An American Hero of the Mind

my dad pointed me to this fascinating story in the toledo blade:

Scarborough: An American hero of the mind

DETROIT - This is the story of one of black history's amazing unknown pioneers, a slave who, against all odds, rose to become the foremost black classical scholar, a major voice in the debate over the future of black America and, finally, president of Wilberforce University.

And it is the story of a young white woman, born long after he died, who found his fascinating autobiography tucked away and forgotten, and who has just given William Sanders Scarborough's incredible life back to the nation after it was somehow tragically lost for decades.

"He was an American hero of the mind," Michelle Valerie Ronnick said. "His story remains living proof that if you work hard, aim high, and dream big dreams, you can overcome tremendous obstacles."

Thanks to her own hard work, Wayne State University Press has just published his book. The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey From Slavery to Scholarship (425 pages; $29.95).

Her achievement, like that of her subject, has been hailed as nothing short of brilliant by Henry Louis Gates, the famous scholar and critic.

Though they are separated by race, gender, and more than a century, the black pioneer and the young scholar have something in common. No one would have expected either to become experts in ancient tongues.

Growing up in Florida in the 1970s, Michele Ronnick took Latin as a senior in high school mainly because her brother liked the teacher. It started her on a lifelong passion for the classics.

Nobody would ever have expected Scarborough to become a scholar - let alone a leading expert on Greek and Latin. When he was growing up, it was illegal to teach blacks to read or write. U.S. Sen. John C. Calhoun, the famous fire-eating defender of slavery, once said that if he "could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe the Negro was a human being."

Scarborough, who surreptitiously was taught to read, ended up not just knowing that ancient language fluently, he became the author of a Greek college textbook widely used in the late 19th century.

He rose to become an amazing example who fought hardship all his life; never took no for an answer, and who wasn't content to be a trailblazer in merely academic circles.

He dabbled in Ohio politics and fought Booker T. Washington's idea that African-Americans should be content to learn industrial arts and not worry about cultivating the life of the mind.

And William Scarborough was witness to some of the greatest moments of his time. He was a 12-year-old boy in Atlanta when the city was sacked by William Tecumseh Sherman. (When blacks were allowed to do some looting, he tellingly went after, he says, "pencils, envelopes, and paper.")

He saw Jefferson Davis dragged away as a prisoner of war; met Richard Wright and Frederick Douglass; knew Warren G. Harding, and attended Booker T. Washington's funeral.

He fell in love with a white divorcee when that was social suicide; they married in 1881, and lived happily ever after for 45 years.

Then, in the fall of 1926, he died, after struggling into his library for one last look at his beloved books. Shortly before he had finished writing an autobiography, to which his heartbroken wife added a few pages. But it was never published, and it and he were finally forgotten.

Meanwhile, Michelle Ronnick had gone on to become an expert on Roman literature, and ended up as part of the tiny classics department at this sprawling urban school.

Eight years ago, doing research, she came across a reference to one William Scarborough. It said he was African-American, a former slave, and was the author of a textbook of ancient Greek.

What amazed her was that she had never heard of him. Her interest was piqued. Then, after a lot of digging, she discovered a treasure trove: A copy of his autobiography, forgotten, in the Ohio Historical Society archives. For some reason, it had never been published. As she began to read, she was hooked.

Wayne State University Press has just published the manuscript. It reveals a black man who was a straight-laced Victorian; who was always proper, but whose remarkable life puts most of us to shame.

"I have never been ashamed of my birth conditions," he says succinctly. "I have left that to the slaveholders."

Shortly before he died nearly a century ago, Professor William Sanders Scarborough finished his memoir, writing, "I look ahead into years to come, when the melting pot - America - will have melted away racial lines, hates, and prejudices … a thing this country owes to its honor."

We can only guess what he would have thought today. But I think it might be something like what I heard a minister say once during a service in the African Methodist Episcopal Church to which the old professor belonged.

"Lord, we're not what we should be. We're not what we could be and we're not what we are going to be. But at least we're not what we were."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.
» E-mail him at OMBLADE@aol.com or call 1-888-746-8610.
» Read more Jack Lessenberry columns at www.toledoblade.com/lessenberry

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

Other than the great number of incompetent classicists, there is at present a number of men who are born classicists, but who are prevented for various reasons from realizing themselves. But the crucial obstacle in the way of these born classicists is the misrepresentation of classical scholarship by unqualified classicists.

Leopardi is the modern ideal of a classicist, the German classicists are quite impotent (the case of Voss is worth considering!).

Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists

ok. here's something that might become at least a semi-regular feature. all of these are taken from selections translated by william arrowsmith in volumes 2.1 and 2.2 of arion (1963). i make no evaluative judgments herein (at least for now): feel free to do so in the comments section. this first excerpt strikes me as a fitting place to begin.

The Greeks are interesting and quite excessively important because they have such an abundance of great individuals. How was that possible? The question deserves study.

The Cheatsheet Has Arrived

The long-awaited Campus Mawrtius Grad School Cheat Sheet has arrived.

It's still very much a work in progress and is primarily intended to help Bryn Mawr folk easily access online resources (hence the special links for off-campus access which require BMC IDs).

But maybe some of our extra-Mawrital associates will find it helpful or have suggestions.

I'll add a link to the sidebar too.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Small News in Any World

Three items here (for those of you keeping score at home) in order of interest and excitement:

1) My thesis will now (probably) be on the ideology of myth in Greek city festivals.

2) I finally passed the Latin exam!

and most importantly ...

3) I conquered Jim the arm-wrestling champ at the bar on Friday night. The bartenders have never heard of such a feat, and I believe it is incumbent upon Eric to compose an epinician poem in my honor. For those of you who don't know Jim, here he is in his own words (viz. in direct speech):

I don't got hands ... I got PAWS!

Now picture a mean lookin' motha' wagging his tongue at you with arms like tree trunks ... with, um, paws on the ends of them. Or something.

And then there was Dennis ...

big news in the classics world

a group of scholars thinks that there may be another library yet to be discovered in the villa of the papyri at herculaneum. this is surely a tantalizing possibility (LvBW). here are a couple of excerpts:

All knowledge of the great house was lost until 1738, when workmen sinking a well shaft encountered a mosaic floor. It was too deep to excavate; instead, over the next 20 years under the supervision of Karl Weber, a Swiss military engineer, a network of tunnels was hewn through the debris clogging the great peristyle, the atrium and the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Cartloads of treasures were brought to the surface, destined for the art collection of the King of Naples.

Throughout this time, mingled with the sculptures and glassware, workmen retrieved what looked like lumps of coal which they unthinkingly dumped in the sea. It was not until 1752 and the discovery of an intact library lined with 1,800 rolls of papyrus, that the excavators realised that what they had been throwing away were carbonised books. The site has since been known as the Villa of the Papyri.

from the 1800 rolls discovered previously, some interesting things have been found:

The author chiefly represented in the collection is Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC who taught Virgil, the greatest Latin poet, and probably also Horace. He may indeed have given lessons to both beneath the porticoes of the Villa of the Papyri, for it is known that Philodemus was employed in the household of a powerful Roman senator, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of the dictator Julius Caesar. And it is now regarded as almost certain that Piso — who died more than a century before the eruption of Vesuvius — was the original owner of the Villa of the Papyri.

Apart from the texts of Philodemus, hundreds of other lost works of Greek philosophy — including half of Epicurus’s entire opus, missing for 2,300 years — have been rediscovered. Among them is a treatise by Zeno of Sidon, who Cicero saw lecture in Athens in 79BC. According to Richard Janko, professor of classics at Michigan University [sic]: “This is the first copy of Zeno’s writings to come to light; they had all been lost in later antiquity.”

the late professor marcello gigante thinks that the extant collection represents perhaps only half of the villa's collection.

read all about it here.

Classics watch

I spotted this in the latest Teen Girl Squad over at homestarrunner.com, and had to post a screen capture:

So and So is hooked on classics!

Ausonius Revisited

i was looking through michael von albrecht's survey of the history of roman literature this evening and found some very unflattering things he had to say about our grammarian friend ausonius, such as:

'Book 16' is the Griphus ternarii numeri, and 'book 17' the Cento nuptialis, an unholy montage out of shredded sentences of the chaste Virgil...(vol.2, 1322).

and:

Just as Lucilius had once done, Ausonius mixed Latin and Greek elements to produce a hybrid poetry. This practice, an affront to both languages, seems to be typical of semiliterate epochs. Particularly striking is the slipshod prosody in many Greek words; he is not especially competent in this language. Even in Latin he shortens the a in contra (vol.2, 1324).

on the other hand, von albrecht also points out that his epigrams 'do betray considerable linguistic awareness' (1324).
finally, the following passage on ausonius' outlook perhaps causes one to think of pliny the younger:

The most important witness to Ausonius' view of his task as an author is the all-embracing character of his collection of poems. To this poet everything seems worth immortalizing: his family, the professors at Bordeaux, and much more. As in the case of Luciliusone is tempted to say that the old gentleman's life lies before us as on a votive tablet. Like some early Latin authors do, Ausonius leaves us with the impression that the personality of the author is more significant than his modest and often incidental verse....In the jumble of seemingly unimportant matters, the reader is conscious of an individual attempting to become a mirror of the world (1325-26).

More on the APA

I listened to the first selections of section 35: Memory and Destruction, presided by Harriet Flower who has done some important work recently on damnatio memoriae.

The second paper, 'City-Destruction in Athenian and Theban Social Memory,' was delivered by Bernd Steinbock of Michigan and incorporated modern psychology in a way I'm not used to (i.e. in a good way) and powerfully used the Morgenthau plan, fueled by Nazi propaganda and spread by word of mouth, as a parallel to the way social memory is formed in wartime. I was especially interested in Steinbock's mention of the First Sacred War though I expected him to emphasize its role in influencing social memory. All in all a refreshingly good paper.

