'the failure of the students to understand its workings in English.' He recommends trying the suggestion of L.W.P. Lewis in Practical Hints on the Teaching of Latin (Macmillan, 1919):

He says (p. 64): "Begin with those Indirect Statements only which are clearly reported, and start with the English. The work proceeds like this:—Q 'What is an Indirect Statement ?' —A. (to be obtained) 'An Indirect Statement is a statement made by A to B and reported by X to Y.'

The basic procedure is simple: set two groups of students before the class to put the words into action.

Make A say to B 'The weather is fine,' and X report to Y in the form 'A told B that the weather was fine.' (Here we get a bit of the much recommended movement and action even in Latin.)

So far so good. Now Lewis wants to complicate matters:

Then have another set of boys out and let them arrange another example in whispers for themselves. Put a boy A in charge and he will arrange the parts, so to speak. He will explain what he is going to say to B and will instruct X how to report to Y the statement he makes. Then let them go through it for the class. I call it making a charade, and I always know when I am doing well, as if anything goes wrong in an ordinary lesson with a duller boy (the change of pronouns, for instance, is liable to give trouble, and the tense) there is sure to be a hand up at once with 'Please, sir, may I make a charade for him?' Lastly, we make our A, B, X, and Y report in all sorts of ways, so that the various reported statements begin with, 'He told him,' 'He told me,' 'I told him,' 'I told you,' 'You told me,' etc. Let there be plenty of it. The boys like it, and they soon get to grasp the pronoun changes and other points. Finally we give them the reported statement and let them get back to the original words spoken."

Ullman calls Lewis's book 'reactionary,' though useful in parts, and unsuited to American teachers. But activities of this sort, properly adapted, certainly have their use.

Also Seen

I hope this exercise is at least useful for collecting some resources and cutting down on search time. Thanks to Dennis for his contribution. Just saw a couple of other books I thought I'd link to.

Vergil in the Middle Ages by Domenico Comparetti (Benecke translation)

Vergil: A Biography by Tenney Frank

And while we're on the subject of former Bryn Mawr faculty, here is Tenney Frank's Roman Imperialism.

The Cults of Ostia, Lily Ross Taylor's doctoral thesis

And a couple from Paul Shorey:
The Unity of Plato's Thought

Horace: Odes and Epodes

Byzantinistik on Google Books

Following Eric's lead I thought I'd link to some useful old works in my hobby area, Byzantine studies. Some of these may be outdated, but still useful.

First up, Karl Krumbacher's Geschichte der byzaninischen Litteratur von Justinian bis zum Ende des Oströmischen Reiches. This is the expanded second edition of 1897, and an incredibly important work.

I was interested also to find Immanuel Bekker's edition of the histories of Nicetas Choniates. Bekker was so prolific as an editor and collator of manuscripts that, it was said, 'he could be silent in seven languages' (Sandys iii 87). Har har.

I then started in trying to catalogue the rest of the 50 volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, but really should have guessed that Mischa Hooker had already done it.

But there are still many important works to be found. (The legendary Du Cange's Histoire de l'empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs francais, for instance.) The rest of this list will be heavily indebted to the introduction to Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State.

What about both volume 1 and volume 2 of John Jacob Reiske's text and commentary on the De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae by Constantine Porphyrogenitus? Ostrogorsky called the discovery of this manuscript 'without doubt one of the greatest events in the history Byzantine studies.'

Though incomplete overall, a certain volume of George Finlay's comprehensive history of Greece is available that includes all of the chapters on Medieval Greece and the Trebizond, covering the years 540-1453. Finlay is described as a philhellene and a friend of Byron. He consciously states in his preface that he has written a supplement to Gibbon, 'until something more worthy to be placed beside the writings of the great historian shall replace it,' and we can infer from this that he intended to be fairer to his subject than Gibbon was while acknowledging Gibbon's labor and achievement.

Then there's Alfred Rambaud's L'empire grec au dixième siècle: Constantin Porphyrogénète, which Ostrogorsky calls 'epoch making.'

Both volume 1 and volume 2 of Sabatier's Description des monnaies byzantines are available.

Karl Neumann's Die Weltstellung des byzantinischen Reiches vor de Kreuzzügen is there too, which Ostrogorsky calls 'stimulating' and describes as 'a masterpiece of research and presentation.'

If Karl Eduard Zachariä von Lingenthal's seven volume Jus graeco-romanum is not available, then at least his Geschichte des Griechisch-römischen rechts is.

That does it for now.

Primary Texts/Late Antiquity

I don't have time for anything substantive at the moment, but I'll post a few more links to Google Books. Today's topic is primary sources from Late Antiquity.

