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.