Finally getting the chance to teach

Teaching has been great so far. I don't mind the extra cash (which will soon enough cease to be extra and will have, somehow, to pay the rent). But my favorite part is when I can bring something to a lesson unplanned, moments when I can spontaneously bring to the students things from my experience with real Latin that has relavance for what they're learning and which actually catches their interest. I like to tell the girls about derivatives, word formation, or the relationship between Latin idiom and the romance languages. For example, the 8th graders were surprised to learn that egregius literally describes someone as standing apart from the flock, and the 10th graders should remember the impersonal use of placet with the dative now that they know it survives even today in French (s'il vous plaît, from si vobis placet).

Just yesterday I started tutoring a local high schooler who's already taking Latin and French and studying Italian and German on his own. He had been begging his father for some time to find him a tutor in Greek. I've started him on Chase and Phillips, and after the first session he's doing lessons 3 and 4. When I showed him the conjugation of eimi he recognized the formation from the cognate forms in Sanskrit.

This is going to be fun.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Texts but Were Afraid to Ask

I've started trying to come up with a list of secondary works on the ancient world that I've never read, or never read in toto, and would like to and that seem in some sense to be seminal ('scuse the alliteration). Here's the list so far, in no particular order except perhaps that of the alphabet:

Buck, Carl Darling. The Greek Dialects.
Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational.
Finley, M.I. The Ancient Economy.
Frazer, James. The Golden Bough.
Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy.
Harrison, Jane Ellison. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
Heinze, Richard. Virgil's Epic Technique.
Jaeger, Werner. Paideia.
Sandys, John Edwin. A History of Classical Scholarship.
Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution.
Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity.

Comments are open, so please contribute any ideas if you have them, and I'll try to repost the updated list later. I'm especially interested in recommendations for standard works on Greek history and historiography and ancient religion, but don't let that limit you. Also, if anyone has favorites for handbooks/histories of Greek and Latin literature, I'd love to hear them.

The Palace of Diocletian

Via rogueclassicism, I have learned that a book from 1764 by Robert Adam called Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia is now entirely available online. I've only had a chance to glance at it so far, but it's pretty interesting, especially for those with a penchant for Late Antiquity.

Classics Reference Watch

I've started reading the first volume of Bob Dylan's autobiography and came across this paragraph, in which I thought those interested in the ancient world might be, well, interested. It comes as he is standing in a library in someone's apartment, after a paragraph about he pop culture of his day.

Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on topography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bug-eyed. Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General--a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundres years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine.

(Chronicles: Volume One, p. 36)

In the next paragraph, he refers to 'Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods'--any ideas for this?

Further down:

I read some of The Sound and the Fury, didn't quite get it, but Faulkner was powerful. I read some of the Albertus Magnus book...the guy who mixed up scientific theories with theology. It was lightweight compared to Thucydides.

And then again, later in the same paragraph:

There was a book there on Joseph Smith, the authentic American prophet who identifies himself with Enoch in the Bible and says that Adam was the first man-god. This stuff pales in comparison to Thucydides, too.

Man, this guy really likes his Thucydides.

Magister for a Day

Well, in answer to Coke's query, teaching didn't go bad at all on Friday. But I suspect it's part of the reason I haven't posted anything in a few days.

I came away from the experience with a nasty cold or flu or something which I might have picked up from my girlfriend, but I think the collective germs a few hundred middle and high school students added to the soup and aggravated what my immune system had been holding at bay.

That said, the day was largely a success. Only one piece of paper was thrown my way, and it missed. Most of the students were so polite that they actually thanked me for being there. But the one thing that really surprised me was how different two classes in the same grade level could be so different. When the tests were finished, one class sat and drew pictures quietly, another erupted into a party, and the third passed notes and cast sly glances my way as if they were up to something but nothing came of it.

I'll let you guess which class threw the paper.

I was a little disappointed in how I handled one class, but I think some of that had to do with the assignment. Not that I'm second-guessing the teacher. I'm sure it works for her. Students were put into groups of 2 and asked to translate 2-3 sentences of a short mythic narrative. The problem was that the students were only concerned with the sentences they had been assigned and made a number of mistakes that they wouldn't have made had they known the context. When I went through the text with them it was clear that those who hadn't gone yet were so focused on re-reading their sentences that they took nothing away from what came before. When I had occasion to correct mistakes and explain why they were mistaken I was very often met with confusion or absolute disbelief, as when students insisted that a third declension dative was a genitive because it didn't end in -o.