Avitus (ed. Chevalier [LIBRAIRIE GÉNÉRALE CATHOLIQUE ET CLASSIQUE ])

Heptateuch-poet/Cyprianus Gallus (ed. Peiper [CSEL])

Juvencus (ed. Huemer [CSEL])

Nonnus--Paraphrasis S. Evangelii Ioannei (ed. Scheindler [Teubner])

Sedulius (ed. Huemer [CSEL])

The centaur at the forest's edge

As I work on making my first pot roast and in the lull before my daily workout (summers off are a nice perk for the teacher) I'm reading a bit of Jacob Burckhardt's Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (translated inexplicably as 'Force and Freedom' and later republished by the Liberty Fund as 'Reflections on History'). Burckhardt is perhaps most famous today for the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. He was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and an accomplished art historian who was lampooned by the likes of Wilamowitz for his views on the Greeks, but whom modern historians have followed and vindicated (cf. Oswyn Murray's edition of Burckhardt's The Greeks and Greek Civilization published by St. Martin's).

Early in the introduction to WB he uses the following image in rejecting Hegel's philosophy of history:

Diese ist ein Kentaur, eine contradictio in adjecto; denn Geschichte, d.h. das Koordinieren, ist nicht Philosophie und Philosophie, d.h. Subordinieren, ist Nichtgeschichte.

For the Deutchless (and perhaps the unLatined) among us:

This ('philosophy of history') is a centaur, a contradiction in terms; for history, i.e., that which coordinates, is not philosophy, and philosophy, i.e., that which subordinates, is unhistorical.

Burckhardt objects to the attempt of imposing a system onto something non-linear and unsystematic, and considers the first principals of the philosophy of history to lead necessarily to contradictions, and sees the obsession with origins as futile and necessitating predictions of the so-called progress of history.

The centaur soon reemerges, though, and we find that he isn't all bad:

Immerhin ist man dem Kentauren den höchsten Dank schuldig und begrüßt ihn gerne hie und da an einem Waldesrand der geschichtlichen Studien. Welches auch sein Prinzip gewesen, er hat einzelne mächtige Ausblicke durch den Wald gehauen und Salz in die Geschichte gebracht. Denken wir dabei nur an Herder.

And again a translation:

Still, we are very grateful to the centaur and gladly welcome him now and again at the edge of forest of historical studies. Whatever his principles have been, he has hewn several powerful vistas through the forest and added salt to history. We need only think of Herder.

Herder is best remembered today for his devotion to the notion of die Völker, or peoples, which may have helped pave the way to German nationalism. It's interesting though that Herder was reacting against the nationalism of his own day and was interested in elevating all 'peoples' of the world equally. He did shake things up to say the least.

Bruce Lincoln's Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, which is concerned with what scholars have done with myth throughout history, contains a lot of useful and insightful information on Herder. Not that I endorse Lincoln's conclusions, his own theoretical framework, or especially his shoddy treatment of historical linguistics in the epilogue, but it is definitely worth reading and generally fair (if sometimes bordering on sensational).

More Google Books

Today we'll feature some full-view volumes by Gilbert Murray.

The Rise of Greek Epic

A History of Ancient Greek Literature

Anthropology and the Classics (Murray is the author of one of the six lectures; other authors include Andrew Lang and Arthur Evans)

The Stoic Philosophy (Conway Memorial Lecture, 1915)

Our Great War and the Great War of the Ancient Greeks (Creighton Lecture, 1918)

A Couple of Notes

I was happy to find that Eduard Norden's book Die Antike Kunstprosa is readable and fully downloadable at Google Books. I was hoping that they would have his commentary on Aeneid 6, but alas.

Also available is the 1908 edition of Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik, which you can find here.

For those interested in the history of classical scholarship, volume 2 of Sandys is available here, though I haven't been able to find the other volumes on Google Books.

Some volumes of Mommsen's Römische Geschichte are available in English translation here.

Also seen was Gilbert Murray's translation of two lectures by Wilamowitz. But they don't have his Geschichte der Philologie.

Finally, I saw Eleanor Dickey's new book Ancient Greek Scholarship (APA/Oxford, 2007) on the new books shelf today. It looks interesting and includes a 'reader' (chapter 5), the purpose of which is 'to provide practice in reading scholarly Greek' (p. 141). That seems to me to be a very good idea indeed. A review by William Slater is here.

The Last Legion trailer

I've mentioned the movie poster with some notes on the story, and now you can see the trailer:

Museum Exhibition + Website

The Indianapolis Museum of Art will be the first U.S. city to host a travelling exhibition of Roman Art from the Louvre. Here are the first three paragraphs of the press release:

INDIANAPOLIS – In preparation for hosting the United States premiere of the Roman Art from the Louvre exhibition, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has launched www.theRomansareComing.com , a special web site that features exhibition information, images, a calendar of events and a series of 10 IMA-produced downloadable videos that will bring to life various themes in the exhibition. Roman Art from the Louvre is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Musée du Louvre and will be on view from September 23, 2007 to January 6, 2008.

