'Sherlock' and the paths of song

A couple of shows I enjoy, 'Sherlock' and 'Alphas', employ these weird floating visualizations of the internet. 'Alphas', a show about mutant counter-terrorism agents, has a character whose only job is to use his ability to 'see' data streams. 'Sherlock' uses the technique in a scene where the irascible detective demands privacy so he can go to his 'mind palace', a sort of mental Google.

I wondered why this interested me so much, and then I remembered a passage from Homer: the Poetry of the Past. Here's a taste:

The way [oimai, "paths"] is used in early Greek indicates that it was a … term for the … themes of epic…. Apparently… the relative fixity and stability of themes was figured in Homeric language by describing them as if they were tracks cut into some landscape. The process of singing was thus a progress, and Hesiod could sum up his election as a poet by saying that the Heliconian muses "made me walk upon [the path] of singing." To proceed from one topic of heroic song to another was to "move along" the paths of song, expressed in another apparently technical word, _metabaino_, to pass from one place to another. (42-43)

Travel was antiquity's metaphor for mentally cataloguing information, whereas disembodied text and images seem to be our way of envisioning this process. Our minds really are reshaped by changing methods of communication.

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'Sappho' by Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Enjoy this excerpt from the opera 'Sappho' by the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. The work, completed in 1963, had it debut just this year. The Australian has a biography of the composer. 

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Are those knucklebones in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

I try to find the funny in academic research whenever I can, and I was amused to come across the "spinning hetaira" this week. The spinning hetaira is to be a woman on Greek vases, who is approached by a man or boy holding a pouch as she spins wool. It is presumed that the pouch holds money with which to pay for the 'hetaira''s services. A few problems with this, as argued by Gloria Ferrari (in Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece): 1) The women are not dressed as hetairai 2) It was part of a hetaira's mystique to avoid dealing directly with money 3) Identical pouches are identified as holding game pieces, not money, in other contexts.

But what's really enjoyable is the way Ferrari gets to poke gentle fun at the attitude that all spinning women in the vicinity of bags are courtesans:

"A prim figure (fig. 5) enthroned and spinning, is labeled the madam of a brothel. A scene of men and boys approaching, bag in hand, a figure wrapped like a mummy and holding a mirror can be described as "a hetaira seated in the porch of what is surely a brothel." (Fig. 6). A sense of the grotesque makes a fugitive appearance in Keul's remarks on this vase: Is the whole family on an excursion to the neighborhood whorehouse? Surely not, even in classical Athens" (13)." 

It's all in the adjectives: prim figure, fugitive appearance, etc. Funny stuff (for academic writing anyway).

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"Some people."

From mental multivitamin, a perfect example of how academia can dampen the imagination (for example, the ability to imagine a humorous class comment)…

The week we were to discuss Tess, he opened as always, with a leading question about our response to the novel. For whatever reason, the class was silent, almost guiltily so. Didn't they read it? I wondered. He asked again. The absence of pseudo-erudition became most uncomfortable. We can sit here all night, people, the professor sighed.
Well, I offered with a light laugh and a glance around the room, that Angel is rather a slow one, eh? Who knew he'd be such a pill?
I was being a smartass. The lone journalism major among this set of English prof wannabes, I turned in papers according to conventional standards -- double-spaced, one-inch margins -- and I actually read the books. Every book. Every page. Of course I realized that Angel was a creature of the conventions and limitations of his time, but wasn't it fun to call him out on his double standards from the relative comfort and social tolerance of the late 1980s?
I guess not.
The professor spent the next two hours using my remark to demonstrate how utterly "some people" missed the point of the novel, how "limited" readers are when they can only frame their responses from their own experience, and so on. And my classmates? Who hadn't even read the feckin' novel? What a bunch of sycophants they turned out to be: Oh, yes, professor. Some people. So limited. How foolish.  

That's a prof who's pretty sure of himself; most of the classics proffies I know would be filled with gratitude to realize that someone had done the reading that day ... and was willing to talk about it! Pin It

Funny

Classics Ryan Gosling

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Is the Iliad campy?

