Male Graduate Students:
un-serious in terms of studies since 1931.
Something called the World Peace Herald has a piece on classical languages which cites Pope Benedict's predilection for Latin homilies as well as the classics program of E.'s alma mater, Hillsdale College.
The piece is riddled with tiny errors ('Cesar's De Bellum Gallicum'?), but check it out anyway.
Reader dave just recommended this quick and dirty glossary of abbreviations and signs used in classical texts. I haven't looked at it too closely but it should be helpful.
It's now been added to the Cheetsheet.
paul cites aratus in Acts 17:28. (in addition, the first part of the verse seems to be a citation of epimenides of crete, also cited by paul in Titus 1:12. Acts 17:28 will be today's verse for reviewing modern languages.
...for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children.'
Denn in ihm leben, weben und sind wir; wie auch etliche Poeten bei euch gesagt haben: "Wir sind seines Geschlechts."
car en lui nous avons la vie, le mouvement, et l'être. C'est ce qu'ont dit aussi quelques-uns de vos poètes: De lui nous sommes la race...
Poiché in lui viviamo, ci muoviamo e siamo, come persino alcuni dei vostri poeti hanno detto: "Poiché siamo anche sua progenie".
'puesto que en él vivimos, nos movemos y existimos.' Como algunos de sus propios poetas griegos han dicho: 'De él somos descendientes.'
A friend pointed me toward this expanded article on the latest developments. Here's an excerpt:
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".
Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.
Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.
Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.
Eureka! Extraordinary discovery unlocks secrets of the ancients
By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke
17 April 2005
Thousands of previously illegible manuscripts containing work by some of the greats of classical literature are being read for the first time using technology which experts believe will unlock the secrets of the ancient world.
Among treasures already discovered by a team from Oxford University are previously unseen writings by classical giants including Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod. Invisible under ordinary light, the faded ink comes clearly into view when placed under infra-red light, using techniques developed from satellite imaging.
The Oxford documents form part of the great papyrus hoard salvaged from an ancient rubbish dump in the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus more than a century ago. The thousands of remaining documents, which will be analysed over the next decade, are expected to include works by Ovid and Aeschylus, plus a series of Christian gospels which have been lost for up to 2,000 years.
τοσοῦτον δ' ἀπολέλοιπεν ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν περὶ τὸ φρονεῖν καὶ λέγειν τοὺς ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους, ὥσθ' οἱ ταύτης μαθηταὶ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασι, καὶ τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι, καὶ μᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως μετέχοντας.
- Isocrates, Panegyricus 50
"So far has our city left behind other men in thought and speech that her students have become the the teachers of others, and she has made the name 'Greeks' seem to be no longer that of a race but of intelligence, and that those be called Greeks who partake of our education rather than of our common nature."
Tim Spalding of www.isidore-of-seville.com e-mailed me just the other day to suggest that we add his new site to the Cheat Sheet.
I highly recommend the site. It currently contains scans from Smith's monumental work on Greek and Roman Antiquities and much more. There's also a new Wiki Classical Dictionary which could benefit from the input of some of our readers (hint).
You can find the link above or in section 4 (Reference) of the Cheat Sheet.
PS: I've fixed the links to the Romance and German dictionaries as well.
PPS: I've also just added a number of online dictionaries including the Monier-Williams Sanskrit Lexicon.
today's verse for review is Psalm 37:7.
Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
Sei stille dem HERRN und warte auf ihn; erzürne dich nicht über den, dem sein Mutwille glücklich fortgeht.
Garde le silence devant l'Éternel, et espère en lui; Ne t'irrite pas contre celui qui réussit dans ses voies, Contre l'homme qui vient à bout de ses mauvais desseins.
Sta' in silenzio davanti all'Eterno e aspettalo; non affliggerti per colui che prospera nelle sue imprese, per l'uomo che segue i suoi malvagi disegni.
Guarda silencio ante el Señor,
y espera en él con paciencia;
no te irrites ante el éxito de otros,
de los que maquinan planes malvados.
a professor sent a link to a new papyrus that has now been identified as containing archilochean elegiacs. the site has a nice photograph of the fragment and says that it's 'the first known instance of a mid-length mythical narrative in elegiacs'.
