Athena's Owl

Archive for June, 2009

Faculty and academic advisers in the liberal arts, and especially in the humanities, and ESPECIALLY in classical studies, like to tell our students that studying the “impractical” liberal arts and living a practical life in the business world are not only compatible but desirable.  Study of the arts and sciences, we say, enriches one’s life, indeed makes one a better, fuller human being.  It’s not just that it increases your ability to participate in the “high culture” that still remains indispensible to certain successful careers.  More than that, study of the liberal arts enables you to think more critically about the everyday world, to recognize more easily the manifold options inherent in real-world situations, and to choose wisely and ethically among the competing claims on your (financial and moral) values.

Yet, deep down, I think all we academics know that we stand on shifting sand when we preach our liberal-arts values.  If the liberal arts were in fact so liberating, one might object, then why have we holed ourselves up in our ivory towers?  Why don’t we go out and lead the world to a better moral place?  My answer to this objection is that this is exactly what I’m trying to do, one class and one student at a time.  As Herodotus and Sophocles both remind us, you can’t judge a person’s success in life until he or she is dead.  (Surprisingly, there was a commentary in today’s New York Times on this very subject.)  So give me some time.

Fortunately, there are people out there who have proved that the liberal arts—and Classics, in particular—are compatible with a successful practical life.  People as diverse as CNN founder Ted Turner, former Secretary of State James Baker, novelist Toni Morrison, women’s activist Betty Friedan, former governor Jerry Brown, NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois, novelist J. K. Rowling and magician Teller (of Penn and Teller) all studied Classics.

One perhaps less well-known but maybe more influential Classics student is Tim O’Reilly.  He and his company, O’Reilly Media, have been at the forefront of World Wide Web development since its inception.  I have seen O’Reilly’s name crop up in discussions about open source software, an area where Classicists have excelled among academics.  (The Perseus site alone stands as a monument to the free dissemination of information and the free dissemination of the media for information.)  O’Reilly recently composed an eloquent blog post about his classical eduaction.  As he puts it: even in his world of business and technology, “The classics are part of my mental toolset, the context I think with.”  Please take some time to read the words of this thoughtful man.  Link is here.

Dr. Charles Fantazzi

This post is the third in a series about Classics’ faculty’s current research projects.  You can read the earlier posts about Dr. Given’s work and Dr.Stevens’s work by following the links.  This post describes the many current projects Dr. Charles Fantazzi is working on.  Before this prolific scholar left for Barcelona, he took the time to write the following description for Athena’s Owl:

“I have just completed an introduction to a Catalan translation of my critical text of Vives’ De subventione pauperum.  I shall be traveling to Barcelona in a few days to discuss this piece with the translator and the publisher.

“I finished the translation of vols. 13 and 14 of Erasmus’ correspondence for the University of Toronto Press  Collected Works of Erasmus quite some ago but they are just appearing now, vol. 13 in the spring of 2010 and vol. 14 the year after.

“I have also completed the translation of Erasmus’ answer to the charges made against him by an assembly of superiors of religious orders held in Valladolid in the summer of 1527, Apologia ad monachos quosdam hispanos.  I still have more work to do on the notes.  This will form vol. 75 of the Toronto Erasmus.

“I am working on an edition and translation of the “Carmina” of Michele Marullo for the I Tatti Renaissance Library series published by Harvard University Press.

“I am also general editor of the Selected Works of Juan Luis Vives for Brill Publishers, which entails a good deal of editorial work.

“I shall be cooperating in the publication of an Encyclopaedia of Neo-Latin Studies with two lengthy articles on the revival of classicism: new texts, new emphases,  and imitation, emulation (including Ciceronianism and anti-Ciceronianism).

“Then there are the usual conferences, articles and reviews, making for a busy summer and fall.”

Building on the success of last spring’s Odyssey LIVE!,  the Classics Program is pleased to announce that its Spring 2010 performance will be Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.   Lysistrata was first performed in Athens circa 411 BC.  It has been one of the most produced comedies in history.  The story centers around the women of Greece during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta.  Conspiring to end the war, the women decide to take over the Athenian acropolis, thus depriving the men of their war funds.  More importantly, they take away something their men cannot live without: sex.  The question becomes how hard it will be for the men to pursue their war without gratification at home.  Men being men, it gets very hard.  Lysistrata, while riotously funny, is also thought-provoking.  It deals with questions of women’s place in civilization during both wartime and peacetime.

The ECU production of Lysistrata will be directed by yours truly, John Given.  We will be using a new translation by Dr. Peter Green, an oft-visiting professor to ECU’s Classics Program and published translator of Greek and Latin poets from Catullus to Yannis Ritsos.  (Last year, the Classics Program co-sponsored Dr. Green’s Ritsos Festival, which included a live performance of three of Ristos’s dramatic monologues.)  More details on date and location will follow in the coming months.  In the meantime, anyone interested in participating in the play, onstage or offstage, should contact me or just comment on this blog post.

