Ben Stiller on the Ancient world

"I am really interested in Roman history so if I could travel back in time I'd take look at Roman culture and possibly some Greek biblical history as well. I'd love to check out the orgies too!"

I'm wondering if there's supposed to be a comma between Greek and biblical, or if Ben just that into the OT.

On Mythological Terminology

'Scholars have often found it difficult to distinguish between myth and other kinds of traditional tale: saga, legend, folktale, and fable. It is not always necessary or even possible to draw such distinctions. For speakers of German the term saga (Sage) is more or less synonymous with myth (Mythos): the best known collection of Greek myths is Gustav Schwab's Die schoensten Sagen des klassischen Altertums, and the most influential treatment of Germanic sagas is Jacob Grimm's Germanische Mythologie. In Grimm's usage the two terms are sometimes synonymous, though occasionally he seems to want to restrict myth (Mythus, as he writes it) to antiquity. If distinctions are drawn, they usually have to do with the cultural context in which the tale was generated.'

--Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology (p. 6)

Love of Sea Monsters?

Has anyone else thought this upon spotting a bottle of Cetaphil lotion or cleanser?

Or am I just a dork?

Don't answer that.

I am tired of scholarship.

The reason, I hope, will be plain when you read the title of a book reviewed in the BMCR and the following quotation from the reviewer: Feeling History. Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion.

Francesca D'Alessandro Behr [D.] has produced an excellent and thought-provoking study of the figure of apostrophe and its many implications in Lucan's De Bello Civili. New scholarship on the poem will now need to take account of D.'s examination of the narrator's voice in Lucan. Her basic thesis is that Lucan's narrator intervenes in his own narrative, at the expense of the reader's immersion, in order to guide his audience's interpretation of the events he is recounting.

I wonder first what the title is supposed to mean (what's wrong with 'Apostrophe in Lucan', for example?) and I'm at a loss so I'll just accept it and move on. What of the reviewer's statement?

The only reason we might need someone to tell us what the narrator was up to was if we hadn't read Lucan for ourselves. We haven't. In fact, we haven't read very much literature, have we? And because of that an endless run of PhDs does the reading for us, then pats one another on the back for telling us what they got out of it. They're always 'negotiating' or 'privileging' or talking vaguely about poetics or imputing subversion. In this case, we need more than 200 pages to learn that the poet tried to 'guide his audience's interpretation'. Wow.

This kind of scholarship wearies me, and made me stop caring about graduate school a long time ago. I don't like what it means to be a scholar, and I enjoy teaching all the more because of it.

Doin' tha running man (of many turns)

Three crews of South Korean breakdancers have scored hit shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, underlining the nation's depth of talent and showing hip-hop moves did not die out in the 1980s, an expert said Friday.

. . . . .

"Spin Odyssey" takes on a more ambitious narrative -- the Last For One group attempts a loose re-telling of Homer's Greek epic with a few dashes of slapstick humour thrown in for good measure.

Odysseus was the original beta boy.

Housman's Letters

I'm fairly certain that Dennis has already seen this, but just in case and for the benefit of other readers--David Butterfield has reviewed Archie Burnett's The Letters of A.E. Housman, a massive 960-page volume, in BMCR. Here is the lead paragraph:

The name of A. E. Housman (1859-1936) causes an instant reaction in the Classical community. The very intensity, and indeed variety, of sentiments that the letters 'A. E. H.' can evoke is startling when it is considered how few, whether scholars or not, have engaged directly with his Classical work. Housman has never lacked attention from both a deeply respectful following and a firm band, regrettably more numerous, of detractors. It is of course one of the wearying but unsurprising facts of Classical scholarship that each bold and revisionary scholar is met with a less than positive reception. Yet Housman's lot deserves particular attention: why should a man, reserved but polite in company, passionate for accuracy and excellence in print, inspire such strong feelings among academic circles even of the present day? A satisfactory answer to this question remains to be given.

The Spirit of the Anti-Classicist

I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion/Mythology/Anthropology

Sorry for my absence of late. I now have regular access to the internet again, so thought I'd throw another Google Books post here. The topic can be seen above.

Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th ed., revised), vol. 1 and vol. 2

James Frazer, Totemism

James Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship

James Frazer, The Golden Bough (2nd. ed., revised and enlarged), vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3

Otto Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte

Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States

W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series: The Fundamental Institutions

Christian Gottlob Heyne, Ad Apollodori Bibliothecam observationes

Travels with Kapuściński

I've finally gotten around to picking up Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus, which I mentioned previously. I'm 25 pages in and there's so much I could quote, but I thought I'd select the following and encourage others to pick the book up as well. The author relates how he purchased a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to work on his English once he'd settled in India:

I returned to the hotel, opened the Hemingway to the first sentence: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one that had been available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word "brown," but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: "The mountainside sloped gently..." Again—not a word. "There was a stream alongside..." The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and blocking my way, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation.

We've all felt that way, but Greek and Latin have never left us alone in a foreign land. Even Herodotus, as Kapuściński notes, had the benefit of Greek being the lingua franca, which is why English was so important for Kapuściński to learn. How he did it showed great determination and possibly courage, though he really had no choice. One bit in particular could be taken as good advice by students of Greek and Latin:

I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn't understand and read the dialogues, which were easier...

How to make Latin seem lame

Something that always drives me nuts is seeing people who care about the same things I do making those things seem lame. Like Star Trek. Watching the interaction between Spock and McCoy isn't much different for me from reading Sherlock Holmes as he invites Watson to join him on a case and says he'll be lost without his Boswell. But then some jerk has to dress up in a costume and get into debates with other jerks about the smallest things, and make me feel like I shouldn't ever confess to liking Star Trek. But there. I said it.

I also like Latin.

And sometimes Latinists make Latin seem so ... dorky.

If you're like me maybe you wouldn't mind seeing the following on a t-shirt:

LATINAM STVDEBAM
ET VNVM ACCEPI HANC
SVBVCVLAM STOLIDAM

It beats some of what I've seen, that I know my students would never be caught dead in, and I can't blame them.

The Haunts of Orthodox Bulldog?

Here's a brief notice of some recent archaeological work in northwestern Turkey, in the region of ancient Phrygia:

"Galleries, negropols, passageways and granaries, dating back to Roman and Byzantine periods, were unearthed during the excavations carried out in Han Underground City of central Anatolian city of Eskisehir," said Ahmet Oguz Alp from Anadolu University's Department of Art History.

"Although it is not clear yet, we think that the city might have been used as a military base in the past. People might have used the city as a place of shelter or to wage attacks in order to protect themselves from Arab and Turkish incursions as well," Alp affirmed.

Alp also noted that the city had a great importance, as it was used as a military route before the Ottoman Empire and a route for pilgrimage afterwards.

The excavation work at the historical site will end on August 22nd.

By 'negropols' is meant necropoleis (or, if you prefer, necropolises).

This just makes me wonder whether this 'Han Underground City' (about which I can find nothing else) is Dorylaeum (Δορύλαιον), which was the see of Eusebius of Dorylaeum, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea.

This Eusebius is remembered for his support of Catholic orthodoxy and his doctrinal battles with the Nestorians and with Eutychus who espoused something like the monophysite doctrine. The latter controversy saw him physically abused, threatened with death, condemned, and removed from office. He found solace in Rome with Pope Leo I, and later participated in the Council of Chalcedon where he was fully vindicated, he helped to author the definition of faith, and his condemnation was annulled. The Catholic Encyclopedia article ends with this:

Flavian said of Eusebius at Constantinople that "fire seemed cold to his zeal for orthodoxy", and Leo wrote of him that he was a man who "had undergone great perils and toils for the Faith". In these two sentences all that is known of him may be fitly summarized.

This is about as clever as a Nashville lyric

The Rockae, music and lyrics by Peter Mills, adapted from Euripides' The Bacchae by Peter Mills and Cara Reichel, directed by Cara Reichel.
"Pent-up King Pentheus takes on Dionysus and his frenzied female fans when the god of wine and theatre returns to Thebes. Get ready for moshing Maenads and thrashing catharsis in this rock musical adaptation of Euripides' classic, The Bacchae. Drama Desk-nominated writer Peter Mills fuses the intensity of heavy metal with the violence of ancient Greek tragedy. The Rockae will be presented as a partner event of the 4th Annual New York Musical Theatre Festival."