I haven't had much to say for this blog (and I still don't) but I do have a PRESSING question I want to present to our readers:
One of the first words we English speakers use (generally) as children is "mine" - a thing which I find truly fascinating. Do you think this is true for other cultures? And for the Romans? And if so (and here is where I am really puzzled), which gender do you think they would use first?
thanks for any input you might have.
today's verse for review is Psalm 35:28.
And my tongue shall declare Your righteousness
And Your praise all day long.
Und meine Zunge soll reden von deiner Gerechtigkeit und dich täglich preisen.
Et ma langue célébrera ta justice, Elle dira tous les jours ta louange.
La mia lingua celebrerà la tua giustizia e canterà la tua lode tutto il giorno.
Con mi lengua proclamaré tu justicia,
y todo el día te alabaré.
it's time to start working on modern languages. we're going to do this by using the Bible, found in a multitude of languages here. today's verse is Psalm 34:4. we will give the verse in english, german, french, italian, and spanish (yes, i realize that more modern languages exist than these five; perhaps we shall add more later).
I sought the LORD, and He answered me,
And delivered me from all my fears.
Da ich den HERRN suchte, antwortete er mir und errettete mich aus aller meiner Furcht.
J'ai cherché l'Éternel, et il m'a répondu; Il m'a délivré de toutes mes frayeurs.
ho cercato l'Eterno, ed egli mi ha risposto e mi ha liberato da tutti i miei spaventi.
Busqué al Señor, y él me respondió;
me libró de todos mis temores.
I suppose it's time I come clean: I no longer have faith in the oral composition theory of the homeric poems.
I highly recommend Douglas Young's epic-length essay 'Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod' from Arion 6 (1966) (also reprinted in Niall Rudd's Essays in Classical Literature, 1972).
It just may change your life.
Also a good (and more current) read for those teetering on the fence is M.L. West's reply to reviews of his Homer Teubner by Nagy and Nardelli in the BMCR:
My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News. Thus Nagy remarks disapprovingly that in my Praefatio I "ignore altogether the work of Parry and Lord", and that throughout my edition "there is a noticeable lack of engagement with oral poetics". Nardelli finds that I "refuse the critical consequences of the Parry-Lord theory"; I show this by marking as spurious a number of verses "which, in their great majority, are easily accounted for in the oralist framework". I have "a keen feeling for Homeric Greek but no sound command in oral linguistics." "He cannot be well acquainted with Parry's principle that rhapsodes would modernize their diction wherever meter does not prevent it since it is his contention that 'Homer' wrote."
Let me take up the last point first. I do not actually commit myself as to whether the poet wrote with his own hand or used an amanuensis, but I do make him responsible for the writing down. Both reviewers imply that there is something controversial, even extreme, in this view. But it is an inescapable fact that we are dealing with a written poem, a text fixed in the course of the writing process (in Parryist theory it could not be otherwise). It cannot be treated as the transcript of a series of oral performances, for even if the poet was capable of creating our Iliad in performance, the means to capture it were not available in antiquity.
There are things which the classics teach us, and about which I could not lightly express myself in public.
max over at in hoc signo vinces has a post on constantine's vision and the sign which constantine was instructed to use as protection in battle, so i thought i might say a little something about it here.
the first thing that should be said is that the separate accounts of constantine's vision/dream must be kept strictly separate, for they do not recount the same event. lactantius (who has a dream, but no vision) includes instructions for the chi-rho at De Mortibus Persecutorum 44 (text; translation):
Commonitus est in quiete Constantinus, ut caeleste signum dei notaret in scutis atque ita proelium committeret. Facit ut iussus est et transversa X littera, summo capite circumflexo, Christum in scutis notat. Quo signo armatus exercitus capit ferrum.
Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle. He did as he had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of CHRIST. Having this sign, his troops stood to arms.