I would like to thank a group of students who took time out of their summer schedules to participate in a reading of Lysistrata.  Their performance and feedback enabled me to make the final decision to select Lysistrata for our spring performance.   The students were: Danielle Bryan, Samantha Canada, Chelsea deMonch, Jim Duffy, Naomi Gerakios and Chelsie Weidele.

Andrew Reinhard over at eClassics tonight posted a letter from the College Board to Latin teachers regarding the future of the AP Latin exam.  As you may know, the College Board last year dropped one of the two AP Latin exams and promised to study the future of the remaining exam, whose subject matter was Vergil.

The upshot of the letter is that the College Board expects high school teachers to develop a single poetry-and-prose course, on Vergil and Caesar.  They expect the new AP exam to be in place by 2012 at the earliest, and more likely 2013.  At ECU, we currently give 12 credits for a score of 3, 4 or 5 on the Vergil exam, to cover Latin 1001-1004.  We will have to study the new curriculum to decide what to grant for the new exam, though it will probably be similar. Meanwhile, if any incoming freshmen are entering ECU with AP Latin credit, please drop me a line.  I would be very happy to talk to you about our Latin program.

The letter:

From the College Board, June 10, 2009:

Dear Latin Educator:

Over the past year, the College Board has been working to establish criteria for revising the AP® Latin program so that it will provide an appropriate capstone experience for secondary school Latin students and support credit and placement policies for Latin at colleges and universities.

With the goal of identifying the desired knowledge, skills, and abilities that AP Latin students should possess at the culmination of their AP course experience, the College Board convened the first national AP Latin Faculty Colloquium in October 2008. The faculty members who attended the colloquium represented 49 of the colleges and universities that receive the greatest numbers of AP Latin Exam scores. To further help define the future of the AP Latin program, we conducted two surveys: the first in November 2008 with those faculty members who participated in the Colloquium, and a second in February 2009 with authorized AP Latin teachers. We are happy to share with you now the results of these efforts. (Note: to see results from both surveys visit AP Latin Survey Results online.)

From the survey of AP Latin Faculty Colloquium participants, we were able to determine that, in the future, the AP Latin course should have a multi-author syllabus that combines poetry and prose readings. One hundred percent of respondents indicated that their institutions would provide some type of course credit and/or advanced placement for such a course. These college faculty also recognized Vergil as the highest priority of all potential authors to include in the course, but they recommended significantly reducing the number of lines from the Aeneid currently required so that prose readings could be added and more emphasis placed on students understanding a specified list of grammatical terminology. Respondents identified Caesar and Cicero as the most appropriate prose authors for the course.

From the survey of authorized AP Latin teachers, we were able to identify several points of agreement with the results of the AP Latin Faculty Colloquium survey. Respondents supported keeping Vergil, and indicated that from all potential authors listed, they would need the least amount of additional professional development to teach Vergil. They also agreed that understanding a specified list of grammatical terminology is extremely or very important (70%) in preparing AP students for subsequent college course work in Latin. Among the prose authors listed in the survey, Caesar was identified as the author that would require the least amount of time and additional professional development for teachers to feel prepared to teach a new AP Latin course.

Using these findings, the AP Latin Development Committee met in late March 2009 to make some preliminary determinations about a future AP Latin course and exam, and have proposed the following:

Revise the future AP Latin course to be a two-author course that contains poetry and prose readings.

Retain Vergil, but reduce significantly the number of lines of the Aeneid currently required in the AP Latin: Vergil syllabus.

The prose author will be Caesar.

AP teachers should bear in mind that it will take three to four years to develop and launch any revisions to the AP Latin course and exam. This means that for May 2010 and May 2011, and probably May 2012 as well, the current AP Latin: Vergil course and exam will remain in place without modifications.

The Development Committee will meet in fall 2009 to determine the specific texts, passages, grammatical terms, and figures of speech to be included in the course. Future work includes developing and pretesting exam items. By late 2009 the College Board should be in a position to announce further details about the new course and exam, as well as offer a timeline for implementing the changes. All changes will be accompanied by appropriate support for AP Latin teachers as they prepare to teach different works and consider effective approaches to designing instruction for the new course.

The College Board is extremely grateful for the valuable feedback provided by Latin educators concerning the AP Latin program. Best wishes to all for an enjoyable and productive summer and much continued success in the future.

The Tony Awards are this weekend.  As someone who has published on both ancient Greek theater and American musicals, this is one of my favorite weekends of the year.  It was a great year on Broadway, especially among the plays.  An astounding 22 plays opened on Broadway this year, seven new plays and 15 revivals.  Only one of those plays had a strong classical connection: Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms, which starred Brian Dennehy.  O’Neill was deeply interested in the psychology of Greek tragedy.  Elms is closely based on Euripides’ Hippolytus. There was also this year a significant off-Broadway production called An Oresteia.  It was translated by poet and classicist Ann Carson.  Instead of simply translating all three of Aeschylus’s plays that make up his Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides), Carson uniquely covered the same story with a play from each of the major tragedians: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Orestes.

