Classics in Contemporary Culture

Colonialism, Classics and Cosmopolitanism, Fictionalized

An "ambitiously weighty" novel, Sunset Oasis, set in late-19th-cen. Egypt, by Bahaa Taher, pairs a "middle-aged government official" with his Irish, Classically trained wife, on a journey to the Oasis of Siwa--yes, that Siwa:

Even Alexander the Great, who makes a surprise appearance as a narrator, remembers his dream "of filling the world with a new strain, from the loins of the Europeans and the Asians, after which there could be no ill will among them or wars" with a sense of defeat.

Sunset Oasis is an ambitiously weighty novel and its characters sometimes behave more like ciphers than real people: "I am not Sappho!" exclaims Catherine, true to her education, when Maleeka tries to embrace her. As if in sympathy, the translation, by the usually excellent Humphrey Davies, is occasionally ponderous. But it offers a welcome glimpse of a troubled period of Egypt's history largely forgotten by its British colonisers and an absorbing portrait of a would-be good man destroyed by bad times.

Sounds interesting...

Hedgehogs or Foxes in Training

In a column in the Beacon-News, a lieutenant in the Aurora (IL) police department makes a surprising allusion to an Archaic Greek lyric poet:

Officers train in the academy so that every day we can handle these dangerous situations while on the job. Our departmental training is rigorous and strenuous because in police training we understand the words of the Greek soldier Archilochus: "We do not rise to the level of expectations. We fall to the level of our training."

Hmm...could be a nice elegiac couplet, right? Now, I'm sure Archilochus was a great martial artist (devotee in equal measure of Enyalios and the Muses!), but he was no Bruce Lee...

More Macedonia...or Not...

Andreas Willi has a response to the "Letter to Obama" on the Macedonia question [pdf]; and of course, what's a point without a counter-point...or...what's a counter-point without a counter-counter-point...or...well...who knows how many "counters" this makes, but Stephen Miller's response to Andreas Willi is here.

Felices qui potuerunt Lucretium cognoscere

A conference on the reception of Lucretius in the European Enlightenment is to be held in Edinburgh on Sept. 3-4.  Here is a list of the papers:

• David Butterfield (Cambridge):  ‘Lucretius’ De rerum natura and classical scholarship in the eighteenth century’
• Gianni Paganini (Università del Piemonte Orientale):  ‘Pierre Bayle’s Lucretius’
• James Harris (St. Andrews):  ‘Of shipwrecks and sympathy: Lucretius, Hume, and the pleasures of tragedy’
• Ann Thomson (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis):  ‘Lucretius and la Mettrie’
• Tim Hochstrasser (London School of Economics and Political Science):  ‘The role of Lucretius in Diderot’s later political thought’

• Alan Charles Kors (University of Pennsylvania):  ‘Lucretius and d’Holbach’
• Piet H. Schrijvers (Leiden):  ‘Lucretius in the Dutch Enlightenment’

• Andrew Laird (Warwick):  ‘Lucretius and Spanish Jesuit culture after the Bourbon Reforms: Diego José Abad and Rafael Landívar in Italy’
• Wolfgang Pross (Berne):  ‘»Atheorum antistes et oraculum«: Enemies of Lucretius in the European Enlightenment’
• Avi Lifshitz (University College London):  ‘Lucretius and German debates over the origins of language, c. 1750’
• Mario Marino (Jena):  ‘Herder and Lucretius’
• Ernst A. Schmidt (Tübingen):  ‘Wieland and Lucretius’

For more information, http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/conferences/lucretius09/index.html

[Thanks to RogueClassicism]

Minotaurs vs. Waterboarding

The Onion News Network, injecting some ancient terror into a modern story, asks: "Is Using a Minotaur to Gore Detainees a Form of Torture?" Theseus could not be reached for comment...

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Eddie: Tragic Hero, Reimagined

The RogueClassicist points out a very interesting-looking comic-book take on Greek tragedy...Greek Street. A fair bit of information (and sample pictures) in an interview at newsarama.com

In London there’s a street running through the Soho district called Greek Street. Originally dubbed ‘Hogs Lane’, the thoroughfare dates back to the late 17th century and has been depicted in a variety of forms including an etching by William Hogarth to novelist Charles Dickens’ Tale Of Two Cities. But for comics writer Peter Milligan, the road runs further back – in time – back to ancient Greek times.