Again, it may have had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn't their regular teacher. They know that I'm not coming back tomorrow, that I'm not giving them a grade. They can slack off for a day when the teacher's away, and maybe their teacher has a way of pulling this stuff out of them that I don't.

But I felt that if I were given a class of my own day in and day out I could make some real progress. It wasn't at all terrifying, so I've passed that test.

Another crazy thing is going back to middle school or high school and realizing just how young these kids are. I seemed so much older to myself when I was their age. It reminds me of my youth, and those memories are downright comical now.

I have a few more days lined up already and will be on call if anyone needs a sick day. The department head has offered to help me find a job in the area if I'm interested, and if that turns into anything I already have ideas.

Coke was talking about bringing in real Latin and I think I would like to try the Colloquia of Erasmus among other things.

But that's a long way away.

More Hanson

Since I recently posted a review of VDH's most recent book, I might as well post his recent review of two books in The New Criterion, The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, edited by Robin Lane Fox; and “The Sea! The Sea!”: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination, by Tim Rood. The review can be found here (registration required).

A War Like No Other

For anyone who's interested, William Grimes in the New York Times has a review of Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

(Lvrogueclassicism.)

Ostia Antica 2

Ok, here's the second batch.

Another shot of the theater, which originally had 3 tiers of seating divided into five cunei (wedges) and a seating capacity of around 2,700; two of the tiers survive
Theater masks
A painting of fruits and vegetables from a Thermopolium, which is very well preserved. The marble countertops are in excellent shape, and two seats flanking the door also survive
The Capitolium in the Forum. The temple was dedicated to the Capitoline triad (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva)
My wife Allison and brother Ryan in the doorways of some buildings on one of Ostia's side streets

If anyone is interested in other pictures of Rome that are not necessarily classical, my wife and I have been posting some at another website.

Dennis: how did the teaching go?

Ostia Antica

Ok, I'm back. My brother, wife, and I visited the ancient Roman port town of Ostia today and I just wanted to post some pictures for y'all. I have a few more pics to post, but blogger won't let me put them all in this one, so see above.

Via Ostiense

Porta Romana

Fragments of the inscription once adorning Porta Romana. Notice 'P. Clodius...', and I believe the 'M' may be from Marcus Tullius Cicero

Neptune mosaic from baths

Theater

A lot to say...

I have a lot to say, so let me get started by giving Dennis the virtual high five for entering the classroom. I have to say that my life has never before made more sense than it does at the present time. I love being in that classroom and I hope that even as tomorrow strikes you, you will have some ember of an appreciation for the magic of being a GOOD teacher. As for the little snots (shites is a great term, too), let them sit in the bathroom for as long as they like. Let them smoke weed in the stalls, let them smoke crack; as long as they will be sure to OD before coming back into my ROOM. I want them out of my class! Don't waste my precious time! I advise you generally not to smile much at ALL, if you are able, since you are a sub. Try not to listen to their murderously sub-neanderthal conversations (if you are in study hall duty). Youths have to be trained to have decent conversations and no one is training these kids. Oh, but you are proctoring tests! Keep an eye on them as they do those tests. They know the system and they know where to put a little index card (right between their legs) with all the 3rd principle parts written in the tiniest letters you've ever seen. I love them, but they are who they are.
I will check out those websites. I am right now generally looking for Latin texts that are REAL, on the internet, can be read by students of lower levels (with some degree of support), and show the language being used artfully. I found this one fantastic set of readings (gesta Romanorum) and I also like to try Publilius (that's what they call him on the Latin Library.com, but I thought his name was Publius) Syrus. We also do Vulgate Latin and Thomas Aquinas because generally, it's just easier stuff. I hunger for material that has less passive constructions and less subjunctives. It's basically impossible to find that kind of stuff, bu I am finding ways to help my students along in passages with Latin constructions they've never seen before. The truly unfortunate thing about Latin textbook series overall is that they do not vary the word order in the readings enough for it to make sense for the students to memorize proficiently those noun endings. Furthermore, the style of the textbook writers is just simply atrocious, because quite obviously they have no CONCEPT of style. But students do, and the book (Oxford Latin) is a bore for them. These are students with a whole IPOD full of artists expressing complex emotions and ideas. Do you think they want to read about Scintilla and Flaccus going to market? These textbook series, I believe, are seriously crippling the progress of student interest in Latin in the country. When I work with the word order and the students use their dictionaries on a daily basis (from the very first year), suddenly the language is extremely FUN for them. It's like another world suddenly. Suddenly, suddenly.