Earlier this year, a team of five IMA staff members traveled to Rome and Paris to conduct interviews with Louvre representatives and to gather footage of historic monuments, buildings, and examples of Roman and Parisian culture. The IMA team then transformed the HDV footage into engaging, two- to three-minute videos called “webisodes” that will be available on www.theRomansareComing.com . The first video currently is available and more will be posted during the course of the exhibition. Upcoming video topics include the city of Paris, which is home to the Musée du Louvre; conservation techniques for antiquities; the art’s journey from Italy to the Louvre; and an analysis of the Roman influence on architecture throughout Indianapolis. An episode titled “I Love the A.D.s” investigates Roman pop culture and is patterned after the VH1 show “I Love the 80s.”

To further explore Rome and its culture, the web site also will feature lists of books and movies, a glossary of terms used in the exhibition, a calendar that includes upcoming programs and events at the IMA and teacher and school resources. Visitors may purchase advanced tickets to Roman Art from the Louvre on the web site as well. Exhibition admission is $12 for adults (ages 18-64); $6 for children (ages 7-17) and college students; $10 for seniors (65+) and groups of 10 or more. The exhibition is free for children six and under and for all school groups booked through the IMA Education Division.

You can read the rest here.

To go to the website mentioned in the release, just click.

Quintus Servilius Pudens

I've been trying to track down the Quintus Servilius Pudens (or 'Mr. Modest') mentioned in the article below. As he is said to have been a friend of Hadrian, the following is the individual closest to the necessary dates I've been able to find. The only year mentioned in the entry is 111, still during the reign of Trajan, so if this is our Servilius, he must have lived on into the reign of Hadrian. Is this he?

The entry is from Paulys Realencylopädie Supplement IX, entry 77a.

Q. Servilius Pudens, ein Legat, der mit Plinius im Dez. 111 in Nicomedia zusammentraf (Plin. epist. X 25), vielleicht Vater des cos. 166 (s.u. 77b). Er wird auf den Ziegeln CIL XV 346. 349-50. 1429-41 erwähnt.

The (possible) son mentioned was also named Q. Servilius Pudens, consul ordinarius in 166 with L. Fufidius Pollio and proconsul of Africa around 180 or shortly thereafter.

Bath Complex Discovered

Apologies if this has already been noted elsewhere:

Archaeologists Dig Up Roman Bath Complex
Staff and agencies
19 July, 2007

By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press Writer 24 minutes ago

ROME - Archaeologists said Thursday they have partly dug up a second-century bath complex believed to be part of the vast, luxurious residence of a wealthy Roman.

Statues and water cascades decorated the interiors, American archaeologist Darius A. Arya, the head of the excavation, said Thursday during a tour of the digs with The Associated Press. Only pedestals and fragments have been recovered.

"The Romans had more leisure time than other people, and it‘s here in the baths that they typically spent their time," Arya said. "Because you could eat well, you could get a massage, you could have sex, you could gossip, you could play your games, you could talk about politics ? you could spend the whole day here."

The complex is believed to be part of a multiple-story villa that belonged to the Roman equivalent of a billionaire of today, a man called Quintus Servilius Pudens who was friends with Emperor Hadrian, Arya said. It is not clear if the baths were open to the public or reserved to distinguished guests of the owner.

Excavations at the Villa delle Vignacce park lasted a total of 10 weeks, and it is planned to continue, he said. Future decisions, including whether the site will be opened to the public, are still to be made.

Meeting at communal bath houses, they would go through a series of rooms of alternating temperatures at a leisurely pace, dipping themselves in hot and cold baths. It was a social event, but also a way to purify their bodies of toxins and a form of relaxation.

Twain, Vergil, Homer, Dante, etc.

Recently in the Muskogee Phoenix by a Food columnist. As the introduction to an Italian recipe, the author, who evidently utilizes an optimistic reading of Vergil, we find the following:

Mark Twain leads us to the topmost topaz of an ancient tower in his short story “A Cure for the Blues.”

This little gem is a witty literary criticism of a leading author of his day, fictionalized as the so-called McClintock, putting forth Twain’s belief that good writing comes from the writer’s own experience and the avid reading of books. He knew that a passionate writer must first be a voracious reader.

I mention Twain’s short story because it is through the reading of books that ideas are transmitted from one writer to another, from the ancient tower to the modern one. Four works can illustrate this point. Starting with Vergil’s “Aeneid,” the epic poem of the Romans, we can easily move between centuries.

Vergil wrote the “Aeneid” to glorify Rome for Emperor Augustus. Aeneas, the Trojan hero who escaped the fall of Troy to the Greeks, is given the profound mission of establishing a new Troy in a land to the West which will become Rome.

