Classics in Contemporary Culture

Odyssey: Cartoonish?

In a post on the film Iron Man, Derek Fincham at the blog Illicit Cultural Properties argues that comics are the modern myths, and explores some of the cultural resonances involved:

...Godzilla is a product of Japanese unease in the 1950's following the dropping of the atomic bomb. Spider Man is the first superhero whose skin we can't see in his costume, because in the 1960s Stan Lee wanted to create a superhero for all races. It's hard not to see the struggle of World War II in Tolkien's work. Now, perhaps I'm just an aging fanboy whose read too much Joseph Campbell, but is the story of the Odyssey really that different from a comic book? The point, I think, is not to choose ancient myths over modern pop culture, but to see how the two inform each other. David Simon has openly acknowledged that the Wire is nothing more than Greek tragedy, save instead of gods and goddesses he substitutes in their place modern institutions like police departments, the media, and the school system. If you're paying attention, I think this nexus between Simon's depiction of the Baltimore drug trade with ancient tragedy can inform both our understanding of urban cities, and realize that many similar struggles existed thousands of years ago.

Now, maybe it's just me, but at least could ICP have done the Odyssey the service of comparing it to a "graphic novel" rather than a more lowly "comic book"...?

Department of Corrections

The paper of record needs to stick a post-it in one of its travel resources; actually, defacing the book with a hand-written note would seem to be justified.  Here's Iva Skoch:

One of my favorite corrections sections is in the Travel section of The New York Times. I bet nobody else reads it ,although it can be quite entertaining. This is my favorite correction of this week: "An article on April 20 about Rome at night misidentified the figure from mythology represented in the centerpiece sculpture of the Trevi Fountain. It is Oceanus, the Titan who the ancient Greeks believed ruled the watery elements - not Neptune, the Roman god of the sea."

That wouldn't be so bad, but this is what they included as an excuse: "The error has appeared for years in travel guides about Rome, is found extensively in Internet references, and has infiltrated at least five other articles in The Times since 1981."

Great. Some slacker once put a false piece of information in a guidebook and it's been picked up repeatedly in the last 27 years. You would think that the NY Times wouldn't rely on guidebooks for their fact-checking.

Only don't click on that Wikipedia link, because the entry identifies the figure as Neptune!

What does it matter, anyway?  Well...Neptune is just one of those Johnny-come-lately Olympians, whereas Oceanus is the more primordial and more philosophically amenable being...or so Nicola Salvi (the original designer of the Trevi Fountain) saw it.  In his explanation, which I'm getting from The Art Bulletin 38 (1956), 169-71, he says:

Oceanus, whose statue will be placed on the Fountain of Trevi should certainly be considered as belonging to the same series as the other ancient deities who, under the cloak of mysterious imagery, have always symbolized useful lessons in moral philosophy or have contained hidden explanations of natural phenomena. This god, according to those authors who have had occasion to speak of him, has never been the subject of fanciful legends, but has always been referred to in terms which denote a Power as superior to other Powers, as a universal Cause is superior to particular Causes. This clearly shows us that he was thought of by ancient philosophers as one of those prime, most powerful agents among natural phenomena, and was one of the original sources of an infinite number of products which depended on him.

In more specific terms he may be described thus. Oceanus has been represented at times as a figure traversing the seas on a chariot drawn by dolphins, preceded by Tritons, and followed by a numerous train of sea Nymphs. This image signifies that the visible and immense body of ocean waters are held together and constrained in the broad bosom of the Earth, and this water when it is in its assigned place we call the Sea. This Sea is, so to speak, the perpetual source which has the power to diffuse various parts of itself, symbolized by the Tritons and the sea Nymphs, who go forth to give necessary sustenance to living matter for the productivity and conservation of new forms of life, and this we can see. But after this function has been served, these parts return in a perpetual cycle to take on new spirit and a new strength from the whole, that is to say from the sea itself.

At other times Oceanus has been called the father of all things, and was believed to be the son of the Sky and of the Earth; in this role he is not the symbol of the powerful operative forces of water gathered together in the sea so much as the actual working manifestation of these powers, which appear as moisture; in this form water permeates all material things, and winding through the veins of Earth, even into the most minute recesses, reveals itself as the everlasting source of that infinite production which we see in Nature, which water also is capable of perpetuating in its productivity by its untiring ministrations.

