Athena's Owl

Archive for August, 2009

Prof. Tricia Wilson-Okamura passes along the news that the Ancient Greek Reading Group will continue this year.  If you’re not familiar with it, this is a reading group for all those interested in reading ancient Greek literature in the original language.  Anyone who has completed one year of Greek is welcome to attend.  Past readings have ranged from Homer’s Odyssey and Herodotus’s Histories to the New Testament Gospels.  This semester, the group is turning to two second century A.D. writers: a non-scriptural early Christian (Polycarp) and then an ancient traveloguist (Pausanias).  Prof. Wilson-Okamura writes:

We’ll be having our inaugural meeting for the Ancient Greek Reading Group next Wednesday, September 2, 2009, and readings are now available on the desk in the entry of the Foreign Languages offices (Bate 3324, to the left of the 3rd floor elevators, as you face them).  I’ll also bring a few to the meeting to distribute.

This semester, we’ll be beginning with Polycarp, and ending up with selections from Pausanias I. If you are not on campus regularly and would like one posted to you, send me your address and I will do so.  If you would like to practice sight-reading and meet with other Classicists, you are most welcome to join us.  Also, if you know of anyone who might be interested in joining, please pass this message along.

Ancient Greek Reading Group
Wednesday, September 2nd, 5:00 P.M.
Marathon Restaurant
706 S. Evans St.

Archaeologists in Germany recently announced a discovery dating from the beginnings of the Roman Empire.  There are several pieces, most notably a life-sized horse’s head and a man’s shoe, from an equine state of the Emperor Augustus (23 B.C. – A.D. 14).  The artifacts were found in a stream near the town of Gießen, north of Frankfurt.  They are especially significant because the Romans never fully controlled this region of northern Europe, and so archaeological finds are relatively rare.  For the full story, follow this link, and be sure to click on the link for additional photographs and the fragments.

Athena’s Owl extends a warm welcome to all our students, returning and incoming.  The Classics Program is looking forward to an exciting year.  We have a full lineup of exciting classes this fall, and we’ll announce our spring classes in the coming weeks.  We expect to have a visiting scholar come in for a lecture sometime this semester.  And we are already looking forward to our production of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, March 25–27.   (If you’ve not already subscribed to this blog, please do so to keep up to date with all events, including Lysistrata auditions.  Just type your e-mail address in the Subscribe box in the right margin.)

If you’d like the chance to reconnect with old friends and make new friends, please join us for an informal lunch at Mike’s Deli, across 10th Street from the Bate Building, at 1:00 on Friday, August 28.  All are welcome.

Classes that start today, Tuesday, August 25, include: Anthropology 3113, Archaeology of the Old Testament World, with Dr. Laura Mazow; Classics 2500, Greek Tragedy, with Mr. Michael Teske; Classics 3460, Classical Mythology, with Mr. Teske; and Greek 3001, Homer and Hesiod, with Dr. John Given.  Tomorrow’s schedule will kick off most of our language classes: Latin 1001 with Dr. John Stevens; Latin 1003 with Ms. Tricia Wilson-Okamura; and Greek 1001 and 1003 with Dr. Given.  It will also see the debuts of Classics 2000 (Introduction to Classics) with Dr. Frank Romer; Classics 1300, Greek and Latin for Vocabulary Building, with Mr. Teske; Classics 2230, Roman Literature, with Dr. Stevens; and English 3600, Homer to Dante, with Dr. David Wilson-Okamura.

Have a good semester!

Dr. Marylaura Papalas

As we begin the 2009-2010 academic year, the ECU Program in Classical Studies is pleased to welcome Dr. Marylaura Papalas as a new member of the program faculty.  Dr. Papalas has been at East Carolina for two years, and is a member of the French section of the ECU Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.  After completing her undergraduate work at UNC-Chapel Hill, Dr. Papalas took two degrees from the Ohio State University: a Ph.D. in French Literature and an M.A. in Modern Greek Literature.  In both languages she has studied surrealist and avant garde literature.  She has published an article entitled, “Nicolas Calas’ Surrealism: Liberating the National Greek Identity”.  The Classics Program has frequently used special events to remind our students of the continuity of culture from ancient to modern Greece, including most recently Dr. Peter Green’s staging of the Yannis Ritsos Festival last spring.  We look forward to having Dr. Papalas’s keen insights into Greek culture as part of our program.

In addition to Dr. Papalas’s arrival, the Classics program is proud to announce that three of our faculty begin the new year with promotions.  Drs. Megan Perry (Anthropology) and John Given (Foreign Languages & Literatures) have moved from assistant professors to associate professors with tenure.  Dr. Laura Mazow (Anthropology) joins the ranks of the tenure-track faculty as an assistant professor.

We’re in our last full week before ECU classes begin on Tuesday, August 25, 2009.  Athena’s Owl wishes all students and faculty a happy last few days of summer.  (And Dr. Given reminds his Greek students to review your vocabulary and morphology before the semester begins!)