In the forthcoming series Greek Street from DC Vertigo, Milligan looks at the timeless stories of classic Greek myth through the lens of a modern era crime story. The doomed King Oedipus becomes the homeless Eddie who grew up without a mother, only meeting her when he’s an adult. Stories such as these, catapulted into the modern streets of London to see how they’ll land – how they’ll thrive, and how they’ll change.

Milligan has been a key player in DC’s Vertigo imprint with work on Shade, The Changing Man and Human Target which is being adapted into a fall 2009 television series. In addition to this new series, Milligan is also scripting Vertigo’s longest-running title Hellblazer, but Greek Street is a whole new zip code.

Newsarama: After a bit of break from comics a couple years back, it seems you’ve jumped back into the thick of it with Hellblazer, some work over at Marvel, and now this new series Greek Street. To what would you explain your resurgence?

Peter Milligan:What it isn’t is some kind of planned assault on the world of comic books. It’s really just worked out this way. Usually it’s story and editor led. That is, if there is a story I’m keen on writing, or an editor I’m keen on working with, things happen. Recently there have been a number of things I’ve wanted to write and a number of really good editors I want to work with.

NRAMA: Good for you, and good for us.

The premise to Greek Street seems pretty straight forward – classic Greek dramas retold in modern-day London. How would you describe the series and what fans can expect?

PM: The premise might be straight forward enough. The reality of the comic is anything but. Greek Street is a very strange beast. I think of it as The Long Good Friday meets Agamemnon. A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek Tragedy to take a look at our world, and to explore some of the things I think about this world. I hope readers aren’t put off, thinking that this is somehow going to be dry or demand that they are well versed in Greek literature. The book is very sexy. IT has beautiful girls, beautiful boys, guns, tension, and the supernatural. The aim, or trick, is to forge something new. Something that refers to and echoes Greek Tragedy but that is also modern, new.

NRAMA: What drew you to retelling these greek legends?

PM: I’ve always been interested in the Greek Tragedies. A few years back a re-read a translation of the The Oresteia and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.

NRAMA: Can you remember when you first became aware and interested in greek dramas?

PM: At school, I suppose. I mean I was aware of ancient greek culture from an early age, trips to the British Museum, the Elgin marbles, those fantastic vase paintings.

NRAMA: Getting into the book itself, there’s a lot of greek mythological characters to pull from – but who’s standing out as the main characters as the series starts?

PM: Our main character is a young guy called Eddie who at the age of 18 has left the childrens’ home. He’s an orphan in search of his mother. Another important character is a girl named Sandy. She's disturbed, prone to visions, and lives with her aristocratic parents, who have their own tragic problems.

NRAMA: Eddie = Oedipus, perhaps?

Vertigo was kind enough to send me advance copies of the first two issues, and what struck me most about these stories is that even though these are storylines over 1600 years old – the stories can, and do, happen in today’s world. Did you think of that – the idea that humans haven’t changed much?

PM: The idea that what we might call ‘human progress’ is a myth is one of the central conceits of Greek Street. Those ancient stories speak to us, I think, because fundamentally we have not changed or progressed that much. Our gods might be different, or at least go under different names. Our technology has obviously advanced. But when it comes to a lot of the really important human stuff, I wonder if we ever really progress.

Lucian: One of Us...

I note that there is a complete translation (well, not entirely complete -- see the Preface of vol. 1) of the works of Lucian now available via Google Books--the four volumes by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler [links from here].  The review from the New York Times emphasizes Lucian's modernity:

About the most modern of the Greek writers was Lucian of Samosata--not the saint, but the satirist.  He ought really to have written in English; as it is, he endures translation very easily.  The sea-change from Greek to English does not affect him, 'tis his Attic salt that keeps him as sweet as when the first edition of his works came out, seventeen centuries or so ago.
...
Swift is not the only one to be influenced by the Greek author:  within a week a newspaper of this city printed an editorial in dialogue suggested--possibly quite without the writer's knowledge--by Lucian's dialogues...

Classics for Business Majors

Steve Forbes and John Prevas have just published a book entitled, Power Ambition Glory: The Stunning Parallels between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today...and the Lessons You Can Learn. And (surprise, surprise!) there's a feature section on the book at Forbes.com, including some excerpts (on Alexander, Caesar, and Augustus), and also little mini-questionnaires answered by various people, on the issue of how study of the Classics has impacted their lives.  Definitely worth checking out...Here, for example, is Garrison Keillor:

Forbes: Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

Keillor: The ancients were dubious of success. They knew the gods were fickle, and if a mortal climbed too high up the cliff, the gods would stomp on his fingers and throw him into the sea. And, actually, the sea was the place to be. You could set sail and go see new worlds and meet mysterious women. "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive"--that is ancient wisdom. Start every day in a spirit of adventure and you're as successful as you can be.

