Why the Romans Celebrated a Child-Killing Patricide

Io, Saturnalia! Tee

Today is the first day of Saturnalia, the great winter festival of the ancient Roman calendar. On the face of it, it doesn't speak well for the Romans that one of their major holidays celebrated Saturn, a god perhaps best known for eating his own children.

But as with most Greek mythology, it is best to look beyond the borderline-nonsensical surface story to the larger cultural significance. And Saturn, of course, ruled over a golden age that only a dramatically transgressive act (like devouring your own offspring) could bring to an end.

As I look ahead to teaching mythology next year, and as I indulge my various modern-day guilty pleasures (like the BBC's Robin Hood series), I ponder the ridiculousness of many ancient and modern myths. I hope to show my students that they should then ask "Why is this myth ridiculous in this particular way? What does it tell us about the people who created it, believed in it and derived great satisfaction from the different versions of it?"

Io, Saturnalia! Mug 

Previous offerings in the Classics Daily shop:

Latin Zombies ("cerebra, cerebrum...") tee and mug

Cano ("I sing") iPhone and iPod case

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

      Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")

*available in several versions

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Roman art proves fish have gotten smaller

Icythologists (is that the right word?) are trying to prevent the extinction of the dusky grouper. They have turned to Roman mosaics to study the fish's original size and habitat. The 3.5-5 foot fish were big enough in Roman times to be portrayed as sea monsters (see the mosaic at the link with a man's legs disappearing into the grouper's mouth). Other figures from the mosaics, who are fishing for the grouper with poles and nets, indicate that shallow water is the creature's ideal habitat.

Under the influence of these mosaics experts have raised grouper in shallow pools and seen them grow much larger than the wild fish. Roman art being used by scientists totally delights me. I guess it is further proof of how much grad school narrows your focus, that such a thing had never occurred to me before. Thanks blogging! Pin It

Roman allusions in 'Mad Men'

As we wait for internet to be installed my husband and I have been watching episodes of Mad Men season 3 on his computer. My attention was caught by the episode where Sally reads a passage from "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to Grandpa Gene ("My Old Kentucky Home").

She reads a little at the beginning of the episode and a little at the end. Gibbon is talking about Antioch under the rule of Julian the Apostate (355-368), a pagan who ruled a mostly Christian people:

The warmth of the climate disposed the natives to the most intemperate enjoyment of tranquillity and opulence; and the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians. Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendor of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honored; the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule; and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capital of the East. The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians; the most skilful artists were procured from the adjacent cities;  a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements; and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness and as the glory of Antioch. 

Grandpa Gene warns her at the point: "You just wait. All hell's gonna break loose." At the conclusion of the episode Sally finishes the passage:

The rustic manners of a prince who disdained such glory, and was insensible of such happiness, soon disgusted the delicacy of his subjects; and the effeminate Orientals could neither imitate, nor admire, the severe simplicity which Julian always maintained, and sometimes affected.

I have a few questions here. I wonder who is intended to serve as our modern-day Julian. As someone who is invested in keeping interest in the classics alive, I am also surprised that reviews (like this one) of the episode which discuss other scenes in great detail don't engage with the Gibbon quotes. 

What non-classicists think of classics is of interest to me, and most of the reviews I've seen (here's another example) appear to think it's enough to mention that Sally read this book in the episode. I suspect that there's some associations involved with the words "Roman Empire." Roman empire … decadence… hubris (in the modern sense)…decline. Certainly very appropriate for Mad Men. 

But if you look into the quote a bit you discover the presence of Julian, the virtuous pagan who ruled over (apparently) dissolute Christians. And this fits beautifully with the theme of the episode. Don and Conrad Hilton bond over their outsider status. Hilton appears to fit the role of the virtuous outsider, with his straightforward manner and (later) instructions to Don to spend time with his family and keep a Bible in his office. But the intense focus necessary for a self-made man eventually ripens into utter lunacy (pun intended): 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDmH_JycZRM

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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

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: 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

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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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

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

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

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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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