The UnCollege Movement

I was in college a looong time. And now I am having a lot of trouble getting a job in the field I trained in for the better part of a decade. Debates about the value of college are therefore of interest to me. The UnCollege movement was founded by a winner of the Thiel Fellowship, which is intended to reward talented, creative people for not going to college. Check out this article in the Seattle Times about the movement. I also enjoyed this post about it over at Mental Multivitamin, particularly the second comment:

It's funny but the people I know who are most successful in their careers and doing well in this economy have either gone to very elite schools like MIT, top public universities, or have skipped college altogether (or dropped out). I don't think its causal so much as indicative of a personality type. A very bright, motivated, ambitious, entrepreneurial young person just isn't going to be happy in a third tier directional-state school classroom for 4 years and are likely to find alternatives.  

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Belated Father's Day Gift: "Who's your daddy (Quis pater tuus?)" t-shirt

The perfect belated (or early) Father's Day gift! A t-shirt that says "Who's your daddy? (Quis pater tuus?)" in Latin:

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How to Learn Latin Vocabulary Online

How to Learn Latin Vocabulary Online

Vocabulary is one of the most difficult parts of learning Latin. It's not that the process of learning vocabulary is difficult, it's just that it has to be done consistently on an almost daily basis (if you are enrolled in a Latin class).

Several online tools exist to help make the process of learning Latin vocabulary less tedious and more convenient.

1. Online Flashcards: Most Latin textbooks, including Wheelock's Latin (www.wheelockslatin.com) and Shelmerdine's Introduction to Latin (www.leakyroofproductions.com/Exercises.html) have a web site with flash cards for each chapter. The iPhone/iPod app iFlipr also has flashcards for most textbooks that other students have uploaded. The online web app is free.

2. Online Dictionaries: Avoid online "Latin translators" or anything that gives you an overly brief definition. Many of my students like the Notre Dame online dictionary, and many have also found the Elementary Latin Dictionary (my favorite shortish Latin dictionary) helpful. 

3. Word Analysis: Of course, the thing about Latin words is that changes to the stem and ending can make it hard to figure out what to look up. The Latin morphological analysis tool on the Perseus website allow you to type in a word and learn what base word (dictionary entry word) it comes from. A brief definition is also provided.

Vocabulary is often cited as one of the biggest roadblocks to reading Latin. Online tools can make learning and looking up vocabulary much more manageable. Pin It

Links and Thinks: The Roman Frontier Museum, Mary Beard on Bosworth's Whispering City

Largo Argentina Temple A
via Wikimedia Commons

If you are a fan of Roman archeology and of the "beauty of the everyday," you may want to look at this story on the Roman Frontier Gallery (with finds from Hadrian's Wall) at Tullie House in Carlisle, Cumbria.

Mary Beard reviews Bosworth's Whispering City: Rome and its Histories in The National Interest. She and Bosworth bring to the fore Mussolini's apparently substantial contribution to Roman archeology. Pin It

Academics need to 'sell' the humanities

 From theaustralian.com.au comes a fascinating piece on the need for humanities scholars to engage the wider public:

JOHN Armstrong is a rare creature, a university philosopher who thinks far too many humanities academics are talking to the wrong people, each other.

The author of scholarly studies of art, love and beauty, with a PhD from University College, London, politely dismisses the accepted academic wisdom that scholarly specialisation is essential.

[....]

 "In principle, humanities could be bearers of knowledge for the whole society. One of the big things they could accomplish is to help people think about issues that have meaning and importance, and this can be done without a systematic engagement with the details of, say, history."

Armstrong accepts that a general audience will not want the detail academic experts expect - "You can't expect non-specialists to get interested in footnotes" - but neither is he especially upset if their absence is the price of putting the humanities back on the agenda: "It's not that we are short of information, we are short of communication."

Read the whole thing. Pin It

Links and Thinks: Ancient Roman Doo-doo, Marcus Aurelius

Archeologists get excited about some funny things. And bless them for it; their zeal for the more distasteful parts of Roman daily life helps literary scholars and teachers recreate that life for their students. Archeologists in Herculaneum, the less tourist-choked neighbor of Pompeii, recently discovered an 86-mile long sewage tunnel full of authentic ancient Roman excrement. By analyzing this find, they have discovered that the Herculaneans enjoyed spiky sea urchin, walnuts, dormice and olives, among other things. Cool.

In Rome, most of the ancient art designed to sit outdoors has been replaced by copies, sometimes less detailed than the original. The arts section of the Wall Street Journal has a meditation on the experience of seeing an ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in a museum and its copy in the intended outdoor setting. Pin It

Why should we study the humanities: three views

I thought these three perspectives on the study of the humanities deserved to be brought together:

"To shape tomorrow, look to the past," the Jerusalem Post

"Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?," salon.com

I share some of the bitterness of the last writer, who feels she was misled about the usefulness of a liberal arts degree. But I also am tired of the kind of conclusion she reaches, of the "oh, it was a glorious mess, and I wouldn't do anything differently," variety. Kudos to her for eventually being able to put her degree to use. But people only have so much time available in their lives, and so college students deserve our best effort at helping them find a satisfactory, reasonably stable career path sooner. Let's be careful we don't make a decade of poverty and drifting post-college into some kind of requirement for being a 'real adult.' (And I don't think the author is suggesting that we do; I just think she let liberal arts colleges off a little too easily at the end.)

Update: I enjoyed this pithy defense of a Classics degree. Pin It

Was Alexander the Great Greek?

Mosaic 3rd c. BC.
Via Wikimedia Commons

When we visited northern Greece (Thessaloniki, Pella and Vergina) last summer, our tour guide Pattu was extremely sensitive to discussion of Alexander the Great. My husband raised the topic of the north's status in antiquity, since the ancient sources do not consider it fully Greek and Aristotle found their failure to live in city-states or poleis a major shortcoming. Pattu had a bit of a cow. Her rebuttal to his argument was Alexander the Great: "He was definitely Greek," she insisted.

Pattu is probably not happy at the raising of a statue that honors Alexander in Skopje, capital of the modern nation of Macedonia. It ups the ante in the long-running dispute between the two countries over the use of the name 'Macedonia,' which is also a regional name for northern Greece. The statue is euphemistically called "Warrior on a Horse," but from the face it is clearly a portrait of Alexander. You can read about it (and see the statue) at the Washington Post website and at Google News.

Update: Some residents of Skopje find the renovation of downtown, of which the statue is a part, inappropriately grandiose. Pin It

Links and Thinks: Hackers look to Odysseus, the Acropolis is closed

The hacker group LulzSec seems to compare itself to the companions of Odysseus, according to an illustration of an ancient Greek warship on its website. Odysseus is both a very positive and a notorious figure in Greek literature, a reputation which perhaps began with his opportunistic soliciting of gifts and the strategic lies he tells in Homer's Odyssey.

The Acropolis is closed to visitors.

The NY Times Review of Books has an interesting discussion about translated novels and the dominance of English on its blog. If you look about two thirds of the way down the page, they get to what seems to be the heart of the argument:

Rather, it seemed that the contemporary writers had already performed a translation within their own languages; they had discovered a lingua franca within their own vernacular, a particular straightforwardness, an agreed order for saying things and perceiving and reporting experience, that made translation easier and more effective. One might call it a simplification, or one might call it an alignment in different languages to an agreed way of going about things. Naturally, there was an impoverishment. Neither of these authors have the mad fertility of Claus; but there was also a huge gain in communicability, particularly in translation where the rhythm of delivery and the immediacy of expression were free from any sense of obstacle.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that there was now a skeleton lingua franca beneath the flesh of these vernaculars, and that it was basically an English skeleton?

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The Greek Islands: Broken idols of Keros

via Wikimedia Commons

I first encountered Cycladic figures like the one on the right at the British Museum in grad school. My husband and I were on a quickie tour of Europe following our trip to Rome. At the time (this is a little embarrassing) I thought something like, "oh look, they didn't know how to sculpt realistic face or varied body postures."

Now of course, having visited Greece and in particular the excellent small Cycladic Art Museum in Athens, I know better. These figures (which nearly all look exactly like the illustration to this post) represent the dead. Their similarity perhaps had religious significance, and they were carried in processions. A very odd archeological site on the island of Keros in the Aegean Sea has added a new wrinkle. It seems that periodically the old figurines were smashed, presumably so that new one could be created. That seems to be the only explanation for the pits full of broken figurines discovered at the site. Check out this article at the Guardian's web site for more. They have a particularly nice illustration with some of the fragments where you can discern the folded arms, triangular nose, etc.

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More on The Gospel at Colonus

If you read my earlier post on the Gospel at Colonus, you may enjoy this very detailed review. The author did a fairly good job of tying together the gospel experience and Greek drama. The former aspect of the play has always intrigued me, but I feel like I have never fully grasped it. The impenetrability of the gospel experience to outsiders reminds me of some of the reasons why classics fascinates me.

The study of Greek and Latin holds examines two societies right on the boundary between local and global (or what passes for global when rowboats are your most sophisticated means of transportation.) A truly local society possesses a sense of community without constantly making a big deal about it; everyone 'gets' the cultural references, the jokes, etc. Romans and Ancient Greeks could be immersed in their local culture in a way that is difficult for us to imagine. At the same time, Rome and Athens were at various periods the most important cities in the western world, and this was a counterforce that pulled them in the direction of the foreign and novel. There is something deeply satisfying about contemplating that eternal tug of war. Pin It

Ancient scientist guessed that Greek peninsula was once an island

Scientists recently put an ancient Greek geographer's theory to the test. They took samples from a peninsula near Athens called Piraeus, and found that this area had once been an island, just as the Greek scientist Strabo hypothesized in the 1st century BC. There are a few ways he could have guessed this: the name of the area, Piraeus, means "on the other side"; traces of the original layout of the land may have been visible from a certain vantage point; or Athenian oral tradition may have passed the information down.

I find the last a little unlikely, given that the area had last been an island 2,000 years before Strabo's time, and Athens did not become a real city (which might be necessary for a coherent oral tradition) until 1,400 years before his time. But most oral traditions cannot be traced back to their starting points with any certainty. The Greek epic tradition, for example, shares certain phrases (such as "undying fame," in Greek kleos aphthiton) with Sanskrit, but it is difficult to know how much else may be borrowed from Sanskrit epic or even if the two traditions have some common origin. Probably the most easy to read book on this issue is Albert Lord's classic The Singer of Tales. That the new edition comes with a CD of  modern oral traditional epics is an added bonus.



H/T arstechnica, 80beats Pin It

Naples is not as crime-ridden as its rep

via Wikimedia Commons

When I visited Naples as a grad student, the professor would not let us get out of the bus except to go into the archeological museum. So this story suggesting that Naples is a charming, less crowded alternative to other Italian cities - and much safer than its reputation suggests - pleased me very much. Of course, you always have to be careful. When you are traveling (anywhere, not just to Europe) my general impression is that if someone approaches you at random and seems too friendly right off the bat, they are trying to scam you.

The detail in this story is valuable for anyone planning a trip to Italy. It is absolutely true that Herculaneum is more pleasant to visit than Pompeii; also that shopkeepers sometimes (mistakenly or not) tack a euro onto the bill. Also, there are often less expensive and just as nice alternatives to hotels (and hostels) in Italy; I will be bookmarking the website Kugel recommends, EuroCheapo.com, for future reference. Pin It

Greece in the News: Savina Yannatou performs Sappho's poems

via Wikimedia Commons

On June 8th in New York Greek singer Savina Yannatou performed lyric poems by Sappho. Like many early Greek poets, Sappho is a semi-mythical figure, but she probably lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC. Her poems make allusions to a group of younger women whom she advises and instructs, but the exact nature of their relationship is unclear. Ann Carson's translation of her fragments is beautiful and accessible and has a reasonably informative introduction.

In case you were unable to make it to Le Poisson Rouge last night, you can listen to Yannatou performing Sappho's lyrics here. A translation of the poems she sings in the video can be found here (start at poem 48). Pin It

Greece in the News: Closed galleries at the National Archeological Museum

This is borderline tragic. When my husband and I visited Greece last summer, this was our very favorite museum (and we spent every possible minute in museums, when we weren't visiting actual archeological sites). We spent nearly 20 hours on our last day roaming Athens, trying to soak up as much culture as we could, and we spent a huge chunk of that time re-visiting the museum. It is a beautifully done facility, and while I mostly hope that Greece gets it together for the sake of the Greek people, I also hope they do not lose the gains they have made in maintaining their archeological heritage. Pin It

Greece in the News: Solon and the financial crisis

via Wikimedia Commons

This article on CNBC tries to find connections between a possible debt default in modern Greece and the cancellation of debts by the archaic Greek statesman Solon of Athens. I have a couple of problems with this. First, modern Greece has truly had so many cultural influences come and go that making this direct comparison is like saying that the modern English-speaking world is directly influenced by Beowulf. Second, although Solon is important, the claim that he founded democracy by forgiving debts is quite a stretch. It was an effort by many politicians over several generations; Cleisthenes one hundred years later put the framework of the classical Athenian democracy into place.

Solon certainly was multi-talented, however. In addition to his talent for statecraft, he wrote (rather tediously didactic) poetry. Here's a sample:

Some wicked men are rich, some good are poor;
We will not change our virtue for their store:
Virtue's a thing that none can take away,
But money changes owners all the day. (tr. Dryden) Pin It

Teaching Greek Culture: Ancient Art Catalogues

This has some potential as a project for a Greek mythology class, imo. Although the original project is designed for eighth graders, it is surprising how willing college students are to get out the colored pencils/graphic design program and do a creative assignment. There are all sort of related possibilities, too -- what about ancient Greek or Roman job ads? ("The city of Thebes has been authorized to appoint a new tyrant. Must been good at solving riddles and enjoy the company of older women....") Pin It

Another funny Latin t-shirt: "that's not what your mama said"

Now for sale in my Zazzle shop: "that's not what your mama said" t-shirts, in Latin (Id quod mater tua dixit non est.)

Men's shirt

Women's shirt Pin It

Visiting Italy: Trieste and Jan Morris

In the Telegraph recently, an interview with Michael Dobbs on visiting Trieste, Italy. Dobbs recommends the Hapsburg coffee shops and local wine; he also suggests Jan Morris' Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Morris' book praises the pleasantly melancholic qualities of Trieste as a once-signficant port city faded into obscurity:

via Wikimedia Commons

I cannot always see Trieste in my mind's eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar memory, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name everyone knows.

The review at Amazon tend to complain that the city is not as melancholic as Morris makes it out to be. I spent several years in a small, decaying farm town fairly recently and found it paradoxically energizing. It was just as lonely as early adulthood can be in a large city, but without the pressure to take advantage of 'culture' (i.e. shopping and restaurants), I saved money and got a lot more work done. It's not a perfect comparison, but it does seem to me that there is a liberating aspect to obscurity that is neglected.

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This Day in Ancient History: Nero's final hours

On June 8 of the year 68, the emperor Nero realized his death was imminent. He woke up to find his bodyguards had fled:

He awoke about midnight and finding that the guard of soldiers had left, he sprang from his bed and sent for all his friends. Since no reply came back from anyone, he went himself to their rooms with a few followers. But finding that all the doors were closed and that no one replied to him, he returned to his own chamber, from which now the very caretakers had fled, taking with them even the bed-clothing and the box of poison. Then he at once called for the gladiator Spiculus or any other adept at whose hand he might find death, and when no one appeared, he cried "Have I then neither friend nor foe?" and ran out as if to throw himself into the Tiber. (Suetonius Life of Nero 47-48; tr. by Thayer)

He knew he would have to commit suicide soon (this was a matter-of-fact circumstance in imperial Rome). But for the Romans this was a step to be taken after due consideration and with the help of friends (or, if you're Nero, the help of servants). And so, once he had found a quiet place to commit the deed, and witnessed preparations for his funeral pyre, his private secretary helped him kill himself. Thus came to an end not just a corrupt and cruel ruler, but also the Julio-Claudian dynasty.


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Matera: Cave dwellers in southern Italy

From swans.com comes this article on Matera, a town in southern Italy inhabited since the Neolithic age:

The ground under me had been lived in for twelve thousand years. Then in the 1950s the lights went out. It was a conundrum to prick the curiosity of even a footsore tourist with lunch on his mind. I was in the city of Matera in Basilicata (formerly Lucania), the province that sits like a pear on the instep of the Italian boot.

The old city was made up of dwellings, of various layers of sophistication, carved directly out of the rock (like the church at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, actually an ancient treasury in Jordan). These cave dwellings were inhabited from the stone age through the 1950s, when the Italian government compelled inhabitants to move. Now they are, of course, a tourist attraction. Pin It

Ancient Greek Personal Names

Over at the London Review of Books, James Davidson has a delightfully tangent-filled review of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names Vol. V. This is one in a series that covers the history and meaning of all known ancient Greek names. One of the more fascinating tidbits from the review's introduction:

The Rev. Easther noted – merely as a curiosity – that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary licence to bestow unusual names. Thus the sloganeering names of Nonconformists: Freewill Shepherd, Praisegod Silkes, Feargod Hodge, River Jordan and, reputedly, Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon, whose father, Praise-God Barebone, lent his surname to the Barebones Parliament of the mid-17th century. 