After I saw Skyfall last weekend, the spouse and I discussed the inherent campiness of action movies. Action movies are supposed to have become more thoughtful on the heels of the Bourne Identity series, but they are still full of heroes who think nothing of chasing a villain over rooftops on a motorbike, then getting shot, then fighting said villain on top of a moving train.

Is there an inherent campiness to such unrealistic deeds? And does Greek lit get to do an end-run around this by making heroes the sons of gods and goddesses? I understand campiness to be an amusing lack of realism. In a Greek context, of course, amusing and realism may have looked very different than they do to us.

It's accepted that certain parts of Homer's poem are meant to be funny, mostly passages involving gods behaving badly. In fact the gods are probably acknowledged to be the campiest part of the Iliad. But are the human characters, particularly Achilles, ever campy? As this NY Times blogpost recently argued, we find sincerity without irony amusing; did the Greeks? 

"I hate that man like the gates of hell who hides one thing in his heart and says another" (Il. 9.312-313)

As far as unrealistic deeds of arms, such as the slaying half the Trojan army in the Scamander river, followed by a very credible effort to conquer the river itself, the Greeks do have an advantage in their tradition of hemitheoi, half-divine heroes. We can't say, "but a person couldn't do that …" because in an important sense Achilles is not a person, or not just a person. As far as I can tell, Achilles' seriousness is taken seriously throughout the Iliad, when he withdraws from battle, when he mourns Patroclus, and even in the Odyssey when he rails against death (the hero who chose an early, glorious death with full knowledge).

Still, there is a reason Odysseus and his poem are more popular today, as a subject of scholarship and as a cultural touchstone. Whatever the original audience's stance towards Achilles may have been, the possibility of ironic distance helps us deal with his implacable, uncomfortable forthrightness in our more 'nuanced' age. As the NYT piece pointed out, we modern ironists mock what we secretly long for:

But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.

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'Achilles had only 2 heels'

A little knowledge of myth can be a dangerous thing, as this guest blog at Scientific American demonstrates:

When I think about [cancer] research, two other Greek legends come to mind: The legend of Sisyphus and the Odyssey. Every day, Sisyphus rolled a rock up a mountain and then had to watch how it would roll back down again. This was his punishment decreed by the Greek gods. It reminds me of a lot of experiments that we scientists perform. When we feel that we are getting close solving a scientific problem we sometimes realize that we have to start all over again. Similarly, Odysseus’ long and exhausting journey is also a metaphor that appropriately characterizes a lot of real-life scientific research. Odysseus did not know if and when he would ever reach his destination, and this is how many of us conduct our research.I googled “Odyssey” and “cancer” to see if I could find news articles that allude to the scientific Odyssey of cancer research. To my surprise, I did find a number of articles, but these were not descriptions of scientific “Odysseys”. They were reports of cancer patients who described how they had undergone numerous different cancer treatments, often with little improvement. I realize that it is easier to market scientific ideas with a simplistic Achilles metaphor than to point out that science is long-winded and at times disorienting journey, similar to the Odyssey. 

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"Clever choices from the past"

Mary Beard's description of the art outside BBC headquarters:

It's one of those neatly simple ideas that works partly because it is so simple, and because it joins the familiar with the strange, and makes clever choices from the past.

I love this and wanted to make sure I saved it somewhere. It seems to me the second part works equally well as a description of Augustan poetry, or of modern poetry with classical influences (like Anne Carson's). 

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The original 007

The opening of Skyfall this week connects to my love of historical novels via John Dee, an Elizabethan secret agent who signed his letters "007".

Dee was a mathematician and astrologer who taughts many of Elizabeth's advisers. The novel The Spymaster's Daughter emphasizes his interest in codes and his role in breaking the cipher used by Mary Queen of Scots.

The double 0 in Dee's signature stood for "your [Elizabeth's] eyes only" and 7 was chosen because of its cabalistic associations.

More historical novels involving Dee: Shadow of Night, The Queen's Fool

The John Dee Society is dedicated to publishing Dee's works and assembling a catalogue of his library, one of the largest in England before it was dispersed.

