Classicists in the real world

I read some of these articles about "saving the humanities" and I am amazed at the gloomy picture they paint. It's a naive question, I know, but: what's wrong with someone getting an innocent little undergraduate degree in Classics or English? Why doesn't anyone want to do it? Why are their prospects so dim if they do?

Lots of people work in fields unrelated to the topic of their degree. My brother has a degree in sociology and works in sales (very successfully, I might add). Why do I get the feeling a classics major would have a hard time getting a job like that? William Pannapacker's article in Slate, "How to fix humanities grad school," inspires a couple of thoughts on this.

Pannapacker writes about how an English PhD applying for regular jobs has to hide their advanced degree "like a prison term." He also insists that professors need to be in touch with the current (lamentable) state of their profession. Students and teachers need to abandon the idealism that aids in their exploitation.

Classics BAs face a similar set of problems. Non-classicists make assumptions about their level of experience or interest in the real world. It can also be very hard to convince the students themselves to venture out into the real world. My husband and I have worked hard to convince several students not to pursue Classics PhDs. It seems like a sweet life (and it can be, if everything works out). To a certain extent students see only the people for whom it has worked out. Pin It

The Vergil Strike: Latin in the novels of Jean Webster, Part I

via Wikimedia Commons

Update: the article that led me to Webster's novel is "Girls Reading Vergil: Stories of Latin and Progressive Education," by Rob Hardy (New England Classical Journal 33.2 2006 122-133).

The other day I saw that someone had written an article about the novel Just Patty by Jean Webster, focusing on the Latin classes the characters have to take. (The novel is set at a turn of the twentieth century boarding school, St. Ursula's.)

Extremely spaced out from being on vacation with a baby, I did not save the reference to the article. I did download the novel to my Kindle (it was free). So far I have read Just Patty, its sequel (although published earlier) When Patty Went to College, and part of Webster's best known work, Daddy-Long-Legs. 


Latin is a continuous theme in the novel thanks to Miss Lord, the strict yet intriguing Latin instructor. Although 'Lordy' is a harsh taskmistress for most of the book, by the end she saves Patty and two of her classmates from expulsion. The three girls formed a secret society devoted to enhancing their feminine charms:

"We're going to become sirens," Mae whispered impressively. "We're going to be beautiful and fascinating and ruthless -"
"Like Cleopatra," said Rosalie.
"And avenge ourselves on Man," added Mae.
[....]
"My heart hasn't been broken."
"Not yet," said Mae with a touch of impatience, "because you don't know any men, but you will know them some day, and then your heart will be broken. You ought to have your weapons ready." (204-205 of the 1911 ed.) 

Miss Lord discovers the secret society because of the SAS bracelets the girls wear (for "Society of Associated Sirens"). Patty convinces her the letters stand for "Smiles and Sunshine," and agrees to make her an honorary member. When an SAS member is nearly expelled for flirting, 'Lordy' explains to the headmistress that she herself is a member of this entirely innocent club.

Patty's Latin classes dominate chapter 3, titled "The Vergil Strike," which Hardy discusses extensively in his article. Miss Lord is also an advocate of worker's rights and the new field of sociology. After listening to a lecturer Miss Lord herself brought to campus, Patty decides to help a struggling classmate by striking for 60 line of Vergil per day instead of 80. After a negotiation mediated by the headmistress, Mrs. Trent, Miss Lord and her class eventually settle on assignments of 70 lines per day. Pin It

Favorite Passages from Gods Behaving Badly

"All I did was turn one little mortal into a tree. This is getting totally out of proportion. Harming mortals is fun. We've all done it." (kindle ed. p. 401)

"Odysseus was scrawny," said Hermes. "And he was one of the best [heroes]."
"He didn't look like a mouse," said the woman.
"He was pretty short."
"Yes, but he didn't have such rodenty features."
"Well, it was the best I could do at such short notice." (kindle ed. p. 3460) Pin It

The historiography of Roman emperors: the new Caligula statue

Articles about the recently discovered statue of the emperor Caligula get a lot of mileage out of casually referring to him as "the incestuous and lunatic Roman emperor" or "s**-crazed despot." I understand the impulse; I have found referring to bizarre figure in classical literature in a matter-of-fact, almost bored way an effective rhetorical tool in the classroom.