If you could invite one classical figure to dinner, who would it be and why?

The Roman poet Horace, whose "Ode to Pyrrha" (What slender young man doused with cologne is courting you with roses in the garden shade? / Beautiful lady, for whom do you comb your fair hair?) I tried to translate as a kid in Maggie Forbes' Latin class at the University of Minnesota. Ovid was a greater poet, but Horace would be a better dinner guest. Not so oracular, more confidential, even gossipy.

...

Greeks or Romans?

The Greeks. Because they were funnier, they told fantastic stories (trips to the moon, slaves flying to heaven on the back of a giant dung beetle, women ending war with a sex strike), they loved games and sort of believed in democracy. The Romans were terrific engineers and bureaucrats, were good at water management and highway construction, but you've got to prefer the Greeks. Most Romans did, too.

Ok, who doesn't like Garrison Keillor, but...Ovid a better poet than Horace!? Really, now...Well, de gustibus and all that...

Tim O'Reilly, who was also interviewed, posted an unabridged version of the interview with him at his own website.

[Thanks to JMY on CLASSICS-L]

Heroic Epic --> Christian Epic --> Video Game

Slated for release in early 2010, a project by Visceral Games lets you play the underworld explorer:  Dante's Inferno.  Your guide is still Virgil, although he plays a smaller role than in Dante's poem:

Once in Hell, you meet Virgil in Limbo.  In contrast to the poem, Dante doesn't actually follow the guy around.  Instead, Virgil just appears every so often and speaking to him is optional.  He just sort of floats around narrating our hero's tale.  Poor Virgil, his job must really suck.

And yes, your job is primarily to kill demons -- but the visuals are amazing!

As Dante travels through each circle of Hell, Beatrice's spirit remains beyond his grasp.  Meanwhile, he has to face his own sins at every stage, like he's stuck within his personal Hell while traveling through Lucifer's domain.

The devs point out that their Dante is an extreme reimagining of the 13th century poet and policitian who authored the Divine Comedy, which is rather obvious from the start.  Not only is this guy running around with a scythe nearly twice his size, he's actually quite apt with it, butchering defenseless demons and what not.

Players will find series of brutal animations to discover, depending on how you want to finish off your enemies, and that scythe allows Dante to control certain (very large) demons by shoving the blade in their skulls.  Hey, there are worst ways to travel in Hell than riding on the back / head of a giant rampaging abomination.  Phlegyas, pictured above, is just one of many such monstrosities you'll be hitching a ride on.

...

But I can't reiterate how engrossing the visuals are for this game, especially if you're familiar with the original Divine Comedy; the devs have made en effort to design the characters as they are described in the poem, "only angrier," given that everything is now trying to kill Dante instead of letting him pass through with somber indifference.

A nice example of this is the blind King Minos, Judge of the Dead, who appears in the game as Aligheri portrays -- a monstrous hybrid between man and snake.  In the poem, he "shakes the urn and calls on the assembly of the silent, to learn the lives of men and their misdeeds," his tail wrapping around his body a number of times equal to the soul's assigned level of Hell.  In the game, he is still rather ugly and... tries to kill Dante.  If you manage to defeat him, you'll be treated to a graphic death-scene, involving a spiked wheel and Minos' tongue.  Go ahead and fill in the blanks on that one.

Where is the Praise of Fathers?

A. S. Maulucci runs through a bit of literary history before citing some modern poems:

Western poetic and dramatic literature has not been kind to fathers. They’ve been portrayed as brutish tyrants and cruel authority figures, deceivers and manipulators, iron-handed rulers and unfaithful husbands.

In Sophocles’ play Antigone, King Creon is so arrogant and drunk with power that when his son, Haemon, defies him he orders Haemon to witness his own fiancee’s execution. In their love for their offspring, Shakespeare’s fathers have been assigned the roles of the tragically flawed (King Lear), the hopelessly misguided (Polonius), or the stubbornly autocratic (Brabantio in Othello and Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Except for a few ancient classics such as Homer’s Illiad and Virgil’s Aeneid, fathers have fared little better in poetry.

With the approach of Father’s Day, I’ve been wondering why there are precious few poems written in praise of fathers.