So I thought it might be interesting to write a post on significant past productions of classical plays on Broadway.  I’ll limit myself to the plays actually written by ancient playwrights, rather than classically themed plays like Desire under the Elms, Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses (based on Ovid) or Stephen Sondheim and Larry Gelbart’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (based on Plautus).  So below is a list of classical plays that have received or been nominated for major Tony awards.

1948:  Judith Anderson (Euripides’ Medea), Best Actress winner
1982:  Euripides’ Medea, Best Revival nominee
1982:  Zoe Caldwell (Euripides’ Medea), Best Actress winner
1982:  Judith Anderson (Euripides’ Medea), Best Featured Actress nominee (playing the Nurse)
1994:  Euripides’ Medea, Best Revival nominee
1994:  Diana Rigg (Euripides’ Medea), Best Actress winner
1999:  Euripides’ Electra, Best Revival nominee
1999:  Zoe Wanamaker (Euripides’ Electra), Best Actress nominee
1999:  Claire Bloom (Euripides’ Electra), Best Featured Actress nominee
2003:  Fiona Shaw (Euripides’ Medea), Best Actress nominee
2003:  Deborah Warner (Euripides’ Medea), Best Director nominee

One has to note the great irony that, in his lifetime, Euripides hardly won any awards for his plays.  Medea itself placed third (out of three) at the City Dionysia of 431 B.C. behind Euphorion and Sophocles.  (We don’t know which plays of theirs were produced that year.)  Yet neither Sophocles nor Aeschylus—nor Aristophanes nor Plautus nor Terence nor Seneca—has ever had a play even nominated for a Tony.

Sam Worthington as Perseus

MTV.com has a copy of the first released image from the forthcoming remake of Clash of the Titans.  It shows Sam Worthington, the Australian actor now appearing in Terminator Salvation, as Perseus, the Greek hero best known for slaying Medusa.  (MTV suggests that it is Medusa’s hand in the foreground, but I doubt it.  Perseus is looking right at the person.  Medusa had the power to turn to stone anyone who looked at her.)  Clash of the Titans, directed by Louis Leterrier, who directed last year’s The Incredible Hulk, is scheduled for release in 2010, according to IMDB.  To judge from the picture, the film will look much more like Troy or even 300 than the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, directed by Desmond Davis and starring Laurence Olivier as Zeus.  (If you want to see Olivier’s Zeus, check out our current class offerings webpage.)  This time, Liam Neeson will take up Zeus’s thunderbolts and Ralph Fiennes plays his brother Hades.

It has been a great decade for Classics-inspired films, starting with Gladiator.  Clash of the Titans isn’t the only one on the horizon, though.  I’ve also heard rumors that Brad Pitt will produce and star in a new version of the Odyssey, which will supposedly get a sci-fi treatment.  Odysseus in outer space?  Could be.

That award-winning political news outlet, The Onion, is reporting that Hercules, son of Zeus and Alcmene, is a candidate for City Council in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Their reporter writes, “Stating that he had not yet fulfilled the labors set forth by Eurystheus to the satisfaction of the Mycenaean king, mythic hero Hercules announced Monday that for the 35th time in 3,000 years he will run for Greensboro City Council.”

More here.

This post is the second in a series about what research projects ECU Classics faculty have underway this summer.

Although he is busy this summer teaching all four sections of lowel-level Latin for the Classics program, Dr. John Stevens also has an exciting research project underway.  He provided Athena’s Owl with the following description:

“I am at work on a book which demonstrates that Vergil’s Aeneid follows the plan of Plato’s Republic, scene by scene.  The reason for Vergil’s interest in Republic is that Plato was trying to explain the cause of his city’s fall from democracy to tyranny in war.  The cause of Athens’ fall was not merely the Peloponnesian War, but a disorder in the soul which made them willing to listen to Alcibiades and other men of unjust ambition.  But it was the restored democracy that put Socrates to death.  That is, even when the thirty tyrants were deposed, tyranny remained a problem in Athens.  Personal virtue, self-control and esp. the self-knowledge of those, like Glaucon, who should not seek political power, that is, living in reality rather than in delusion, are key to Plato’s solution to the problem of educating Athens in justice.

“Vergil faced a similar situation in that the Roman republic, through nearly a century of civil war, had become so corrupt that it was incapable of self-governance.  Vergil had to explain why Augustus was not a tyrant (the chief pre-occupation of the emperor’s autobiographical Res Gestae), and why men of ambition, like Antony, should no longer seek to rule Rome, but should, instead, yield to one man.  His solution drew on certain of Plato’s paradoxes: that the real tyrant is the man who seeks to satisfy his own desires (the thief), rather than to serve the city (like a shepherd – philosopher) which inhabits a cave-like existence of passions and false appearances; that we are responsible for the fate of our own lives and cities, and that we must interpret carefully and examine ‘what lies beneath’ before choosing to act (Aeneas is like Odysseus in Myth of Er); and that virtue is not something anyone is born with or synonymous with common sense, but is rather the product of maturation (like Glaucon, Aeneas is shown learning and we, the readers, are expected to advance in learning along with both).”