fio magister

I am doing it! I am following Reggie's methods! They said it could not be done! All of his students would say, "The old man's impractical. You can't teach Latin like THAT to a bunch of highschoolers!" That's because they were all idiots. It is working well, and for the first time, my job seems to MAKE SENSE. My students LIKE LATIN and they understand why the cases are important. We look at the real Latin stuff and my students LOVE IT. Okay not all of them. Some kids are only pleased by stupid video games and chocolate.
quodcunque ostendas eis, increduli oderunt. Verum universa non est turba ac iam eas auras mentes vidi meis cum oculis
vita mea nunc vivit.
Hey Dennis, am I allowed to write in Latin on this blog as much as I like? Is it annoying to the readers? I like to write in Latin, and most certainly my Latin is not the best, but where else would I find an audience to critique my work or give me suggestions on word usage and finer points of grammar?

Spam no more

We've been inundated with comment spam recently, and I just noticed that Blogger has word verification to ensure that real people and not robots are entering comments.

So I apologize for the inconvenience but it's better than reading (and deleting) unwanted advertisements.

Paging Dr. House ...

James Le Fanu at the Telegraph has a column on something called the Ulysses syndrome which might have interest for classicists and which reminded me of a scene from my favorite show, House:

Medicine is full of classical allusions, a faint echo from the days when doctors knew more of the world than just the narrow horizons of science.

So, famously, we have the Achilles tendon, after the young warrior was dipped in the river Styx by his mother to ensure his immortality, while the atlas, the first of the vertebrae at the top of the spine, like its namesake, balances a globe - the skull - on the shoulders. There is the iris, after the Greek goddess of the rainbow, and the hymen, in honour of Apollo's son, so beautiful he was thought to be a girl.

More recently, the paediatrician Charles Essex, writing in the British Medical Journal, has drawn attention to the Ulysses syndrome, a reference to the Greek hero's 10-year odyssey following the Trojan war, with its many dangerous and occasionally pleasurable adventures - before he eventually returned to his point of departure. Similarly, those with the Ulysses syndrome, though healthy enough at the start, undertake a long journey with many disagreeable adventures on the way - before ending up where they started.

The conclusion here is a happy one, but the road to it isn't very pretty.

X-Rays reveal Draconian Measures!

Researchers at Cornell have used x-ray fluorescence to recover a number of illegible inscriptions, and apparently Draco's laws are among them.

The article is found in ZPE 152 (2005): 221–227, 'X-ray Fluorescence Recovers Writing from Ancient Inscriptions.'

Unfortunately our copy is currently in 'labelling' which means I may never see it. I'll have to make do with short-on-content articles that feel the need to translate the names of publications.

(Zeitschrift fuer Papyrologie und Epigraphik is translated--Journal for Papyrology and Epigraphy--and given with no further citation other than 'the August issue,' so that lots of people who might want to read the article--and not the article about the article-- might have a hard time finding it.)

Ancient Egyptian Secret

Here's something that might actually get me out of the Philly area for a day: the Edwin Smith papyrus:

What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.

It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater - Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.

It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.

I guess spending a few months with Nicander makes medical history seem not so unappealing as it might otherwise have been.

MedGadget has more, including a previous post which links to an interactive translation (click the symptom and read the suggestion).

Congratulations, Eric.

Today Eric completed the oral examination for his PhD prelims and will be heading off to Rome next week to begin work on his dissertation as the first Marti Fellow to the American Academy.

As Professor Scott told us today over champagne following Eric's exam, Berthe Marti was partial to three institutions: Bryn Mawr College, UNC Chapel Hill, and the American Academy. Her dream was to send one Bryn Mawr and one UNC graduate to the Academy each year on a fellowship, a dream which the changing times and financial constraints have forced to compromise.

All of us here know that Eric will do everyone proud.

Here's a biographical sketch of Berthe Marti written by Bryn Mawr alumn Eleanor Dickey (A.B./M.A. 1989) while still an undergraduate:

Berthe Marti, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, came to Bryn Mawr as a graduate student in 1925, wrote her dissertation with Lily Ross Taylor, and received her Ph.D. in 1934. She began teaching in 1930 and remained at Bryn Mawr until 1963. Although most famous as a medievalist, she also taught classical Latin and sometimes French.

What that doesn't tell you (but what Professor Scott told us) is that she was forced to leave by the strict retirement laws in effect in those days. That led to her tenure at UNC, where the laws were freer.

Once again, congratulations. As Jason once told me, 'Eric is the only one of us well on his way to becoming a true scholar.'

Google Earth Roman Villa Update

I found this at Slashdot:

(Make sure you're on satellite view and not map.)