The fall Classics schedule will be an exciting one.  If students are still looking for a class or two, you can see all your options here.  Classics 1300 (Greek & Latin Roots in English), Classics 2000 (Introduction to Classics), Classics 2230 (Roman Literature in Translation) and English 3600 (Homer to Dante) are all full, but you can still find some available seats in Classics 2500 (Greek Tragedy), Classics 3460 (Mythology), Anthropology 3113 (Archaeology of the Old Testament World) as well as the Greek and Latin language classes.  If any incoming students have had Latin or Greek in high school, especially if you passed the AP Latin exam, please contact Dr. Given immediately so we can get you placed into the right level of your language.

Meanwhile, to get you ready for your plunge back into the world of Humanities education, I invite you to read this article from Inside Higher Education, called “Iphigenia and the iPhone,” about the place of the humanities in an America that so highly values innovation and entrepreneurship.  Never doubt that you can change the world with the critical thinking skills and unique, complex perspectives provided by the humanities!

Regular readers of this blog know the ongoing controversy regarding the name of the modern nation of Macedonia, which once formed part of Yugoslavia.  Earlier this summer, a group of Classics scholars from the U.S. and around the world wrote a letter to President Obama, asking him to use the weight of American diplomacy to protect the legacy of the most famous ancient Macedonian, Alexander the Great, from what the letter writers considered to be Slavic interlopers on the Macedonian name.  In July, Prof. Andreas Willi of Oxford University wrote a reply arguing for the legitimacy of the use of the name Macedonia by the nation’s current residents.  Now, Prof. Stephen Miller, lead author of the original letter to President Obama, has written a response to Prof. Willi’s letter.  In the interest of bringing the debate to our readers at East Carolina University and elsewhere, Athena’s Owl is providing a link to Prof. Miller’s new letter.  It is a continuing demonstration of the salience of the ancient world to modern life.

I’m currently reviewing a new translation of Sophocles’ “Theban Plays” (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone).  The plays are very familiar to me.  I’ve read them all repeatedly in Greek and English.  I’ve even played Oedipus in a bizarrely funny production for high school students.  So I know these plays very well.

Studying a new translation always presents the opportunity for learning something new.  I’ll save my comments about the translation for my published review.  I wanted to write here, however, about something I noticed in Oedipus the King, something I have not noticed others comment on, but which isn’t really substantial enough for publication.

It is striking how often Sophocles uses the word orthos (”straight”) and its cognates in the play.  (I noticed it because the translation never renders it literally.  It’s been interesting just to watch the wide semantic field the word covers.)  Orthos and its cognates are used a total of 17 times.  The words are common enough in Athenian tragedy, but that seems like a lot for a single play.  Sophocles uses it five times in the opening scene alone, suggesting that the word is programmatic for the whole play.  In this scene, a priest tells Oedipus of the plague the city is suffering, which stands in contrast to the prosperity Oedipus brought when he became king.  The priest praises Oedipus for “setting our lives straight” (line 39) and “standing us up straight” (50), and urges him to “straighten up the city” (46 and again 51).  Creon too expresses a wish that circumstances will improve and “turn out on the straight path.”  “Straightness” is repeatedly connected to the prosperity and safety of the city.  But one of the well-known themes of the play is how it connects the prosperity of the city with the prosperity of its king.  As the captain of the ship of state sails, so sails the state.  The vocabulary of “straightness” follows this pattern.  Thus, later, the seer Tiresias predicts that Oedipus will go into exile “when you see straight” (419).  Creon uses it twice in the same line: He asks the Chorus whether Oedipus is behaving “from straight eyes and from a straight mind” (528), i.e. rationally.  And Creon tells Oedipus to his face that he is “not thinking straight” (550).

You get the idea.  I won’t quote all 17 instances.  It’s clear that Sophocles sets up an image where the goodness of the state and of the individual is measured by the straightness of the path being followed or the straightness of the state/individual as it/he/she stands tall.  The pay-off for this imagery comes at the moment when Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother-and-wife, mentions that Laius, Oedipus’s father, was killed at the place where three roads meet.  Oedipus realizes for the first time that he may be the murderer of Laius (although he does not yet know that Laius was his father).  He says, “My wife, how a wandering of the soul and a swaying of the mind holds me as I was just listening to you” (726-727).  Sophocles marks the moment by knocking Oedipus off the straight and narrow and causing him to “wander” and “sway” through the rest of the play until he finally learns the truth of who he is.

This is a quick post about the newest way to learn about the ECU Classics Program.  We’re now on Twitter.  Search for “ECUClassicsProf” (or search my name: John Given).  Tweets will include a daily Latin or Greek word or ancient world factoid, and will carry news of the ECU Classics Program that is too ephemeral for a blog post.  Follow along!