There, the oracle has told him, he will find a troia, a white pig with baby piglets, but not before visiting the Underworld, escaping perils, and jilting Carthaginian queen Dido to fulfill his glorious mission.

If we follow this thread backwards eight centuries we arrive at Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the prototype for Vergil’s “Aeneid.” But, if we follow it forward to the late Middle Ages, we come to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” In the first part of the work Vergil serves as Dante’s guide through the Inferno.

There they encounter nine circles increasing in severity where sinners receive a punishment befitting their transgressions. Dante’ influence continues to affect literature, his dialect setting the standard for the Italian language.

Move ahead several centuries into our time and we arrive at Daniel Pearle’s “The Dante Club.” In this well researched historical thriller three friends, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes are furtively translating Dante’s Inferno into English when murders imitating the punishments in the nine circles begin cropping up in Cambridge just as the translators reach that point in the translating.

The men scramble to find the killer and help a widowed Longfellow finish the poetic translation.

And we can move beyond the ninth circle to Jodi Picoult’s “The Tenth Circle.” Comic book artist Daniel Stone and his wife Laura, a Dante scholar, struggle to save their 14-year-old daughter, Trixie, who has accused her boyfriend of rape. When Trixie runs away to Alaska, Daniel stops at nothing to save his daughter.

The novel raises the issue of not only how well we can ever know another person, but how well we are able to know even ourselves. Picoult has a devoted following; her latest novel is “Nineteen Minutes.”

These books offer a diversion from this deluge of rain. With the Romans as a foundation, they also give us an excuse to try an Italian-based menu this week, always a good cure for weather-induced blues.

Polytheism and Society in Ancient Athens

Dennis recently mentioned a review of Robert Parker's recent book Polytheism and Society in Ancient Athens. BMCR, too, now has a review (in French), this one by Corinne Bonnet.

The Straight Dope on the Trojan War

As an occasional reader of the Straight Dope through the years I was pleased to see the latest entry, though I was very highly disturbed by the question that Cecil Adams was responding to:

In mythology class the other day, my teacher mentioned that Agamemnon's death mask had been found ...

I would have replied that her mythology teacher be fired immediately. Cecil was nicer and actually pretty informative (but that's what we've come to expect). The argument that (Hittite) Ahhiyawa equals (Greek) Achaea and that Wilusija equals Ilios is still disputed and I think he handles it well here in his closing statement:

The point is, we know the Greeks (or at least the Ahhiyawans) interfered in Trojan (or at least Wilusan) politics and on one or two occasions arranged the overthrow of the king. That’s a frail thread to hang the Iliad on, but it’s all we’ve got.

An old but still accessible and readable account by as eminent a scholar as you'll find is given in History and the Homeric Iliad by Denys Page, which I apparently picked up in a used book store for $3.50 in my undergraduate days.

For what it's worth, on Ahhiyawa the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.) cites only T.R. Bryce in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology (1989): 297-310.

On the End of Roman Rule in Britain

Continuing on for a moment on the topic of late Roman administration, I offer a citation from J.N.L. Myres articles 'Pelagius and the End of Roman Rule in Britain' (JRS 50 [1960] 21-36). He notes at the opening of the article that '[t]he circumstance in which Roman rule over Britain came to an end have always been something of a puzzle to historians' (21). But he fills out the picture a little bit on p. 23:

The first decade of the fifth century, which saw the hey-day of Pelagius' influence and popularity in Rome, was marked by tremendous events in the political world, events which accelerated the disintegration of Roman authority in the West. Alaric and his Visigoths entered Italy in 402: in the last days of 406 vast hordes of barbarians, Vandlas, Alans, and Sueves, crossed the frozen Rhine and penetrated deeply into the Empire from which, in fact, they were never ejected again: almost at the same time came the revolt of Constantine III in Britain, which was quickly followed by the removal of the Roman armies and the ejection of the civil administration from this country: in 408 came the death of Stilicho, the last of Honorius' generals to continue the policy of the great Theodosius in dealing with barbarian penetration of the Empire: and in 410 Alaric sacked Rome and the government of Honorius officially acknowledged its inability to restore its authority in Britain. From that time, as Procopius puts it, the Romans never recovered Britain, which continued to be ruled by tyrants.

Zosimus, in Book 6 of his Historia Nova (translation here) comments on the period and the revolt of Constantine:

Constans was afterwards a second time sent into Spain, and took with him Justus as his general. Gerontius being dissatisfied at this, and having conciliated the favour of the soldiers in that quarter, incited the barbarians who were in Gallia Celtica to revolt against Constantine. Constantine being unable to withstand these, the greater part of his army being in Spain, the barbarians beyond the Rhine made such unbounded incursions over every province, as to reduce not only the Britons, but some of the Celtic nations also to the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws but as they themselves pleased. The Britons therefore took up arms, and incurred many dangerous enterprises for their own protection, until they had freed their cities from the barbarians who besieged them. In a |175 similiar manner, the whole of Armorica, with other provinces of Gaul, delivered themselves by the same means ; expelling the Roman magistrates or officers, and erecting a government, such as they pleased, of their own.