The first however, Julia Shear's talk on 'Stasis, Good Victory, and the Athenian Demos,' plodded along to a predictable end (the Athenians de-emphasized stasis in accord with decree of Demophantos -- *yawn*), so it was especially annoying when she showed up during section 44: Athenian Culture and History only to unduly attack a presenter who'd received a bachelor's degree just a year ago. Sarah Murray's 'Man Overboard: A Re-evaluation of the Underrepresentation of the Navy in Classical Athenian Art' might have benefited from some polish, but that's hardly a thing to hold against a young scholar.

Murray argued succesfully that the navy itself had never been depicted on Athenian vases, countering a common view that there was a decline in their representation during a certain period due to fear and disdain on the part of the citizenry. In the second half of her paper, Murray showed that pride in naval victory was depicted through mythological symbolism. One vase employing a divine scene showed two individual sailors on the opposite side exercising.

This vase alone damaged Shear's criticism, which was essentially that the Athenians may have taken pride in naval victories while hating the sailors. But I suppose anything is possible.

What was really objectionable was that Shear, while pretending to question Murray, began lecturing all in attendance, turning several times to address the room as though we were her students, virtually pleading with us to see through Murray's holes. Then she would turn back to Murray and tell her sternly that her work was essentially evasive and incomplete.

To her credit Murray handled herself well and countered Shear successfully.

I'm afraid I may end up focusing on negatives, but I will eventually get to Robert Tordoff, who delivered one of the most satisfying papers of the convention.

one more APA report

i also caught part of the 'lucretius, vergil, and ovid' session and heard two papers on vergil. the second was called 'the aristeia and the poetics of failure in book nine of vergil's aeneid', given by mark a. thorne of the university of iowa. he cites three times in book 9 in which an aristeia seems to be on the horizon and in which it ultimately fails: turnus' attack on the fleet (9.69ff.), compared to hector's attack in iliad 12; nisus' failed aristeia in 9.339ff., compared to the doloneia in iliad 10; finally, turnus almost gets his aristeia at 9.573-76. this is interesting, because turnus slays 7 opponents within three lines (citations taken from handout):

Ortygium Caeneus, victorem Caenea Turnus,
Turnus Ityn Cloniumque, Dioxippum Promolumque
et Sagarim et summis stantem pro turribus Idan... .

but then, right at the moment when the action seems to be taking off, vergil gives us this:

Privernum Capys.

he changes the subject and diverts attention away from turnus. when turnus finally does get his aristeia, thorne argues that it ends in strategic failure (9.759ff.). if he had let his fellow soldiers in at the gates, vergil states that that would have been the last day of the war (759-61):

ultimus ille dies bello gentique fuisset.
sed furor ardentem caedisque insana cupido
egit in aduersos...

finally, he pointed out the importance of the final victim of turnus' aristeia, the poet cretheus, who is intended to remind us of the singer of the aeneid himself (semper equos atque arma virum pugnasque canebat, 9.777). if i remember correctly, thorne argued that, because the poet sang of arms, a man, and battles, he is the one person who should have been able to control the aristeia, but he is unable to--hence, epic failure and the need for a new form of combat (see summary below). in the death of cretheus, it seems to me, vergil also may be saying that poetry/art is ruined by war, or that it is powerless in the face of war.

here is thorne's summary of his argument (taken from handout):

In Book 9, Vergil sets up an aristeia three times only to abort each one as a poetic tactic to delay the start of the fighting. These are linked with the images of tragic death and mourning that lie at the center of the book. When Turnus finally is granted his full aristeia, it accomplishes nothing. I argue that Vergil has transformed the Homeric aristeia to show how glory through combat in the traditional "epic" sense must not be sought by Rome as its own end, for to do so will only result in further loss and defeat.

That was a pretty boss town

And at long last my first APA report. I hope there really wasn't much anticipation.

We picked Mo up at Philadelphia International at 9:30 Friday night, and made it to Boston by 4am. We slept two to three hours then had to face the regrettable consequences of requesting a wake-up call.

After getting lost in the maze of the hotel/convention center, I ran into Professor Kitchell, who is as funny and charming as ever. He proceeded to tell someone who seemed important to watch out for me because I'm a thief and a liar, and the stories about the goat are all true.

From there I snuck into section 31: Using Linguistic Evidence to Enrich the Teaching of Classical Languages and Cultures. I caught the second half of Mary Bacharova's talk, yeah? But I didn't really see the usefulness of the approach and felt that her extensive treatment of the so-called English 'get passive' was tedious and often incorrect. Mastering the verb is the key to reading Greek, and the teaching of individual verb forms based on relative frequency can at best give a temporary satisfaction to the textbook learner. What happens when the most common forms are not encountered, and your students have no idea how to determine what it is they're looking at?

Rex Wallace in turn offered his own approach, namely teaching Greek pronunciation from an articulatory perspective from day one, and empowering students throughout the first year of Greek to determine forms which most people would consider irregular but which are in fact perfectly consonant with native phonetic rules. This answered part of Bacharova's paper in which she noted that her students often can't find words in the dictionary.

Andrew and I were taking a coffee break today and for some reason I asked him what the aorist of βλώσκω is. It took a minute to remember ἔμολον and it occurred to me that it's probably not irregular. I reckoned that the root might well be *mol(o)-. The present would then be zero grade, *ml(o)-, with the bi-labial nasal affected by native phonological rules to produce the stem *blo-. Understanding phonology early can eliminate a lot of the confusion.

Professor Wallace's examples included Grassmann's law and loss of voice before -s, among others.

To be continued ...

Calvinists and Epicureans

and now for the next installment of the piecemeal report on the APA.

i attended part of a panel called 'epicureanism in the renaissance' and heard a paper by kirk summers entitled 'the calvinists against the epicureans: whom are they attacking?' the epicureans are frequently mentioned in reformation texts as a currently existing group with whom Christians must contend, and are rebuked with force. prof. summers, if i am remembering correctly, suspected, before he began his investigation, that the calvinist disagreement with the epicureans would be on ethical grounds; as it turned out, however, ethics were a basis on which Catholics disagreed with epicureans. calvinists, on the other hand, found fault with them because they viewed God as uninvolved in His universe--a view which flew in the face of calvinist ideas and doctrine about Divine Providence. these epicureans were viewed as such important opposition that they received mention in both the belgic confession and the second helvetic confession. from the belgic confession (as quoted in the handout):

On Providence
"For that reason we reject the damnable error of the Epicureans, who say that God involves himself in nothing and leaves everything to chance."

and from the second helvetic confession:

The Epicureans. We therefore condemn the Epicureans who deny the providence of God, and all those who blasphemously say that God is busy with the heavens and neither sees nor cares about us and our affairs.

Ausonius and Catullus

of the panels of which i attended at least a part, the one on late antiquity was the most interesting to me. the papers read included bret mulligan's aforementioned 'epistolarity in claudian's carmina minora'; 'constantius II and eusebius' constantine', given by david potter; 'eusebius' chronological tables and the invention of Christian history in late antiquity'; scott mcgill's 'ausonius and recitation'; and joseph pucci's 'catullan extremism in fortunatus' poem to agnes'.

but there's something that's been bothering me since then that i am glad to be able to report on. after joseph pucci's talk, there was some dispute over, if i understood correctly, the availability of catullus to late antique authors. i was almost certain that i had seen direct reference to catullus in ausonius, and, now back at home, i submit that there are at least two quotations in ausonius of catullus 1. the first is in Praefationes Variae 4 Green ('G' hereafter) (one of only two surviving ausonius passages in hendecasyllables; the other is Ep.13G.82-104). here are ll.1-9, which, in addition to the direct quotation, contain a number of other allusions to catullus 1 and to catullus himself (italicized, and cf. the use of ineptiae elsewhere in catullus):

'Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?'Veronensis ait poeta quondam
inventoque dedit statim Nepoti.
at nos illepidum rudem libellum,
burras quisquilias ineptiasque,
credimus gremio cui fovendum?
inveni--trepidae silete nugae--
nec doctum minus et magnis benignum
quam quem Gallia praebuit Catullo.

the other quotation of catullus 1 is found in the preface of the Griphus Ternarii Numeri, addressed to Symmachus:

dein cogitans mecum, non illud Catullianum 'cui dono lepidum novum libellum', sed amousoteron [sorry, no greek] et verius 'cui dono illepidum, rudem libellum', non diu quaesivi... .

au bon pain

alright, just got back from the APA. just a quick note for the moment after the whirlwind trip up and back. i heard a number of interesting and stimulating papers, including one by a reader of the campus on claudius claudianus and epistolarity in the carmina minora. i tried to ask a question, but my hand-raise must have been too low and too late. alas!

also, welcome to coke! it's about time he posted on here! be sure to check out his hexameter in the comments section a couple of posts below--a line which deserves a post of its own (hint, hint). anyway, more soon, i hope.

love,
your friendly misanthropologist

I found my password

Having found my password and having found little else to do with a dull Saturday (other than grade papers which I REFUSE to do right now) I have decided to make my first (?) posting on this lovely website.

After teaching Latin to a century of highschoolers for half a year, I have very little to show for my development as a classicist. But if you read my little comment on the last posting, you'll see that I have not been entirely idle.

Not long now ...

Andrew and I will be picking up Eric soon, then we're off to Philadelphia International to grab Mo. From there it's a late night drive to Boston and the final two days of the APA where we'll meet up with Diane and Jessica.

Better late than never, right?

HOT TIPS

yes, be sure to look for us at the APA/AIA. we will be the ones who are togate, and dennis will be sporting the laurel.

A new look for the new year!

Happy new year to all our faithful readers who doubtless have stayed tuned for nearly a month of inactivity!

