Artemis Comparisons in the Odyssey

A female figure is compared to Artemis in both books 4 and 6 of the Odyssey. The first one makes me chuckle. Here it is (Lattimore's translation):

While he was pondering these things in his heart and his spirit,
Helen came out of her fragrant high-roofed bedchamber,
looking like Artemis of the golden distaff. (4.120-2)

Helen, of all people, is liked to the chaste, virgin Artemis. I can't help but picture Homer snickering as he wrote (or recited?) that.

The second is more appropriate. In 6.99-109, we read:

But when she and her maids had taken their pleasure in eating,
they all threw off their veils for a game of ball, and among them
it was Nausikaa of the white arms who led in the dancing;
and as Artemis, who showers arrows, moves on the mountains
either along Taygetos or on high-towering
Erymanthos, delighting in boars and deer in their running,
and along with her the nymphs, daughters of Zeus of the aegis,
range in the wilds and play, and the heart of Leto is gladdened,
for the head and brows of Artemis are above all the others,
and she is easily marked among them, though all are lovely,
so this one shone among her handmaidens, a virgin unwedded.

Accent & Rhythm

This is just to brag that I've finally gotten my very own copy of W. Sidney Allen's Accent and Rhythm, Prosodic Features of Latin and Greek: a study in Theory and Reconstruction. With shipping from the UK it was far below what it normally goes for.

It will keep Wilkinson's Golden Latin Artistry good company within easy reach here in the study.

The times, they aren't a changin'

The following comes to us from "A Professional Debt" by Robert L. Ladd, published in
The Classical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4. (Jan., 1935), pp. 203-211.

A bit of vocabulary aside this could have been written today.

During the period characterized by the supposed financial suc-
cesses of the twenties, when success was synonymous with the
acquisition of wealth, the subjects of the high-school curriculum
had to justify their position in the schools almost exclusively on
the basis of their practical value in the promotion of this material
end. Many and strange have been the activities of the classroom
to demonstrate the practical value of Latin. For the instructor in-
terested in teaching pupils the language the task has been well-
nigh impossible because of the necessity of making the process
painless, practical, and even delightful. In many cases these ac-
tivities of the classroom have deteriorated into a process of learn-
ing much about Latin and of learning very little Latin. Too often
this process has the same result as in the case of the little tot who
had been ill and was in need of a tonic. The doctor prescribed
quinine. The child was difficult to manage when it became neces-
sary to administer any kind of medicine. The mother seized upon
the happy thought of disguising the quinine by making a pill of it
and placing it in the centre of a luscious cherry. The little girl took
the cherry gleefully and went away eating it. With outstretched
hand she soon returned to her mother, saying, "Mother, I've eaten
the cherry, and here's the seed!" We regret that the essential tonic
of Latin is frequently returned to the teacher untouched, after the
nonessentials have gone the way of the luscious cherry.

Now, once you get past this it's very jarring to read about the threat of child labor laws flooding the classrooms with more students, and the 'problem' of what to do with leisure time now that all classes are seeing a reduction in work hours. Still, that opening is right on.

Typhoeus/Typhon/Typhoon

In The Nature of Greek Myths (p. 48), G.S. Kirk makes the following comment:

'Typhoeus (in his alternative form Typhon the origin of 'typhoon') succumbed to Zeus, but in a later epoch Boreas, the north wind, snatched away Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus King of Athens, much as Hades had ravished Kore-Persephone.'

In other words, Kirk derives our English word 'typhoon' from the Greek monster. Barry Powell, on the other hand, remarks in Classical Mythology as follows (5th ed., p. 100 n. 5):

'Our word typhoon, really from the Chinese term tai fung, "violent wind," derives its form by analogy with Typhon (= Typhoeus). Typhus and typhoid fever also come from the Greek monster, for both arouse a wild delirium in the patient.'