Thus happened this revolt or defection of Britain and the Celtic nations, when Constantine usurped the empire, by whose negligent government the barbarians were emboldened to commit such devastations.

Finally, for a some more general background on the upheavals occurring around 410, we can go to P. Brown's biography of Augustine (rev. ed., pp. 288-9):

Augustine was a bishop. His contact with the outside world was through pious Christians. He wished to 'weep with those who weep'; and he was genuinely annoyed that the Italian bishops had not troubled to inform him of the extent of the disaster. As an African bishop, however, he was himself fully preoccupied by events nearer home. The authorities in Carthage panicked at this time: to allay discontent they issued a hasty edict of toleration for the Donatists. This action dominated Augustine's life at the time of the sack of Rome. He was faced with a crisis of authority in his own town. Donatist violence had been renewed, and with it, a revival of religious 'segregation' among the Catholics: his own congregation had begun to ostracize Donatist converts. Augustine was partly responsible for this bad atmosphere. He had been constantly absent: he was still in Carthage on September 8th, 410, receiving urgent letters to return to Hippo. On his return, he was faced with far more pressing problems than the news of the distant sack of Rome: a converted Donatist had lapsed through being cold-shouldered by the Catholics. This is what really moved him: 'At that news, I tell you, brethren, my heart was broken: yes, my heart was broken.'

As a bishop, he had looked to Ravenna, where the Catholic Emperors issued the laws that protected his church, not to Rome. Thus, while Britain became independent, and Gaul fell to usurpers, Augustine and his colleagues remained loyal to the existing Emperor--Honorius. The father of this 'pale flower of the women's quarters', Theodosius the Great, will be presented as a model Christian prince in the City of God. There were good reasons for such a superficial panegyric: a law reaffirming all previous legislation suppressing non-Catholics had emerged from the chancery at Ravenna at almost exactly the same time as the Goths entered Rome.

Allusion in the Modern Novel

I was reading Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead tonight, and in one passage the narrator describes himself and a friend as boys spending large parts of the summer walking around on stilts. At one point, he says (p. 38), 'Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor.' That sounded familiar to me as a description of the Nephilim in Genesis (6:4), so I checked some English translations. Here are a few samples (from
here):

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. (NIV)

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (NASB)

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. (ESV)

None of these uses the translation 'giants', preserving the word 'Nephilim' instead, but I found a couple examples that do:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (KJV)

There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (NKJV)

I suspect that the KJV is the source for the reference, since it seems to me to be the most popular translation for literary use (and, in fact, it was used to quote Job 1:21 on p. 30), but, just in case, there is a parallel in the Septuagint as well:

οἱ δὲ γίγαντες ἦσαν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις καὶ μετ ἐκεῖνο ὡς ἂν εἰσεπορεύοντο οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ θεοῦ πρὸς τὰς θυγατέρας τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἐγεννῶσαν ἑαυτοῖς ἐκεῖνοι ἦσαν οἱ γίγαντες οἱ ἀπ αἰῶνος οἱ ἄνθρωποι οἱ ὀνομαστοί

Prudentius

Recently noted in a list of research grants to faculty of Dickinson College:

Marc Mastrangelo, professor of classical studies, received a $30,000 Loeb Classical Library Foundation Research Grant to support the completion of a literary and philological commentary on the Psychomachia Prudentius. This volume is expected to help establish Prudentius as one of the most significant intellectuals and artists of Late Antiquity.

As an admirer of Prudentius, I look forward to getting a look at this once it's published.

The Late Roman Military

Dennis recently mentioned the late Roman military and its capacities. Here are some citations from Michael Whitby's entry 'The Army, c. 420-602' (pp. 288ff.) in the recent volume of the Cambridge Ancient History covering 425-600. Sorry for the information dump, but perhaps some of it will prove useful for the investigation. These mostly have to do with the western half of the empire.