Thus, in whatever way we choose to visualize Oceanus, it will always be true that the image must embody an impression of power which has no limit, and is not restricted in the material world by any bounds. It is completely free and always at work in even the smallest parts of the created Universe. Here it is brought and distributes itself to make useful those parts of Earth which give nutrition and birth to new forms. At the same time it quenches the excessive heat which would destroy this life. Thus water can be called the only everlasting source of continuous being.

[...and he goes on for a page or two after that, with the specifics...]

Pre-Med Classics

In an article on the various possibilities for prospective doctors at Stanford:

Other pre-meds have found themselves gravitating towards Classics, a traditional home for students who want to spend time with Plato and Catullus, for a kind of complexity different from that of organic chemistry.

“Classics has done wonders to complement my science classes,” said Classics major Nikita Vashi ‘09. “Not only does it have direct applications, for instance in that a lot of medical/scientific terminology has linguistic roots in Ancient Greek, but there are so many connections between the fields that, to this day, surprise me every time they pop up.”

Classics major Jiahui Lin ‘10, who had been pursuing a degree in Biomedical Engineering, also found a home working with the ancients and revisiting the Latin she had taken in high school.

“It sounds cheesy, but when I switched in I fell in love with it again,” Lin said.

“Plus at the Classics socials they have better food, and I’m a big foodie, so I definitely think it was a good decision,” she added.

Lavinia Revisited

Ursula K. Le Guin has rewritten the Aeneid from the perspective of...Lavinia (cf. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad), using a Vergilian narrative device - Lavinia is visited by the (future) shade of the poet himself.  "Oh Lavinia," he tells her, "You are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it."  From Laura Miller (Salon):

Lavinia makes for an unlikely heroine, which is just what Le Guin likes about her. From Mulan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sassy, kick-ass girls are preferred nowadays to circumspect homebodies like Virgil's Latin princess. There may even be a touch of self-reproach in Le Guin's choice of Lavinia as her main character, since the heroine of her 1971 novel, "The Tombs of Atuan," is a priestess named Tenar who rebels against a life entirely devoted to serving a pantheon of nameless, implacable gods. Lavinia, by contrast, embraces the ritual aspect of her designated role, all the humble and solemn daily sacrifices, the scattering of sacred salt, the tending of clan totems, and even her own fate, as a woman destined to have little choice in who her husband will be.

..."Lavinia" is also not a revisionist fiction in which a minor character from a famous book (Mr. Rochester's wife or Dr. Jekyll's maid, for example) finally gets to correct the official record. Le Guin clearly loves Virgil and the "essentially untranslatable" beauty of his verse, and so does her heroine, who gets a chance to hear the latter when the poet's shade appears to her during a pilgrimage to a sacred grove. Aware of her fictionality (all of the characters in the "Aeneid" are derived from old legends but are otherwise inventions of Virgil, although only Lavinia realizes this), she sees her own tale as the completion of her creator's work, a subject that (in this telling at least) he regretted not getting the chance to explore before his death. "I'm not sure of the nature of my existence," Lavinia explains. "As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all." Perhaps "the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them."

Karen Long (The Plain Dealer) likes it:

"Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war," Lavinia tells us. "She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure: not a bad balance."

This wry, original voice meditates the treachery, terror and warfare that preoccupy the last six books of "The Aeneid." Le Guin brings an almost anthropological preciseness to cobbling her alternative universe. She works hard over the maps, figuring where the rivers and hills met the poetic legend, how many miles her characters might actually have to walk.

Sam Munson (NYSun), however, finds it prosaic:

It seems clear that Ms. Le Guin harbored no epic ambitions for her book. Which may, indeed, have been her central problem: To contend with titans requires arrogance and outsize will. But Ms. Le Guin chose to examine the rich and troubled inner life of a wise-beyond-her-years girl confronted with her romantic and sexual destiny. Even in this small fragment of an epic, there's enormous potential — a spurned prince, a war, a forced marriage that fosters real love, an insane mother. But Ms. Le Guin makes almost nothing of this rich material, instead allowing over-ample time to Lavinia's flaccid introspections...[ouch!]

[Ah, now I see that once again, I'm late to the party:  the RogueClassicist has of course already linked to a couple of reviews.]

C(E)CC Conference

The RogueClassicist posted a notice of an upcoming (free!) conference which...if I were in London...I would definitely try to attend!  A one-day affair, on May 23: "Classical Empires in Contemporary Culture."  Here's the list of papers:

• ‘Reviving classical knowledge while writing about globalization’ - Richard Hingley, (University of Durham)
• ‘Writing empires: neo-liberalism and the ends of civilization’ - Richard Alston (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• ’Empire, States of Exception, and Iustitium. Augustus and Agamben' - Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• ‘The last Shah at Persepolis: The Iranian use of the Persian past 1960-2007’ - Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (University of Edinburgh)
• ‘Hollywood versus Ahmadinejad: conquering the east in the third-millennial western cinema’ - Edith Hall (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• ‘Xena versus the Romans: Anti-imperialism in /Xena Warrior Princess/’ - Amanda Potter (Open University)
• ‘Athens and America: Comparing Empires in /The New York Times/’ - Adam Goldwyn (City University of New York)
• ‘The decline and fall of the Roman empire and its place in American political discourse’ - Leslie Dodd (University of Glasgow)
• ‘Greeks and Persians all over again? The intellectualisation of imperial metaphors in contemporary politics’ - Naoise Mac Sweeney (University of Cambridge)

Tense Moments in the US House...And the Real Reason for the Fall of the Roman Empire

Oh, Language Log!  Always a source of fun...

From today:  Extensive excerpts from last year's congressional investigations into possible contraventions of the Hatch Act by Lurita Doan, now dredged up again in the wake of her resignation/dismissal...I had not realized that such an extensive grammatical discussion had been involved.  Latin teachers, hold on tight...Here's the paragraph that brings in the Latin:

REP. JOHN P. SARBANES (D-MD): I hope my mother’s watching. She’s a Latin teacher, and I’m just going to take issue with your citing of the hortatory subjunctive. (Laughter.) The actual tense that was used in the statement about will not be getting promoted and so forth, that is just clearly the future tense. It’s not future perfect or future pluperfect or anything of that nature.

So really, there is a reason to learn all those terms in Latin class:  for the purpose of obfuscation in the halls of Congress.  But privately, of course, make sure you do know the difference between tense, mood, voice, and that stuff; or not, I guess:  does "I didn't know what I was talking about" qualify as "plausible deniability"?

From a week ago, in a post entitled "PONT MAX TR POT LOL" (and citing the Epea Pteroenta blog as the source), a new explanation of the Fall of Rome is advanced:  a frame of mind not unlike the one so prevalent among text-messagers..."Kids these days," and all that...

Be Jason

Another game on a mythological theme is set to be released later this year by Liquid Entertainment:  Rise of the Argonauts.  There's a preview:

In Rise of the Argonauts, you control Jason and his crew (which includes Hercules, Perseus, Atalanta, and others) aboard the Argos. Basically, Jason's trying to resurrect his wife, and will need to find the means to do so. With your ship it's possible to sail all across the game world, giving you the ability to select which path you choose to advance through the game. When you land on islands, you'll talk to villagers, power-up Jason through shrines, and recruit others to work on your ship.

...

These gods factor prominently in the character development system as well, as Jason will be able to go to each of their specific shrines and trade deeds for abilities. What are deeds, you ask? They're sort of like Xbox Live achievements. If you perform a deed (killing 10 enemies in under one minute, slaying specific monsters), you'll get a little notification through a pop-up screen. Each deed turned in at the gods' shrines strengthens Jason's favor with them and grants access to godly powers and passive abilities in line with the gods' personalities. You'll be able to visit the four gods freely, meaning visiting one shrine doesn't prevent you from visiting another, but you won't be able to learn every ability from every deity, meaning you'll need to make a few decisions as to where to concentrate your power depending on how much of the game world you choose to explore.

Got it?  Oh, and here are some screenshots...So, my only question is, why not stick with the Argo...and, well, maybe the Golden Fleece will in fact end up being part of the game; who can say?

The L Word

Ah, here's a news story that cries out to be quoted in full...Frankly, I'm amazed this hasn't happened before now!

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos — home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, "insults the identity" of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using "lesbian" in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.

Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island is a favored holiday destination for gay women, particularly the lyric poet's reputed home town of Eressos.

"This is not an aggressive act against gay women," Lambrou said. "Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title."

He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10.

Sappho lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century B.C. and is considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity. Many of her poems, written in the first person and intended to be accompanied by music, contain passionate references to love for other women.

Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. "But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.

Very little is known of Sappho's life. According to some ancient accounts, she was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had a daughter with him. One tradition says that she killed herself by jumping off a cliff over an unhappy love affair.

Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. "But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent — including women — be considered homosexual?"

The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment.

Lambrou also presented an essay on the subject, "The Misfortune of Being Lesbian" (in Greek:  Η δυστυχία του να είσαι Λέσβιος, -ια) at the website of his magazine, Davlos, so feel free to go out and work on your modern Greek language skills...

I should just add, since as a footnote to his essay Lambrou appeals to Oxford lexicography and the change in definitions (of both Lesbian and, of course, gay) wreaked by people other than himself between the 1911 and 1999 editions (of the Compact Dictionary), that the big OED has citations for the female homosexual meaning of "Lesbian" dating back to 1870, when A. J. Munby wrote, "Swinburne..expressed a horror of sodomy..and an actual admiration of Lesbianism, being unable..to see that that is equally loathsome."  And finally, if antiquity of usage is the issue, I wonder whether Lambrou is more comfortable with a different "Lesbian" association in ancient Greek - e.g. the verb λεσβιάζω...

Ok, really finally:  I think I have a compromise suggestion.  Since LesVos is the modern Greek pronunciation of the place name, let's just all say that LesVian will be toponymic designation, and LesBian (to be spelled Λέσμπιος, etc., in Greek) will be the sexual orientation.

Byzantine Ecclesiastical Politics - with a (Martial) Point

So, who's been following the politics of the Alaska diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church?  This report from the Kodiak Daily Mirror - I confess, not one of my usual sources for news - gives some of the latest details. 

The Byzantine:

In early March, when Bishop Nikolai refused to recognize his mandatory leave of absence, he said he did so because proper procedure had not been followed. He argued the point at a special meeting of the synod last month, and won. The bishop returned to Alaska reinstated....Bishop Tikon was one of two bishops who came to Alaska to investigate allegations that Bishop Nikolai has been ruling the diocese by fear and intimidation.  Bishop Tikon is a supporter of Bishop Nikolai.  In his letter to Bishop Nikolai, he criticized the church’s leader for trying to keep Bishop Nikolai from attending the synod meeting.

“I contemplated the recent letter you got from the Metropolitan Herman in which he rather haughtily told you that while the Holy Synod would be meeting for a second ‘extraordinary’ time during the great 40-day fast, you, a constituent member of that synod, should not come, for all members (except you of course) want to have their meeting to discuss you without you being there,” he wrote. “Where I grew up, that’s called ‘talking behind someone’s back,’ a common human vice.”

The Point:

Bishop Tikon, a member of the synod, then closed with words of hope and an indication of where his vote may lean.

“As one who knows you better than probably any other member of the Laos (both clergy and non-clergy) alive today, I wish to offer you my version of ‘Keep the Faith’ by providing you a most apt quotation from the classic Latin master of the epigram, Martial,” he wrote. “It seems to me the words must have been created centuries ago in order to (be) made available to you, as a kindness.”

If the vote does go in favor of Bishop Nikolai he will return to Alaska, no longer under threat of removal.

Wait - that wasn't much of an epigram, is it?  Of course, the plot thickens...[more Martial to follow]

The Paul Volcker of Roman Emperors

Will wonders never cease?!  An article citing Domitian as an example...not of cruelty or megalomania (no flies, no dominus et deus)...but of sound economic policy.  Bill Bonner, in the Daily Reckoning, writes:

“Bill, you’re wrong about two things,” begins a helpful Dear Reader. “First, you’re wrong about emerging markets. You say they are going up, along with gold and commodities…while US stocks and US property goes down. But so far, emerging markets have been the biggest losers in this financial ‘adjustment’ we are suffering.

“More importantly, you’re wrong about Diocletian. Not about his economic policies, but about the Piazza di Navona. It was not Diocletian who built a stadium there; it was Domitian. Big difference.”