This made me curious to check the etymology in the OED. Here is what they give:

[Two different Oriental words are included here: (1) the {alpha}-forms (like Pg. tufão, {dag}tufõe) are a. Urd{umac} (Persian and Arabic) {tdotbl}{umac}f{amac}n a violent storm of wind and rain, a tempest, hurricane, tornado, commonly referred to Arab. {tdotbl}{amac}fa, to turn round (nouns of action {tdotbl}auf, {tdotbl}awaf{amac}n), but possibly an adoption of Gr. {tau}{gumac}{phi}{gwfrown}{nu} TYPHON2; (2) the {beta}- and {gamma}- forms represent Chinese tai fung, common dialect forms (as in Cantonese) of ta big, and fêng wind (hence also G. teifun). The spelling of the {beta}-forms has apparently been influenced by that of the earlier-known Indian word, while that now current is due to association with TYPHON2.]

(Sorry, the formatting did not transfer, and I'm not sure how to fix it.)

The earliest citations for 'typhoon' and 'typhon' (this latter derived from the Greek), with current spellings that are nearly identical, present an interesting contrast. The OED's earliest citation for 'typhoon', from 1588, is:

I went a boord of the Shippe of Bengala, at which time it was the yeere of Touffon. Ibid. 35 This Touffon or cruell storme endured three dayes and three nightes.

The OED's earliest citation for 'typhon', from 1555, mentions the Greeks explicitly:

These tempestes of the ayer (which the Grecians caule Tiphones that is whyrle wyndes) they caule, Furacanes.

The second citation (1585) does as well:

A wind called by the Gretians Typhon, of Plinie Vertex or Vortex.

No Monolithic Theories

'My own conviction, nevertheless, is that there can be no single and comprehensive theory of myths--except, perhaps, the theory that all such theories are necessarily wrong.'

--G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, p. 38

Pre-Zeus Altar in Arcadia

Read the interesting story here.

The lead:

PHILADELPHIA — Before Zeus hurled his first thunderbolt from Olympus, the pre-Greek people occupying the land presumably paid homage and offered sacrifices to their own gods and goddesses, whose nature and identities are unknown to scholars today.

But archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion, in the region of Greece known as Arcadia. The remains were uncovered last summer at an altar later devoted to Zeus.

Fragments of a coarse, undecorated pottery in the debris indicated that the sacrifices might have been made as early as 3000 B.C., the archaeologists concluded. That was about 900 years before Greek-speaking people arrived, probably from the north in the Balkans, and brought their religion with them.

Solon in English

I didn't realize until today's Merriam-Webster Word of the Day that the name of the Athenian lawgiver Solon had made it into English as a (lower-case) noun. I find it even more interesting that its current use is for the most part ironic.

solon \SOH-lun\ noun

1 : a wise and skillful lawgiver
*2 : a member of a legislative body

Example sentence:
“The bill will likely look quite different by the time the solons in Congress are through with it,” the pundit remarked.

Did you know?
Solon was a particularly wise lawgiver in ancient Athens who was born in approximately 630 B.C. and lived until about 560 B.C. He was one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, and he implemented a number of reforms in Athenian law. In English, his name has been used generically since at least 1625 to refer to any wise statesman. Contemporary American journalists, with whom the term is especially popular, have extended the meaning even further to include any member of a lawmaking body, wise or not. In fact, today the word is sometimes used ironically for a legislator who displays a marked lack of wisdom, rather than a profusion of it.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Latin: The Ne Plus Ultra of Languages

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

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

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

You can read the rest here.

An Interesting Take on Plato and Socrates

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

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

A Nice Use of Irony

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

Throne Found in Herculaneum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dictionarese and the Death of Latin

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

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

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

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

When he means to say this?

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

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

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

Latin and the Emergence of the Space-Time Continuum

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

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

Backdating Chocolate

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

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

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

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

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


On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

Ancient Quotation Marks?

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

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

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

Two Words

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

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

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

Steven Runciman on the writing of history

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

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

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

Housman's letters again

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

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

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

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

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

How do you make kids care?

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

So that was a failure.

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

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

West on Passages of Disputed Authenticity

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

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