The year 420 marks a convenient break: between then and the Persian wars of Anastasius' reign (502-7), recorded by Procopius and Joshua the Stylite, there is little reliable narrative of Roman military action, and no Notitia....During these years the western Roman army ceased to exist as a state institution, being superseded by the military forces of the successor kingdoms in Gaul, Spain, Africa and finally Italy, none of which maintained a standing army. (288)

[T]here was a still smaller, but significant, group of comitatenses in Africa commanded by a comes, although comparable units in Spain, Britain and the western Balkans had probably ceased to exist by 420. (289)

Both methods of requiring non-Roman soldiers [i.e., volunteers and those who 'accepted military obligation as part of their peace settlement'--ed.] continued in operation, but the most prominent way of employing tribesmen during the fifth century was as federate units. These functioned as ethnic contingents under the leadership of their own chief--basically a tribal, or quasi-tribal, war-band which might vary in size from a few hundred to the 10,000 or so controlled by each of the Theoderics in the Balkans in the 470s. The commander received a Roman title--magister militum for the powerful and successful, with the consulship as the ultimate accolade--and this gave the tribesmen access to Roman salaries and provisions....Roman reliance on federates, however, had disadvantages in that the mechanics of the agreements served to increase the independent power of non-Roman leaders: their strength as patrons grew through disbursement of Roman resources, while they remained outside the institutional structures and discipline of the state army. In the west in the fifth century independent action by federates on various occasions contributed significantly to the collapse of central authority. (290-1)

Overall, supplying the army, and especially an army on campaign, represented by far the largest, costliest and most complex single element in the administration of the empire, and so would be the first to falter at times of crisis or dislocation. (292)

The administrative problem is expounded in a Novel of Valentinian III in late 444: the empire desperately needed an army, but this required regular supplies which could not be squeezed from the western economy--the serene mind of the emperor was in turmoil over the remedy required by the crises. The western emperor no longer commanded a mobile army. (296)

[On the loss of resources] The result of this process was that by the 440s only Italy and southern Gaul were under imperial control, and even in these areas it was difficult to exploit human or economic resources without the consent of local elites. A military challenge could be met only by the construction of a coalition of local interest groups--for example, the alliance of Gallic military resources, tribal as well as Gallo-Roman, brought together by Aetius to oppose the common challenge of Atilla's Hunds, or on a smaller scale the grouping organized by Anthemius to fight the Visigoths under Euric....Outside Italy, however, local aristocrats, including in some cases bishops, could organize armed forces, such as Ecdicius, the brother-in-law of Sidonius Apollinaris, in the Auvergne, Syagarius at Soissons, or the elite of Saragossa in Spain, but their range of action was limited: it was not that all western Romans had lost the ability or will to fight, but that the state could not deploy this military potential, since the complex system for raising, paying, supplying and moving armies no longer functioned. (297)

The army of Italy was composed largely of non-Roman federal units, off-shoots from the tribal groups dominant in Gaul and Spain or elements who preferred imperial money to Hunnic dominion on the Danube. These troops, like the armies of the emerging post-Roman tribal kingdoms, wanted the stability that only land ownership could afford in times of financial shortage. When their demands were refused in 476 by the patrician Orestes, father of the emperor Romulus Augustulus, they disposed of the last western emperor and elected as king the Scirian officer Odoacer. (298)

In the west the empire's military institutions failed to survive the tribal challenge. Distinctions between limitanei and comitatenses became irrelevant when frontier conditions prevailed throughout all provinces; the authority of the centre evaporated together with its ability to provide pay and organize supplies, while military force was provided either by the tribal war-bands whose federate status became increasingly nominal or by local leaders with the capacity to marshal the military potential of their particular region. (299)

Review: Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum

James Davidson's review in the London Review of Books also covers Robert Parker's Polytheism and Society at Athens, but I wager there will be more interest in TCRA as a potential research tool with broad appeal.

After seven paragraphs of bewildering, contradictory, and fascinating snippets of various cult practices throughout the ancient mediterranean, Davidson has this to say:

Never easy to make sense of, the religion of the Greeks and Romans has just become infinitely more difficult, thanks to the publication of five volumes (plus index) of the Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum, which aims ‘to present scholars with a comprehensive account of all substantial aspects of Greek, Roman and Etruscan religion’, and thereby to overwhelm any attempt at general theory by providing masses of exceptions to the rule. It is the follow-up project of the team that brought us the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, an 18-volume catalogue – each volume in itself capable of provoking a lawsuit if it slipped your grip, as well it might, and fell onto the head of a bottom-shelf browser – of all known images of figures from ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan mythology/religion.

Thanks be to research libraries. And all seems very promising.

LIMC was always a valued asset in my early graduate career and I soon learned that the bibliography for mythical subjects nearly always outdid the OCD, was more current than the RE, and often surpassed even the Neue Pauly.

And yet Davidson is disappointed in that this follow-up project became too ambitious, divided among a massive committee of experts, and only shows occasional brilliance and comprehensiveness on individual topics:

Organisationally, however, it is a mess, a lesson in how an ambitious international grand projet, supported with oodles of money, eons of scholar-hours and lashings of good will, and concealing within the innumerable nooks of its labyrinthine structure plenty of astute commentary and the occasional mind-blowing map, can nevertheless be a huge disappointment.

