"a history book that ... prioritised the reader's interests"

I discovered the wonderful Ian Mortimer recently through an interview with Medievalists.net. Mortimer writes popular history in non-traditional formats (such as a daybook and traveller's guide):

"There are, of course, those who argue ... that we cannot presume that people in the past were anything like us. But such a line of argument is both self-defeating and false. It is false because, if we deny the humanity of the past, then we cease to study history, for history is specifically the history of our species – the past of uninhabited islands and other species belongs to other areas of enquiry."

"A succinct way of illustrating the difference is to say that I am studying humanity over time (then and now) whereas traditional academics study evidence from the past."  

Pin It

Adoption in Greece and Rome

On vacation I spent a lot of time watching this movie about a foster family (one of my children likes it). The movie deals with a classic (if not hackneyed) adoption plot: a family takes in a foster child to console the mother for her infertility; she's thrilled, but her husband is concerned that the child presents an unacceptable risk to the family and its resources. The husband eventually signals his approval of the foster daughter by spending a large(ish) sum of money on something important to her.

Many of these concerns were also present in Greece and Rome.* Women were not permitted to adopt as a consolation for the loss of children until the late Empire. In Greece, only adult male citizens had the right; in Rome it belonged to the paterfamilias. Rome, with its customary pragmatism about family relationships, permitted an adoption to be undone though the same process that governed child emancipation. Adoption severed relationships with the father but not the mother.

Succession in the Roman empire was often based on adoption, beginning with the posthumous adoption of Octavian by his great-uncle Julius Caesar. Galba was a little more unusual; he was adopted not by his predecessor but by his wealthy stepmother Livia Ocellina. 

Roman family customs are (almost) always a nice corrective to our sentimentalization of the institution. I'm tickled by how they always provide an out, whether it's easy divorce or dissolving an adoption.

* OCD 4th ed.

image credit

Pin It

Ancient and modern advertising

I don't usually read magazines (leaves more time for historical novels, heh), but I read the Smithsonian this morning. I was really liking the articles, even though Olympics coverage generally bores me.

But I was embarrassed by the ads. I assume as a humanities professor I'm part of the audience they are aimed at, and I found that idea repellant. There was a total lack of wit as well as practicality: it was all these DVD courses on world religions and replicas of Roman coins advertised in an ickily pretentious way. This is what I'm supposed to want? Don't smart people buy soap?

The "Leisure" chapter of Pompeii: A Sourcebook is a good source of ancient ads. They're surprisingly simple, just a brief description of the event and its most attractive features: "The gladiatorial troupe of Aulus Suertius Certus, aedile, will fight at Pompeii on 31 May. There will be a hunt and awnings" (52).

Humorous graffiti was often in verse: "Chios, I hope your piles become sore/ so that they smart more than they smarted before" (78). The two genres of the announcement and the witty verse statement didn't seem to mix. I suspect people needed to become more self-conscious about their consumerism before that could happen.

image credit Pin It

Bring back the city-state?

I love seeing Greek history in the the Wall Street Journal, but I was skeptical about this article on why we should revive the city-state. According to the article, city-states develop robust economies because of regional specialization, unlike nation-states which coast along on "agriculture, tourism and a knack for ... design".

The main example of a thriving modern city-state was South Tyrol, an Italian province with the highest GDP and lowest unemployment in the nation. But the more I read about South Tyrol, the more it seemed that the circumstances of its creation would be impossible to duplicate, if not actually undesirable. The region was annexed to Italy as a way of persuading that country to enter WW I against the Central Powers. Decades of upheaval followed since the province was actually 90% German-speaking. Now, as a result of efforts to provide the German speakers with some autonomy, the entire province is largely self-governing.

Based on the serendipitous (and harsh) beginnings of South Tyrol, I wonder whether city-states seem great because we only see the ones that succeed. A city has to have a strong identity and assets worth protecting to thrive under such a system. As with so many things in life, it's great when it works.

image credit Pin It

Classical reenactments and the new Nemean Games

I was thrilled to discover in this article that the Nemean Games have been revived. They have resisted commercializion and recreate the Greek games as nearly as possible, in dress and procedures.

I'm not sure who I thought was competing in these games (high school and college athletes, maybe?), but when I found out they're open to anyone who registers online, they became a little silly in my eyes. I started picturing them as a version of "Toga Day" at the Junior Classical League, or something. Not that the JCL isn't wonderful, it's just doesn't seem like the best model for an ancient Greek athletic contest.

But I was unexpectedly moved by the last paragraph:

This, for me, is the great moment: in that dark tunnel [of the stadium] there are no cameras, no phones, nothing of the modern world, there are only my feet slapping the same rough hard earth that ancient athletes like Telestas experienced. The tunnel exit is crowded with hands that want to slap me on the back, and smiling, cheering faces.

This drawing back from distractions is what attracts many people to classics, I believe. The classics are (more or less) unchanging: there are no Facebook updates, no news headlines we need to check while we're reading the Apology. Reading Sappho or Plato or Cicero can thus resemble a private conversation, the intellectual equivalent of running through the Nemean tunnel. The world needs more of that, not less.

image credit

Pin It

'I was Achilles'

I was listening to "My City" by Dear Daystar tonight and mulling over its classical influences. There's a reference to Icarus ("Tried to fly and I fell into the sea"); the vocative of city is also used a lot, which is classical-ish (heh).

It turns out their song "Tanadaqadakux" is part of a short film about Achilles on Youtube. The film itself is a little silly (the part at the end where she's walking off into the sunset wearing a fabric helmet is hilarious), but I thought the Greek narration was quite beautiful.

Pin It

Greek epic and movie palaces

The Chicago Theatre, a 'movie palace'

Yesterday I was looking for theaters with 'crying rooms,' so I could go to the movies with my spouse. Right now we have an "I go one day, you go the next, then we discuss the movie" arrangement.

Crying rooms are rooms where you can take your fussy child and finish watching the movie without disturbing anyone else. Only older theaters, aka "movie palaces," have them. Movie palaces, many built during the Great Depression, were super-fancy theaters designed to make average people feel like royalty and allow them to escape their circumstances for a little while.

The movie palaces' fantasy element struck me as quite similar to the escapist overtones of early Greek epic. Early Greek epic was composed during the Dark Ages (quite as grim as the Great Depression) for a sub-elite audience. Hence the poems' grandeur, tragedy and even their mania for visual description. Stories that are too close to your everyday life are useless as a way to "escape", but you need to be able to picture what that alternative, escapist world looks like, whether it's a medieval palace or the treasure room of a Mycenaean king.

I get a kick out of imagining that nebulous group of people, the 'original audience of the Iliad,' as a bunch of downtrodden 1930s office workers going to the movies. But maybe that's just me.

image credit Pin It