Old Timey Scholars

I am thoroughly enjoying (very occasionally) browsing through Briggs and Calder's Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia (and I do take Rusten's caution to heart, especially since I noted a few glaring omissions myself).

You can read about former Bryn Mawr professors Paul Shorey, Tenney Frank, and Lily Ross Taylor. I see via the department's site that Briggs's Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists contains entries on Paul Shorey, Herbert Weir Smyth, Gonzalez Lodge, Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Tenney Frank, Lily Ross Taylor, Louise Adams Holland, and T. Robert S. Broughton.

But the reason I started this post was simply to say that I envy the old-timers who knew these languages better than many of us ever will. I've just gotten my hands on J.G. Schneider's edition of the Theriaca of Nicander (1816) which has been highly praised by those in the know (one modern scholar once called it the only useful edition, a direct slap to Otto Schneider's edition of 1856 and an acknowledgment of the limitations of Gow-Scholfield). I haven't time to do much with it yet, but the most promising thing is J.G. Schneider's prose: his Latin is the clearest academic Latin prose I've come across.

That's high praise.

Google Earth helps to find Roman Villa?

The following story has relevance for those interested in classical civilization and archaeology, as well as the internet (hat tip to Sarah):

A computer programmer looking at Google Earth satellite images has reportedly discovered the remains of an ancient Roman villa near Sorbelo, Italy.

Luca Mori of Sorbelo was looking at a satellite image of his area, located near Parma, when he noticed unusual shading near his home, the London Telegraph reported Wednesday.

He said the area had an oval shaded form more than 500 yards long, with some unusual rectangular shadows nearby.

Archaeologists subsequently determined the rectangular lines were, most likely, a buried structure and the oval area was likely the course of an ancient river.

Mori contacted the National Archaeological Museum of Parma, which investigated.

"At first they thought the site might be Bronze Age, but a closer inspection turned up ceramic and stone pieces that showed it was a Roman villa built some time just before the birth of Christ," he told the newspaper.

Mori said he was happy with his discovery. "I have managed to get people talking about the Internet because of something interesting rather than pedophiles and viruses," he told the Telegraph.

That last bit is my favorite, I think.

On the German verb

This will probably seem silly to anyone who actually knows German, but I've been working on my reading competence and I'm finding it much easier to deal with compound verbs by thinking of a hierarchy of compositional elements.

The second position in the sentence of course takes the finite verb, and the other parts get kicked back to the end of the sentence.

The rank goes like this:

(1) Futurity (2) Perfectivity (3) Passivity (4) Verbal idea

Their ordering goes like this:

... A ... (D,C)B

It's that final position which moves right to left that seems tricky at first.

In English we have the same hierarchy but for the fact that ours reads from left to right.

Compare the following:

G. ... wird ... gesagt worden sein.
E. ... will have been said ....

If you remove any element, the hierarchy requires that the other elements take their proper place. If you wanted to remove the passivity, worden and been would both be dropped and their place would be taken up by gesagt and said, and the auxiliary of sagen (haben) rather than of werden (sein) would take final position:

G. ... wird ... gesagt haben.
E. ... will have said ....

In neither language is there any flexibility in the position of each element. If any of them is present it will take its place in the hierarchy.

Again,
German, ... A ... (D,C,B)
English, ... A (B,C,D) ...

Then again, I'm just a classicist struggling through this language. Go ahead and trash and/or correct me in the comments.

The Greek textbook chugs along

I've been working on a new edition of an old Greek textbook, as some of you know, and I've made my share of contributions--mostly of the negative variety, like successfully lobbying to delete unsound linguistic arguments.

But yesterday I was greeted with the note 'NEED EXAMPLE' on the accusative absolute.

I wrote:

(e.g., δέον ἡμῖν ἀπιέναι, ‘it being necessary for us to depart’ ; δέον is the neuter accusative participle of the impersonal verb δεῖ. Compare the genitive absolute ἀπερχομένων ἡμῶν, ‘with us departing’).

He said he liked it and thanked me for the addition.

It's a small thing, but it sort of made my day.

I'd say we're about two-thirds of the way through the new edition, but it'll doubtless spend at least a year being tested in classrooms here and elsewhere. (Our students already want the Greek to be bigger. But what's worth more? Printing costs, or their eyes? Bah!)

On the Field of Mawrs

Let's see what's on the agenda here at the Campus ...

Finish long-overdue thesis

Correct the next 80 pages of the Greek textbook

Write a review of Bolchazy-Carducci's reprint of Dover's Theocritus for the blog (not surprisingly the one I look most forward to)

Really work on my German

Post daily!

Now that last one's going to be tough. One of the worst things about blogging is the permanence, the fact that parts of you are cryogenically frozen, and they're just as often parts you'd rather forget, like unwarranted confidence in an area of relative ignorance or meanness on a bad day.