You should, of course, read his review for yourself. I haven't given you the smallest fraction, such as the shocking omissions he outlines.

Parker fares much better though Davidson is dubious on many points. Still, he calls it 'one of the best books I have read on ancient religion and one of the most useful.'

Age of Bronze

Here's an article about the ongoing comic adaptation of the legend of the Trojan War, Age of Bronze.

I bought the first volume of collected stories around the time I had first begun to study the classics and when I was still an aspiring comic book artist. Back then college was just a stepping stone to becoming a better artist and storyteller.

The funny thing is that after all this time I have yet to read Age of Bronze. It sits in a box amidst my neglected collection. I've toyed with drawing comics of my own for my classes in the coming school year. In the meantime maybe I'll hunt up that copy of Age of Bronze 1 in my parents' basement, though I'm not encouraged by drivel like this:

There are also specific relationships that can be drawn between the dynamics of the Achaeans and Trojans at war and the US government and the current wars it's running. Both the bare facts of history and the underlying truth of fiction have a lot of wisdom and guidance that many seem inexplicably blind to. Tragedy is thrilling and cleansing in fiction. It ain't so pleasant to actually live through.

This, too, takes me back to those early undergraduate days.

Heath contra Feeney

One of the things I look forward to most in the BMCR are the responses. There have been some famous fights in the past, one of my favorites centering around M.L. West and the Parry-Lord thesis. This one is not as sexy, but worthy of note.

Casper C. de Jonge of Leiden, reviewing Oxford Readings in Ancient Literary Criticism (ed. Andrew Laird) said the following about one contribution:

The usefulness of ancient criticism for modern research is in fact the subject of the final contribution in the volume, Denis Feeney's polemical essay "Criticism Ancient and Modern". The author disagrees with Malcolm Heath, who has famously claimed that ancient literary criticism is the only tool that a modern scholar is allowed to use.5 Feeney argues that, although ancient critics can be useful guides, they will never be our only "interpretative key" (p. 442).

The footnote there (5) broadly cites two works by Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (1987), and Unity in Greek Poetics (1989), which in itself proves no direct familiarity with the text. Not having access these works (which, incidentally, did not fare well under review by Stephen Halliwell elsewhere), I can not support either Feeney or Heath. But Heath has words of his own:

Since I have no wish to bask in unearned fame, I must point out that I have never made the mind-bogglingly stupid claim which de Jonge (following Feeney) attributes to me. I have claimed, subject to various qualifications, that ancient literary criticism is an indispensable tool.

A concise explanation of my thoughts on this issue (including a response to Feeney's critique) can be found in chapter 4 of my Interpreting Classical Texts (London: Duckworth, 2002).

If history is any indication we'll hear more in the weeks to come.

'Bebop with Aesop'

Canterbury Woods Elementary School's Summer Institute for the Arts performs masked drama:

In the school gym, students wearing animal masks rehearsed for a half-hour performance of the musical play "Bebop with Aesop" by playwrights Michael and Jill Gallina and based on Aesop's fables.

The Last Legion

There's a movie poster available for the upcoming film adaptation of Valerio Massimo Manfredi's novel L'ultimo legione (the Last Legion):The story offers a novel (no pun intended) sequel to the mysterious fate of Romulus Augustus (often called the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire) as well as a clever origin for the Arthur legend. Romulus, who would have been about 12-13 when Odoacer forced his abdication, was lost to history. Here, he finds a sword that once belonged to Caesar and escapes to Britannia in search of the last loyal legion.

A serious question: Were there any legions to speak of in 476, and if so were there any legions in Britannia? My guess is no on both counts.

I'll be interested to see how accurately the movie plays out, taking into consideration the necessary fabrications. How consistent will it be with the world that it rewrites?

Housman and the definition of a scholar

In his Cambridge Inaugural Lecture of 1911, published under the title The Confines of Criticism, A.E. Housman was concerned primarily with two common detriments to the true work of a scholar.

To Housman 'scholar' was really a technical term for a scientist whose provenance was literature, though he defined the term in Latin as vir bonus discendi peritus (a clever twist on Cato's definition of an orator: vir bonus dicendi peritus.)*

Scholars are afflicted by the twin serpents (not Housman's image) of emotion and method.

A scholar's emotional response to literature is no more valid than anyone else's, and he runs the risk of confusing aesthetic judgment with the pursuit of truth:

That a scholar should appreciate literature is good for his own pleasure and profit; but it is none of his business to communicate that appreciation to his audience. Appreciation of literature is just as likely to be found in his audience as in him, for it has no connection with scholarship. He has no right to presume that his own aesthetic perceptions are superior to those of anyone whom he addresses, or that in this respect he is better qualified to teach them than they to teach him.

