"The Unbearable Truth of War"

This review (of the one-man show An Iliad) won me over immediately by its references to Simone Weil:

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others.

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Greek myth and the Hunger Games?

I want to/ consider it strategic to do some 'modern myth' before the semester ends in my Greek Myth class. I'd really like to break away from the old "Star Wars! Look, Luke is on a Hero's Journey!" type of thing.

And so, a question for my readers: have you tried to incorporate recent fantasy works or adaptations of Greek myth into your classes? E.g. Harry Potter, the Hunger Games series? How did it go? Pin It

Teaching Koine?

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the Greek program, we are considering making Koine or Biblical Greek a larger part of our offerings at some point in the near future. The thinking is that this offers two advantages:

1) Koine is easier to learn, at least initially. We have a growing problem with students who won't (and perhaps don't know how) to put in the effort required to learn classical Greek.

2) Students interested in ministry have a vested interest in learning Greek well; a few students who are there for a practical purpose can raise the level of the whole class, we hope. (Not that learning Greek for its own sake is wrong or doesn't happen -- goodness no! -- but we get a lot of students who take Greek to 'feel smart' and then find that the challenges of first year have the exact opposite effect.)

Has anyone else started incorporating more Koine into their program? Is it something you would recommend?

(I should note that we are still planning to offer classical texts in second and third year. A student who learns classical Greek and then takes a course in lyric poetry has to become comfortable in a new dialect or dialects -- the same principle would seem to hold for a student who learn Koine and then reads Plato or Herodotus.)

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De Anima and the lumber-room of the mind

Page from a 14th century edition of De Anima

I read this article about Asperger's Syndrome in the NYT recently and was annoyed by its insistence that people misdiagnosed with Asperger's nevertheless suffer from "social disabilites." They're quiet, so something must be wrong with them ...

Articles like this make me appreciate how wonderfully free from excessive psychologizing classics usually manages to be. I wanted to delve a bit into what did pass for psychology in antiquity.

It seems that psychology from the classical period up through the 19th century is based on Aristotle (big surprise). For Aristotle (Peri psyches/ De Anima) the soul is inseparable from the body. The rational soul has a 'possible intellect,' a storage area of ideas essentially, and an 'agent intellect', which forms selected ideas into thoughts. This is a bit like the concept of mind espoused by one of my favorite Victorian detectives (and fittingly, one with considerable "social difficulties"):

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

-Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet" 

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Review of 'Ironclad' (2011)

Netflix threw Ironclad in my path recently. Apparently I like "Gritty yet Wildly Unrealistic British Period Pieces" or whatever.

Confession: I did watch the whole thing, and I did enjoy it a little. But I have been a huge fan of the early Middle Ages for a long time. I felt like Ironclad was visually true to this period, at least. Settings were both dirtier and less luxurious than they are in many movies about this time period. The heroine (oh, the heroine!) had only a few dresses, for example, and the furniture in the castle was sparse and basic.

The details of the battle sequences also seemed very realistic, which is both good and bad. Nobody slows down and then magically speeds up as they deliver a killing blow (see Cracked for a hilarious article on this.) On the other hand, if you don't care to dwell on the details of grisly battle wounds (I don't), you might be displeased.

The plot is silly and filled with war movie cliches. The castle is defended from King John by less than 20 men (in real life it was around 100). The hero (played by the excellent James Purefoy) is released from membership in the Knights Templar at the end. Umm... people took vows a bit more seriously than that 800 years ago, I sort of thought.

And of course, the poor heroine is compelled to run out into the castle yard during a battle and wave a mace around. Because that's an obligatory part of all movies of this type now, apparently. (And thus I still get students who think Spartan queens were full paricipants in ruling and waging war. Thanks, 300!) Pin It

Greek tragedy and class issues

"It starts out slowly
but still the strength of the gods
is trustworthy. And it punishes
those mortals who honor foolish arrogance
and those who, in the madness
of their opinions, do not extol things divine."

Euripides, Bacchae, tr. Stephen Esposito, 882-887


I used to think life experiences were responsible for my inability to go along with certain stereotypes common to my line of work. As in, I don't think people who didn't go to college are my inferiors or at a permanent disadvantage in life (except 'on paper'). Ditto for those who have children before 30, have served in the military, etc.

But I've been reading a lot of Greek tragedy lately. And I'm wondering if 10+ years of immersion in the classical world is responsible for this attitude as well. Now, tragedy was composed and performed by the elite (and the male). But if a civilization that was even more stratified than ours can put profound speeches and sentiments in the mouths of slaves, foreigners and women, surely we can take people as individuals and accept that there can be many routes to becoming a well-rounded, thoughtful person. Pin It

A Fenian Grandchild

In a recent episode of Downton Abbey, Lady Cora tells Lord Robert that their youngest daughter is expecting, and he says something like, "Great, a Fenian grandchild."

We were wondering exactly what that meant. It was meant to be sarcastic/mildly derogatory, but how? Lady Sibyl is married to an Irishman (horrors :)) and it seems the Fenian Brotherhood was an early precursor to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name is based on Fianna, the word for a small band of warriors in Celtic mythology.

The term is especially associated with Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the Irish name for Finn Mac Cool. In Lord Robert's time and apparently today as well, it is a derogatory term for Catholics and Irish nationalists.

I guess I must harbor a latent love of soap operas ... I watched season 1 of the series in 2 days on Netflix. I'm eagerly awaiting season 3. I'm also waiting impatiently for PBS to get through their interminable Dickens miniseries so I can see see season 2 of Sherlock.

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What to do with a book

Experiential learning at its finest:

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'Fiction gives us back our human shape'

From a wonderful piece in this month's Utne Reader:

"A few days after I started reading [the science fiction novel 1Q84] I was standing in my Michigan backyard, talking on the phone, when the unusual brightness of the night cause me to look up at the moon -- nearly full, unobstructed by clouds - for the first time in as long as I could remember .... Afterward I called Caroline out to the backyard. If it had been a while since I'd looked at the moon, it had been even longer since we'd looked at it together. The moon is outside our realm of concern. I have to care for my kids, earn a living, be a good husband. What difference does it make if the moon is waxing or waning, full or crescent? For a few quiet moments we looked up at it together before retreating inside from the cold." (Kevin Hartnett, "Father Fiction")

The story is accompanied by a sidebar discussing the ways that reading fiction has been proven to improve social skills. The human in humanities, if you will.

I had my 'looking at the moon' moment last week when I was talking with class about tragic reversal in the Oedipus Rex, and the way no human success or human endeavor lasts forever, according to the Greeks. They were listening to me good-naturedly.

But when I segued into a discussion of how the changeability of human life is a gift, because you can only truly love something if you know you might lose it (unlike the gods), I could tell it broke through their distraction a little. Their expressions became focused and thoughtful. I love those moments. Pin It