About the time of the midday sun, when day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it whichsaid, `By this conquer' (τούτῳ νίκα). Amazement at the spectacle seized both him and the whole company of soldiers which was then accompanying him on a campaign he was conducting somewhere, and witnessed the miracle. 29 He was, he said, wondering to himself what the manifestation might mean; then, while he meditated, and thought long and hard, night overtook him. Thereupon, as he slept, the Christ of God appeared to him with the sign which had appeared in the sky, and urged him to make himself a copy of the sign which had appeared in the sky, and to use this as protection against the attacks of the enemy. 30 When day came he arose and recounted the mysterious communication to his friends. Then he summoned goldsmiths and jewellers, sat down among them, and explained the shape of the sign, and gave them instructions about copying it in gold and precious stones. This was something which the Emperor himself once saw it to let me also set eyes on, God vouchsafing even this. 31 (1) It was constructed to the following design. A tall pole plated with gold had a transverse bar forming the shape of a cross. Up at [31] the extreme top a wreath woven of precious stones and gold had been fastened. On it two letters, intimating by its first characters the name `Christ', formed the monogram of the Saviour's title, rho being intersected in the middle by chi. These letters the Emperor also used to wear upon his helmet in later times. (2)From the transverse bar, which was bisected by the pole, hung suspended a cloth, an imperial tapestry covered with a pattern of precious stones fastened together, which glittered with shafts of light, and interwoven with much gold, producing an impression of indescribable beauty on those who saw it. This banner then, attached to the bar, was given equal dimensions of length and breadth. But the upright pole, which extended upwards a long way from its lower end, below the trophy of the cross and near the top of the tapestry delineated, carried the golden head-and-shoulders portrait of the Godbeloved Emperor, and likewise of his sons. (3) This saving sign was always used by the Emperor for protection against every opposing and hostile force, and he commanded replicas of it to lead all his armies.
32 (1) That was, however, somewhat later. At the time in question, stunned by the amazing vision, and determined to worship no other god than the one who had appeared, he summoned those expert in his words, and enquired who this
god was, and what was the explanation of the vision which had appeared of the sign. (2) They said that the god was the Onlybegotten Son of the one and only God, and that the sign which appeared was a token of immortality, and was an abiding
trophy of the victory over death, which he had once won when he was present on earth. They began to teach him the reasons for his coming, explaining to him in detail the story of his self-accommodation to human conditions. [32] (3) He listened
attentively to these accounts too, while he marvelled at the divine manifestation which had been granted to his eyes; comparing the heavenly vision with the meaning of what was being said, he made up his mind, convinced that it was as God's own teaching that the knowledge of these things had come to him. He now decided personally to apply himself to the divinely inspired writings. Taking the priests of God as his advisers, he also deemed it right to honour the God who had appeared to him with all due rites. Thereafter, fortifed by good hopes in him, he finally set about extinguishing the menacing flames of tyranny.
Eusebius saw the labarum in its established form, as depicted on Constantine's late coins, and here describes what he had seen later... . Even in this form it could be described as cross-shaped, and resembled a military vexillum; Firm. Mat., Err. prof. rel. 20.7 refers to it as the vexillum fidei.
The whole structure is cruciform. The fact that the military vexillum was cruciform had been noted by Methodius, Porph. 1, who claimed that earthly emperors thus used the cross 'for the destruction of wicked habits'. The description of the wreath and the first two letters of the name of Christ point clearly to the later labarum, as it was depicted on coins.
Like other Christian signs, the chi-rho emblem is in fact rare on Constantine's coins, and the early silver medallions of 315 from Ticinum (Pavia) showing the Emperor wearing a high-crested helmet with the Christogram are exceptional (Fig.3). See P. Bruun, 'The Christian Signs on the Coins of Constantine', Arctos, NS 3 (1962), 5-35, against A. Alfoeldi, 'The Helmet of Constantine with the Christian Monogram', JRS 22 (1932), 9-23; though the form of the chi-rho is attested before Constantine, there is no certain Christian use (E. Dinkler, Signum Crucis (Tuebingen, 1967), 134-5).
Quaint, I'd imagine.
But here's the latest odd search request to catch my eye:
priestly, brain detroit computers
When something great appears and lasts for some time, we can presuppose a careful training, e.g. among the Greeks. How did so many men among them achieve their freedom?