Two Articles on Rome

The first is about the excavation of an ancient tannery outside of Rome that now stands in the way of progress, in the form of a rail line with only 109 yards to go for its completion. Either the rail line must be stopped, or the ancient complex will have to be moved to preserve it. My money is on the latter. Here is the lead:

ROME --Archaeologists excavating an ancient tannery believed to be the largest ever found in Rome said Tuesday they might need to move the entire work site, which is being threatened by railroad construction. The 1,255-square-yard complex includes a tannery dating to the second or third century, as well as burial sites and part of a Roman road.

At least 97 tubs, some measuring more than three feet in diameter, have been dug up so far in the tannery, archaeologists said.

In other news, Italian P.M. Romano Prodi is pushing for the restoration of the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome.

THE ancient road on which pilgrims travelled from Canterbury to Rome could soon become a vibrant thoroughfare again.

The Via Francigena was first mentioned in the third century and is Europe's oldest route of pilgrimage.

After leaving England, it winds for roughly 600 miles through Arras, Rheims and Lausanne before reaching Tuscany and some of Italy's most beautiful landscapes.

The earliest map of the road was made in around 990 by Sigeric the Serious, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, the Via Francigena is much less famous than its Spanish counterpart, the Way of St James, which pilgrims use to visit Santiago di Compostela. Last year, around 100,000 Catholics registered with the church in Santiago but only about 8,000 people walked the Via Francigena. Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister and a devout Catholic, has vowed to restore the Via Francigena to its former glory. Before the arrival of the motorcar, the Francigena, which means "born in France", was Italy's transport spine.

I'm guessing there must be a nautical component to the road somewhere between, say, England and France. And I think everyone will agree that its first cartographer had an absolutely first-rate name. The earnestness implied by his name is evidenced in his effort in map-making--an activity which, to be sure, would never be undertaken by someone called, e.g., Gaiseric the Frivolous. I'll leave you with a quote from Mr. Prodi:

"It really makes me angry that we do not have pilgrims walking towards Rome any longer."

Latin Rules in Jingles

From the same issue, sent in by one Eva Johnson, a first year student at Ballard High in Seattle, we find a helpful set of rhyming couplets to memorize the dative with special verbs:

Credo, credere, to believe or trust
Faveo, favere, to favor all just,
Pareo, parere, to obey and do right,
Noceo, nocere, to injure in fight.
Studeo, studere, to be eager for a's,
Resisto, resistere, to resist low grades,
Persuadeo, persuadere, to urge or persuade.
To memorize these will be of great aid,
With all these verbs the Dative is used,
But by students of Latin they are often confused.

Any suggestions for other verbs?

The Pedagogical Value of Parody

This exceddingly entertaining time capsule is excerpted from B.L. Ullman's Hints for Teachers (CJ 19.5, p. 330):

Parodies
In the "Hints" for June, 1922, I pointed out that parodies had a distinct teaching value, in addition to that gained from the interest created by them, because they presupposed a thorough knowledge of the passages parodied and thus encouraged reading for thought. Miss Helen S. Conover of the Hillsboro, Ohio, High School sends the following Ciceronian parody by a junior in her school:

How long, O flapper, will you try our patience? How long will your wildness elude us? For what purpose do you display your lip stick so publicly? Do the laments of your mother, the growls of your father, the horrified countenance of your grandmother, and the bold glances of many men move you not at all? Do you not see that your tricks are known and your wishes are made harmless by the knowledge of all who know you? Do you think any one of us is ignorant of what dance hall you visited night before last, what time you came home last night, where you were, who was with you and what exciting lark you planned?

O the times, O the customs! The town knows these things, the families see them, yet they continue. Do they continue? Nay, they even grow worse and worse. Chic flappers draw flasks from wondrous corsages and mark with their eyes what man they are going to lure to ruin. But the brave fathers and mothers lift not one finger to prevent and think they have done enough for their children's souls if they give them more money than they ask for and more clothes than they can wear.

With a few changes it might be relevant today.

Teaching oratio obliqua: A to B, X to Y

In the April 1921 edition of B.L. Ullman's 'Hints for Teachers,' once a regular feature of the Classical Journal, I found the following in which we see that a current pedagogical concern (movement and active learning) was current nearly a century ago as well.

Ullman cites the 'difficulty in the understanding of continuous indirect discourse as we find it in Caesar' which is rooted in 'the failure of the students to understand its workings in English.' He recommends trying the suggestion of L.W.P. Lewis in Practical Hints on the Teaching of Latin (Macmillan, 1919):

He says (p. 64): "Begin with those Indirect Statements only which are clearly reported, and start with the English. The work proceeds like this:—Q 'What is an Indirect Statement ?' —A. (to be obtained) 'An Indirect Statement is a statement made by A to B and reported by X to Y.'

The basic procedure is simple: set two groups of students before the class to put the words into action.

Make A say to B 'The weather is fine,' and X report to Y in the form 'A told B that the weather was fine.' (Here we get a bit of the much recommended movement and action even in Latin.)

So far so good. Now Lewis wants to complicate matters:

Then have another set of boys out and let them arrange another example in whispers for themselves. Put a boy A in charge and he will arrange the parts, so to speak. He will explain what he is going to say to B and will instruct X how to report to Y the statement he makes. Then let them go through it for the class. I call it making a charade, and I always know when I am doing well, as if anything goes wrong in an ordinary lesson with a duller boy (the change of pronouns, for instance, is liable to give trouble, and the tense) there is sure to be a hand up at once with 'Please, sir, may I make a charade for him?' Lastly, we make our A, B, X, and Y report in all sorts of ways, so that the various reported statements begin with, 'He told him,' 'He told me,' 'I told him,' 'I told you,' 'You told me,' etc. Let there be plenty of it. The boys like it, and they soon get to grasp the pronoun changes and other points. Finally we give them the reported statement and let them get back to the original words spoken."

Ullman calls Lewis's book 'reactionary,' though useful in parts, and unsuited to American teachers. But activities of this sort, properly adapted, certainly have their use.

Also Seen

I hope this exercise is at least useful for collecting some resources and cutting down on search time. Thanks to Dennis for his contribution. Just saw a couple of other books I thought I'd link to.

Vergil in the Middle Ages by Domenico Comparetti (Benecke translation)

Vergil: A Biography by Tenney Frank

And while we're on the subject of former Bryn Mawr faculty, here is Tenney Frank's Roman Imperialism.

The Cults of Ostia, Lily Ross Taylor's doctoral thesis

And a couple from Paul Shorey:
The Unity of Plato's Thought

Horace: Odes and Epodes

Byzantinistik on Google Books

Following Eric's lead I thought I'd link to some useful old works in my hobby area, Byzantine studies. Some of these may be outdated, but still useful.

First up, Karl Krumbacher's Geschichte der byzaninischen Litteratur von Justinian bis zum Ende des Oströmischen Reiches. This is the expanded second edition of 1897, and an incredibly important work.

I was interested also to find Immanuel Bekker's edition of the histories of Nicetas Choniates. Bekker was so prolific as an editor and collator of manuscripts that, it was said, 'he could be silent in seven languages' (Sandys iii 87). Har har.

I then started in trying to catalogue the rest of the 50 volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, but really should have guessed that Mischa Hooker had already done it.

But there are still many important works to be found. (The legendary Du Cange's Histoire de l'empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs francais, for instance.) The rest of this list will be heavily indebted to the introduction to Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State.

What about both volume 1 and volume 2 of John Jacob Reiske's text and commentary on the De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae by Constantine Porphyrogenitus? Ostrogorsky called the discovery of this manuscript 'without doubt one of the greatest events in the history Byzantine studies.'

