Athena's Owl

Archive for July, 2009

The 2010 Classics Play, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in a new translation by Dr. Peter Green and directed by Dr. John Given, will take place Thursday, Friday and Saturday, March 25-27 at 8:00 p.m. in the ECU Mendenhall Student Center.  Performances will be free and open to the public.

Information on auditions will follow later in the school year, but anyone interested in participating in the cast or the crew should contact Dr. Given (givenj@ecu.edu) at his or her earliest convenience.  Participation is not limited to students in the Classics program; all ECU students are welcome.

Please be aware that this play contains adult language and situations.  It may not be suitable for children.

One good way for a student (or even an experienced scholar) to get to know what is going on in an academic field is to look at lists of scholarly citations.  Such lists tend to be most telling in scientific fields, where scholars build on each other’s work much more rapidly.  In the humanities, we tend to have a longer view of the history of scholarship, intellectual trends, and so forth.  In the sciences, there is not much point is responding to someone’s work from 50 years ago; because of the nature of the humanities, those 50 year old—or 250 year old—ideas may still be worth thinking about.

That said, it is still important to see which scholarly works are being cited by other scholars.  The (London) Times Higher Education has published a list of the Classical Studies journal articles most often cited over the past decade.  A number of things on the list surprise me.  It is very heavily weighted toward the Greek side of the field, with only two of the ten articles devoted exclusively to Roman topics.  Not too surprisingly but fairly disappointing is that only one of the articles deals with material culture or archaeology, and that article is about modern collections of ancient artificats.  This is a very hot topic today, as prominent museums around the world and especially in the U.K. and the U.S. have been forced to examine their collection methods of the present and the past.  But I was still surprised that this was the only archaeological article.  Classics is still a field dominated by texts.  I was also surprised that a rather specialized linguistics article was the third most cited journal article of the past decade.  Apparently, many people have been reading about Greek nouns like basileus (king).

But the single biggest surprise was that a whopping 50% of the articles were devoted to a single field: Athenian drama, my own specialty.  (Alas, my work does not appear on the list.)  There is one article on comedy and four on tragedy.  These five prove clearly that Classics takes a long time to sort out answers to questions, but also suggest that there is no clear direction today in which the subfield of Athenian drama and the broader field of Classical Studies are moving.  The article on Sophocles by C. W. Willink is one of a long line of his articles studying the manuscript problems of the tragedians.  Willink does excellent work, and I’m glad (albeit again surprised) that such a technical article would be widely cited.  The other four drama articles are situated within controversies about the place of tragedy and comedy in Athenian society.  Certainly advances have been made, but the questions asked and the methods used by these articles continue work work begun 20 or 25 years ago, most notably in a collection of essays published as Nothing to Do with Dionysus? (Princeton Univ. Press; edited by J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, 1990).  One of the chapters in that book, Simon Goldhill’s “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology” has been singularly influential in drama studies.  All four of the tragedy articles—including Goldhill’s own new essay—can be seen as directly related to Goldhill’s 1990 essay, and even Ian Ruffell’s essay on Cratinus (one of the best pieces I’ve read in the past decade) follows the general methodology pioneered by Goldhill, Mark Griffith, Froma Zeitlin and others.  It’s a methodology broadly called New Historicism, a theoretically sophisticated positioning of literary texts within a culture by eschewing attribution of grand truths to the texts and instead recognizing that literary meaning is contingent upon cultural norms, historical circumstances and non-literary texts.  Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard scholar of Shakespeare studies, is usually said to have developed the method in the 1980s.  To be sure, there are other trends even within the subfield of Athenian drama.  For example, it is unfortunate that the important work on the performance of tragedy and comedy, both ancient performance itself and modern performance of ancient plays, is not being more widely read and cited.  (Myself, to brag a bit, I was happy to see that my name appears twice in the bibliography of the 2007 book Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, edited by Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley.)

So where is the field of Classical Studies today?  I would say and I have heard several others say that we just don’t know where we are headed right now.  The field seems very fragmented both in terms of narrow specializations and in terms of methodological approach.  Clearly, we still have a lot to explore on some questions that have been around for a while and we still find merit in the methods we have been using for a while now.  (Remember, though, that Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the subject of much of this research, was first performed 2,467 years ago.  The questions and methods are not that old!)  Although there are exceptions, Classics has generally not found great value in more recent trends in the other humanities fields.  Post-colonialism, for example, has been a very important means for drawing attention to minority voices around the world and for examining the silencing of those voices in majority cultures.  There have been some post-colonialist studies in Classics, but not many.  To be sure, the Greeks and Romans did plenty of silencing of others within and outside of their own cultures, but the surviving evidence little allows for us to recover those voices. (If anything, post-colonial ways of thinking have helped us to sort out questions about how museums collect their treasures.)