But it turns out that Caligula might not have been as crazy as we imagine. Very few contemporary accounts survive; the main sources for his reign are Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who wrote 80 and 180 years after his death. If you are a fan of the Tudors, you might compare this to the posthumous accounts of Anne Boleyn that accuse her of having six fingers and a giant mole on her neck, which are now acknowledged to be false and intended as anti-Protestant propaganda.

So maybe Caligula was actually as crazy as we imagine him to be, and maybe he wasn't. But in the final analysis, he was still a Roman emperor; it's unlikely he was a nice person.

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Briefly Noted: Ancient vases buried in cat litter, tragicomic 'Pandora'

One of my favorite things about archeology is the way everyday life intrudes on it. The Greek artifacts Roberta Beach Jacobson discovered while clearing out her cat litter dump site are a great example.


Pandora: A Tragicomic Greek Romp, despite involving Greek mythological characters in non-canonical plots (a pet peeve of mine) sounds worth seeing. The reviewer observes that "the characters throw ... curve balls at archetypes"; and that to me is a salient feature of the original Greek myths. Look into a Greek mythological figure, such as Heracles or Odysseus, and you will find them behaving in completely opposite ways in various myths. It's just that usually one myth or set of myths has become dominant.



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What are Latin principal parts, Part II

Read Part I here.

Review: Latin principal parts are a list of four Latin verb forms. These forms are chosen because if you know them, you can successfully write out or translate *any* form of that verb.

The first form is the first person singular of the present indicative active. This form ends in a long -o: laudo, clamo, facio.

2. The second form is the present active infinitive. This form is called 'infinitive' (Latin for "not limited") because it is a very open-ended form, it just means "to …. run/sit/whatever."

The form is called 'present' because the action is taking place in the present moment ("to run" instead of "to have run").

It is called 'active' because it describes something a person would do themselves ("I like to run") rather than something they would do to an inanimate object or another person ("I like to run" as opposed to "race to be run"). Pin It

Athens on edge

On a recent visit to Athens, Allyn Harvey observed the city's mood:

People, even those who appear financially secure, are nervous and discontented. Walking 30 blocks across Athens late one afternoon, I am struck by how often we find ourselves on streets filled with loitering young men, some throwing angry glances our way. I feel under threat. We are two weeks after a round of clashes between protesters and police at Syntagma Square, and two weeks before another round. If I were an Athenian, I'd be seething too.  

The ravaged economy ends up taking a toll on our chosen restaurant for our last night in town. The place had closed, so we found ourselves hungry and a little lost about what to do for dinner. We walk into a boutique hotel that seems out of place in the neighborhood and ask two young men at the desk what to do. Half an hour later, we walk into Alexandras, a very Greek restaurant well off the tourist loop. Our table is in a small courtyard. The Greeks around us eat and drink at a leisurely pace. What makes the scene special to us is how normal it seems to be for everyone else. It's one of a very few places where we saw Athenians let their guard down.

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Monastery stays in Italy: less spartan than you might imagine

via Wikipedia Commons

For a few years now I have been trying to persuade my mom to go to Italy with me. A little bit of a sticking point has been my suggestion that we stay at convents, which are cheap and plentiful lodging places in Rome especially. "But I like luxury," she says. You have to admire her candor.

If you are thinking of staying at a convent or monastery while traveling in Europe, this article will answer most of your questions and help you set it up. And if you are trying to persuade someone to go with you, this will reassure him or her that they are perfectly nice places to stay. The only drawback is that you may not have internet or TV in your room and, as the article mentions, that's not always the case anymore.

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The real economic value of a humanities degree

Matthew Guteri, a professor of American Studies at Indiana University, has written just the kind of essay  that I wished for in a previous post. He acknowledges the seeming irrelevance of an idealist defense of the humanities:

There is a profound richness in everything, I offered – even in the seemingly predictable life of a barista or waitress. No one knows what the future might bring, and no one can predict what sort of skills might be useful. Invest in your mind, I said, for the long term.

This, one might suppose, is old-fashioned advice given by a dying breed: the starry-eyed dreamer-professor who has been rendered increasingly irrelevant by the new matrix of instrumentalist, quasi-vocational, more-easily-assessed training that is ascendant in the universe of higher education.