Though incomplete overall, a certain volume of George Finlay's comprehensive history of Greece is available that includes all of the chapters on Medieval Greece and the Trebizond, covering the years 540-1453. Finlay is described as a philhellene and a friend of Byron. He consciously states in his preface that he has written a supplement to Gibbon, 'until something more worthy to be placed beside the writings of the great historian shall replace it,' and we can infer from this that he intended to be fairer to his subject than Gibbon was while acknowledging Gibbon's labor and achievement.

Then there's Alfred Rambaud's L'empire grec au dixième siècle: Constantin Porphyrogénète, which Ostrogorsky calls 'epoch making.'

Both volume 1 and volume 2 of Sabatier's Description des monnaies byzantines are available.

Karl Neumann's Die Weltstellung des byzantinischen Reiches vor de Kreuzzügen is there too, which Ostrogorsky calls 'stimulating' and describes as 'a masterpiece of research and presentation.'

If Karl Eduard Zachariä von Lingenthal's seven volume Jus graeco-romanum is not available, then at least his Geschichte des Griechisch-römischen rechts is.

That does it for now.

Primary Texts/Late Antiquity

I don't have time for anything substantive at the moment, but I'll post a few more links to Google Books. Today's topic is primary sources from Late Antiquity.

Avitus (ed. Chevalier [LIBRAIRIE GÉNÉRALE CATHOLIQUE ET CLASSIQUE ])

Heptateuch-poet/Cyprianus Gallus (ed. Peiper [CSEL])

Juvencus (ed. Huemer [CSEL])

Nonnus--Paraphrasis S. Evangelii Ioannei (ed. Scheindler [Teubner])

Sedulius (ed. Huemer [CSEL])

The centaur at the forest's edge

As I work on making my first pot roast and in the lull before my daily workout (summers off are a nice perk for the teacher) I'm reading a bit of Jacob Burckhardt's Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (translated inexplicably as 'Force and Freedom' and later republished by the Liberty Fund as 'Reflections on History'). Burckhardt is perhaps most famous today for the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. He was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and an accomplished art historian who was lampooned by the likes of Wilamowitz for his views on the Greeks, but whom modern historians have followed and vindicated (cf. Oswyn Murray's edition of Burckhardt's The Greeks and Greek Civilization published by St. Martin's).

Early in the introduction to WB he uses the following image in rejecting Hegel's philosophy of history:

Diese ist ein Kentaur, eine contradictio in adjecto; denn Geschichte, d.h. das Koordinieren, ist nicht Philosophie und Philosophie, d.h. Subordinieren, ist Nichtgeschichte.

For the Deutchless (and perhaps the unLatined) among us:

This ('philosophy of history') is a centaur, a contradiction in terms; for history, i.e., that which coordinates, is not philosophy, and philosophy, i.e., that which subordinates, is unhistorical.

Burckhardt objects to the attempt of imposing a system onto something non-linear and unsystematic, and considers the first principals of the philosophy of history to lead necessarily to contradictions, and sees the obsession with origins as futile and necessitating predictions of the so-called progress of history.

The centaur soon reemerges, though, and we find that he isn't all bad:

Immerhin ist man dem Kentauren den höchsten Dank schuldig und begrüßt ihn gerne hie und da an einem Waldesrand der geschichtlichen Studien. Welches auch sein Prinzip gewesen, er hat einzelne mächtige Ausblicke durch den Wald gehauen und Salz in die Geschichte gebracht. Denken wir dabei nur an Herder.

And again a translation:

Still, we are very grateful to the centaur and gladly welcome him now and again at the edge of forest of historical studies. Whatever his principles have been, he has hewn several powerful vistas through the forest and added salt to history. We need only think of Herder.

Herder is best remembered today for his devotion to the notion of die Völker, or peoples, which may have helped pave the way to German nationalism. It's interesting though that Herder was reacting against the nationalism of his own day and was interested in elevating all 'peoples' of the world equally. He did shake things up to say the least.

Bruce Lincoln's Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, which is concerned with what scholars have done with myth throughout history, contains a lot of useful and insightful information on Herder. Not that I endorse Lincoln's conclusions, his own theoretical framework, or especially his shoddy treatment of historical linguistics in the epilogue, but it is definitely worth reading and generally fair (if sometimes bordering on sensational).