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.

Wherefore aren't thou Rome?

Peter Jones reviews two books on the fall of Rome, if that's the sort of thing you're in to.

Classics in the News

Remember the lonely, retired classics teacher in Italy who asked to be adopted by a family in need of a grandpa? A heart-warming story of a man loved by all. Well, the old pedagogue is apparently on the lam:

I remember grandpa's smile: he never paid for it

Jun 17, 11:01 AM (ET)

ROME (Reuters) - A lonely Italian pensioner who was "adopted" by a family last year after his pleas for company in classified ads, has absconded leaving behind a big dentist's bill and bounced checks.

Giorgio Angelozzi, 80, skipped out on the family in Bergamo, northern Italy, before a dentist's bill for 2,360 euros ($2,860) arrived. Two checks Angelozzi sent to cover the costs turned out to have been stolen from another family that took him in.

"He wasn't the granddad we wanted. He got on well with mom, but when we talked to him about our stuff, he got bored," said Dagmara Riva of the retired classics teacher her parents gave a home to.

Angelozzi was inundated with offers from as far away as New Zealand, Brazil and the United States before he opted to live with the Riva family.

Police are now hunting for the man who used to live alone with seven cats. The pensioner's story has also caught the eye of a movie producers who have been in touch with the Rivas.

Now who's going to risk taking me in?

If your interested in more positive news you can read the exciting tale of a high schooler who enjoys Latin so much she's actually considering studying Greek. No, seriously. It was a slow news day in Framingham, MA.

Either A, B, or C

Here's a specimen of bad English if I've ever seen one:

Greek and many other languages have grammatical gender: a noun is either masculine, feminine, or neuter (and must have its article and adjective in agreement with that gender), sometimes quite regardless of its sex or lack thereof.

It was found in a Greek textbook shortly after a glowing endorsement of the study of grammar toward speaking and writing 'correctly, clearly, elegantly.'

Indeed.

More on Greek meter

I don't know how I've missed this till now, but I've just discovered C.M.J. Sicking's Griechische Verslehre (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.4, 1993).

It appears upon a cursory inspection to be the most up to date, clearly layed-out, and well-documented handbook I've seen yet. Just browsing through the section on the dactylic hexameter I see all the names I'd like to see in the footnotes:

Van Raalte, La Roche, E.G. O'Neill, H.N. Porter, Keydell, Nagy, Wifstrand, Harry Barnes, Devine & Stephens, West, et al.

What I've read so far (my German isn't the best) has been clear and helpful, so I've got high hopes for this one.

The textbook has begun

Today I started editing a new edition of an introductory Greek textbook. A brand new iMac was purchased for the project, and despite all of my past dislike for snobbish Mac culture I find myself drawn to it ... it's like the Dark Side. I have to admit, it's very stylish and elegant -- as long as you know how to use.

There's a common myth about Macs that they're more user-friendly than PCs. Most things that can be done on a PC with a click of the right mouse button require secret codes or an annoying amount of clicking and moving of tiled windows. Things get lost easily. But boy, the sound is nice, and it sure is purty to look at.

The whole thing consists of a monitor! Check it out.

http://www.apple.com/imac/

That little slit in the side is for CDs. There's a USB port on the keyboard, and a number of others ports behind the monitor.

Not that I'd ever buy one, but if the school wants to, well ...

Grumble grumble ...

It strikes me that no general reference on Greek meter answers the questions that come up most often when actually dealing with meter. I know that in the past I was chided by one commenter for complicating an issue supposedly deftly handled in Raven's Latin Metre, but truth be told, I wouldn't recommend Raven's second-rate texts to anyone (though it's his work on Greek that is especially troublesome). I pour through Maas's still largely sound handbook (though it was originally published as part of a student's companion), West's disordered mass of undocumented observations (which is heavily Maasian), Snell's concise notes (or Rosenmeyer's, which are based on Snell's), Wilamowitz's unwieldy tome, the equally enlightening and infuriating French handbooks by Dain and Koster, and I still have doubts or find the same ambiguity spread about equally.

Then when it comes to actual analysis I find that the statistics which many arguments rely on are flat wrong.

And I can only conclude that it has been among the discipline's gravest errors to tuck metrical studies away in favor of things like speech-act theory.

Or maybe I'm just becoming a curmudgeon before my time.

What's wrong with men?

Reviewing Donald Lateiner's update of Macauley's Herodotus in the BMCR, David C. Noe has this to say:

"[T]here dwell in the skirts of lofty mountains men who are said to be all bald-headed from their birth, male and female equally..." (205).
The problem with this of course is that, as English usage has changed, "men" no longer regularly stands for "mankind," which is itself considered by many outmoded, archaic, and even offensive. That realization renders the appositive "male and female" even more ridiculous. It would have been better to replace "men" with people or mankind.

To which I say, 'nonsense.' Literally. "[T]here dwell in the skirts of lofty mountains mankind who are said to be all bald-headed from their birth, male and female equally...?"

If you have Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, check out 81 ff. under 'A digression on a word.' You'll find a man (who happens to be male) making good sense about language. It reads in part:

it is unwise to give up a long-established practice, familiar to all, without reviewing the purpose it has served. In Genesis we read: "and God created man, male and female." Plainly, in 1611 and long before, man meant human being.

Barzun rightly defends man not only for its history (with ample examples) but for its usefulness and facility in a number of situations. Those who choose to be offended, or are offended out of sheer ignorance, shouldn't dictate every text in our possession. Stop the inanity.

If you're interested, the original Greek follows:

Διεξελθόντι δὲ καὶ τῆς τρηχέης χῶρον πολλὸν οἰκέουσι ὑπωρείην ὀρέων ὑψηλῶν ἄνθρωποι λεγόμενοι εἶναι πάντες φαλακροὶ ἐκ γενετῆς γινόμενοι, καὶ ἔρσενες καὶ θήλεαι ὁμοίως, καὶ σιμοὶ καὶ γένεια ἔχοντες μεγάλα, φωνὴν δὲ ἰδίην ἱέντες, ἐσθῆτι δὲ χρεώμενοι Σκυθικῇ, ζώοντες δὲ ἀπὸ δενδρέων.

Men, both and male (men) and female (men) alike. The Greek ἄνθρωπος means precisely what English man means: human being. Man is the native English word, while human is really an adjective (humanus) derived from Latin homo (which is equivalent to man and ἄνθρωπος as a non-gendered term for the human animal). To reject man as sexist is as silly as to reject history or promote herstory.

Catholicism rides the Latin wave?

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.

App. Crit. glossary

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.

Modern Language Review

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.'

Oxyrhynchus Update

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".

Get ready, kids. Looks like we up-and-comers will one day have our hands full editing new OCTS and commentaries. Whay intrigues me most is this lost epic of Archilochus. Is that a typo?

Here's someone's translation of the fragment of Sophocles' Epigonoi:

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.

'In summation I have only one question: Is Latin dead?' -- Max Fisher

Well, maybe. But Greek is doing just fine.

Oxyrhynchus--invisibile inkus? ... follow the linkus!

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.

It's all Greek to me!

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."