You are rewarded with a fresh new look, and coming soon (thanks to occasional nudging by the Hawk) will be "the Campus Mawrtius Grad School Cheat Sheet," a handy collection of research tools available on the internet — just some of the tricks of this tricky trade.

A number of these resources require institutional subscription, which is identified by the IP address of the computer you use to log on. Ever the keen-minded helper, I've included special links for my BMC-ers for off-campus access.

That's just one of the things to look forward to in the new year.

I don't know what else there is, but we'll think of something.

And I'm sure Eric and I will have plenty to say about the APA convention (to which we'll be driving in the middle of the night Friday — in time to catch the final two days of papers and see Nick deliver an abbreviated version of his archaeology MA at the AIA).

Excelsior!

A Lost Epigram

ἡμεῖς γ’ ἀρχαῖον κεραμόν τε λογόν τε φιλοῦμεν
συγκρίνειν φρονιμῶς λείψαν’ ὀρυσσόμενα

- Philologus Philadelphus

are we there yet?

no.

anyway, sorry for the dearth of posts the last couple of days. maybe something sometime soon. as journey says, don't stop believing.

Vergiliana

a few questions for pondering on the eclogues resulting from class today.

Eclogue 7: why is daphnis under the holm-oak? how did he get there? where did he come from? (see especially the first word of the poem, forte--'by chance'.) what sort of creature, exactly, is he?

i find vergil a very cinematic (if you'll forgive the anachronism) writer. In ecl.7, you can almost see the screen go fuzzy flashback-style as we move from line 20 and then clarifying in re at some unspecified point in the past as the contest gets underway.

by the way, if you've ever wondered where we get our term 'sardonic smile', see ll.41-44:

Immo ego Sardoniis videar tibi amarior herbis,
horridior rusco, proiecta vilior alga,
si mihi non haec lux toto iam longior anno est.
Ite domum pasti, si quis pudor, ite, iuvenci.

coleman points out ad loc. that 'the celery-leaved crowfoot, Ranunculus Sceleratus, though not peculiar to Sardinia, was thought to be responsible both fo the proverbial 'Sardonic smile' of those who ate it...and for the acrid flavour of Sardum mel (Hor. A.P.375)'. in other words, it's bitter.

Eclogue 8: why do we have daphnis again, when this part of the poem is modeled on Th.Id.2, where we find 'delphis' instead? does daphnis actually return at the end of the poem? or, to put in in amaryllis' words (who i take to be the 'I' of the second song), Credimus? to be sure, the dog is barking about something. but her final question leaves room for doubt--an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? ('or do those who love construct dreams for themselves of their own accord?').

Ll.36-41 are indeed exquisitely beautiful:

Saepibus in nostris paruam te roscida mala
(dux ego uester eram) uidi cum matre legentem;
alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus;
iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: 40
ut uidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!

page (ad loc.) quotes macaulay as saying the following about them: 'I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin--saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala. I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil' (Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 1.371).

Eclogue 10: why does gallus appear in 6 and 10, the beginning and end of the second half of the book? what is the significance of his playing hesiod in 6 and daphnis in 10?

on the whole, i do not understand the eclogues. either their depth or my denseness (or 'denstrosity'?)--or, more likely, a combination of the two--baffles me. what is the significance of the recurring characters? are they always the same people? is it possible to construct a narrative all ten poems as a whole? what is arcadia? when does it signify something more than a region in greece, and how do we know? and if it is a 'spiritual landscape' (cf. Snell), at what point in the book does it become such a thing? finally, why does the contemporary world continually break into vergil's idyllic domains?

Alexander, the Multiculturalist Freedom-spreading Visionary?

and speaking of bruce thornton, he's got a rather pointed review of alexander here. with the exception of a few scenes, i thought the movie was a stunning disaster. (Lvrogueclassicism.)

matters calendrical

december 7 is an important date in history for at least two reasons. first of all, japan attacke pearl harbor on december 7, 1941.

second, it is the date on which, in 43 BC, cicero was executed:

On this day in 43 BCE, the greatest Roman orator, Cicero, was executed at Formiae by order of Mark Antony. Cicero had angered Antony by his famous speeches, the Phillipics, that called for a restoration of the Republic. Mark Antony ordered his hands cut off after his death -- the hands that had written the speeches.

feel free to post any thoughts about cicero here today, be they historical, philosophical, philological, or anything else.

On Scholarship as a vacuum

This one, pulled from the unpublished archives, goes out to Eric in response to his post on "Theorese."

---

Response to Doty: “The Cosmological Human Body: Biogenetic and Cultural Factors”

There are times when you have to stop and wonder whether anyone knows how to write clear academic prose anymore. Doty’s “Cosmological Human Body” reads like narratology. Abstraction is abused to no real end outside the confusion (or amusement) of the reader [thanks to Doty we can now discuss “particular parts” and “enacted performance” (as opposed to non-specific parts and latent performance)]. It is a genuine effort to carve away from his unnatural prose all the filler and senseless abstraction, and once that is done very little of value remains.

Put plainly he claims in the introduction that the human body is central to cosmology. This is hardly addressed and its ‘recognition’ gets us nowhere. Early on he claims that human physical nature both influences and interacts with the social/universal aspects of myth and ritual. The body in essence becomes a model. Culture and biology are non-exclusive determinants of what is characteristically human. Further, comparison with animal nature yields helpful data toward understanding the use of the body in ritual as both a link to and a microcosm of the universal. However, “Ritualization” among non-human animals is merely a helpful model that must not be given too much weight. Finally, the human body is correlative to one’s social structure, existing as an individualized code which makes the universal immediate. The apparent lack of ritual among moderns is an illusion: we simply have different types of ritual. So far so good. Now one should expect evidence beyond the scattered theoretical ramblings of scholars across several fields.

Instead we are told that the colors white, red and black have symbolic significance because they represent presumably sperm, blood and excrement, each of which (in some indeterminable way) relates to an intensity of emotion and hence power. The body is the source of all expressions of the social and universal (somehow, though he never quite says how or relates the sperm-blood-excrement triad with the rest of this disconnected section). He feels content then to move on to the social ramifications of what he has failed to prove.

Social themes develop from the human life cycle, of which themes three shall be considered: 1) suckling; 2) gender differences; and 3) the family’s role in establishing social class. All three are treated carelessly and there is no real reference to the body as cosmological symbol. Breasts show up in stories, boys and girls play differently—possibly because of their genitals—, and the ‘family’ of gods is at odds on gender lines. Never mind that his mythological facts are wrong [Gaia, not Hera bore Typhon. Hephaestus is the product of virgin birth at Hesiod 927, but is fathered by Zeus in Homer. And to call the leg of Zeus (in the account of Dionysus) his “genital region” is quite a stretch], and that his choice of evidence seems randomly selected. The real question is what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

The answer shall never be found. Myth is simply a response to the tensions and complexities of society in bodily terms. Doty does not feel the need to tell us how. Further, his claim at last that myth is a medium of communication is not new, and is not derived from anything he has said. Again, the disconnected conclusion of this section bears no relation to what precedes, but seems forced to connect myth and ritual somehow with the modern world.

‘Ludic liminality’ is the same. Doty believes that “play” is an essential component of life, and that sports and hobbies are pale substitutes. ‘Real’ play is an active participation in myth and ritual. There is no justification for this, and no connection with the chapter as a whole. Again, what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

Perhaps we must explore the personal/individual/restricted code by which liminality is universalized, whereby one might perhaps envisage, in essence, a peremptory acting-out of the transpersonal modes of what one might indeed call ritualistic polarities.

Or something.

the closing of the american mind?

QF45 pays homage to (a certain type of) closed-mindedness. i reproduce it here:

I had a conversation about the DaVinci code yesterday. I was unabashed in denouncing it as a pile of pseudo-scholarly garbage. The girl I discussed it with wasn't so sure. She thought I should at least be open to the possibility of its being correct, and found its implications fascinating. She didn't say it outright, but there was an air of presumption that I was being close-minded.

And so I have come to a conclusion: there is such a thing as being too open minded, and it is a pervasive form of intellectual shallowness. Almost every patent falsehood that presents itself is possibly true. It is not impossible that crystals cure cancer, that astrology is valid, and that 'true' Christianity is an eroticist mysticism.

But a mind with true depth isn't seduced by mere possibility- it demands probability, plausibility and evidence. A mind with depth is closed to most of the noise and clatter that pretends to bear the mark of truth. A mind with depth doesn't welcome in anything that cannot stand up and prove itself worthy of belief.
In other words, intellectual depth demands that one be close-minded to a substantial degree. Ideas do not have an inherent right to be taken seriously. It is a privelege- they must earn it first. To be an egalitarian in the world of ideas is to become the shallowest and most pathetic sort of thinker in the world.

discuss. any thoughts?

criticism 3

following tangentially on the last couple days, i came across an article by rainer friedrich in Arion 11 (2003) 33-50 called 'Theorese and Science Envy in the Humanities: A New Take on the Two Cultures Divide'. it is very interesting, and he does a nice send-up (though with serious intent) of the type of obfuscating jargon that currently muddles much so-called 'postmodern' criticism (though i do not agree with his defense of the word 'deconstruction'; for the process of reducing something to an ash-heap of meaninglessness, we already have a perfectly good and descriptive word in english, 'destruction'). here is the second paragraph:

Theorese

Theorese is the name of the beast. Among the justifications its apologists offer for the spawning of its neologisms, there is one that gives the game away. If there ever was an unnecessary one, it is narratology. Its cointers, apparently commanding small Latin and less Greek, must have assumed a Greek word by the name of 'narratos,' to which they unabashedly added the suffix -logy, thereby creating a linguistic monstrosity (topped only by another pseudo-Graecism, homographesis, claiming to denote 'gay writing'--which also proves that a little Greek can be a dangerous thing). Narrotology, in turn, gave birth to 'focalization,' 'focalizer,'focalisee,' 'narratee,' 'intradiegetic'--terms that fascinate for their sheer ugliness. Why these replellent neologisms when workable terms--'narrative theory,' 'perspective,' 'point-of-view,' etc.--are available? Because, as the apologists, when challenged, assure us with a straight face, 'narratology' possesses a more scientific air and sounds more recherche than unpresumptuous 'narrative theory.' This is the inadvertent caricature of a legitimate concern: like the natural sciences, the humanities need a differentiated and complex nomenclature, a technical terminology that distinguishes scholarship from belletrism. Fair enough. But we have that nomenclature already. It is an ensemble of the terminologies of poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and literary criticism, to be easily enriched if need be by the occasional neologism and by borrowing from the terminologies of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and other social sciences. No need therefore of the current tidal wave of ugly and pretentious jargon words that disfigure the critical idiom.

he goes on to discuss later what he calls 'postmodern science-envy' in its linguistic pretensions, creating an odd paradox with postmodernism's characteristic ride on the last train departing from science and reason (or 'reasonicity', as they might say). he ends with a suggestion:

Here is an immodest proposal for the reform of the academy. Corresponding to the two cultures, the proposed division should be that between the Faculty of Science (in the broad sense of Latin scientia and German Wissenschaft), with its three traditional branches of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, each enjoying as much autonomy as desired, but all united in the espousal of the notion of objective knowledge; and a faculty comprising the postmodern discourses, whose appropriate name would proceed from postmodernism's notorious scorn of the very idea of scientia: the Faculty of Nescience.

insofar as this essay is a reaction to recent trends in the humanities, it is reminscent of camille paglia's 'junk bonds and corporate raiders', also published in Arion, though i don't have the volume number/year with me.

i should also point out that i finished the auden essay, and i think it's well worth reading. he sets criticism in the context of two types of societies--the totally open (which i take to correspond, more or less, to his later discussion of social democracy) and the totally closed (which i take to correspond to his later discussion of fascist totalitarianism)--of which he gives platonic idealizations as a way of illustrating and differentiating their views of the world and of the meaning of human experience. he does not make the case that all criticism should prioritize the political or should be the expression of a political agenda; i assume we've all seen the danger that lies down that path. but he wants to give the critic a sense of his responsibility to his fellow citizens and the importance of good criticism in an open society. also of great interest in the volume (to me, anyway) was norman foerster's essay 'the esthetic judgment and the ethical judgment'.

One more thing a classical education is good for

I watched Fox's "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" tonight with two of my fellow Bryn Mawr fellows, and as it turns out it's fun to watch people humiliate themselves.

But better than that the fictional company on the show is called IOCOR. That's Latin for "I'm joking."

Of course they pronounce it 'eye-oh-core', but how great is that?

more criticism

continuing with the discussion that is not yet a discussion begun yesterday on the place and function of criticism, i thought i would pass along a couple of excerpts from gian biagio conte's essay 'empirical and theoretical approaches to literary genre' (in The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, K. Galinsky (Ed.), P. Lang 1992). the first has to do with the huge success of deconstructionist criticism; i think the parenthesis in the middle, though relegated only to parenthesis, is perhaps the most telling statement herein (p.114) (all translations are those of glenn w. most):

As you certainly know better than I, hermeneutic criticism in its deconstructionist version is enjoying increasing success in many places, if for no other reason than because it answers to a widespread need. Many people seem in fact to believe that our relation with the classic texts is running the risk of becoming tired, static, unadventurous. The idea that these texts have shot all their bolts of meaning and have been definitively understood is truly frightening: we would then be left with sluggish readers on the one hand, and texts that are no longer interesting on the other. Deconstructionist hermeneutics responds to this crisis with a new movement that gives an undeniable impression of vitality: it draws its motto from a recognition that "there is no peace in the texts." As a struggle against conformism this is certainly positive (and also--but let us not say this too loudly--because it promises to provide a living for a larger number of interpreters, a promise all the more attractive for classicists, who are obliged to work on a finite body of material--a source of energy which cannot be renewed!). As a pre-deconstructionist critic, I wish these developments good luck; but I refuse to limit myself to a static and rigid vision of my own hermeneutic practice. I do not believe that literary criticism, as I understand and practice it, needs this medicine.

later in the essay, he slips into a place i cannot go, or where my miniscule brain will not allow me (to be fair, i allow the caveat that i am reading this in translation; perhaps there are nuances to the italian vocabulary and sense that i simply am not understanding in english):

What we should avoid is thinking of reality naturalistically, as though it were a simple datum. In fact, reality is nothing but a system of perceptions determined by cultural codes and is therefore itself a construction, even if one at a different level from literature.

am i really supposed to believe this? to take a very simple example--if i were to stand on top of a 20-story building and to send a collection of derrida's writings plummeting toward the earth, i am under the impression that it will fall at 9.8 m/s/s (excluding drag from wind, etc.)--but according to the foregoing, that would merely be a perception i had determined by a cultural code. forgive me for saying so, but i think it rather beyond the scope of a cultural code to create something like, say, gravity. i am confident that the book would fall at the same rate regardless of whether i dropped it in america, japan, or the hindu kush of the 4th century BC. and, at any rate, how do views of reality such as that cited above really help the critic in his task? how does it help us understand roman poetry? if the romans' view of reality is completely conditioned by their own cultural codes, now lost to those of us who do not have the (radically alien) lived experience of a roman of (say) the augustan period, why should we trick ourselves into thinking we're actually discovering anything meaningful about roman poetry? and if we're not, how is criticism anything more than a narcissistic exercise in self-gratification?

ISI Guides

via rogue classicism, i found out that ISI has a bunch of 'student's guides' for various disciplines that can be downloaded in PDF here. the one on classics is by bruce thornton. other disciplines include philosophy, literature, liberal learning, history, core curriculum, u.s. history, economics, political philosophy, and psychology.

some auden

i've been reading w.h. auden's essay 'criticism in a mass society' (in the 1941 collection The Intent of the Critic), and thought the following passage was interesting enough to pass along. feel free to comment at will, all the better as it pertains to study of the ancients.

The contemporary critic has two primary tasks. Firstly he must show the individual that though he is unique he has also much in common with all other individuals, that each life is, to use a chemical metaphor, an isomorph of a general human life and then must teach him how to see the relevance to his own experience of works of art which deal with experiences apparently strange to him; so that, for example, the coal miner in Pennsylvania can learn to see himself in terms of the world of Ronald Firbank, and an Anglican bishop find in The Grapes of Wrath a parable of his diocesan problems.

And secondly the critic must attempt to spread a knowledge of past cultures so that his audience may be as aware of them as the artist himself, not only simply in order to appreciate the latter, but because the situation of all individuals, artist and audience alike, in an open society is such that the only check on authoritarian control by the few, whether in matters of esthetic taste or political choice, is the knowledge of the many. We cannot of course all be experts in everything; we are always governed, and I hope willingly, by those whom we believe to be expert; but our society has already reached a point in its development where the expert can be recognized only by an educated judgment. The standared demanded of the man in the street (and outside our own special field, we are all men in the street) rises with every genereation.

the funniest thing i heard on the radio this morning...

went something like this:

Imagine a gathering of Mozart, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Madame Curie. That's what it was like yesterday when Diane Sawyer sat down with the cast of Ocean's Twelve.

then again, if that means brad pitt will be sporting a colonial cut and george clooney will be wearing a buskin, that's good enough for me.

whee!

i have found my new favorite type of greek genitive, courtesy of m.l. west. it is in hesiod, theogony 5-6.

καί τε λοεσσάμεναι τέρενα χρόα Περμησσοῖο (5)
ἠ’ Ἵππου κρήνης ἠ’ Ὀλμειοῦ ζαθέοιο

you know what that's called? prof. west tells us: the 'genitive of water in (from)which one washes'. two further examples he cites are il.5.6 and 6.508.

UPDATE: by the way, i'm having a hard time getting the greek font to work. oops.

Etymology

One of our trusty field correspondents asked about the etymology of Helot, those serf-like minions of the Spartans, after being told that it may be derived from a verbal root.

I'm not buying it. My instinct was that this was an ethnic name.

The root in question is *hel-, which supplies the aorist of αἱρέω (e.g. εἷλον).

The lexicon records three forms, two masculine and one feminine:

Εἵλως, -ωτος
Εἰλώτης, -ου
Εἰλωτίς, -ίδος

One might fool oneself into thinking Εἵλως formally the perfect active participle of *hel-, but that the word is supposed to be passive in sense ('the captured,' rather than 'those who have captured'), and perhaps more importantly the stem of the perfect active participle is -οτ- rather than -ωτ-.

Considering the three forms it seems safe to say that the root is *εἱλωτ-. I might be willing to wager that should you compare any number of 3rd declension dental stems, 1st declension masculines, and 3rd declension feminines of the -ις/-ιδος type you wouldn't find any suffixed/lengthened deverbal nouns.

Correct me if I'm wrong, though. I haven't bothered to do serious research because *hel- is too easy an answer that seems to require too many shadowy shifts in the mists of time.

The old story that the Helots were the original inhabitants of Laconian Ἕλος is at least as probable.

But I would rule out the theory of a verbal root until someone is able to offer parallel constructions, which to my knowledge no one has done.

The fact that the Helots were viewed as a social class and that others might be described as living like Helots (in reference to social conditions) does not indicate that the term Helot originated as a descriptive term. It is at least as probable that the Helots as a people simply came to represent a certain social condition in the Greek world.

Regardless, no effort to root out the 'truth' or origin behind the name seems worthwhile or conclusive.