This classicist at least find it heartening that traditional fields like textual criticism and linguistics are still important.  Certainly all the questions in those subfields have not been answered.  New understandings of things like the musical design of a Sophoclean play will influence study of his lyrics in the manuscript tradition; new methods in linguistics like functional grammar are only beginning to help us come to grips with phenomena like word order in Latin and Greek.  (Hey, the words aren’t just thrown together randomly, to be sorted out and put together like a jigsaw puzzle!  There are actual linguistic reasons for where a word appears in a sentence!)

In the end, Classical Studies’ fragmentation, although it can be frustrating to the student and young professor, is, I think, its strength.  We remain, as we always have, a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring many different questions with many complementary methodologies.

This is an update to my first post about the controversy surrounding the name of the Republic of Macedonia.  Prof. Stephen Miller, one of the signatories of the letter to President Obama, has called my attention to a second letter sent to Mr. Obama.  The signatories there clarify that they are not seeking the revocation of the United States’ recognition of the Republic of Macedonia, as numerous readers (including myself) of the original letter assumed.  “We do ask,” they write, “that the weight of US diplomacy be used to stop the theft of history and historic figures, starting with Alexander the Great.”  You can read this updated letter here.  The letter also notes that the letters and website have been “translated into FYROM Slavic, Greek, and German. French and Italian are to be added soon.”  FYROM, to clarify, is “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” the name under which the United Nations still recognizes the country.

Prof. Miller also tells me that he is writing a response to Prof. Willi’s letter.  When that is published, I will be sure to include a link here.

The Associated Press is reporting the recent discovery of five sunken Roman ships deep in the waters off of western Italy.  The depth of the ships has insulated them from water currents as well as treasure hunters.  They are preserved almost wholly intact with their cargo still on board.

The ships are near the island of Ventotene, off the central western coast between Rome and Naples.  Wikipedia’s map gives its location—as well as some juicy details about the history of the island as a place of exile for some notorious Roman women.

In our continuing series on faculty summer research projects, ECU scholar David Scott Wilson-Okamura from the Department of English writes about his book Virgil in the Renaissance, forthcoming in 2010 from Cambridge University Press:

I deliberately did not start with a chapter about what Virgil really means. Too many books on the reception of classical authors have been spoilt by tracing the scholar’s preferred explanation of the text through the ages, until it becomes revealed in its full glory by the scholar himself, his teacher, or his school. A sure symptom is when scholars praise authors in the Renaissance for being ahead of their time. In my view, it is usually better not to worry overmuch about separating the wheat from the tares, the progressive ideas about Virgil from the dead ends of literary scholarship. Once we start, it is too easy to dismiss an idea, just because it doesn’t appeal to us or conform with our expectations. The important thing, for understanding poetry based on Virgil, is the idea of Virgil in the mind of the poet imitating him: not what Virgil meant, necessarily, but what he seemed to mean.

There are many articles and books on Renaissance epic which assume that the meaning of Virgil’s text is self-evident and stable through time: that of course Ariosto, because he is intelligent, would have understood Virgil in the same, intelligent way that we do. But when we start reading Virgil (or Ovid, for that matter) in the editions that Ariosto might have owned, and with the commentaries that he probably would have consulted, we find that some of the interpretations which, today, we take for granted have not, in fact, always been obvious.

To be sure, just because it wasn’t part of the scholarly tradition yet doesn’t mean an interpretation was “unthinkable” by Ariosto. As Richard Strier argues, “We must strive to see traditional works against the backdrop of their traditions, not as merging indistinguishably into them.” Craig Kallendorf’s recent book The Other Virgil gives numerous examples of scholars and especially poets who broke ranks with their contemporaries and read Virgil in ways that seem to prefigure our own.

What use, then, is researching the traditional interpretations if they weren’t binding on poets? There is some value, first, in reminding ourselves that what seems, in our own limited circles—whether of conversation, colleagues, scholarship, or merely century—to be obvious, permanent, and unarguable is actually contingent, temporary, and hypothetical. By loosening our grip on the obvious, we become receptive to, capable of, alternatives.

What the old commentaries are really good for, I have concluded, is not excluding “unthinkable” readings so much as retrieving the “unguessables”: interpretations so odd they would never have occurred to most of us in a hundred years of concentrated cerebration. Sometimes it’s the odd interpretation that turns out to have been influential.

