College graduation in the Bronze Age

Cool quote from the intro to Stephen Mitchell's Iliad:

"Here, amid all the sorrow and concern and deep husbandly love, in what both these admirable people sense may be their final meeting, at the climax of a prayer Hector must know will never be fulfilled, is the image of a mother rejoicing at her son's return from battle with the bloody armor of the enemy he has just killed, as if she were watching him in his robe and mortarboard graduating from college."

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Achilles the vampire?

Last week's myth class perked up briefly when, in a sudden fit of inspiration (desperation?), I compared Achilles to a vampire. Prior to the poems' conclusion, he stops needing to eat and reaches almost demonic heights of rage, so I said that he was "almost an undead figure." The students seemed quite taken with this idea.

No doubt if I rewrote the poem to include some zombies and vampires (a la Jane Austen), some of them would actually read it.* Never mind that the work's humanity is supposed to be the point ...

*Emboldened by the fact that I'd already given the evals, I asked recently if anyone had actually done the reading. (This was after asking several factual questions about the text that no one would answer.) The response was, shall we say, less than heartening.

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'Our way is the old way'

It seems like everyone in Game of Thrones is a classical scholar. Ned Stark is killed more or less because he borrowed the wrong book on genealogy from the Grand Maester. Jaime Lannister studies the White Book of the Kingsguard for tips on how to stop being a massive jerk. Tyrion Lannister gives his evil nephew Joffrey a rare biography of four ancient kings (which he promptly destroys).

Bits of treasure and knowledge survive from Valyria Before the Doom, which is also where the old ruling family of Westeros came from. House Targaryen sounds like a hideous domestic disaster to me -- brother-sister marriage, madness (no doubt aided and abetted by a limited gene pool). But the new ruling family wants to be just like them. Jaime Lannister fantasizes about making his sister/lover an honest women; Tywin Lannister obsesses over owning a Valyrian steel sword. Something about that connection to the mysterious, fragmentary past...

Anyway, I finally gave in and started reading the Song of Ice and Fire series (=Game of Thrones). It's fantastic, and I can report that even the lower-rated fourth book is enjoyable. Its flaws, such as slightly slow pacing and a length(ier) list of characters, are the sorts of things classicists tolerate well. Pin It

Inventive spellings of classical names

Creative spellings I've witnessed or heard about this semester:

Opedidus Rex, the famous play by Sophocles

Oddyssey (the student was perhaps commenting on Odysseus' questioning of heroic ideals?)

Oddisseous

The 'profit' Tiresias

For the record, I don't grade on spelling and I have some respect for student's efforts to deal with words and names that are clearly not part of their everyday vocabulary. On the other hand, phonetic spellings like the third above make me wonder how often this particular student has seen the name in print, in his or her textbook. Pin It

Why is the third declension such a black hole for students?

I started my fall Latin course absolutely to help my students succeed in understanding and using the third declension. I even broke a rule that's been repeated to me many times, which is not to distract students by telling them about grammar before you get to it in the book.

"Now, this is the first declension. You take the word's stem (which is self-evidently the same in both the nom. and gen. forms) and attach endings to it."

"By the way -- when you get to the third declension you will need to use the genitive stem, because it's different from the nominative stem.

"Hi, welcome back! Today we're going to talk about the second declension ... By the way ---" etc.

The third declension fell about halfway through the semester. What did they do? Wait for it ...

Over and over again, they took a few (randomly selected) letters off the end of the nominative stem and attached the third declension endings to it.

Readers, I introduced this new (but not unheard-of) concept so carefully. We looked at the endings and the new nouns separately. Then together. We discussed common patterns in third declension nouns. We drilled. We looked for third declension nouns in readings.

After we had reviewed about four times, it seemed clear that my students were going to have as much difficulty with it the seventh time as they did the first time.

I am told that this is a not uncommon reaction to the third declension, and I'm baffled. Would it be better to introduce this declension first? Is there a textbook that does that?

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"Eros is an enemy"

From Chapter 1 of Eros the Bittersweet:

"Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate."

Cool.

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It worked for Heath Ledger and Queen

Filmmaker to bring the Middle Ages and Rap together in ‘The Quickener’

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