Bucolica

while reading vergil eclogue 3 today, i was surprised to come across the following couplet (ll.64-65):

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,
et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.
[Galatea attacks me with an apple, playful girl,
and she flees to the willow grove and desires that she be seen before (she enters it).]

why my suprise? well, because i didn't know that pelting one's beloved with fruit was a conventional courtship signal in the ancient world. but it was (see coleman's commentary p.118). compare, e.g., theocritus Id.5.88-89.

by the way, i also wanted to congratulate dennius maximus on nailing down a thesis topic area. let the juvenalia begin!

hooray for horace!

i just came across what garrison labels 'complex poetic anastrophe' in epode 16. horace writes: Etrusca praeter et... . the normal word order? et praeter Etrusca... . and it even includes some metonymy, since Etrusca...litora = Italy (garrison p.195).

wow!

We have a winner ... and it's not you.

Well, a thesis topic has been provisionally approved, one which, however, is not leading the thesis poll here at the Campus.

Juvenal 6 it is.

No whining if your candidate didn't make the cut.

an oddity of the ancient world: hypercolor aminals

man, it's been awhile.

anyway.

i was just reading the fourth eclogue and came to the passage in ll.43ff. on the chromatically versatile lambs and rams. though i like vergil quite a lot, i'm afraid i have to agree, contra williams, with t.e. page's assessment (and even if i didn't agree, i would probably reproduce it here anyway, because it's just such a jolly-good piece of writing:

There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous and Virgil has here decidedly taken it. According to Spinoza's famous formula 'Art' may no doubt be sometimes best defined as 'that which is not nature', and this picture of an earthly paradise bespeckled with purple, yellow, and scarlet rams might have suggested a warning to much medieval and modern extravagance which has parodied nature under the name of Art.

Richmond Lattimore

The old Bryn Mawr professor and still Homer's best translator was an underappreciated poet himself. I turned to this at random just now and thought it fit to post:

---

IN MEMORIAM
Elsie Campbell Sinclair Hodge, AB 1897.
Born Dec. 15, 1874. Died in the massacre of Christians
at Paotingfu, China, June, 1900.

This is the stone bench on the Bryn Mawr campus.
Sometimes in mild weather I teach classes
at the bench of Elsie, killed by Chinese Boxers.

Mobs, rage, weapons. The sleeping dragon shook
his scales between the spells before his last
awakening to red fire and howling guards.

The quaint and pretty graduation class,
round-eyed before the camera, gave her up
to her short duties, love, and violent death.

The Empress of India, small, yacht-prowed,
reeling in high waters off the Aleutians
(those stormy gray ships on the Eastern Grand Circle),

carried my parents, innocent and clever,
squeezed by hard means from their own academe,
to China, months and dollars away from home.

Where Elsie's blood was only six years faded,
at the hired temple, next the lily pond,
I was born in Paotingfu. The stars are joined.

All taught. It's in our blood, a hard gray strain
to discipline our little furies, knot
our stormy-colored lusts into cool form

until dragons shall dim their fires and smile.

basil, and not as in 'bunting'

i learned something new today from our greek textbook that makes me feel like a dancing songmistress. i learned that the name of the herb 'basil' comes from the greek word 'basileus' ('king'). and you know what? i'm not too disappointed to learn that one of my favorites is king of the herb world.

the dictionary has an argosy of definitions

merriam-webster's word-of-the-day for october 23 has prima facie sweet classical connections, but a surprising etymology:

argosy \AHR-guh-see\ noun

1 : a large ship; especially : a large merchant ship
*2 : a rich supply

Example sentence:
Uncle Ken is always armed with an argosy of jokes, and he keeps the family entertained for hours.

Did you know?
Looking at the first sense of "argosy," you might assume that this word is a close relative of "argonaut," but that isn't the case. Although both words have a nautical sense, they have different etymologies. The original argonauts sailed on a ship called the Argo to seek the Golden Fleece; their moniker combines the name of their ship and the Greek word "nautēs," meaning "sailor." "Argosy" comes from Arragosa, the English name for the city that is now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Over time, the Italian name of the town, Ragusa, was gradually modified into a noun for the laden merchant ships that sailed from that port in medieval days, and later still into one denoting any merchant vessel or rich store.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

garden abstract

the first line of this hart crane poem made me think of sappho:

Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

The Man and His Letters

today's quote of the day is about p.l.i.n.y and is from a.n. sherwin-white's (not to be confused with sherwin williams) 1969 article 'pliny, the man and his letters' (GR16(1969)76-90):

Pliny was neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but as a man superficially educated in the philosophical disciplines of his own day he was a rationalist, and his rationalism is not perverted or obscured by his devotion as a writer to the cult of style. It is the balance of these two qualities that his particular excellence lies. He was not a great writer any more than he was a great man, but he did little things well.

at the 100th derridean (where the great plains begin)

after a little hiatus of my own, i bring another link on derrida. i didn't realize he was such an avid tv-watcher. this is what he said:

"I watch TV all the time," he once said. What kind of shows did he watch? "Anything." But television was not mere passive entertainment — not for a Brilliant French intellectual. "I am critical of what I'm watching," Derrida insisted. "I am trying to be vigilant. I deconstruct all the time."

neat. that last sentence is something i would expect to be sampled and looped into a techno song.

uhn-ts, uhn-ts, uhn-ts, uhn-ts-ts, bad-ump, bad-ump, bad-ump, bad-ump--[fuzzy voice]i deconstruct all the time. i deconstruct all the time. i deconstruct all the time...

Funny Search Entry of the Week

I've noticed that we sometimes receive mistaken visits by people who find the Campus through search engines, and this one amused me quite a bit:

A&G italian sexy couple

This was entered over at google.it (Italy) by someone presumably looking for a sexy Italian couple with the initials A&G, not a classics-related blog which happened to mention Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar (A&G), a retired Italian classics teacher, and what we'd been reading a couple of days before.

As for sexy, your guess is as good as mine.

Meter for the Masses

Ever wondered why that pesky, seemingly arbitrary, hiatus appears? Ever come across the term diastole (normally defined as artificial lengthening of a short syllable) and wondered why?

Well, neither is arbitrary, and actually diastole and hiatus are products of thesame phenomenon.

Diastole is derived from the old Greek grammatical term for a comma. It came to be used later as a technical term for the comma in texts which distinguishes ὅτι ('wherefore') from ὅ,τι (that).

But I digress. The primary function of the comma is to mark a kind of pause, and that's precisely what the metrical phenomenon labeled 'diastole' does.

Now, as I alluded to before the term is used in Latin prosody of a position normally counted short but which is counted long. This is a bit misleading (it seems arbitrary but it's not), so let's take a look at Catullus 64. 20 (we'll us d for dactyl and s for spondee):

tum Thetis humanos non despexit hymenaeos

This scans d-s-s-s-d-s. The phrase despexit hymenaeos is s-d-s, with the final syllable of despexit counted long. Now, initial h is never counted as a consonant and can not force the -t to close that syllable (i.e. it can't make it 'long by position'). So why is it scanned long? Why diastole?

The culprit is a 5th caesura which I found also at Aeneid 1. 720, also preceding hymenaeos: profugus | hymenaeos.

Diastole only occurs when (1) the syllable is composed of a short vowel + consonant, and (2) it is followed by a pause. Necessarily the following letter must be a vowel or h (a consonant would force the syllable to be counted long).

This pause is most often the 4th, 2nd, or 3rd foot caesura, in that order (in
Vergil at least, based on a quick glance at occurences of diastole in the Aeneid), but there are other possibilities. Vergil has a few examples of 5th foot caesura causing diastole.

Hiatus is the term used when such a pause causes a vowel-final syllable not to
be elided (again, a cursory glance at occurrences in the Aeneid shows a preference for hiatus at the 3rd foot caesura). Check out any occurrences of diastole or hiatus that you find in Latin hexameters. I'm willing to bet you'll find that caesura explains it.

I just figured this out today, so if there's anything I've missed or some deeper significance, please pass it along.

Bad Movie Latin!

I just watched the Punisher with my dad on his sweet new widescreen hi-def TV, and noticed an odd bit of Latin.

The main character talks about his military training and says he was told repeatedly sic vis pacem para bellum: 'if you want peace, prepare for war.'

Of course it should be si and not sic.

That's not so bad as far as films go. It's certainly not as bad as Rushmore's nihilo sanctum estne? which is supposed to mean 'is nothing sacred?,' but which can only mean 'in nothing there is something sacred. Isn't there?'

If I recall the Latin in Tombstone wasn't bad, even if they were only quoting proverbs to one other.

Quoth Samuel Johnson,

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth."

(Dedicated to the legacy of Jacques Derrida.)

today's quote

today's quote on my myway.com page is campus appropriate, so i thought i'd share it:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
- -- Aristotle

jacques derrida

from the corner on nro:

JACQUES DERRIDA, RIP [John J. Miller]
The French father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, has died at the age of 74, in Paris. His intellectual legacy essentially is to have articulated a theory proposing that communication is impossible. Think about that for a second, because that's what deconstruction really is: a theory that argues communication is impossible. As one critic of deconstruction has pointed out: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length."

the Catullan Galliambic

We're reading Catullus 63 this week and I've found no work very helpful on the meter.

So here is the schema, which is really much simpler than the commentaries and metrical treatises would have you believe:



And here is the most natural form of this ionic meter followed by Catullus' most common adaptation:



The places marked here by curly brackets allow the phenomenon called anaclasis, whereby two positions of different quantity may be switched. Put simply long-short become short-long, as the schema makes clear.

You'll notice that in the first half Catullus favors anaclasis in the bracketed portion, while he favors resolution in the second. I haven't bothered to calculate percentages but I'd bet he follows this as a rule 75% of the time.

Aside from resolution and contraction (which are pretty straightforward) the only seemingly tricky thing occurs between the curly brackets. But even that isn't so tricky. There are only three options:



Galliambic meter should never cause anyone headaches again.