What role does history play in the naming of a country?  What are the political consequences of choosing a country’s name?  Does a country have the absolute sovereignty to determine its own name?

These are pressing questions in southeastern Europe.  One of the former constituents of Yugoslavia gained independence from that nation as it broke apart in 1991, named Skopje its capital, and declared itself the Republic of Macedonia.  Largely because of objections from Greece, the United Nations recognized—and still recognizes—this nation only under the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.  Depending on who prints a map, it is usually labeled as either Macedonia or F.Y.R.O.M.   The United States recognized the nation as the Republic of Macedonia in 2004.  The dispute over the country’s name has had serious ramifications.  For example, NATO has refused to invite it to join the treaty organization until the dispute is resolved.

The dispute centers on the fact that a region of northern Greece also claims the name Macedonia and that this area has very strong historical ties to the name.  For the region in Greece was the birthplace of Alexander the Great, the conqueror who made Greek the lingua franca of most of southeastern Europe, southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa in the fourth century B.C.  The modern nation’s usage of the name Macedonia, many Greeks believe, amounts to a theft of ancient Greek history.  On the other hand, the current republic has its own historical claim to the name, since the Roman province of Macedonia included most of the modern Republic.

I write about this today because the controversy has spilled over from the halls of European politics into the halls of American and European academia.  Classical scholars are debating the facts of ancient history, the role history should play in political debates, and the nature of ethnic and national identities, and they are using their expertise to try to influence the political debate.  A group of over 300 academics has written a letter to President Obama asking him to reverse President Bush’s recognition of the Republic of Macedonia.  The group includes some of the most prominent names among classical scholars, including ECU’s own Prof. Tony Papalas.  Just yesterday, however, a respected scholar at Oxford, Andreas Willi, published an open letter in Classical Journal refuting the arguments of the letter to Obama.

I want to emphasize that (although I do have an opinion on the matter) I am not writing as an advocate but in a journalistic vein to bring to your attention the importance that history and Classics have in the world.  Neither this blog nor the ECU Classics program is taking a stand on the matter.  Rather, I invite you to read the letter to President Obama and Prof. Willi’s response for yourself (to access the Willi letter, follow the link and click on the title “Whose is Macedonia, Whose is Alexander?”).  Please use the comments section to discuss the matter.  Be aware, though, that the comments are moderated and will take some time to appear.

I happily and shamelessly bring to you a recent blog post by Mary Beard, an eminent Cambridge classical archaeologist and witty commentator for the Times of London.  She reports that London Underground drivers have started inserting famous literary lines into their on-board announcements (e.g., “Hell is others”).  And so she scrounged up some famous Latin lines appropriate for the Undeground experience.  I suggest that, the next time you’re in an American city with a crowded subway (New York, Philadelphia, Boston… take your pick), start muttering these to your sardined neighbors.

[The references to "Boris", but the way, are to Boris Johnson, the current mayor of London, who studied Classics at Balliol College, Oxford University]

Peter Jones, another Classicist, writing in The Spectator, also came up with a few appropriate aphorisms for the morning and evening commute: here.   But on to Professor Beard’s:

1. “perfer et obdura! dolor hic tibi proderit olim” — or “Be patient and put up with it; one day this pain will pay dividends”. That’s Ovid (Amores III, XIa) reflecting on the insults of his mistress — but fits well enough for the rush hour commute.

2 “quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra” — or “How long Catiline will you abuse our patience?”. The famous first line of Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, attacking the would-be revolutionary (or innocent stooge), Catiline. But you can substitute any adversary for Catiline.. ‘quousque tandem abutere, Boris, patientia nostra?”

3. “arma virumque cano” — or “Arms and the man I sing”. The most famous line in the whole of Latin poetry, the first line of the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Though Virgil didn’t exactly mean the arms of the man digging into your side, as you’re stuck in the tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

4. “amantium irae amoris integratio est” — or “Lovers’ quarrels are the renewal of love” (that’s from Terence’s comedy, The Woman of Andros, 555). Something to cheer you up after a bad night.

5. “medio tutissimus ibis” — or “You’ll go safest in the middle”, from Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 137. Advice to Phaethon, who was about — disastrously — to drive the chariot of the sun. Probably not much better advice on the underground.

6. “audacibus annue coeptis” — or “Look with favour on a bold start” (as in Virgil, Georgics 1, 40). You could translate as — make for the tube door first, and dont worry about the elder;y, disabled or women with buggies.

7. “nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanus” — or “No-one dances sober, unless maybe he’s mad” (Cicero, Pro Murena 6, 13). More memories of last night.