Educate educators! But first educators must educate themselves. It is for these I write.
i've been reading some claudian lately. perhaps someday i'll have something intelligent to say about it.
but i wouldn't hold my breath.
in the meantime, i direct your attention to someone who does. here is bret mulligan's review of the recently published Aetas Claudianea. Eine Tagung an der Freien Universität Berlin vom 28. bis 30. Juni 2002, edited by Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers.
mulligan states:
This volume will be required reading for students of Claudian, and offers much of value to scholars of late antique literary culture and the Classical Tradition in general. In their inclusion of extensive references and supplementary material, most contributors appear to be aiming at an audience beyond that of the Claudian specialist, and taken together the twelve contributions in this volume provide a valuable introduction to the current questions and challenges of Claudian scholarship, as well as a useful overview of its bibliography. Of the twelve contributions, six are in German, four in English, and two in Italian.
In "Claudian's Greek World: Callimachus" (pp. 78-95), Isabella Gualandri reassesses the difficult topic of Claudian's use of Greek models, focusing on a few points of apparent contact between Claudian and Callimachus. She demonstrates how allusions to the Hymn to Delos structure the arrival of Mars in In Eutropium and inform the predicted destruction of the Giants in his Greek Gigantomachy. This last reference leads Gualandri to discuss other instances where Claudian exploits similarities between ancient Gallic and contemporary Gothic invaders, in particular the preface to the second book of the In Rufinum, where the anachronistic interest in Delphi is best explained as a reference to the Hymn to Delos's treatment of the Gallic invasion of 279 BCE. Although Gualandri cautions that "nothing conclusive can be inferred from these few examples," she ventures that Claudian's references to Greek models are not allusions -- i.e. aemulatio intended to be recognized by a learned audience -- but simply material "to be freely exploited and exhibited as if they were the result of his own inventio," an "elusive use of his literary models." In this well-argued essay, Gualandri is meticulous in documenting her sources and providing interesting supplementary information. She thoroughly treats other possible sources and avoids the pitfalls of overstatement that often plague the exposition of poetic models.
Lucio Ceccarelli, "Osservazioni sull'esametro di Claudiano"
Franca Ela Consolino, "Poetry and politics in Claudian's carmina minora 22 and 50"
Siegmar Döpp, "Von Napoleon zu Ludwig XVIII.: Der Claudian-Cento des L.A. Descampe"
Manfred Fuhrmann, "Claudian in der Neuzeit"
Isabella Gualandri, "Claudian's Greek World"
Jacqueline Long, "Claudian and the City: Poetry and Pride of Place"
Jens Michners, "Spott und Ironi in Claudians carmina minora"
Claudio Moreschini, "Paganus pervicacissimus religione e 'filosofia' in Claudiano"
Claudia Schindlerm "Tradition - Transformation - Innovation: Claudians Panegyriken und das Epos"
Peter Lebrecht Schmidt, "Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Erwägungen zur Claudianüberlieferung"
Christine Schmitz, "Das Orpheus-Thema in Claudians De raptu Proserpinae"
Catherine Ware, "Gildo tyrannus: Accusation and Allusion in the Speeches of Roma and Africa"
first of all, it's nice to see dennis back again! i was beginning to wonder whether he'd abandoned us for fairer campi. if anyone else is glad to see his return, they are warmly invited to express their delight in the comments.
and now on to our citation for the day--
Classical scholarship as knowledge of the ancient world cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible. What cannot be exhausted is the perpetually new adjustment of our own age to the classical world, of measuring ourselves against it. If we assign the classicist the task of understanding his own age better by means of the classical world, then his task is a permanent one.--This is the antinomy of classical scholarship. Men have always, in fact, understood the ancient world exclusively in terms of the present--and shall the present now be understood in terms of the ancient world? More precisely: men have explained the classical world to themselves in terms of their own experience; and from what they have acquired of the classical world in this way, they have assessed, evaluated their own experience. Hence experience is clearly an absolute prerequisite for a classicist. Which means: the classicist must first be a man in order to become creative as a classicist...
The other day I heard a caller to the lcoal sports radio station offer big kuh-DOOZ to the host (and yes, kuh-DOOZ rhymes with 'the news'). Never have I heard kudos butchered so badly.
This morning on Howard Stern I briefly heard the gang repeatedly saying, 'Latin gravitas' apparently in mockery of James Lipton.
Now that I can get behind. The man makes a mean iced tea though.