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Mirror, mirror

I recently started watching the tv show Once Upon a Time, and I've been looking at the ancient roots of some of its fairy-tale themes. Magic mirror have always been part of the show, since the evil queen from Snow White is arguably the main character:

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But in a recent episode there was a magic mirror in which absent loved ones appear, shades of Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised:

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Assuming that ancient mirrors were crummy, I wondered if they would seem magical before they provided an accurate reflection. But, first misconception: ancient mirrors were capable of an accurate reflection. Obsidian mirrors recovered from Turkey work well, as this image shows:

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Ancient Greek mirrors were made of copper, iron or silver; glass mirrors are first found in ancient Rome. It seems that even if ancient mirrors did not allow you to count all your nose hairs, they seemed mystical enough for a few legends to grow up around them. 

The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy says that the witches of Thessaly wrote oracles on mirrors, and that Pythagoras foretold the future using a magic mirror. Ancient healers suspended a mirror in water to determine whether a sick person could be healed. These folkloric uses of mirrors are echoed in literature, as with the mirror analogy in Republic 10. The mirror on the moon found in Lucian, in which you could see your family on earth, demonstrates how magical mirrors could seem. However, as Fairytale in the Ancient World explains, the oracular role in Snow White was filled by more typical oracle figures, such as the moon or sun.

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'I drank what?'

I was writing a lecture on Plato this morning and decided to run over to Etsy as a study break. Etsy is a site with lots of little shops selling handmade and vintage items. These are my favorites that feature ancient Greek themes (no affiliate links, I just love Etsy):

I started out looking for Plato-related products. There's the usual repackaging of serious quotes, but also this delightful magnet. Notice you still receive nerd points, since you have to be "in the know" to identify the bust as Socrates.

Wonderfully weird knitted and crocheted hats are another Etsy speciality. This toddler hat is supposed to look like Leonidas' hair and beard. You be the judge (Of course, there are no contemporary images of Leonidas):

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A benefit of the internet age is that it's given so many people a forum for their quirky sense of humor, and when it's that rare breed, irreverent classics humor, all the better.

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"Good," "Noble" and Occasionally "Large"

Wonderful, funny NPR article on the Iliad vs. Adele Geras' young adult novel Troy:

The Iliad is probably a better poem for never describing the size of Helen's breasts or the exact shade of Paris' hair (a "spun gold," if you believe Geras). But there is something immensely satisfying about the unabashed sentimentalism and lush prose of Geras's Troy after the cryptic sparsity of the original, in which the city falls only by implication, when its hero, Hector, dies. We never see it go down, which is both masterful and frustrating. But Troy provides us with flames, destruction and trysts among the ruins.

The novel follows various Trojan women during the siege and destruction of the city and features several love triangles, an unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes shockingly bad prose ("There's a fire burning in my body, and only you can put it out"). Xanthe and Marpessa are a pair of sisters in love with the same boy, the unsubtly named Alastor (Greek for "vengeful spirit"), and together they survive the deaths of Hector, Achilles, Priam and, eventually, the destruction of the city. 

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'Commoner than blackberries'

Quoted in HuffPo: 

It seems quite clear that the Greeks owed exceedingly little to foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race, as Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century 'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as 'one great City of gods and men'. It is that movement which you will not find elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.

- Gilbert Murray, The Legacy of Greece 

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Those glass slippers

I've become quite addicted to Once Upon a Time, the ABC show starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jennifer Morrison (far less annoying than on House, by the way). I love the fantasy elements, and it made me curious about fairy tales in antiquity.

A bit of time with Google Scholar and this monograph have clarified a few things to me, which may be obvious to others:

1) Cinderella and Snow White are basically the same story. There are only so many ways your stepmother can mess with you. As Anderson points out in Fairytale in the Ancient World, "to anyone accustomed to reading folktales in quantity it will come as no surprise to encounter a male Cinderella, an angel as fairy godfather, a Cinderella without a slipper test, and many more such deviations." Female jealousy and infighting occur even now; they were perhaps even more common in an age of narrower female expectations and the frequent deaths of mothers and remarriage of fathers.