8. “nil desperandum” — or “don’t despair about anything” (Horace, Odes I, 7, 27). Self explanatory for the rush hour journey , but hard advice to follow.

9. Better perhaps would be “nunc est bibendum” — or “Now is the time to drink” (Horace, Odes I, 37, 1 – in the original celebrating the death of Cleopatra).

10. “capax imperii nisi imperavisset” — or “capable of ruling if he hadn’t ruled ” (or roughly, “he had a great future behind him”). This is what Tacitus had to say of Galba after the event. Too soon to tell if that’s true of Boris.

The BBC recently reported the launch of a new website featuring digitized images of the oldest complete manuscript of the New Testament.  It’s the Codex Sinaiticus Project.  The Codex is a fourth-century manuscript that contains the entire New Testament, a couple of non-canonical early Christian writings and much of the Septuagint and Apocrypha.  (The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures; the Septuagint are Jewish writings now considered canonical by some Christian denominations, but non-canonical by others.)

The Codex is now divided among four different universities around the world.  The webpage project brings all the pieces together into the same virtual space.

I’ve been looking at some of the images on the website.  (Select a book from the drop-down menu at the top-right corner of the page.  This seems to work better than the “See the Manuscript” link.)  The images are crystal clear.  As is true of all ancient manuscripts, the text is written in all capitals with no spaces between the words and no accents or breathing marks.  To help the reader, there is a transcription of the Greek on each page, which divides the text into the traditional chapters and verses, along with an English translation.

So if you go to the Book of John, you’ll find at the top of the first page: ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ (”According to John”), along with John’s famous first words: ΕΝΑΡΧΗΗΝΟΛΟΓΟΣ.  Adding spaces: ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ΗΝ Ο ΛΟΓΟΣ “In the beginning was the word.”  (The sigma in the manuscript actually looks like a C.  That’s a “lunate” sigma, the standard way sigmas are written in manuscripts.  But I can’t seem to get a lunate sigma into this post.)

Take some time to explore the Codex.  Notice how some words are abbreviated.  In some places, a scribe has written in a correction between lines.  Imagine trying to establish the definitive word of God when the scribes differed with regard to which was the correct reading of a sentence!

Our latest report on summer research comes from Dr. Megan Perry.  Dr. Perry writes from the Middle East:

Umayyad Mosque

“I am in Amman, Jordan as a CAORC (Council of American Overseas Research Centers) Senior Fellow at the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR).  I am using this time to complete the publication of the 1994-2002 ACOR-sponsored excavations at the site of Petra, Jordan.  My co-author, Patricia M. Bikai (director of the excavation for this first phase of the project) lives in Jordan during the summer, so being in residence here allows me to meet with her on a regular basis.  I also am making use of the fantastic library at ACOR, one of the most complete in the Middle East (in terms of archaeological resources). And of course the other resources provided by ACOR (laundry, room cleaning, meals) help as well!

Palmyra, a city dating primarily to the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D.

“I have taken the time to travel while I’ve been here.  I have worked in Jordan for 17 years, but there are still new things to see and new people with whom I can share the experience.  The visit of a friend from the U.S. persuaded me to leave my office at ACOR and first spend 6 days in Syria.  We visited the amazing 2nd – 3rd century site of Palmyra (from where Queen Zenobia constantly plotted against the Roman Empire) and Crac des Chevaliers, one of the best-preserved Crusader castles in the Near East.  This one was primarily controlled by the Knights Hospitaller, but was finally taken by the Sultan Baibars in 1271.  Of course, while in Damascus, we also visited the amazing Umayyad mosque, built in the 8th century.

Bilingual Greek & Palmyrene inscription at Palmyra

“After returning from Syria, we viewed the Roman Army Chariot Experience (RACE) in the hippodrome at the ancient Decapolis city of Jerash in northern Jordan. We then traveled to Petra, the capital of the Nabataeans (and apparently featured in the new Transformers movie).  The Nabataean

Crac des Chevaliers

kingdom was taken over by the Romans in 106 A.D., and the city received the title of “Petra Hadriana” during Emperor Hadrian’s 129/130 A.D. visit.  The city was occupied until the 6th-7th century A.D. – the primary evidence that we have of this period are the amazing carbonized Greek papyri from in the cathedral at Petra, studied by Dr. Traianos Gagos of the University of Michigan – who gave a lecture on them at ECU in Fall of 2007 and was one of Dr. Given’s former professors.