And yet it is not only that scholars promote their own appreciation of literature, but that they are expected to while their colleagues are not:

The botanist and the astronomer have for their provinces two worlds of beauty and magnificence not inferior in their way to literature; but no one expects the botanist to throw up his hands and say 'how beautiful', nor the the astronomer to fall down flat and say 'how magnificent': no one would praise their taste if they did perform these ceremonies, and no one calls them unappreciative pedants because they do not. Why should the scholar alone indulge in public ecstasy?

It is sometimes assumed that those who try to leave the 'personal voice' out of scholarship today are pedants or worse, and that they approach too closely the maligned German philologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who are sometimes trumped up in modern publications as proto-Fascist bogeymen. And yet, though he doesn't vilify them in the same way, Housman sees in these same philologists the other chief affliction, which is a kind of mechanistic adherence to methodology.

For Housman, the 'laws' of criticism are rough guidelines meant to be challenged, broken, and reformed. They are never constant. The reason, then, why so many would-be scholars treat them instead as incontrovertible rules?

'Thinking is hard,' says Goethe, 'and acting according to thought is irksome' (Denken ist schwer, nach dem Gedachten handeln unbequem).

Housman's genius for textual criticism is still recognized and the key lies in 'the application of thought to textual criticism' (the title of a later and very instructive lecture). Not emotion. Not sets of rules akin to mathematical computations. The scholar must learn what he can of the author, the subject, the era, the dialect, and all the rest, and apart from his own feelings, and unfettered by arbitrary rules, use reason to determine the soundness of the texts we've received.

Then you're free privately to appreciate the texts that a disinterested intellect has processed in the pursuit of truth. No one can deny that the texts we appreciate today have been much improved by the work of such scholars.

----
* Housman apparently took the adapted phrase from Friedrich Leo who learned it from its originator, Wilamowitz. See William M. Calder III, Vir Bonus Discendi Peritus, AJP 108.1 (1987): 168-171.

Aesop in the News

Ape research shows similarities to one of Aesop's Fables:

Orangutans are bright enough to use water as a tool, a finding that researchers say is straight out of Aesop's Fables.

Five orangutans at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany were each shown shelled peanuts. The nuts floated out of reach inside a clear 10-inch-high plastic tube quarter-filled with water.

All of the orangutans collected water from a drinker and spat it inside the tube to float the peanuts high enough to grab them, averaging three mouthfuls before success. In their first attempts, the apes on average took nine minutes before they got the nuts, but they only needed just 31 seconds by their tenth try.

The researchers had to make sure the tube was strong, "because the jaw power of orangutans is enormous," recalled Natacha Mendes, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "After so much work constructing tubes, it can be heartbreaking to see it getting destroyed so easily."

The findings reminded Mendes of the fable of the thirsty crow, which threw stones into a pitcher to raise and drink the otherwise unreachable water.

Another account is here. Or here.

And Aesop is apparently still relevant to sportswriting as well:

For those struggling to understand why Brian McClennan is no longer coach of the Kiwis, consider an Aesop fable, one that may have been running around in Bluey's head.

A scorpion and a frog meet on the banks of a stream. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him to the good eating for both of them on the other side of the stream.

"But you scorpions have a death sting. How do I know you won't sting me?" the frog asks. "Because both of us would die," the scorpion responds, promising not to sting the frog.

Halfway across to land, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog asks "Why did you do that? You promised not to and now we're both going to die." The scorpion answers "I couldn't help myself - it's in my nature."

The fable provides parallels to the saga being played out between McClennan and the New Zealand Rugby League this week.

When in Rome

Constance Bodurow, an urban designer/planner, compares civic life in Rome and Detroit, which has its own Campus Martius (and, of course, one should not forget that Detroit Metro Airport is in Romulus).

Also, Timothy Farrington's review in the New York Sun of Shadow of the Silk Road, in which author Colin Thubron gives an account of his journeys on the ancient trade routes between Rome and China. The closer:

In Mr. Thubron's depiction, the Silk Road provides a cautionary tale of mutual misunderstanding. Although tightly bound by trade, he emphasizes, Rome and China were deeply ignorant of each other. Goods made their way from one terminus to the other in "an endless, complicated relay race," and so "no Romans strolled along the boulevards of Changan; no Chinese trader astonished the Palatine." In the absence of direct contact, secondhand reports blossomed into myth. The Romans believed that silk came from a pacific kingdom free from crime, while the Chinese imagined a splendid city in the west governed by philosophers. The metaphoric lesson for the present is clear, but Mr. Thubron is pessimistic: On the Mediterranean shore, his journey complete, he sees that "to the west and east the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows."

Of Farming and Classics

I started reading this book 6 weeks or so ago, but haven't picked it up for a few weeks. The review is by Edith Hall. A teaser:

Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs.