Athena's Owl

Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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).”

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.