At the moment I'm working on a new thesis which also was not on our earlier poll. Sorry about that. But the good news is that I have under two months to complete a thesis on meter in Aratus and Nicander, and I'm currently convinced that Nicander's Alexipharmaca is the most underappreciated poem in the history of the world of mankind ever. It's--dare I say it?--really really ridiculously good.
The consistency which is honored in a scholar is pedantry when applied to the Greeks.
The new degree of Bachelor of Science does not guarantee that the holder knows any science. It does guarantee that he does not know any Latin.
--Dean Briggs of Harvard College (c.1900)
In the average Greek we encounter the qualities of genius without originality--in short, all the dangerous qualities of spirit and character.
Besides shirking my duties on this website, I have been extremely neglectful concerning graduate school. I got an email a few days ago from Bryn Mawr's bow-tied Godfather, Darby Scott, scolding me for not responding to any emails from professors regarding my UNFINISHED THESIS. I know, I know, I am BAAAAD. Sed quid dicam? I mean seriously, in my first year of teaching, when will I have time for writing? When I am not planning lessons, I am sleeping and maybe even eating. Nonetheless, I haven't emailed him back, which is definitely in bad form.
On a lighter note, I have written two songs to help my students with the cases. I'm sure that this will help all of you Latin tutors out there. Maybe I should put out an mp3 with the songs recorded.
The first song is from the Adam's Family theme song:
They're crazy and they're KOOKy
they're marvelous and spooky
it won't be long 'till you see
the case as family!
nominative (click click)
the genitive (click click)
dative and accusative, the ablative (click click)
The second song takes its melody from The Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg: "Singular is US A UM, I AE I, O AE O..." and so forth. It gets complicated with the plurals, so you'll have to wait until I come out with a CD to hear the rest of it.
Kids love it. 9th graders are finally getting a handle on the cases. You'd be surprised how differently a 9th grader's mind works from the mind I was using when I learned Latin my junior year of college. Maybe if they were not taking seven or eight other classes, it would be easier for them to focus!
guess what? someone found the campus today by googling 'aaron kook'. and i don't blame them.
i figured this was the explanation: aaron forgot the address of the blog to which HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE CONTRIBUTING, and googled himself to find it. well done.
but then i wandered over to the dave, the other blog into which i insinuate myself, and someone had found THAT by googling '"aaron kook"'!
this, friends, i cannot explain.
It is not true that culture can be acquired only from the classics. We can get something from them, but not "culture" as that word is understood nowadays. Our own culture is based upon a completely castrated and mendacious classical curriculum. To see how little effect this curriculum has, just take a look at our classicists. Thanks to the classics, they should be our best educated men: are they?
via rogue classicism, i came across this interview in the chronicle of higher education with michele ronnick, responsible for the publication of william sanders scarborough's autobiography, mentioned previously on the campus.
My purpose is: to create complete hostility between our modern "culture" and classical civilization. Whoever wants to serve the former must hate the latter.
i'm becoming more and more glad that we have a wider variety of names to choose from in modern times than did the ancient romans.
for example, constantine, whose father was named constantius, had three sons besides crispus. their names were constantine II, constantius, and constans.
seriously.
One of the greatest values of classical antiquity is the fact that its writings are the only ones which modern men still read carefully.
Overstraining of the memory--very common among classicists--and underdeveloped judgment.
here is michael kulikowski's review of christopher kelly's book Ruling the Later Roman Empire. here are the first two paragraphs:
This book has been awaited since Kelly's contribution s on the subject to the Cambridge Ancient History and Bowersock, Brown and Grabar's guide to late antiquity. Very much a book of two parts, Ruling the Later Roman Empire deals chiefly with the administrative and bureaucratic elites of the late empire, first through the prism of the De magistratibus of John Lydus, then through three long chapters on the symbolic and actual meaning of late Roman bureaucracy and its contrast with the early empire. Kelly's sources are familiar, at least until the short epilogue in which he adduces sermon literature envisaging heaven in imperial terms. His approach is expository and analytical, resolutely traditional: the shrine of Bourdieu is by-passed without modish genuflection, and a topic seemingly made for thick description does not get it. All of which is to say that, to those for whom such things matter, Ruling the Later Roman Empire will seem woefully under-theorized.