You might wonder, what do you do with an entire book or series on personal names? For one thing, names reveal something about the priorities and values of everyday Greeks, something about which we still know surprisingly little. For instance, an unusual number of Greek children were given names that honored Dionysus:

For some unknown reason, the most popular name in almost every region was Dennis i.e. Dionysius – ‘Of Dionysus’. Other common god-names, Apollonius, Apollodorus, Demetrius – ‘Of Demeter’ – were usually in the top ten. For centuries after their deaths the names Philip and Alexander were also very popular, but especially in the region that includes Macedon, where Alexander was the second most popular[....] Achilles-names, including Achillodorus, are popular in the Black Sea region, where the hero had important cults. Generally speaking, god-names were less common than you might expect for women – because a baby girl was not considered the answer to a prayer? – and more common than you might expect for slaves, the naming of whom was a prerogative of the owner: perhaps the equivalent, therefore, of naming a slave Tom, Dick or Harry. 

H/T languagehat

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Greek and Latin in the News: A tutor for Apple and Moses

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin would like a tutor who knows Latin, Greek, French and Spanish to tutor their seven-year-old daughter Apple and five-year-old son Moses. Apparently Chris Martin graduated from University College London with First Class Honors in Greek and Latin, the equivalent of a summa cum laude. Luckily he met he future bandmates in college, so he was able to launch a practical career :)

I would love to hear them discuss why they want their elementary-school age children to learn Latin and Greek. I think it is great, as long as it is presented in an age-appropriate way. I bet, as entertainers and 'creative' people, they would be more articulate about the value of studying classics than many professors sometimes are.

Update: Disappointingly, the ad turned out to be fake. Pin It

Greece in the News: The Gospel at Colonus in Charleston

When I taught my Greek mythology class most recently, we talked a lot about how the Greeks choose their heroes. Often our discussions ended up focusing on the redeeming power of suffering. Pain of any sort is huge in the Greek concept of what is heroic, and what is most essentially human.

The musical "The Gospel at Colonus" is based on Oedipus at Colonus, the last of three plays Sophocles wrote about the family of the Greek hero Oedipus. He, of course, is the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, while trying very hard not to (it had been prophesied that he would). In Oedipus at Colonus, the cities of Athens and Thebes compete for the luck Oedipus can bring them by being buried in their city. Oedipus has acquired this power to bestow luck through his suffering. In fact, this power of his in death was part of the same prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother.

The Gospel at Colonus uses the traditions of gospel music to bring new life to Sophocles' portrayal of power and wisdom gained through pain. If you don't have the chance to see it live in Charleston, hopefully you can rent the video sometime.

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Greece and Rome in the News: "Self-Improvement Wednesday" at ABC Sydney

In the "Self-Improvement Wednesday" section of the Australian Broadcasting Company's website, you can listen to quite a nice mini-lecture on disaster and political spin in ancient Greece and Rome. I find the lecture a very charming idea. If more people in the states considered learning a form of recreation, my fellow classicists and I would be much wealthier and more reliably employed than we are now. Pin It

Norse mythology and the word "yard"

via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps you've seen Kenneth Branagh's Thor, and if so, you may have gone home and googled some of the mythological figures and place names from the movie. (Yeah, I didn't know that frost giants were a real thing either). In Norse mythology the world was divided into nine realms, three of which are Asgard, the realm of the gods, Jotunheimr, the home of the frost giants, and Midgard, the abode of human beings.

The second part of Asgard and Midgard is (probably) the ancestor of our word "yard." It refers to any enclosure, so it is also the root of the word garth, meaning the enclosed open space in the middle of a cloister. In Anglo-Saxon, the parent language of modern English, the word geard can refer to any place that is distinct from another place - the kingdom of England or the kingdom of Heaven (literally referred to as "the eternal yard"), as well as to someone's garden or lawn. So, think of that the next time you see a sign for a "yard sale." Pin It

Greece in the News: Avoiding the Crowds in Athens

via Wikimedia Commons

From the New York Times In Transit blog comes this useful post on lesser-seen attractions in Athens. I particularly appreciate the notes on which attractions are free on certain days. When my spouse and I visited Athens last summer, we found it pretty overwhelming, so it is nice to know which places are less crowded, and which you can re-visit later for free. I hope to do a series on visiting Greece someday soon. Pin It