Our reader is wrong and right, in that order. That is, he is wrong about emerging markets and right about right about the Piazza di Navona. As to the latter, we were misinformed…and realised it when we were having a cup of café latte out in the square and looked over and saw the “Ristorante Domiziano” on the opposite side. Why would they name a restaurant after Domitian in Diocletian’s square, we wondered. Turned out, it was Domitian’s square, not Diocletian’s.

About Domitian, we knew nothing. So we looked him up..

...

The US money supply is said (the government no longer gives out the numbers) to be increasing at 20% per year. Interest rates are being pushed down by the Fed.  The US federal government is running a record deficit…and financing the most expensive war in history with borrowed money.

Rome got itself into a similar bind. It couldn’t support the empire from its own resources. It had the reserve currency of the day…but it was a metal-based money. All emperors could do was to send more slaves to the mines to try to dig out more silver and gold…levy more taxes…and squeeze more money and resources from Rome’s far-flung tributary nations.

The population of the Rome itself rose to over one million people – far more than could be supported by the local economy. What resulted was the equivalent of a huge trade deficit – with shiploads of wheat, marble, wood, wine and other products arriving at the port of Ostia, near the capital, and then shipped up to Rome itself.

By the time of Domitian, this trade deficit – combined with almost constant warfare - had already brought a substantial inflation to the empire. Domitian’s father, Vespasian, had devalued the currency. But Domitian was the Paul Volcker of Emperors. He actually restored the value of the denarius to Augustine levels, increased tax collections, and managed to leave the government with a surplus.

Now, restoring it to Augustine levels would be quite the trick...Here's DIR:

As emperor, Domitian was to become one of Rome's foremost micromanagers, especially concerning the economy. Shortly after taking office, he raised the silver content of the denarius by about 12% (to the earlier level of Augustus), only to devaluate it in A.D. 85, when the imperial income must have proved insufficient to meet military and public expenses.

Oh, and I nearly missed the ambiguous last line of Bonner's column:  I want to read it as when he "left the government" he had a surplus...there was, of course, something of a no-confidence vote...

Boris Johnson's Aspirations

Hoping to become mayor of London, Boris Johnson cites Pericles as his hero:

With most of our politicians, confined as they are by their knowledge of only one language and only one time - the present - the best one could hope for would be an admiring reference to what Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg have done in New York.

Instead, this classicist takes us back to the first flowering of democratic politics in Athens: his hero is Pericles, leader of that city state in its golden age in the fifth century BC.

As far as I can see, none of the politicians and pundits who wonder whether Boris is "serious" has troubled to glance at Pericles.

It is not as if Boris has made any secret of his hero-worship: his Commons office is adorned with a bust of the great man, and when asked by a magazine who he would invite to a "fantasy dinner party", he replied: "You mean apart from Marilyn Monroe, Pericles, Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Descartes? I think I would have Scarlett thingy… Scarlett Johansson, my wife, and David Willetts, the Tory education spokesman."

Another interviewer asked: "Who is your historical pin-up, and why?"

Back came the answer: "Pericles. Look at his funeral speech.  Democracy. Freedom. Champion stuff."

The article then goes on to look at the speech and comment on possible policy parallels...and on the last page, it turns out that Pericles is only the low end:

So I asked him how, if elected, he would avoid the temptation of giving jobs to his friends, as Livingstone has done. Again, Boris reached for the classics: he would reign, he said, like the Emperor Augustus, who had vast power and patronage and yet lived frugally, in a simple room. (Although Augustus was an autocrat who preserved republican forms, one could see the point he was making.)

At the time, this seemed like an amusingly grand comparison, but it was also in its way a serious one.

The Decline of Cambridge?

A review of Arianna Huffington's Right Is Wrong at the Arizona Daily Wildcat mentions an embarrassing detail in the context of classical comparisons...

Occasionally Huffington decides to remind us of her pedigree - she's a Cambridge graduate - by drawing a clever, original historical parallel, like comparing President Bush to the Emperor Nero. At one point she compares Iraq to the Peloponnesian War. Then she explains what the Peloponnesian War was by citing Wikipedia. Wikipedia.

Hmm...Peloponnesian War...maybe really a reference to the Sicilian Expedition?  But maybe the reluctance to cite a print source is due to the neo-con associations of the Kagan family, so it's not really an indication of reliance on Wikipedia...maybe?

Incarnations of Alexander

Richard Stoneman's Alexander the Great:  A Life in Legend, noted here by the Olympian, looks pretty darn fascinating; it appears to focus on the Eastern Nachleben of Alexander.  Here's an excerpt from a longer treatment by Tom Holland (in the Telegraph):

...Crusaders and jihadis, philosophers and alchemists: all have laid claim to him as one of their own...Certainly, there is nothing specifically occidental about the fame of Alexander.

Even the Persians, the very people whose empire he overthrew, came to regard him as a hero. It is true that there was an enduring tradition - one still very much alive in Iran to this day - that saw him as a hellish destroyer, 'wicked, heretical, corrupt and criminal'; but this did not prevent him from being the toast of some of Persia's greatest poets.

To Firdausi, writing in the 10th century, 'Iskander' was the son of a Persian princess, and therefore not an invader at all, but a perfectly legitimate king; to Nizami, writing in the 12th, he was nothing less than the founder of Islam in Persia.

A startling piece of casting, it might be thought - except that Alexander's Muslim pedigree is a venerable one indeed. As 'Dhu'l-qarnain' - 'the two-horned one' - he even pops up in the Koran.

True, there have been some recent critics who have disputed the equivalence of Alexander and Dhu'l-qarnain, but Persian authors, certainly, 'were confident of the identity of the two figures' - and Stoneman agrees with them.

Which, in turn, should be more than sufficient for anyone reading this book. Slim the main body of the text may be - but size, as the Macedonian army demonstrated, is not always a reflection of quality.

Indeed, as a work of scholarship, it is staggeringly rich. If there is nothing about television shows or computer games in it, then that may reflect the sheer amount of time that Stoneman has so evidently devoted to less frivolous pursuits, the learning of foreign languages being prominent among them - even if he does, in his Introduction, apologise for his lack of Mongolian and Malay.

As a result, like his subject, he is able to strike deep into fabulous and exotic territory. Whether it is Hellenistic notions of utopia, or cities of death in the Arabian Nights, or the origins of the manticore in Indian fable, the extraordinary range of Alexander's afterlife has enabled Stoneman to write a veritable book of wonders.

When he tells us that 'the quest has occupied me now for more than 20 years,' the reader will have no hesitation in believing him. Yet it is typical of his dry, understated humour that he should immediately follow this avowal with a wry reminder that 'Alexander conquered the East in 13.'

Scholarly and wide-ranging though Stonehouse's chapters are, they never appear dense; nor is his prose ever anything less than pellucid and witty.

To experts, his book will surely serve as the definitive treatment of Alexander as a figure of myth, a resource to be consulted and quarried for years - and to the general reader as an almost Borgesian compendium of fantasy. If you want stories of the great conqueror in a flying chariot or a diving bell, or as the adversary of dragons and winged foxes, or as a Pharaoh or an Afghan khan, then this is the only book for you...

SecDef Promotes Minerva

Last bit of random news: Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense Secretary, recently announced a proposal for co-operation between the Pentagon and the Academy:

He said his agency was developing a proposal to finance a new “Minerva Consortium,” named for the goddess of wisdom, of universities to carry out social-sciences research relevant to national security. Among the group’s tasks could be predicting the likely evolution of jihadist extremism, he said.

Wisdom and war...I'm sure someone had both sides of the personality in mind...Up next: Gates announces co-operative endeavors between the DoD and the DC Madam, under the rubric "Ishtar Consortium"...

Stoic Advice for Ex-Politicians

The Former New South Wales premier's end-of-life reading? Marcus Aurelius. The possible soundtrack? Puccini. From the West Australian:

[Bob Carr] remains implacably opposed to popular culture, but denies he is elitist.

"I am not a snob," Carr insists.

"I just think high culture, serious literature, is better. I think one bar of pulsating, crowd-pleasing Puccini is superior to the entire output of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I would go to Miss Saigon as readily as I would sign myself into Abu Ghraib."

If he knew he would die in 24 hours, Carr says he would eat "a fabulous bowl of spaghetti, tomato and chilli", plunge into the surf at Maroubra, and read Marcus Aurelius "for advice on how to die."

Marcus Aurelius - Roman Emperor and adopted grandson of Carr's hero Publius Aelius Hadrianus - said a good many things about death, among which, this is what Carr might be reading:

"Do not be anxious. Everything is in accord with the nature of the universe. In just a little while, you will be nothing..."