Now who's a metrist of some repute?

NOTES:

The symbol showing two shorts below a long indicates 'contractible biceps,' i.e. a position which is properly filled by double breve (two shorts) but which may be contracted into a single longum.

The symbol showing two shorts above a long indicates 'resolvable long,' i.e. a position which is properly filled by a single longum but which may be resolved into double breve.

The basic Ionic metron is composed of two shorts followed by two longs. The Galliambic is properly an Ionic dimeter plus an Ionic dimeter catalectic (catalexis refers to suppression of the final element at line end -- note that the second dimeter is always short one syllable).

classics from a different culture 2

see here for photos of the inscription:

Solving a Riddle Written in Silver
New York Times ^ | September 28, 2004 | JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Posted on 09/27/2004 9:26:45 PM PDT by 68skylark

The words are among the most familiar and ecumenical in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity. At the close of a worship service, the rabbi, priest or pastor delivers, with only slight variations, the comforting and fortifying benediction:

"May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace."

An archaeological discovery in 1979 revealed that the Priestly Benediction, as the verse from Numbers 6:24-26 is called, appeared to be the earliest biblical passage ever found in ancient artifacts. Two tiny strips of silver, each wound tightly like a miniature scroll and bearing the inscribed words, were uncovered in a tomb outside Jerusalem and initially dated from the late seventh or early sixth century B.C. - some 400 years before the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

But doubts persisted. The silver was cracked and corroded, and many words and not a few whole lines in the faintly scratched inscriptions were unreadable. Some critics contended that the artifacts were from the third or second century B.C., and thus of less importance in establishing the antiquity of religious concepts and language that became part of the Hebrew Bible.

So researchers at the University of Southern California have now re-examined the inscriptions using new photographic and computer imaging techniques. The words still do not exactly leap off the silver. But the researchers said they could finally be "read fully and analyzed with far greater precision," and that they were indeed the earliest.

In a scholarly report published this month, the research team concluded that the improved reading of the inscriptions confirmed their greater antiquity. The script, the team wrote, is indeed from the period just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent exile of Israelites in Babylonia.

The researchers further reaffirmed that the scrolls "preserve the earliest known citations of texts also found in the Hebrew Bible and that they provide us with the earliest examples of confessional statements concerning Yahweh."

Some of the previously unreadable lines seemed to remove any doubt about the purpose of the silver scrolls: they were amulets. Unrolled, one amulet is nearly four inches long and an inch wide and the other an inch and a half long and about half an inch wide. The inscribed words, the researchers said, were "intended to provide a blessing that will be used to protect the wearer from some manner of evil forces."

The report in The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research was written by Dr. Gabriel Barkay, the archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who discovered the artifacts, and collaborators associated with Southern California's West Semitic Research Project. The project leader is Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, a professor of Semitic languages at U.S.C., who worked with Dr. Marilyn J. Lundberg, a Hebrew Bible specialist with the project, and Dr. Andrew G. Vaughn, a biblical historian at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn.

A companion article for next month's issue of the magazine Near Eastern Archaeology describes the new technology used in the research. The article is by the same authors, as well as Kenneth Zuckerman, Dr. Zuckerman's brother and a specialist in photographing ancient documents.

Other scholars not affiliated with the research but familiar with it agreed with the group's conclusions.

They said it was a relief to have the antiquity and authenticity of the artifacts confirmed, considering that other inscriptions from biblical times have suffered from their uncertain provenance.

Scholars also noted that early Hebrew inscriptions were a rarity, and called the work on the amulets a significant contribution to an understanding of the history of religion in ancient Israel, particularly the time of the Judean Monarchy 2,600 years ago.

"These photographs are far superior to what you can see looking at the inscriptions with the naked eye," said Dr. Wayne Pitard, professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Pitard said the evidence for the antiquity of the benediction was now compelling, although this did not necessarily mean that the Book of Numbers already existed at that time. Possibly it did, he added, but if not, at least some elements of the book were current before the Babylonian exile.

A part of the sacred Torah of Judaism (the first five books of the Bible), Numbers includes a narrative of the Israelite wanderings from Mount Sinai to the east side of the Jordan River. Some scholars think the Torah was compiled in the time of the exile. A number of other scholars, the so-called minimalists, who are influential mainly in Europe, argue that the Bible was a relatively recent invention by those who took control of Judea in the late fourth century B.C. In this view, the early books of the Bible were largely fictional to give the new rulers a place in the country's history and thus a claim to the land.

"The new research on the inscriptions suggests that that's not true," Dr. Pitard said. In fact, the research team noted in its journal report that the improved images showed the seventh-century lines of the benediction to be "actually closer to the biblical parallels than previously recognized."

Dr. P. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in ancient Semitic scripts, said the research should "settle any controversy over these inscriptions."

A close study, Dr. McCarter said, showed that the handwriting is an early style of Hebrew script and the letters are from an old Hebrew alphabet, which had all but ceased to be used after the destruction of Jerusalem. Later Hebrew writing usually adopted the Aramaic alphabet.

There was an exception in the time of Roman rule, around the first centuries B.C. and A.D. The archaic Hebrew script and letters were revived and used widely in documents. But Dr. McCarter noted telling attributes of the strokes of the letters and the spelling on the amulets that, he said, ruled out the more recent date for the inscriptions. Words in the revived Hebrew writing would have included letters indicating vowel sounds. The benediction, the scholar said, was written in words spelled entirely with consonants, the authentic archaic way.

The two silver scrolls were found in 1979 deep inside a burial cave in a hillside known as Ketef Hinnom, west of the Old City of Jerusalem. Dr. Barkay, documenting the context of the discovery, noted that the artifacts were at the back of the tomb embedded in pottery and other material from the seventh or sixth centuries B.C. Such caves were reused for burials over many centuries. Near this tomb's entrance were artifacts from the fourth century, but nothing so recent remains in the undisturbed recesses.

It took Dr. Barkay another seven years before he felt sure enough of what he had to announce details of the discovery. Even then, for all their microscopic examination of the inscriptions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, scholars remained frustrated by the many unreadable words and lines.

About a decade ago, Dr. Barkay enlisted the help of Dr. Zuckerman, whose team had earned a reputation for achieving the near-impossible in photographing illegible ancient documents.

Working with scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Zuckerman's group used advanced infrared imagining systems enhanced by electronic cameras and computer image-processing technology to draw out previously invisible writing on a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The researchers also pioneered electronic techniques for reproducing missing pieces of letters on documents. By examining similar letters elsewhere in the text, they were able to recognize half of a letter and reconstruct the rest of it in a scribe's own peculiar style.

"We learned a lot from work on the Dead Sea Scrolls," Dr. Zuckerman said. "But at first a processing job like this would send your computers into cardiac arrest. We had to wait for computer technology to catch up with our needs."

As the researchers said in their magazine article, the only reasonably clear aspect of the inscriptions was the Priestly Benediction. Other lines preceding or following the prayer "could barely be seen."

To get higher-definition photographs of the inscriptions, Ken Zuckerman applied an old photographer's technique called "light painting," brought up to date by the use of fiber-optic technology. He used a hand-held light in an otherwise dark room to illuminate a spot on the artifact during a time exposure. In addition, he photographed the artifact at different angles, which made the scratched letters shine in stark relief.

The next step was to convert the pictures to digital form, making possible computer processing that brought out "the subtleties of the surface almost at the micron level." This analysis was particularly successful in joining a partial letter stroke on one side of a crack with the rest of the stroke on the other side. It also enabled the researchers to restore fragments of letters to full legibility by matching them with clear letters from elsewhere in the text.

In this way, the researchers filled in more of the letters and words of the benediction itself and for the first time deciphered meaningful words and phrases in the lines preceding the benediction.

Scholars were particularly intrigued by a statement on the smaller artifact. It reads: "May h[e]/sh[e] be blessed by YHWH, the warrior/helper, and the rebuker of Evil."

Referring to God, Yahweh, as the "rebuker of Evil" is similar to language used in the Bible and in various Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars said. The phraseology is also found in later incantations and amulets associated with Israel, evidence that these artifacts were also amulets, researchers concluded.

"In the ancient world, amulets were taken quite seriously," Dr. Zuckerman said. "There's evil out there, demons, and you need protection. Having this around your neck, you are involving God's presence and protection against harm."

Dr. Esther Eshel, a professor of the Bible at Bar-Ilan and an authority on Hebrew inscriptions, said this was the earliest example of amulets from Israel. But she noted that the language of the benediction was similar to a blessing ("May he bless you and keep you") found on a jar from the eighth century B.C.

If the new findings are correct, the people who wore these amulets may have died before they had to face the limitations of their efficacy. They might then have asked in uncomprehending despair, "Where was Yahweh when the Babylonians swooped down on Jerusalem?"

Other scholars, including those previously skeptical, will soon be analyzing the improved images. In a departure from usual practices, the researchers not only published their findings in a standard print version in a journal but also as an accompanying "digital article," a CD version of the article and the images to allow scholars to examine and manipulate the data themselves.

The research group said, "As far as we are aware, this is the first article to be done in this fashion, but it certainly will not be the last."

cassius hueffer

a couple of days ago i mentioned the spoon river anthology and its relation to epigrams from the greek anthology. so here is one for today:

Cassius Hueffer

THEY have chiseled on my stone the words:
"His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man."
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
"Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain."
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

I Love Thucy!

Here's a brain bender for you.