I can report though that my French has improved dramatically recently and I've been enjoying Masqueray's Traité de Metrique Grecque (1880) as well as Koster's (4th ed., 1966). The latter is particularly fun when he has occasion to mention trends in German scholarship. Both are more complete than Rosenmeyer, more useful than West, and easier to read than any of the Germans because I can't read German very well.

And that's good enough for me.

(n.b.: Masqueray is impossible to find used so I've resorted to photocopying the whole thing, and Koster is only available in over-priced earlier editions. I may end up copying that as well. I think they're both worth it.)

I've just acquired my own copies of the first and second editions of the OCD (which have many articles superior to the third) and I've just gotten a job as a substitute Latin teacher, so there should be plenty to blog about.

Now if only Eric could find some time between prelims, travel plans, and marriage ...

New Sappho? Where have I been?

Thanks to Sarah I've just found out that the Times Literary Supplement published a new fragment of Sappho discovered on a papyrus roll at Cologne.

The fragment was originally published June 24 with conjectural emendations and a translation by M.L. West, and now they offer a few different renderings.

Unfortunately you need to get your hands on the print version to read the Greek.

West says:

The poem is a small masterpiece: simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of human feeling, dignified in its restraint. It moves both by what it says and by what it leaves unspoken. It gives us no ground for thinking that Sappho’s poetic reputation was undeserved.

UPDATE: I really should keep up on all of the excellent classics blogs out there. Then I wouldn't show up so late to the party. The new Sappho has been discussed in many places with great enthusiasm, and I found the Greek text in Unicode at Glaukôpidos:

῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλἀοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν·

ἔμοι δ᾽ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ᾽ [ἔ]ο̣ντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν·

βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ’ ἔον ὄρχησθ’ ἴσα νεβρίοισι.

τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾽ οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι

καὶ γἀρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ̣ . . α̣θ̣ε̣ισαν βάμεν’ εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,

ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’ αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ[ο]ν̣τ’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

UPDATE 2: The text has been modified to fix two typoes spotted by William Annis in the comments to languagehat (he has a PDF here, which is not Unicode, but pretty nonetheless). Also, I reckon languagehat's observation should be noted: 'to be more accurate, filled-out version of Lobel-Page's fragment 58'.

UPDATE 3: Here's an effort at Lobel-Page 58 for comparison (I hope the spacing works -- fingers crossed):

[                                           ].[
[                                          ].δα[
[                                        ]
[                                          ].α
5 [                                        ]ύ̣γοισα̣[   ]
[                       ].[..]..[          ]ι̣δάχθην
[                   ]χ̣υ θ[´̣]ο̣ι̣[.]αλλ[.......]ύταν
[                      ].χθο.[.]ατί.[.....]εισα
[                     ]μένα ταν[....ώ]νυμόν σε̣
10 [                      ]νι θῆται στ[ύ]μα[τι] πρό̣κοψιν
[                     ]πων κάλα δῶρα παῖδες
[                       .]φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν
[                      ]ντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
[                         ]ντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν
15 [                       ]α̣ι, γόνα δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι
[                          ]ησθ’ ἴσα νεβρίοισιν
[                        ἀ]λ̣λὰ τί κεν ποείην;
[                            ] οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι
[                              ] βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
20 [                                ἔσ]χατα γᾶς φέροισα[
[                                ]ο̣ν ὔμως ἔμαρψε[
[                                    ]άταν ἄκοιτιν
[                                 ]ι̣μέναν νομίσδει
[                                   ]αις ὀπάσδοι
25 ἔγω δὲ φίλημμ’ ἀβροσύναν,         ] τοῦτο καί μοι
τὸ λά[μπρον ἔρος τὠελίω καὶ τὸ κά]λον λέ[λ]ογχε.

Greek & Latin for sporting folk

For the football fans out there (or anyone else on T.O. watch), I spotted two classical references in Len Pasquarelli's ESPN.com article on Terrell Owens's return to camp with my Philadelphia Eagles:

... Owens sprinted past the gauntlet of minicams and the phalanx of reporters ...

Interestingly enough, phalanx is the root in the ancient Greek word for the Mediterranean black widow: φαλάγγιον. But I digress.

Pasquarelli also has this gem:

More than a mea culpa, the return of Owens was mostly about the first two letters of that Latin term.

The next isn't classical but sure is classic:

he best moles we've got here, squeezed hard for any nugget of inside information, offered up nothing sexy. So the Reid-Owens meeting, it seems, will never be mistaken for the Yalta Summit.

I think I've just found my new favorite sports writer.

New classics blog

Robert Larity, a recent grad of the College of the Holy Cross writes to promote his new classics blog, Memento Vivere: Classicism for the 21st Century.