2) Happily ever after is an incredibly generous expectation and a modern luxury. The ancient fairy tale heroines Anderson proposes, such as Io and Psyche, make excessive housework and suspended animation seem like a vacation. Io, of course, hopes for nothing more than returning to human forms and living to bear Zeus' child. Hera inflicts household tasks of diabolical complexity on Psyche, such as sorting a enormous pile of mixed grains in a few hours' time and stealing beauty from the goddess of the underworld. It's a compelling story; if you're looking for a starter text for second year Latin, you might want to check out this simplified version.

I tend to be vaguely embarrassed at my romantic notions of the Middle Ages (fed by my historical fiction addiction), but at least in their imaginations medieval people tended to be more idealistic and more generous to their fictional heroes and heroines. I'm not sure whether we have cultural Christianity or Eleanor of Aquitaine's Court of Love to thank for that.

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A Professor's 'Secret Plan'

This isn't strictly classics-related, but I had an email exchange yesterday that reminded me of this classic West Wing clip, where Josh makes a sarcastic comment in a press briefing that gets taken seriously:

In my upper-level classics in translation course one of their assignments is to compare any modern work (film or literature) to any ancient work we've read. I've put in place (I hope) safeguards to prevent frivolous or shallow papers, but the choice of topic is supposed to be wide open.

Nevertheless, I get emails like the one yesterday, asking if 17th century literature is okay, if 20th century literature is okay, if movies are acceptable, and on and on. Students are looking for secret limits or criteria that are. not. there.

These emails reflect the frequent, and unfortunate, assumption that professors have a secret plan to mess with their students. To throw in test questions unrelated to the material and then rub our hands together with glee. To assign paper with wide-open topics so we can trap people into choosing the one secretly forbidden topic.

It doesn't really bother me, and by no means is it a constant problem. Just another fascinating and odd little bit of student psychology. Pin It

Would you have a beer with Agamemnon?

As I mentioned last time, I've been re-reading The Lonely American and thinking about the American myth of virtuous independence that the authors criticize. 

Rather than focusing on myths detrimental to ancient life, as originally planned, I've decided to follow up with a post on ancient (elite) people and social connections.

Now, I love the Greeks. But it seems to me that the elite Greeks were either overly dependent on family connections, or quarrelsome and backstabbing within their social group.

For example, Agamemnon, as far as I can recall, has no close friends apart from his brother, for whom he harbors an almost smothering affection. Witness his total freakout when Menelaus is slightly wounded in _Iliad_ book 4:

When King Agamemnon saw the blood flowing from the wound he was afraid, and so was brave Menelaus himself till he saw that the barbs of the arrow and the thread that bound the arrow-head to the shaft were still outside the wound. Then he took heart, but Agamemnon heaved a deep sigh as he held Menelaus's hand in his own, and his comrades made moan in concert. "Dear brother," he cried, "I have been the death of you in pledging this covenant and letting you come forward as our champion. ….how, Menelaus, shall I mourn you, if it be your lot now to die? I should return to Argos as a by-word, for the Achaeans will at once go home. We shall leave Priam and the Trojans the glory of still keeping Helen, and the earth will rot your bones as you lie here at Troy with your purpose not fulfilled. Then shall some braggart Trojan leap upon your tomb and say, 'Ever thus may Agamemnon wreak his vengeance; he brought his army in vain; he is gone home to his own land with empty ships, and has left Menelaus behind him.' Thus will one of them say, and may the earth then swallow me."

The symposium ("drinking-together") immediately springs to mind as an example of a later, civilized friendship circle. But there's more to it than intellectual companionship and good times. David Konstan identifies several proverbs that hint at strife and betrayal in the symposium: "He who does not betray a man who is his friend has great honor among mortals and gods, in my judgment"; "If only it were possible to know without being deceived about each man who is a friend what he is like, cutting open his chest, looking into his heart, and locking it up again" (45).

I think the Romans may have done better, but I may be getting that impression simply because Cicero writes so eloquently and frequently about the joys of friendship. That's another post.

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A Facade of Busyness

The Lonely American is a favorite nonfiction book of mine, in large part because it makes intelligent use of myth. Olds and Schwartz begin by deconstructing the myths surrounding independence and productivity in American culture, and return to that theme throughout the book.

