Athena's Owl

Archive for May, 2009

A press release from the University of Bristol this week announced the completion of one of the most important projects in Classical Studies: LIMC, or the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Iconographic Lexicon of Classical Mythology).  This 20-volume set is an invaluable resource to anyone whose work even tangentially touches classical myths, i.e. anyone who works on ancient literature, religion, art, cultural studies, women’s studies, etc.  The Lexicon has collected every surviving representation of Greek and Roman mythological stories and published not only the bibliographical information for each image but also the image itself.   And it catalogs them all not according to the museum or collection in which they happen to be located, but according to the mythological character represented.  So if you want to study, say, Heracles (Roman Hercules), just look up Heracles and you’ll find ancient sculptures and vase paintings, like this one:

Athena leads Heracles from his pyre to Mt. Olympus

Unfortunately, ECU’s library does not own LIMC.  (You can consult it at UNC-Chapel Hill.)  But the press release contains great news.  The Foundation that published LIMC is now working to digitize the entire collection.  They hope to have it available online for free within three years.

This Classicist, for one, gets excited every year for this day: the telecast of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  It’s a great day for watching really smart kids showing off their knowledge of Greek and Latin (and many other) roots.  It’s a shame that our students in Classics 1300 are too old to compete!

The Spelling Bee has grown in popularity over the years to the point where the finals are now televised in prime time on ABC.  It used to be that I had to sneak away from graduate school classes on a weekday afternoon.  The Bee was televised on ESPN, of all places, but it was hardly at a convenient time.  Along came the documentary “Spellbound” (here’s the IMDB entry), which tracked several of the contestants for the 1999 Bee, and the Bee’s popularity soared.  There was even, believe it or not, a Broadway musical version of the spelling bee, called “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin.  The Classics world has held a special place in the Bee, since University of Vermont Classics professor Jacques Bailly has been the chief pronouncer for the past few years.

Already this summer, Classics faculty and students are busy planning an exciting event for Spring 2010.  Still glowing from the success of Odyssey LIVE!, our fifteen-hour long Homeric extravaganza, we are planning another live performance event.  We will present a play, most likely a comedy, from the ancient Greece or Rome.  On Monday, June 1, a group of six faculty and students will be sitting down to perform an in-house reading of one script that we’re considering.  If all goes well, I’ll be announcing the name of the play soon.  Auditions will be open to all interested students, not just Classics majors and minors.  So stay tuned!

The New York Times published an essay today about the use of Latin on college and university diplomas.  It was written by Christopher Francese, an associate professor of Classics at Dickinson College, my undergraduate alma mater.  In my college days, Dickinson didn’t have a Classics major.  Instead, I had to double major in both Latin and Greek.  It was an intense experience, but an excellent education.  I remember it very fondly.  My Dickinson diploma, I should say, is written in very elegant Latin.  The Latin diplomas in those days were handled by the now retired Dr. Robert Sider, a sometime collaborator with ECU’s own Dr. Charles Fantazzi.  In fact, all four of the Classics faculty from my undergraduate days are all gone, whether through retirement, death or acceptance of new positions.  I’m happy to have the chance to pay tribute to my own teachers, not only Robert Sider, but also GailAnn Rickert, Mary Moser and Leon Fitts, and to acknowledge that the department is in the very good hands of Dr. Francese and his colleagues.

I have an interesting summer research season in front of me.  In the past, I’ve worked primarily on Greek tragedy and comedy.  My past publications all involve theater.  I’m now setting out in a direction.  By no means do I intend to abandon my theater studies.  The stage will always be my first love.  But I’m starting to work on a project in late ancient history.  The fifth-century AD historian Priscus is our main source for Roman interactions with the Huns.  Priscus was Thracian by birth, from the town of Panium.  He himself took part in an embassy from the Eastern Roman Empire to Attila in 449.  His History covered the middle of the fifth century, from about 434 to 474, and includes a first-hand account of his visit to Hunnic territory.  Much of his History is now lost, but very large excerpts of it survive in a tenth-century work, commissioned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the Excerpta de Legationibus.  In total, we have about 50 to 60 pages of text, perhaps the equivalent of two entire books from this (probably) eight-book work.  What I’m going to be doing is translating what survives.  Only one English translation has ever been made, as far as I know, by a scholar named Roger Blockley.  It’s an excellent work, intended primarily for scholars.  My translation will be aimed at a different audience: general readers and students.  I do strongly believe that it is vital for us classicists to attract readers from outside academia.  And I think that the original sources about Attila and the Huns will be of interest for non-academics.  So I am working with a small independent press that specializes in late antiquity, called Arx Publishing, to produce a new translation of the excerpts from Priscus’s History in an affordable edition with introduction and notes for the non-specialist.  I expect that it will be published in 2011.