He counters this by pointing out certain naive but common assumptions about the value of a college education:

...we need to stop blaming the humanities for not preparing students for some idyllic life – filled with afternoon martinis, big property, and gleaming SUVs – that wasn’t for everyone to begin with, and isn't available anymore, except without the dangerous extension of credit.

Finally, he argues that humanities graduates are well equipped to contribute to America's chief export at the moment, culture:

Oh, we love to celebrate our ingenuity in science and manufacturing, but in this epoch of the flat world, our dominance in those fields is no longer assured. What we do best – despite the near total absence of public support – is paint, and sing, and compose, and write, and read, and watch. And then argue and debate over all of it.

Read the whole thing.

  

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New Latin T-Shirt and Mug: "I'm the brightest witch of my age"

In honor of a certain movie coming out next week, a new Classics Daily t-shirt: "I'm the brightest witch of my age (venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum)".

Also available as a coffee mug. Pin It

Briefly Noted: Gods Behaving Badly, the humanities under fire in Sweden, the pleasures of Seneca

Marie Phillips' novel Gods Behaving Badly is becoming a movie with an A-list cast. Maybe this is the decent movie about ancient Greece I've been hoping for. I've put her novel on my Kindle: it's about the Olympian gods, their worship long since faded away, working as dog-walkers and TV psychics in London (New York in the movie; Hercules in New York, anyone?)

A business group in Sweden has recommended that grants to humanities students be reduced. Swedish college students receive study grants, and the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise urges that students who study high-demand subjects such as engineering receive larger grants. This story reminds me of an articulate defense of humanities study that I hope to blog about later this week.

Neil Steinberg has an enjoyable piece on the pleasures of the reading Hesiod and Seneca in their Loeb Classical Library editions. I enjoyed his description of Seneca ("as useful as a pocketknife"); Seneca, the Roman philosopher whose uncompromising Stoic ideals helped him cope with the Emperor Nero, would doubtless have considered it a compliment.

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Classics in the News: Robert Hughes

This interview with Robert Hughes, author of Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History, is highly intriguing. Oddly enough (considering the focus of this blog), I particularly like the part where Hughes talked about his Catholic upbringing:

When I say to him Rome has a lot of history in it, he says, "Well, you have to do that." The man who was educated by the Jesuits at Sydney's St Ignatius College, Riverview, is off, talking about the way his Catholic education was what made it possible for him to write a narrative portrait of Rome. "My Jesuit education is still very much in my head," he says. "You know, once it gets in there it's never likely to get out. Nor would you want it to. The Catholicism ran very deep. The combination of some training in Latin and the religion itself made it possible to take on the hubristic task of writing this book."

Many of my Classics colleagues here in the US are Catholic or (more commonly) former Catholic, and certainly the language background (however slight it has become) is a part of that. What Hughes says about "the religion itself" is also telling. When I visited Rome I was struck by how much ancient Roman religion can be glimpsed beneath the surface of Catholicism: the title "pontifex," the temple turned into churches, etc. The seriousness of devout Catholicism may well find an affinity in the stark realities of life in antiquity, and the art that developed as a way of explaining and coping with those realities. Pin It

Defending the humanities: the idealist vs. the materialist argument

Inspired by the cuts to humanities funding in Britain, Australia seems to be having a vigorous debate about their role in public life. In an earlier post I shared the views of John Armstrong, who believes that the public could benefit much more from the humanities, if scholars would only direct more of their work to a general audience. Now a new piece from The Australian contrasts the "idealist" view of Armstrong with the "materialist" view of Stuart Cunningham, who prefers to focus on the contributions humanities graduates make to government and industry:

In an essay in the Griffith Review earlier this year, Armstrong wrote that the humanities had become inward looking, were anti-business and were characterised by a left-wing monoculture, all of which contributed to a disconnect with wider society.

"There is a very good fit between the potential for the humanities and the needs of society. But we have set things up in such a way that the services that the humanities offer to our society are actually not that good a version of what they could offer," Armstrong told the HES.

The question is whether or not the humanities can reform itself without having the type of crisis that has hit it in Britain.

"The great hope is that you can learn in times of safety the lessons that other people have had to learn by failure and in times of terrible trouble," he says.