"Productivity is a virtue in America. Busyness itself is a virtue in America. And because busyness is virtuous, it has "legs." When necessity recedes, the busyness does not stop. It continues not only because it is a habit but because it is a "good" habit. And since busyness is a public virtue, a boast as well as a complaint, since people want to be seen as virtuous even in those moments when their virtues are flagging, they sometimes present a facade of busyness to the world whether they are being productive or not." (14-15)

I"m always trying to get my myth students to look at the relevance of Greek myths in ancient life (however reluctant they sometimes are). So I'm wondering what myths had a consistently negative effect on life in the ancient world. I'm going to do a little reading in De Officiis and Works and Days, and post an update.

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"Working their looms or whatever"

Penelope at her loom (15th c.)

I never finished Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean (a little too much salaciousness for salaciousness' sake) but I think I might like her new novel, Sweet Girl (about Aristotle's daughter Pythias). From the Global Edmonton:

"When we think of ancient Greece, we think of centaurs and Zeus throwing thunderbolts and stuff, but we don't think of these women trying to take some kind of control of their lives," said Lyon.
"And it seems those were acts that women would undertake as ways of exerting power over their lives."
Such is the quest of Lyon's Pythias, who gets her smarts and love of science from her aging dad.
At the start of the novel, Pythias is seven and boldly declares she wants to be a teacher and doesn't want to get married.
Her viewpoint changes as she matures and, like most women at that time, becomes defined by her fertility and the sexist social beliefs that surround her.
As Pythias's story unfolds, so too does an era of upheaval, as Alexander's death forces Aristotle to flee Athens with his Macedonian family to Chalcis in fear he'll be killed.
But once there, the household is no more stable, and a financially strapped Pythias faces a journey that takes her to the welcoming arms of priestesses, midwives and hetairas (high-end prostitutes).
"I remember really early on the way I kind of imagined her to my editor, we were kicking the ideas around and I said, 'I want her to be a Jane Austen character who likes sex,'" said Lyon.
Lyon said the only concrete facts she had on Pythias came from Aristotle's will, which detailed his plans for her.
"He lays out who he wants her to marry and all the things that he wants to happen to her," said Lyon. "And you get a strong sense of his love for her through the document, and his worry."
Writing the novel made Lyon realize she had "a pretty stereotypical view of what women were at that time."
"I thought: in veils, kept in the house, illiterate, working their looms or whatever and not really doing much else," she said.

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Greek baby names and generations

The Telegraph writes about the new love for Greek baby names among celebrities:

[Robin] Williams had promised his daughter wouldn’t have a “mad celebrity baby name” but something “very solid, old-school”. Theodora is certainly that – nearly 2,000 years old, to be precise.
Of Greek origin, meaning “God’s gift” – from theos (God) and doron (gift) – Teddy has it in common with Theodora Richards, daughter of Rolling Stone Keith and model Patti Hansen, who made up for such a sound choice by then landing her with the middle name Dupree.
Picking the right name can be tricky, and Mr and Mrs Williams aren’t the first high-profile couple to turn to ancient Greece for inspiration. First, there was Zachary, the son of Elton John and David Furnish, whose name comes from Zacharias, another Greek word meaning “remembrance of the Lord”. Kourtney Kardashian, the younger sister of American reality TV star Kim, named her daughter Penelope (from penelops, a predatory bird); while actress Hilary Duff’s toddler is called Luca, from the Greek Loukas, or “man from Lucania”.

I was reminded of a book I recently came across called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. It argues that history is driven by a repeating cycle of generations: idealist, reactive, civic, and adaptive. In the most recent iteration of the cycle, the boomers are "idealist", Generation X is "reactive", Gen Y is "civic", and the generation to come will be "adaptive". 

I'd be willing to bet that a traditional baby name was Williams' wife's idea -- she's a "reactive" Gen Xer, while he's an "idealist" baby boomer. 

Given my profession, I'm hoping the next generation of "adaptive" college students aren't so focused on consensus-building that they let classroom discussions die, or write dull papers (she said ironically).

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German debts to Greece?

from salon.com:

Beginning in 1942 the German occupiers demanded that Greece pay, monthly, the cost of being occupied. Over the past two decades various Greek governments have raised the subject of that theft, which amounts to $14 billion in today’s dollars (without interest). Germany has dismissed the idea that it owes Greece anything. There is a certain short-sightedness in the German insistence that debts must always, always be repaid.

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The klismos chair, a brief history

I've been looking at ancient Greek furniture lately, and I was particularly drawn to the klismos, a chair with a sloped back and four curved legs.

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For one thing, I remember translating klismos as "easy chair" in my first Greek reading class. Seeing what an austere, if graceful, thing it is, I'm amused that we talked about them as though they were La-z-boy recliners. I also love the idea that they're still part of modern furniture design. It's reassuring to classicists whenever we find a bit of the ancient world in an unexpectedly modern setting.

Recreation of a Greek klismos (credit)

Klismoi first appear in Homer and later in classical art like the vase-painting above. The curved back provides support and the curved legs are very stable, although they may spread out and break if too much weight is put on them.

Klismos chairs were revived in the eighteenth-century neoclassical period, first as props for historically-themed paintings and later as everyday furniture.

Neoclassical chair based on klismos (credit)

 Amazon lists several modern klismos chairs (shockingly expensive). "Design by Todd" considers how they could be used in a modern house, ultimately concluding that they are best employed as a "statement piece" or a "sculpture" -- too deep to sit in comfortably.

Oh well, it's better than a backless stool, right?

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Birds do it, bees do it ...

Kohl container from Egypt

From Care2, a website on healthy and green living (strangely enough), comes this list of 22 unusual word origins:

7. DogI mentioned before that some etymologies are just plain baffling; dog is unquestionably one of those. The word dog was docga in Old English, but nobody can decide where it actually came from. The word hund (of Germanic origin, which became modern-day hound) was much more common, so it’s likely that dog/docgawas an informal or non-literary word… but how did it spring into existence? No one really knows for sure. 

8. ButterflyThere are several conflicting explanations for the origin of butterfly. It may come from a combination of Old English bēatan “to beat,” and flēoge “fly.” The first part of the word may instead come from butere, or “butter,” which may have originally referred only to yellow-colored butterflies. However, my favorite explanation of butterfly is that is could have come from the Middle Dutch word boterschijte, which referred to the fact that their excrement may look similar to butter: literally, “butter-shitter.” Think of that the next time you encounter a gorgeous butterfly!

10. AlcoholThe word alcohol came into English with the help of Latin, but it’s originally from the Spanish Arabic al-kuḥul, which means “the kohl” (kohl being a black powder that is used as eye makeup). Wait, what? Well, the process that is used to make kohl involves vaporizing and then cooling a solid substance, while the process of distilling alcohol is the same deal, but with a liquid. So, over the course of centuries, it began to mean an “essence obtained by distillation” and then finally “spirit of wine, ethanol.”

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Good for them

Greek professors in border towns are moonlighting at Albanian schools:

The representatives from these seven universities that met with Albanis wanted to explore whether professors from Ioannina University -- and especially in the medical field -- would be interested in teaching in Tirana a few days a week. Other than a good supplementary salary, the offer also included travel expenses, a car service from the Greek-Albanian border into Tirana, as well as room and board.

Things are still wretched over there, but I'm still a little envious of a situation where professors are in actual demand. Pin It

Who doesn't love a little Latin prose humor?

"The Ides of March

Dear D-L-L,

I am studying Latin prose composition. I have been studying it. I shall be studying it. I shall be about to have been studying it ... you may expect to hear from me next, either whole and happy and free from conditions, or in fragments."

-Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster

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Tying the knot

An article on the "Mother Nature Network"  recently discussed reef knots on the Mars rover , briefly mentioning their origins in Egypt and Greece. I needed an excuse to look at something pretty (it being rather grey and grim in my remote Midwestern locale), so ...

Googling the Greek name for it, "Herakles knot," brings up dozens of ancient necklaces and tiaras. It seems that the knot symbolized fertility and the marriage 'knot,' a meaning which probably grew  from its use in medicine and especially to tie women's belts.

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Another symbolic knot, the proverbial "Gordian knot," was perhaps a "knot-cypher" that symbolized the "ineffable name of Dionysus." (Graves, The Greek Myths, 284) 

A bit of a tangent, but Celtic knotwork may have originated in the late Roman empire, where interlace floor mosaics are popular:

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After all, what do we do as classicists but study beautiful and enduring things made from simple materials?

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It's called panegyric, people.

Bust once thought to show Poppaea Sabina

I might be missing something about the new poem praising Poppaea Sabina, second wife of Nero. MSNBC implies that its sentimental theme shows a "very different side to this ancient couple." Nero, of course, is said to have murdered his first wife Octavia to marry Poppaea, and to then caused Poppaea to miscarry by kicking her in the stomach.

MSNBC also ponders why the poem "was written nearly 200 years after Nero died … why [would] someone so far away from Rome bother composing or copying it at such a late date." The article explains some possibilities below, such as a "deification poem" or a "poem of circumstance" comparing an Egyptian official and his dead wife to Nero and Poppaea.

That's all well and good, but this notion that the romantic relationship in the poems shows a "different side" of Nero is silly. Should the poet have represented Poppaea as trapped in a relationship with a crazed despot?

My spouse and I debate the point of classics education sometimes, but I hope we at least teach our students not to take everything they read at face value.

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Epic heroes and their stuff

The dragon's hoard from Beowulf

I recently read From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought, a book about Odysseus' role as a philosophical hero post-Homer. The philosophical schools that co-opted Odysseus as a spokesman, or at least an exemplar of their teaching, always had to deal with his love of stuff, his attachment to material gain. Plato, for example, shows Odysseus receiving a new life as a philosopher in the Myth of Er, in part so that he can circumvent the issue of the Homeric character's greed (49 and passim).

I thought this was rather unfair of the philosophers (she said anachronistically). I've always understood timē (pronounced teemai), the desire to get stuff as a sign of status, to be a widespread (and perfectly respectable) Homeric value. Epic heroes in other cultures do it too. Beowulf dies happy knowing that he's gained lots of gold for his people by slaying the dragon who was guarding it.

Margalit Finkelberg (Time and Arete in Homer, CQ 48:1 (1998) 14-28) is illuminating on this point. She argues that timē is an aristocratic value already outdated by the time our Iliad was composed. In speeches, the most flexible part of the poem, the egalitarian value of aretē is uppermost. 

Poseidon's speech to the Greeks in Iliad 14 and the description of the Greek army at the beginning of Iliad 3 stress acting for the benefit of the community, the essence of aretē (27).  Homeric performers in the eighth century and after praised aretē but preserved the role of timē because it was essential to the plot. After all, Achilles and Agamemnon didn't quarrel over who could benefit the community most.

As I read example after example of urban philosophers criticizing or ignoring Odysseus' love of profit, it occurred to me that city life doesn't exactly make poverty easier, but it makes the single-minded acquisition of wealth less necessary. Lots of smart and motivated people enjoy living in tiny apartments in New York who would need a lot more space and things to be happy where I live.

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"Will our family ever desist from madness?"

From The Comic History of Rome

I've been looking further into mothers in the ancient world. I remembered Cornelia Africana, mother of the Gracchi, from a passage in Wheelock's Latin. I can't find the page, but it's a simplified version of this:

Valerius Maximus 4.4:A companion matron who was staying with Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, was showing off her jewels, the most beautiful of that period. Cornelia managed to prolong the conversation until her children got home from school. Then she said, "These are my jewels."

Cornelia's sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, served as tribunes in the late second century and were both assassinated, Tiberius for redistributing land among the plebeians and Gaius for granting citizenship to Italians living outside Rome. 