I've just started on Thucydides 3. 82 and was almost immediately hit with what Marchant calls "perhaps the most extraordinary anacoluthon in Thuc." All of the commentaries say that the men-de construction sets a participle against a finite verb, but I just can't get myself to believe that:

καὶ ἐν μὲν εἰρήνῃ οὐκ ἂν ἐχόντων πρόφασιν οὐδ’ ἑτοίμων παρακαλεῖν αὐτούς, πολεμουμένων δὲ καὶ ξυμμαχίας ἅμα ἑκατέροις τῇ τῶν ἐναντίων κακώσει καὶ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ προσποιήσει ῥᾳδίως αἱ ἐπαγωγαὶ τοῖς νεωτερίζειν τι βουλομένοις ἐπορίζοντο.

Is it at all possible that the men-de construction is part of an elaborate genitive absolute? (The genitive absolute is, afterall, a kind of circumstantial participle.)

My reading would run thus:

"And though they neither had a reason to nor were prepared to summon them [i.e. the Athenians or the Spartans] in peacetime, but--while they were at war--(they) even (had reason and were willing to summon their) allies together with either side [i.e. Athenians and Spartans again] for the ruin of their opponents and, from the same thing, for their own gain, the introductions [i.e. of the Athenians or Spartans] were easily contrived by those who wanted to change the system a bit."

The argument as I see it is that while the people weren't prepared to bring in foreigners in peacetime, but were in war, those who wanted to shake things up found reasons to bring in foreigners and thus to agitate things sufficiently to effect change.

Does that make sense? Can anyone make better sense?

Am I being unreasonable in refusing to accept "perhaps the most extraordinary anacoluthon" in Thucydides?

ut i am a world-class bodybuilder, the u.s. olympic team didn't want me

did you know ut can govern a concessive clause? it can! and it takes the subjunctive! and the negative is ut non!

elsewhere, i've recently mentioned edgard lee masters. while poking around online, i learned something that was totally new to me and quite apposite for the campus:

In 1909 Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, given him by Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis. This inspired Masters' most famous work, Spoon River Anthology, realistic and sometimes cynical epitaphs spoken by about 250 persons buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle West. "You will die, no doubt, but die while living / In depths of azure, rapt and mated, / Kissing the queen-bee, Life!" Original idea for the book came from his mother, with whom he discussed people they used to know in the villages. The work appeared first anonymously in Reedy's Mirror in 1914 and 1915. It was then published anonymously in book form. A sequel, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924, but it was less successful. Spoon River was Masters's revenge on narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It gained a huge popularity, but shattered his position as a respectable member of establishment.

so: you can find the greek anthology even in that most quintessential piece of americana, written in the early 20th century in the american middle west!

catullus as transformer/thundercat

i was just reading d.e.w. wormell's essay called 'catullus as translator' (found in 'the classical tradition: literary and historical studies in honor of harry caplan', ed. luitpold wallach) and came across a couple of points of interest:

Discussing Catullus' version of Sappho's poem Swinburne wrote "a more beautiful translation there never was and never will be; but compared with the Greek it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against each other the first two stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce."

I suspect he is unfairly harsh with Catullus, and I shall perhaps (though perhaps not) have more to say on that in the future.

the second point of interest regards latin vocabulary:

[F]rom Terence onwards exprimere, originally "to take the impression of a seal," comes increasingly to be used of literal translation, often with verbum de (or e) verbo added. The Greeks had, of course, translated documents from other languages on occasion; but Greek translation from the literature of foreign countries appears to be unknown. Latin literature, on the other hand, began with free adaptation of Greek models, and the word used from Plautus onwards to describe this kind of translation is vertere ("to turn," but also, significantly, "to change").

catappho

i am supposed to help this week with a group presentation on catullus 51 and its relationship to sappho 31. it is a pretty interesting investigation, and renders true the words of t.s. eliot, which apply especially well to ancient poets:

Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.

Is this the fate that awaits us?

Lonely Italian Pensioner Gets Adopted

Sep 26, 7:57 AM (ET)

By Antonio Denti

SAN POLO DEI CAVALIERI, Italy (Reuters) - A lonely pensioner who turned to Italy's classified pages to find someone willing to "adopt" him as a grandfather is finally heading to his new home and family in northern Italy this weekend.

Giorgio Angelozzi, 80, has lived alone outside Rome with seven cats since his wife died in 1992, but he took the unprecedented step of putting himself up for adoption last month via the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Not satisfied with just running the advertisement, Italy's main daily ran a front-page story about Angelozzi's plight.

Inundated with offers from families across Italy and as far away as New Zealand, Brazil and the United States, the retired schoolteacher has decided to go to live with Elio and Marlena Riva and their two teenage children in Bergamo, northern Italy.

"I was hit by a torrential downpour. I didn't think I would be able to choose among so many offers," the white-bearded Angelozzi told Reuters during his last hours in his simple two-room flat.

"But I chose the woman whose voice reminded me of my wife."

Angelozzi's appeal struck a chord in family-loving Italy where up to four generations have traditionally lived under the same roof or at least in the same neighborhood.

Today, one in five Italians is over the age of 65 and almost half of them live alone, partly because of the more mobile lifestyle of younger generations. Italy also has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

"Remember that my problem is one that affects so many elderly people in Italy. Always remember that," Angelozzi had said during the initial flurry of attention.

He will travel with Marlena Riva to Bergamo on Saturday night where his new home boasts a garden with apple, cherry and pomegranate trees and a beagle called Pablo to replace his cats.

"I will become a grandfather -- this was my plan. I will have the affection of this woman who is already calling me 'daddy' and the children who call me Grandpa Giorgio," said Angelozzi, who has a daughter working abroad with a charity.

The former classics teacher had told potential families he would contribute 500 euros ($615) a month to expenses, but the Rivas say what they really want is a grandfather.

"This grandfather needs help and we need him," Marlena told Corriere. Her relatives live in her native Poland and her husband's parents recently died.

Their 16-year-old daughter Dagmara said: "I just want a grandfather, the rest isn't important." ($1-.8129 Euro)

And you thought we were through with provisos!

I've been getting a lot of pressure to post some Greek syntax rules, so following up on last week's Latin Proviso, I give you the much simpler Greek equivalent.

Interestingly Goodwin refuses to use the term 'proviso' and classes this as a type of consecutive clause, though one could just as easily make the case that a proviso is analogous (in sense though not form) to conditionals. Perhaps understanding this potential overlap Smyth gives the proviso its own place, sandwiched between result clauses and conditionals:

CLAUSES WITH ἐφ' ᾧ AND ἐφ' ᾧτε INTRODUCING A PROVISO

§2279. ἐφ' ᾧ and ἐφ' ᾧτε on condition that, for the purpose of take the infinitive or (less often) the future indicative, and may be introduced, in the principal clause, by the demonstrative ἐπὶ τούτῳ. Negative μή.

αἱρεθέντες ἐφ' ᾧτε συγγράψαι νόμους having been chosen for the purpose of compiling laws X. H. 2.3.11 , ἔφασαν ἀποδώσειν (τοὺς νεκροὺς) ἐφ' ᾧ μὴ καίειν τὰ̄ς οἰκίᾱς the barbarians said they would surrender the dead on condition that he would not burn their houses X. A. 4.2.19, ἀφί̄εμέν σε, ἐπὶ τούτῳ μέντοι, ἐφ' ᾧτε μηκέτι . . . φιλοσοφεῖν we release you, on this condition however, that you no longer search after wisdom P. A. 29c . Future indicative: ξυνέβησαν ἐφ' ᾧτε ἐξίᾱσιν ἐκ Πελοποννήσου ὑπόσπονδοι καὶ μηδέποτε ἐπιβήσονται αὐτῆς they made an agreement on condition that they should depart from the Peloponnesus under a truce and never set foot on it again T. 1.103.

a. These constructions do not occur in Homer. The future indicative is used by Herodotus and Thucydides on the analogy of relative clauses equivalent to consecutive clauses. These authors also use ἐπὶ τοῖσδε for ἐπὶ τούτῳ.

ut i got home, we made dinner

and now i'd like to say something about ut temporal clauses for our syntax point today. did you KNOW ut could take a temporal clause? well, it can, cowboy. and when it does, do you know what mood of the verb it takes? INDICATIVE, which i think is swell! in fact, it usually takes the PERFECT INDICATIVE or the HISTORICAL PRESENT. sometimes it takes the imperfect to show a past state of things, or the pluperfect to show action completed in past time.

hey drum-major, toss me that hyper baton!

yes, i know that was dumb. but what i really wanted to tell you is that i just came across a nice example of hyperbaton in catullus 65:

namque mei nuper Lethaeo in gurgit fratris
pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem...

'For recently has the flowing water washed the pale (dim.) foot of my brother in the Lethaean stream...'

i would also like there to be a transference of the diminutive from the foot itself to the adjective. i don't know why calling his foot a 'little foot' would bring about pathos, but for some reason it seems to me that it would.

red derrick

we haven't had a rhetorical post in a few days. my sincere apologies. in the meantime, here is something i read today in michael trapp's collection 'greek and latin letters' about letter 42 in his collection--a letter by jerome (letter 23 in his own works, written in 384) to marcella on the death of lea. trapp writes in his commentary:

Using a (very) recent even as his cue, Jerome constructs a letter of consolation...which is also a sermon on the superiority of spiritual over worldly values; central to its rhetorical structure is a comparison (synkrisis, comparatio) that combines eulogy of a recently deceased Christian with invective against a recently deceased pagan. Rhetorical polish is evident also in the attention given to rhythm: e.g. in the double cretic clausulae (ex)isse de corpore, (doce)amus in tartaro, quanta mutatio, cernit inquirere.

i admit my complete ignorance about prose rhthym; if anyone cares to comment on it, please feel free!

relax and let the syntax bring you home

today's lesson is on Christian latin and comes from albert blaise's 'A Handbook of Christian Latin: Style, Morphology, and Syntax'.