But Stuart Cunningham, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, regards such comments as an "idealist argument" rather than reflecting the actual importance of the humanities, arts and social sciences in producing large numbers of graduates who work productively for the economy and government. He argues HASS teaches about two-thirds of students. It is this "materialist argument", as he calls it, that needs to be advanced to the base funding review and which, he says, is so self-evident that it sometimes gets lost.

I can see the practical appeal of the materialist argument. It's something that can seem comforting in a funding environment that sees universities as drivers of economic growth. Its weakness lies in its almost complete disconnection from the content of humanities instruction. People earn humanities degrees and then attain leadership positions; if we don't draw explicit connections between the former and the latter events, who's to say they would not do even better with engineering or science degrees?

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Greek travel as altruism and inspiration

A pair of travel articles highlight the disjunction between the terrible difficulties of modern Greece with the beauty and inspiration of the ancient sites. The travails of modern Greece are not explicitly mentioned in Juliet Rix's piece on Crete, but the truly excellent quality of their tour is a poignant reminder of how serious many Greeks are about safeguarding their heritage:

Archaeology isn’t always that easy, as we discover at the tiny Sitia museum into which we are driven by rare rain. The place doesn’t look like much and the labels are lousy, but we have insider information: one of our guides is responsible for the dig that produced many of the finds. We stand in front of the star exhibit, a statuette known as the “Palaikastro Kouros”, a lithe Minoan male (“dismissive colleagues say he’s a Ken doll”) with a figure not unlike Evans’s Lily Prince.

We have our attention drawn to the Egyptian influence in the pose, and the delicacy of the carving on the hands, feet and hair. And then our archaeologist says, “The legs were in 300 pieces. We sieved six tons of soil to find them and his eyes… It took the conservator three years to rebuild him.” Times have clearly changed in archaeological reconstruction — and that’s no bull either! 

Jonathan Jones' piece on Delphi right stresses the extreme beauty of Delphi's landscape and the uplifting effect of a visit to the archeological site:

It was a place of holiness shared by all the rival city states of ancient Greece, where they sent gifts and raised sanctuaries and shrines. All this was done in homage to the Delphic oracle of Apollo. Games were held here, the classical Hellenic world gathered here, and what remains is a captivating landscape that fills you with joy, rhapsody, and a sense of what human beings are capable of. 

This is the thought-provoking thing about Greek antiquities: they make you believe in us, the humans. 

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Ancient Greece in Film: Immortals

Ancient Greece seems to have a rather troubled relationship with film. Maybe the problem is with Greek mythology, and the colorful, exciting characters found therein. Moviemakers seem to find these larger-than-life figures so appealing that they tend to overlook anything else that would make a good movie: realistic ancient Greek history (there were no flipper handed giants among the Persian soldiers at Thermopylae, sorry, 300) or even actual plots from Greek myth.

And so I come to the point of my post: the plot of Immortals is, as far as I can tell after two semesters teaching mythology and a PhD in Classics, totally made up. And why? There are many legitimate mythological tales about Theseus that would make a good movie. Why does it always have to come down to some half-baked good vs. evil nonsense? Why is it that there can be movies (and TV series) based on ancient Rome that are not totally unbearable, but no halfway decent recent movies based on ancient Greece? Pin It

Pitigliano

This article about traveling to Tuscany ends with some fascinating information on an Italian village that was a refuge for Jews as early as the 16th century:

Pitigliano, the small Maremma town called "Little Jerusalem," has a dramatic setting atop a sandstone outcrop at the edge of a gorge. A safe refuge for Jews who fled the Papal States and other parts of Tuscany in the 16th century after edicts confined them to ghettoes in Rome, Florence, Siena and Ancona, it was a feudal enclave in Tuscany's southeast corner ruled by the Counts Orsini, a wealthy Roman family.

In an 1841 census, Jews accounted for 12 percent of its population of 3,100. Italy's first Jewish newspaper was founded by the Servi brothers here.

Its mayor raised money in the 1990s to restore its synagogue, built in 1598 -- an inscription inside notes a visit from an 18th century duke who praised its beauty; a gilded wooden balustrade inlaid with leaf designs encloses the women's section.

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New Funny Latin T-Shirt and Mug: Honey Badger Don't Care

New in the Classics Daily t-shirt shop: a "honey badger don't care (meles mellis non curat)" t-shirt with a different style of illustration. Available in men's and women's sizes/styles. The design is also available on a coffee mug. (The original shirt is still available here).

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