Their mother, widowed young, was lionized for never remarrying, for directing her sons' education and for writing powerful letters to her sons that were later circulated as a collection. Only two fragments of survive today. I will quote the longer fragment, from a letter to her son Gaius when he was tribune:

“You will say that it is a beautiful thing to take on vengeance on enemies. To no one does this seem either greater or more beautiful than it does to me, but only if it is possible to pursue these aims without harming our country. But seeing as that cannot be done, our enemies will not perish for a long time and for many reasons, and they will be as they are now rather than have our country be destroyed and perish. . . . I would dare to take an oath solemnly, swearing that, except for those who have murdered Tiberius Gracchus, no enemy has foisted so much difficulty and so much distress upon me as you have because of the matters: you should have shouldered the responsibilities of all of those children whom I had in the past, and to make sure that I might have the least anxiety possible in my old age; and that, whatever you did, you would wish to please me most greatly; and that you would consider it sacrilegious to do anything of great significance contrary to my feelings, especially as I am someone with only a short portion of my life left. Cannot even that time span, as brief as it is, be of help in keeping you from opposing me and destroying our country? In the final analysis, what end will there be? When will our family stop behaving insanely? When will we cease insisting on troubles, both suffering and causing them? When will we begin to feel shame about disrupting and disturbing our country? But if this is altogether unable to take place, seek the office of tribune when I will be dead; as far as I am concerned, do what will please you, when I shall not perceive what you are doing. When I have died, you will sacrifice to me as a parent and call upon the god of your parent. At that time does it not shame you to seek prayers of those gods, whom you considered abandoned and deserted when they were alive and on hand? May Jupiter not for a single instant allow you to continue in these actions nor permit such madness to come into your mind. And if you persist, I fear that, by your own fault, you may incur such trouble for your entire life that at no time would you be able to make yourself happy.”

The letter is skillfully written and milks the rhetorical question to death in the best Roman fashion. But Judith Hallett (in Women Writing Latin) argues that Cornelia does not merely rival the rhetorical skills of male authors, but that her letter is a model of "maternal motivational speaking" that influenced Livy and Vergil:

Cornelia's letter to Gaius, which articulates Roman political values that include a concern for families and their emotional needs, is a radical document. Its author's priorities differ greatly from those inculcated by Roman patriarchal tradition, which pitted political against familial and emotional concerns. We should also note that ….. [t]he Roman literary figures and historical personages who gave voice to these priorities in the generations after Cornelia include men as well.

However difficult it is to reconstruct the historical Cornelia in detail, she must have been fierce and a little scary. I'm becoming more and more enamored of the Romans' lack of sentimentality, and their notion of the 'ideal mother' is no exception.

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The Little Bears of Artemis

I intended this post to be about cultural attitudes toward motherhood in antiquity. With a new school year starting, I was remembering when I taught part-time (not by choice) and my troglodytic chair congratulated himself on how he was facilitating my 'work-life balance.' Yuck.

But while poking around I came across the delightful Cult of Artemis at Brauron. This is the cult of the arkteia, the 'bear-dance' performed by young Athenian girls as a rite of passage into womanhood. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article on it for the couple of WTF? moments it gave me.

Basically, girls between 5 and 10 would worship Artemis in a festival culminating in a wild dance in which the participants stripped. So, the first head-scratching moment comes when Wikipedia explain that this is part of the rigorous preparation for a young woman's first childbirth. 

However, it seems that the dance associated the girls with Iphigeneia, who was to be sacrificed in atonement for the killing of a mother bear. She shed her robes in order to draw the viewers' pity for her innocent state. So there is at least a tenuous connection with motherhood.

The second 'what the heck?' moment came when I read about the rather macabre gifts made to Iphigeneia as the mortal patroness of the shrine. Apparently, she was given the sewing and weaving projects left over when a woman died in childbirth. But she seems to have been urged to grant the women a positive afterlife in return for the gift (Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis 1468).

I do truly treasure these moments of delighted puzzlement. It's great to talk about how the classics are universal and speak to the human condition, etc., but it's also a pleasure when their real differentness from us comes across, as it so often does in ancient religious practices. 

Artemis' sacred groves are considered forerunners of modern wilderness sanctuaries (see this article in Forest & Conservation History).You can read more about Brauron in Nancy Demand's book. I've also read about the 'little bears of Artemis' before in this young adult novel based on Demosthenes 59 (Against Neaira).

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