Dr. Perry and the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock

“On to Jerusalem, where we explored the Old City and visited the Western Wall of the 2nd Temple.  Our timings unfortunately prevented us from visiting the Haram esh-Sharif, the Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount.  We drove down to Qumran to see where the Dead Sea scrolls were found, and took a dip in the Dead Sea.  Then we went up to the Sea of Galilee to visit sites important in early Christianity – Tiberias, Nazareth, Caperneum,

Flame trees at the Mount of the Beautitudes, where Jesus supposedly held his sermon on the mount. It was a very beautiful spot.

Mount of the Beautitudes, and Banias (Caesarea Philippi).  We also drove around the Golan Heights, which still contains vivid evidence of the 1973 war between Israel and Syria that resulted in the Golan coming under Israeli control – including tanks, battle memorials, and bombed-out Syrian villages.

The iconic view of the treasury at Petra

“My remaining time in Amman will be spent finishing the Petra volume – working out the stratigraphic sequence and architectural phasing of the North Ridge (which extends from the 1st century A.D. to the present), writing up the importance of our findings within the historical and archaeological context of the region during the Classical period, and finding parallels to artifacts that we found in our excavations and exploring what they can tell us about these buildings and how they were used.  Archaeologists truly spend 10% of their time in the field & 90% in the library and lab! I plan on returning to Greenville on August 1, when I will get ready for classes and attend to other publications that I put aside for the summer. Hopefully I’ll have time leftover to work in the yard!

Chariot races at Jerash

Roman military formations at Jerash

The “testuda”, or “tortoise”

An abandoned Syrian village in the Golan

The Golan: a destroyed Syrian jeep

And now for something completely random.

One of the joys of the summer research season is that my intellectual life gets very eclectic.  I have been fortunate this summer that I began it by signing a book contract, for my Priscus project.  But I am keeping up an active reading agenda in other fields that interest me.  As I look at the pile of books atop the shelves next to me, it strikes me just how manifold those interests are.  Here’s what I’ve got:

Plato, Collected Dialogues.  That’s still there from last semester, when Dr. Stevens and I taught Classics 4000, the senior seminar, on Plato.  But I also have it handy since I’m working with a student this summer on reading Crito.

Otto Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns.  I just finished this book, which I read as background information for the Priscus project.  Published in 1971, it’s a far-ranging and highly speculative work about every aspect of Hunnic life and history.  Few of his conclusions can be trusted as fact, but it was still a very useful read just to know what evidence does (and does not) exist for the Huns.

2008 issue of Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA).  I recently read an excellent article by Marianne Hopman called “Revenge and Mythopoiesis in Euripides’ Medea.”  I was finishing up an article of my own about Medea, which is now under submission.  Hopman’s article wasn’t very relevant to my project, but I still learned a lot.  The issue also contains an article by my good friend Bradley Buszard (on Plutarch’s Lives), with whom I organized a panel last spring at the CAMWS (Classical Association of the Middle West and South) conference.  We had five great presentations on productions of ancient dramas on American university campuses.

2008 issue of the journal Text & Presentation, a comparative drama journal.  My article, “Constructions of Motherhood in Euripides’ Medea,” appears therein.  You should buy it and read it!  (No, I don’t get royalties.  Wait until my book comes out for that.)  Amazon says that there are only two left in stock!

N. J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy.  Published in 2007.  The topic sounds right up my alley.  I can’t wait to read it.

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge.  I also am eager to read this one.  Ober’s works are always thought-provoking and helpful to me.  The democratic theory of knowledge that he has developed in scattered form in earlier books and articles is similar to theories I attributed to Protagoras in my dissertation and that I used as my basis for reading Tragedy and Comedy.  This book (I think) brings together Ober’s work on the problem.  If I ever get around to publishing my reading of Protagoras, I’ll certainly need to cite this heavily.  I expect it will also influence my scholarship on drama.

M. L. West, Greek Metre.  Because no one who works on Greek poetry can ever let this out of arm’s reach.

Tom Stoppard, Collected Plays.  I’ve never read Stoppard before, but I’m falling in love with him.  I’ve read Arcadia and The Real Thing now.  Not as intellectually high-brow as I thought.  He really knows how to manipulate stage space, and to tell a story that is both accessible and challenging at the same time.

Sophocles, Theban Plays, translated by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff.  This is here because I’ve been asked to review a new translation of these plays.  It’s helpful to have an excellent comparandum.  The cover art is a remarkable choice: a photo of JFK, back to the camera, leaning over an Oval Office table.  So many possible interpretations, given the three plays (Oedipus the King, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus) that lay inside the covers.

Finally, The Essential Hesiod, by C. J. Rowe.  Because I’m teaching a class on Homer and Hesiod in the fall, and I need to figure out what I’m going to put on the syllabus.

What are you reading this summer?