Quo is sometimes used in place of ut even when the clause does not contain a comparative, which is rare in Classical Latin:
rogabam te...quo sanares dolorem meum, Aug.Conf.2.12; 6.13; 8.13; Tert.Apol.27; 47.

review of 'sailing the wine-dark sea: why the greeks matter'

here is n.s. gill's review of thomas cahill's book 'sailing the wine-dark sea':

The Bottom Line:
In a non-pretentious format, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea - Why the Greeks Matter" does indeed show to those interested why the ancient Greeks should matter -- even to modern Americans.

Pros

* Clear, easy reading
* Photographs of representative artwork
* Puts all of ancient Greece into a compact framework

Cons

* Needless profanity and slang
* Some factual errors

Description

* Retells various important Greek myths and puts them in historical context.
* Describes the contributions the Greeks made in all aspects of culture.
* Discusses Plato's Republic's cave and the sex discussion in the Symposium.
* Contains many photographs of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery.
* Compares ancient democracy and leaders with modern politics and political
leaders.
* Catalogues important writers and philosophers.
* Drenched with facts and anecdotes.

Guide Review - Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea - Why the Greeks Matter:
In eight chapters Thomas Cahill covers the history of ancient Greece in a light, informal manner, using anecdotes and comparisons with modern mores and political figures. Although Cahill has been criticized for exactly this modern outlook, this seems to me crucial to a look at a distant world with an eye to making it relevant as the subtitle "Why the Greeks Matter" demands. If we do indeed have problems with people who are racist, classist, and sexist, as Cahill says the ancient Greeks were, they must have other redeeming characteristics if they're to be worth studying. They developed art, adapted Egyptian mathematics, added vowels to the Semitic consonants to produce the alphabet, produced innovations in various literary fields, created science and philosophy, and introduced the democratic system. It is a bit hard to decide the audience for Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. It is not a scholarly work, nor is it a work for people who can't tell Ancient from Medieval History. A certain familiarity with ancient Greece seems crucial, but if you already have that understanding, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea" is somewhat redundant. Still, it is hard to keep the wealth of detail in mind at all times, so Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea seems a refresher for those of us who originally learned about ancient Greece -- whether at the Met, like Cahill, or in school -- in our youth and have since forgotten some of the lessons we learned.

and here is what publisher's weekly had to say:

In this elegant introduction to Greek life and thought, Cahill provides the same majestic historical survey he has already offered for the Irish, the Jews and the Christians. He eloquently narrates the rise of Greek civilization and cannily isolates six archetypal figures representative of the development of Greek thinking. He opens with a consideration of Homer's Iliad and its glorification of the warrior way as an exemplum of life in the Greek state. Cahill then proceeds to offer an evolutionary look at the rise and fall of Greece by examining the wanderer (Odysseus), the politician (Solon), the playwright (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides), the poet (Sappho), the philosopher (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle) and the artist (Praxiteles). These figures provide lessons in how to feel, how to rule, how to party, how to think and how to see. For example, Cahill contends that Odysseus reveals longing and desire for love, domestic peace and his homeland, while the rage of Achilles offers us lessons in the way to fight for one's homeland. The book is full of whimsical characterizations, such as the depiction of Socrates as a "squat, ugly, barefoot man who did not bathe too often." The author includes generous portions of the original writings in order to provide the flavor of the Greek way. Once again, Cahill gracefully opens up a world that has provided so much of Western culture's characteristic way of thinking.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

desine fata deum flecti sperare precando...

i'm sorry to say that we didn't get this up yesterday, but better late than never.
yesterday was the anniversary of vergil's death in 19 BC at brindisii.

also, around this time are the approximate dates for initiation into the eleusinian mysteries.

(via about.com).

Hendecasyllabics and the Epigrammatic Tradition

The question was posed whether the hendecasyllabics of Catullus are epigrams, and it was noted that Martial's are.

I thought I'd take up the question, and started with the meter. As others have noted any eleven syllable line can be called hendecayllabic, and I quickly found reference to both Sapphic and Phalaecean hendecasyllabics.

The Phalaecean is the meter of our poet, yet solid information is hard to come by. Even harder to find is information on the man who lent his name, Phalaecus. The helpful little handbook on Greek and Latin meter by Rosenmeyer, Ostwald and Halporn (is that the order?) is not helpful here. In fact you'd think no Greek had ever used the meter, but you'd be wrong.

As it happens the meter was used considerably throughout the Alexandrian period, and according the West in his Greek Metre was the only Aeolic meter in constant use through to the imperial period. It wasn't until I'd turned to West that I found more than a hint that the meter preceded Catullus. (That's not entirely true. Some journal article on JSTOR mentioned a Phalaecean in a sepulchral inscription, published by Wilamowitz, but that was my best lead till West.)

West pointed me toward a number of extant Greek epigrams in the phalaecean meter, and his list included two in the A.P. which came as a surprise to everyone as most of the collection seems to be in elegiacs. This has probably led many to the conclusion that elegiacs are the sole or the best meter for epigrams, though this ignores the plethora of verse inscriptions and epigrams in hexameter.

But I digress. On to the elusive Phalaecus. He's not an easy figure to track down, but through L'Année philologique I was able to find an excellent article (one of only two on the subject) published in Greek! (Skiadas, A. D. - ὁ ποιητὴς Φάλαικος. EEAth 1967-1968 XVIII : 65-88.)

Skiadas says that Phalaecus was not the first to use the meter, but was the first to turn this Aeolic lyric measure to use in epigrams. Couple with the testimony on the meter's use and popularity as treated by West, this article goes a long toward establishing the meter as comfortably within the epigrammatic tradition.

If we turn back to Catullus carmen L, treated here previously, in light of Maria Carilli's 1979 article, in which she related that poem to a fragment of the Alexandrian epigrammatist Hedylus, everything will tie together nicely.(Carilli, M. G. "Rapporti tra Catullo e gli epigrammisti greci." RAAN 1979 LIV : 163-184.)

The imagery of the poetry exchange in carmen L echoes closely the kind of poetic affair treated in the Hedylus fragment: I suggest a light-hearted round of wine and erotic epigrams, though the subject could change with the occasion.

The important point for us however is that carmen L is written in hendecasyllabics: Phalaecean hendecasyllabics.

It is an epigram about the writing of epigrams in a largely forgotten epigrammatic meter. It would behoove us all to reconsider the arbitrary classification of Catullus' poems that calls these epigrams, and those something else.

Martial knew better than we.

catullus and his world

i just finished reading the first chapter of t.p. wiseman's catullus and his world, called 'a world not ours'. it is quite eye-opening, and disturbing. catullus includes a number of incredibly violent images in his poems, and wiseman comments (p.5):

What lies behind these sadistic imaginings is the Roman idea of punishment, for that is what Catullus wants to exact.

It is striking that throughout Roman literature, from Plautus to Prudentius, we find instruments of torture referred to as something familiar.

he goes on to describe just how ubiquitous violence and cruelty was in the roman world of the late republic (and early empire). he goes on to remind the reader of the public nature of such violence (p.7):

Judicial torture was also done in public: at the entrance to the Subura the bloody scourges hung ready for use, and any passer-by in the Forum might see, and hear, the dreadful carnifices in their red caps (to mark them out as men beyond the pale) inflicting agony on some criminal before his execution. It was a spectacle to enjoy: the populace could 'feast their eyes and satisfy their souls' at the torture and death of a notorious malefactor.

furthermore, there was no police force to protect one from harm (p.8):

A passing rustic makes an untimely joke? A humble neighbour's dog keeps you awake? Out with the whips, and have the culprit beaten--if he dies, too bad. In a city without a police force, where self-help was basic to the operation of the law, the humble citizen needed a powerful friend for his protection, and the great men of the time went about with armed escorts as a matter of course.

this is why i argued, when 'The Passion' was criticized due to its extreme violence, in spite of the Gospel writers not having included such detail in their accounts, that these criticisms were ill-founded. there is a reason the Gospel writers did not include the gruesome violence visually depicted in the movie: they did not need to. such brutality, at the state's hands, would have been commonplace for someone living in the roman empire. as wiseman writes, quoting suetonius' life of vespasian (f.n.18), 'It was, after all, a city where a dog might pick up a human hand in the street.'

don't disguise your provis(o)

i dedicate these two provisos that i just came across in catullus 114.5-6 (ad mentulam) to dennis:

quare concedo sit dives, dum omnia desint.
saltum laudemus, dum modo ipse egeat.

what's certain in this life? death and (syn)taxes!

time for a latin syntax rule. hmmm...possibly we should also begin including greek syntax. anyway, for the moment, placet mihi to do some latin. for the moment, we are leaving questions behind and switching to the genitive.

A noun used to limit or define another, and NOT meaning the same person or thing, is put in the Genitive.
Examples:
libri Ciceronis, the books of Cicero
inimici Caesaris, Caesar's enemies
vacatio laboris, a respite from toil
petitio consulatus, candidacy for the consulship
regnum civitatis, royal power over the state

rhetoric schmeteric

first of all, thanks go out to rogue classicism for the links and kind words.

second, the weekend's over and it's time to get back to figures and tropes. today's rhetorical figure is...

PROSOPOPEIA: personification. For example: 'The pine trees smiled wide and danced a jig to the tune of bob seger's "the fire down below".' i encourage you to submit your own prosopopeia in the comments section. the best one (as decided completely according the caprice of dennis and me, and possibly magister coke) will be awarded ITS OWN ENTRY, with A COOL TITLE.

personify away!

question of the day

'What am I doing? Why am I doing it?'
--Title of a 'conversation with graduate students', taking place at Princeton University on 20 September 2004.

quote of the day

'I'm all in favor of an empire that is large, that is based on conquering, and that has room for quirky nerds.'
--Peter Brown, 9/19/04

Calling Magister Coke

This will be meaningless to most of our readers, so let me apologize at the start.

But Magister Coke, please let us all know how things are going. The Campus extends far beyond the Main Line.