I wrote Reggie a small note a few weeks ago, saying something like:

Dear Reggie,
I am teaching Latin by your method as best I can. I taught last year using those textbooks you used to rage about in class. I see now what is wrong with them. I am teaching Latin your way, and I am really DYING for the language. I don't sleep anymore. You sent me out as Father Zosima sent out Alyosha. I miss you a lot. I hope your health is better and that the surgery went well. If you need money for photocopies or anything else, please let me know.
Aaron.

This is what he wrote back on a postcard (I just got it tonight...) in four different colors of ink:

Pridie Kalendas Octobres m m v.
AARONI SUO
REGINALDUS
SALUTEM.
TUA MIHI SALUTATIO SIMULQUE
LAMENTATIO PLURIMUM SANE
ADTULIT IUCUNDITATIS ET CONSOLA-
TIONIS. I am happy you are sharing
with others in the classroom and are
on fire with Latin. The time has passed
and after our 20th "AESTIVA" and vacation (aestiva is the summer program)
in Wisconsin, I am back waiting for the
pope to do something AND preparing also
for a full year of 5 experiences at the (experiences are the levels of Latin -
University in a few weeks. My health he teaches five preps.)
is fine, as my legs and feet have by
nature healed. I am better = worse than
ever, and have energy and ideas for a
long time to come. The no-Latin crisis
in the Catholic church will grow, and I
do not know what THEY will do about it.
I always speak about more interest-study
of Ltin outside than inside. SO you must
continue your zealous no-sleep efforts.
TIBI FAVENTES ADSUMUS PECUNIA NON EGENTES.
-Reginaldus

The only thing that bothered me about the letter was that he put a macron over the A in PECUNIA. Did I seem that stupid in his class?
But otherwise, the letter took me to the third level of Nirvana. When I got the letter, my heart was pounding. I am actually going to stay up tonight and finish grading my homework assignments, just as I know that Reggie does. The whole night. I am pulling an all-nighter as a teacher. Well, unfortunately, my workaholic habits have done more than made me lose sleep. I have lost 15 pounds in the last three months. I work like a raving madman. I am actually dying for the Latin language. I don't really care, because I actually feel happy. I think I won't mind dying like this. When I tried to DIE for graduate school, I was always miserable. Perhaps I have found my true home...
Anyway, either I will die or something beautiful will come out of all of this. I am betting on the second of the two. I guess I better get started grading now.
AARON EIUS

Taking a stroll

Sarah and I took a nice walk around campus this afternoon, and though I'm in my third year here (!) I saw lots of things I hadn't seen before.

Like the pond. Where did that thing come from?

I imagine a lot of people haven't seen them because they're off the paths, but they're the most beautiful and interesting angles and bits architectural oddities.

I'm going to bring a camera soon and share some of this stuff.

I think I may also locate the fabled Latin inscriptions left by former students, such as the one that apparently translates 'death to squirrels.'

But for now it's back to work.

Bibliophiles Unite! etc.

If you haven't already heard (and where have you been, I might ask), be sure to check Library Thing, brought to you by Tim Spalding, whose other sites, Isadore of Seville and the Ancient Library, have been discussed here before.

It's an easy-to-use online database of your books. Now you don't have to invite people to the apartment to show off your book collection. That means more beer and food for you.

On an unrelated note, I'm looking at a copy of Graham Zanker's Realism in Alexandrian Poetry, and it makes me wonder if there's anything realistic in my hope to re-read all the Greek epic I can get my hands on this week (and by epic I don't mean just 'heroic' epic).

And on another unrelated note, I have my first teaching duties this Friday, filling in at a local private school. I'll mainly be proctoring tests, thanks to the kindness and planning of the usual teacher, but I'll have my hands full with one eighth grade class dealing with the 3rd and 4th conjugations.

That I can handle. But do you have any encouraging words for a guy stepping in front a class of kids for the first time?

Magister Coke?

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.