But the book is conceptually modern in other ways. Kelly is laudably unwilling to surrender administrative history to German dissertations and gigantic French thèses exhaustively cataloguing the legal minutiae of individual departments. Instead, he searches to find the personal and affective side of Roman bureaucracy, with great success: this is a fundamentally humane book. Kelly can show imaginative feeling both for an invented ageing bureaucrat, gasping with relief when the emperor insists on promotion strictly by seniority, and for canny operators slowly weaving intricate webs of shadowy power and perquisites. Time and again, the book conjures the image of a late Roman Sir Humphrey Appleby, ranging self-interestedly through bureaux every bit as tiresome as the Department of Administrative Affairs, lacking only a sense of humour to complete the picture.
the following is (in)appropriate, since we just talked a little about the history of classical scholarship.
Ah, it's a miserable history, the history of classical scholarship! The most nauseating erudition; the sluggish, passive indifference; timid acquiescence.--Who has ever possessed any freedom?
ever wonder why texts of plato have that funny page-numbering system? you know, 'stephanus pages'? well, i wondered, too.
they are due to the edition of scholar and printer henricus stephanus (henri estienne) (1528-31--1598), son of scholar and printer robertus stephanus (robert estienne). henricus has a number of notables to his credit, including discovering ten new books of diodorus while on a trip to italy, which were printed in 1559, the same year in which he took over his father's business in geneva.
moreover, he was responsible for the printing of editions of myriad ancient works: 58 in latin and 74 in greek, of which 18 were editiones principes. his aeschylus, edited by victorius (1557), was the first to include the complete Agamemnon.
he is perhaps best-known for his Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which, as of 1908, was still unsurpassed as a Greek lexicon on a large scale, and for his edition of Plato, issued in 1578, which held its ground for two centuries until the bipontine edition of 1781-87.
(the foregoing information is taken from sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol.II.)
Centralization in the end defeated itself. The clerks of the central ministries were by no means proof against corruption and would, for a consideration, draft and submit illegal petitions to their chiefs. The ministers of the comitatus themselves, even if they were incorruptible--and they were, it would appear, often susceptible to influence and bribes--found it difficult to keep a check on the vast mass of business which passed through their hands. The emperor himself, snowed under with papers, could not examine every document submitted to him. He regularly threatened with penalties the clerks who prepared illegal rescripts and sometimes the ministers who submitted them. But he openly admitted his impotence by declaring invalid in advance any special grants in contravention of the law, even if they bore his own signature.
Where do we see the effect of classical antiquity? Not in language, not in the imitation of this or that, and surely not in the absurdity displayed by the French. Our museums are crammed; I always feel nauseated when I see statues--pure and naked in the Greek manner--confronted with this mindless Philistinism which wants to swallow everything.
*please note that the nietzsche entry for 9 february has been removed by necessity due to a scribal error on my part. you see, my photocopy had cut off the bottom of a page, thereby eliding the end of one excerpt and the beginning of the next, which caused me to believe i was looking at one excerpt when, in fact, i was looking at parts of two. the next two entries, then, will be the two that i inadvertantly combined. as separate entities, they will, i'm sure you'll agree, make much more sense.
Origin of the classicist. When a great work of art makes its appearance, it always finds a corresponding spectator who not only experiences its influence but wants to immortalize it. The same applies to a great state, to everything, in short, which raises mankind. In the same way classicists want to immortalize the influence of the classics, which they can only do as imitative artists. Not as men who model their lives on the classics?
contra Nietzsche, i actually find some of aristotle's observations stimulating, such as the following:
As far as possible, too, the dramatic poet should carry out the appropriate gestures as he composes his speeches, for of writers with equal abilities those who can actually make themselves feel the relevant emotions will be the most convincing--agitation or rage will be most vividly reproduced by one who is himself agitated or in a passion. Hence poetry is the product either of a man of great natural ability or of one not wholly sane; the one is highly responsive, the other possessed.
(Tr. T.S. Dorsch)
The desire for some sort of certainty in aesthetics led to Aristotle-worship. It will gradually be seen, I think, that he knew nothing about art, and that what we admire in him is merely an echo of clever Athenian conversation.
since i'm still going through some of a.h.m. jones's the later roman empire, you get to, too. today we will learn that the arabs used greek as their administrative language for a fair chunk of time.
