Siculate Sigma?

A few weeks ago Michael Hendry was wondering about certain orthographical conventions (adscript iota and the like) and was surprised to find that 'siculate sigmas' hadn't caught on.

I tried to post a comment asking for more information, but it doesn't seem to have taken (apologies if it does, and this is redundant), so I thought I'd ask our readers for input.

Does anyone know what a siculate sigma is?

The way I see it there are three possibilities:

1) A sigma which resembles a Sicilian girl (from Siculus, -a, -um)
2) A sigma which resembles a small curved dagger, with handle (final sigma, ς)
3) A sigma which resembles a small curved dagger, sans handle (lunate sigma, ϲ)

Little help? I know others (such as Caelestis at Sauvage Noble) have been wondering.

Hera has lost her head!

Statues of Athena and Hera have found at Gortyn in Crete:

The works, representing the goddesses Athena and Hera, date to between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD – a period of Roman rule in Greece – and originally decorated the Roman theatre in the town of Gortyn, archeologist Anna Micheli from the Italian School of Archaeology told the Associated Press.

“They are in very good condition,” she said, adding that the statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, was complete, while Hera – long-suffering wife of Zeus, the philandering king of gods – is missing her head.

Philandering? Not φιλογύναιος? In one sense, but not the other.

Ithaka post update

Here's the full citation for the article on the excavations of the mask and the tripods & cauldrons at Ithaka:

Benton, Sylvia. BSA (The Annual of the British School at Athens) 35 (1934-1935): 45-73.

(It was actually published in 1938 by Macmillan & Co., and 1934-1935 marks the session, but it should be catalogued under the latter.)

The description of the mask is on page 54, with a plate on 55 showing a black and white photograph and a line drawing.

The top of the mask reads horizontally
ΕΥΧΗΝ Ο
ΔΥΣΣΕΙ

while the lower portion, of which the surface is completely gone, yields only Η and Ν at the ends of two vertical lines.

Based on this the following was proposed:

εὐχὴν Ὀδυσσεῖ, [ὁ δεῖνα ἀνέθ]η[κε]ν.

i.e., 'Votive offering to Odysseus, so and so dedicated it.'

It seems to me a poor translation. If the reconstruction is at all correct it should say, '(so-and-so) set (this object) up (as) a vow to Odysseus.'

Anyone with anything to contribute? An updated bibliography? Thoughts on the controversy?

Ithaka found in Odysseus Unbound?

Roger Cox at Scotsman.com writes about the new book by businessman Robert Bittlestone, (written with the aid of geologist John Underhill and Euripides scholar James Diggle, who doesn't appear to have a decent on-line bio).

Essentially they argue that the western peninsula of Kefalonia was once an island, now joined to its neighbor by rockfalls and deposits, and that it better accords with Homer's description in book 9 than does the island now called Ithaka:

In book nine of The Odyssey, Ithaca is described as "low-lying" and "furthest towards dusk [i.e. west]" of all the nearby islands. However, the island now known as Ithaca is mountainous, and lies to the east of its neighbours.

Here's the Greek for some context:

αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμαλὴ πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται (25)
πρὸς ζόφον, αἱ δέ τ’ ἄνευθε πρὸς ἠῶ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε,
τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουροτρόφος·

History writer and 'television presenter' (sorry, but U.K. English always makes me smirk) Michael Wood isn't buying it, citing the fact that Mycenean finds have surfaced on what we now call Ithaka, so by golly it must be Ithaka!

But there's more to it than that. He cites the work of archaeologist Sylvia Benton who reportedly found tripods and cauldrons as well as a mask inscribed 'my prayer to Odysseus'

In Book 8 of the Odyssey, Homer tells how Odysseus receives gifts from King Alkinoos of Phaeacia before he sails back to Ithaca. The gifts were from "12 noble lords ... and I myself the 13th", says the king. What were the gifts? Later in Book 13 we read: "Come let each of us man by man give him a large tripod and cauldron..."

So 13 men gave Odysseus gifts, and the finds in the 1870s and 1930s add up to 13 cauldrons. When dated, they are proved to be from before Homer.

I should mention that he cites Benton without giving a citation, so I'll do it for him:

Benton, Sylvia. BSA (The Annual of the British school at Athens) 35 (1934-1935).

You're on your own for page numbers, unless I get around to finding more info once I'm on campus.

Campus Update

I've added a number of blogs to the sidebar (each of which links here):

Por las tierras de los Banu Qasi, en Español. This blog appears to cover an interesting range which includes Mongolian history, Linux, and fiction.
hobbyblog, for all you numismatists.
AVE, by a self-described 'Ancient Roman history geek' in Vancouver.
Netlex News, with posts divided among 46 categories, covers art and music among many, many other things.
Memento Vivere, which I've linked to before, now makes the sidebar: 'Classicism for the 21st Century.'
The Hellenophile, where a commercial property examiner from Ohio--with degrees in classics and history--shares his love of Greece. (Seems dormant, but blogs go that way now and then.)
Frequent Citations, 'musings and misadventures of a would-be lawyer' who must have a background in Classics if she bothers with this here blog.

That's it for now. There's no hierarchy there -- just listed in the order I found them.

Also, our e-mail address has changed: it's now campusmawrtius@gmail.

Bring on the spam!

p.s. I was too lazy to put the addresses here in the post, so you'll just have to use the sidebar. Sorry.

Archaeological Finds in Jerusalem

Who says scholarship doesn't have any impact on the real world?

Israel unveiled an underground archaeological site near a disputed Jerusalem holy shrine on Tuesday, nearly a decade after the opening of an exhibit in the same area sparked widespread Palestinian rioting.

The latest discovery included a ritual bath from the period of the second Jewish Temple, destroyed in 70 A.D., and a wall that archaeologists said dates to the first Jewish Temple, destroyed in 586 B.C. The findings strengthen Jewish ties to the shrine also claimed by Muslims.

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.