He's been kind enough to link to the Campus, and we're always glad to see the classics represented in the blogosphere. And this cat's got loads of enthusiasm, posting sometimes more than once a day! That's a mere dream 'round these parts.

But beyond that there's loads of content, so step lively.

Welcome aboard!

No news here!

This is just to say that I've been moving over the past few days and won't have an internet connection at the new place for the next few, so blogging will be light.

But soon enough we'll have a new feature at the Campus: book reviews. I'm pretty excited about that, and with any luck I won't be alone in writing them. There's a slim chance that Eric's impending marriage and overseas studies won't prevent him from participating.

Stop laughing.

Metaphrastical!

Here's an odd bit of translationese about translation of 'Latin and Greek Plato's texts':

If the first modern translators of Latin and Greek Plato's texts had worried to translate the texts adjusting the possible maximum to the own written words, to their true meaning etymologises and contextual, he is to say to translate metaphrastical and not to interpret on which he assumes that he meant Plato, because probably never so many fantasies would have been written and speculations on the Atlantis neither would have been tried to look for their rest by almost all the Earth corners, until in the absurd and remote points the more of “Columns of Hercules” or Straits of Gibraltar.

One more reason why machines haven't yet risen.

Books to dust off

After the turn of the last century J.W. Mackail served at Oxford in the same position once held by Matthew Arnold: Professor of Poetry. His light does not shine as brightly but he has left some fine specimens of criticism and prose style, exemplified perhaps in his delightful Lectures on Greek poetry. The the book begins and ends, oddly enough, with selected verses from Whitman. He begins, 'O a new song, a free song.' And at times that's what his prose becomes.

His sympathy for the Alexandrians seems almost modern:

The whole history of early Alexandrianism, a steady laborious poetical movement which went on at full pressure for something like half a century, is the history of an attempt to bring poetry back into touch with life, to reinstate it as a living art. This statement of the case may at first sight appear paradoxical. The Alexandrians are dismissed in common surveys of Greek literature, as little more than pedants. They are called artificial poets, as though all poetry were not artificial, and the greatest poetry were not the poetry of most consummate artifice.

I think it's worth reading. It's easy reading, enlightening, unapologetic, and uncluttered by appeals to theory.

nuntiorum errare est?

For those of you who take pleasure in the endless errors that plague purveyors of print, UPI writer James J. Kilpatrick has collected a bunch but committed an error of his own:

This past December, two AP writers provided a feature story about a midnight hike through a botanical garden. "At the end of the trail was a beautiful opening in the canapi." An opening in the what? Perhaps those hungry campers saw cheese and caviar. The word the writers wanted was "canopy," a noun rooted in ancient Greek and Latin. The plural "canopies" may be purchased in grocery stores throughout the world.

I sent him the following:

"The word the writers wanted was "canopy," a noun rooted in ancient Greek and Latin."

Which is it?

The answer is Greek. The Latin form is merely a transliteration of the Greek (drawn from the word for 'gnat' or 'mosquito,' which means literally 'cone face'). An example of a noun rooted in ancient Greek *and* Latin is 'television,' the second element presumably drawn from Latin because '-scope' was already taken.

I think now tht 'needle-face' would have been more to the point.

I can't think of any other words at the moment derived from both languages, so if you can please leave a comment.

So *that's* where I left that blog!

I'm going to try not to jinx this, but I think I'm back here at the Campus after a long hiatus. My compatriot Eric is in another state getting hitched and he'll be busy with prelims and world travel in coming months, so I may just be going it alone.

But go it I shall.

And the thing I really don't want to jinx is my thesis, which is finally taking shape and morphing into something exciting. Naturally I won't mention the details--the chance is always out there that it's garbage, and blog posts are a very accessible and relatively permanent (think: Google cache) mode of embarrassment.

If all goes according to plan you may begin to see book reviews posted and archived here, and more, but again I don't want to ruin anything by making announcements.

On a professional note, I hope everyone is seriously considering the candidates on this year's APA ballot. The tendency would be to go for this most recognizable name but there there are some hidden gems (including a few Bryn Mawr alums).

My favorite bit of the whole election supplement (download if you haven't gotten yours in the mail) was Holt N. Parker's seven point plan (he's running for the program committee):

My seven point plan. I promise that:
1) you will hear nothing you haven’t heard before,
2) all papers will be undertheorized and/or contain no new
insights that you can apply to your own work,
3) all papers must consist of people reading their Powerpoint
slides,
4) session chairs will allow each paper to run a minimum of ten
minutes over,
5) all the really interesting papers will be scheduled opposite
each other,
6) during lunch,
7) and your paper will be on the last session of the last day,
when everyone has gone home.

I don't know Professor Parker, but I think he just earned my vote.