In Syria and Egypt Greek does not seem to have outlived the end of Roman rule by more than about a century. It was maintained by the Arabs as their administrative language until the middle of the eighth century, but when the caliphs ordered the use of Arabic in the government offices it quickly died out.
The shades in Homer's Hades--what sort of existence are they really modelled on? I think it must be a portrait of the classicist. Surely it is better to be the "lowest serf on earth" than to have such a bloodless recollection of the past--of things great and small.
i'd never used our link on the left to the postmodern generator before, but i just did, and i must say--it's quite fun(ny)!
wait--maybe i should put some scare-quotes in there:
i'd never 'used' our 'link' on the left to the postmodern 'generator' before, but i just did, and i must 'say'--it's quite fun(ny)!
for example, see
this from an 'essay' titled 'surrealism in the works of spelling':
1. Spelling and dialectic pretextual theory
"Class is part of the futility of reality," says Foucault. The characteristic theme of von Junz's[1] essay on posttextual nationalism is not appropriation, as neosemanticist nihilism suggests, but preappropriation.
It could be said that surrealism states that narrativity, paradoxically, has significance, given that sexuality is interchangeable with language. The primary theme of the works of Stone is the genre, and some would say the collapse, of material society.
Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a postcapitalist paradigm of discourse that includes culture as a whole. Derrida promotes the use of dialectic pretextual theory to read reality.
"Sexual identity is unattainable," says Sartre; however, according to Dahmus[1] , it is not so much sexual identity that is unattainable, but rather the genre, and subsequent stasis, of sexual identity. The characteristic theme of the works of Madonna is the role of the artist as poet. In a sense, Sontag uses the term 'subdialectic narrative' to denote not demodernism per se, but predemodernism.
Very little can be gotten by sheer violence of industry, if the mind is obtuse. In the case of Homer, numerous classicists think that violence achieves results. The classics speak to us when they feel like doing so; not when we do.
i thought this was going to be the most bizarre thing i read yesterday:
Theodoret personally met an aged Marcionite who had all his life washed his face in his own spittle to avoid using water, the creation of the demiurge.
Augustine records from personal knowledge the practices of the Abelonii, a sect which survived to his own day in a village of his own city of Hippo. They held that marriage and continence were obligatory on all believers. Each couple adopted a boy and girl, who on the death of both foster parents, succeeded to the family farm and in turn adopted a boy and a girl. There was never any difficulty, Augustine tells us, in maintaining the sect, as neighbouring villages were always ready to provide children to be adopted in the certainty of ultimately acquiring a farm.
right now i wish that aristotle were more intelligible.
then again, i suppose that if some speaker of an alien tongue tried to read my notes 2300-odd years from now, he wouldn't fare much better. and the fruits of his labor would be much less, well, fruitful.
When classicists discuss their discipline, they don't get down to the root of the matter: they don't adduce classical scholarship itself as a problem. Bad conscience? Or simple inadvertance?
Classical scholars are men who exploit the hollow feeling of inadequacy in modern man in order to earn their living.
I know them--I'm one of them myself.
diocletian was the first emperor to demand adoratio instead of salutatio (a.h.m. jones, LRE 40).
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
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!).
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 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.
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!
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.
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.”
I spotted this in the latest Teen Girl Squad over at homestarrunner.com, and had to post a screen capture:
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).
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).
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).
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.
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... .
Privernum Capys.
ultimus ille dies bello gentique fuisset.
sed furor ardentem caedisque insana cupido
egit in aduersos...
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.
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 ...
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."
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.
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.
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... .
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
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.
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?
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.
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!
ἡμεῖς γ’ ἀρχαῖον κεραμόν τε λογόν τε φιλοῦμεν
συγκρίνειν φρονιμῶς λείψαν’ ὀρυσσόμενα
- Philologus Philadelphus
no.
anyway, sorry for the dearth of posts the last couple of days. maybe something sometime soon. as journey says, don't stop believing.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
This one, pulled from the unpublished archives, goes out to Eric in response to his post on "Theorese."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).]
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!
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.
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.
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.