Granted the Creon example--and certainly there are many others in tragedies--the last sentence of the second paragraph really amazes me (totally apart from the spelling of Iliad): With the exception of two of the most important works of Classical antiquity...you can hardly find any examples of "positive presentations" of fatherhood. And of course, if you add the Odyssey...

Oh, but this did lead me to find that at the Poetry Foundation, you can find "poems for all occasions" including for Father's Day.

Et tu, Ecclesia?

David Gibson (beliefnet) points out an essay by Thomas Casey, S.J. in America, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church should jettison Latin as the official language of the Vatican, in favor of English--basically, the argument is that Latin was adopted because it was the "lingua franca" in the late Western Roman Empire, and that now English is the international lingua franca.  He does concede the historical importance of Latin:

Latin remains essential to the church’s tradition and identity. Anyone who wants to study canon law or to understand great Catholic thinkers, like Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, needs a good working knowledge of the language. As the Papal Latinist, Reginald Foster, O.C.D., puts it: “You cannot understand Saint Augustine in English. He thought in Latin. It is like listening to Mozart through a jukebox.”

He notes that originally the common language of the Church was Greek, although he strangely sees this as a "choice" (over Hebrew!--not Aramaic) rather than an inevitable concomitant of expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean:

Christianity at its origins made a surprising decision: it adopted Greek as its language. The earliest documents of the Christian community were written in Greek. Although Greek was the language most Christians used among themselves, it would have been easier in many ways had they made Hebrew the church’s official language. After all, Hebrew was the revered language of the Jewish Scriptures and the language in which God first revealed his love to the chosen people, and the very earliest Christians (the Apostles) were predominantly Jewish. Yet the church’s surprising decision to switch to Greek paid enormous historical dividends.

The church produced its most creative theology during its first millennium, because it was audacious enough to take Greek as its language. It took the best from the Greek world of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and brought it together with the wisdom of Judaism.

He rightly pokes a little fun at Mel Gibson:

Given the historical importance of Greek in the first centuries of Christianity, it is surprising today to encounter zealous young seminarians and priests who are enthusiastic about Latin, thinking it is rooted in a 2,000-year-old connection with the church. They imagine they are returning to the genesis of Christianity, but they have unknowingly erased the first centuries of church history.

Such selective amnesia was also evident in Mel Gibson’s controversial film “The Passion.” In the film Gibson has the Roman soldiers speaking Latin, a historical blunder. Was Gibson led to this mistake because of his attachment to the Latin Tridentine liturgy and the conservative Catholic lens through which he views early Christianity? Scholars agree that the common language of the Roman Empire in the Middle East was Greek. Greek was, in fact, widely used in Italy and Rome at the time of Jesus. There is little doubt that Pilate and Roman military officers garrisoned in Palestine would have been Greek-speakers.

And again, he presents the switch to Latin as entirely calculated, top-down [cf. this bit of history, although not on the Greek vs. Latin question]:

First, the church had come to recognize that the center of Christianity was in Rome. Latin was the language of that city and the language of the world’s major power at the time, the Roman Empire. Second, the church recognized that Latin was the lingua franca throughout western Europe, and it wanted to reach all the people there. The decision to take on Latin had major ramifications: By identifying with the Roman Empire, would the church appear to endorse imperialism? Why would it throw in its lot with the Roman Empire, which in many respects was antithetical to Christian ideals and values? Would it be more appropriate to retain Greek?

Yet Latin won the day. One can recognize the great potential of Latin simply from observing the beauty and economy of this most resourceful of languages. The very structure of Latin gave new clarity and precision to the teaching of the church. Although common or “vulgar” Latin deteriorated into a series of dialects that were to become the basis of languages like Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish, classical Latin itself remained unchanged. Since it was no longer used daily, this more refined Latin was not subject to alteration. It thus provided the Catholic Church with a stable norm by which to evaluate the correctness of doctrinal and theological expressions in other languages. For centuries, Latin continued to be a critical point of reference for the Catholic Church.

Ancient History, Modern Insights

Here's a snippet from the acknowledgements in the preface to T. D. Barnes' Athanasius and Constantius:  Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Harvard U. P., 1993):

My research would have been impossible without both institutional support and the opportunity to work in a consistently academic environment...The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided a small research grant which has considerably hastened the completion of the final text, while the University of Toronto not only gave me a year's research leave again in 1990-91, but has over the years deepened my insight into the modus operandi of men like Athanasius and Constantius.

What Killed Alexander?

On the anniversary of Alexander the Great's death, N. S. Gill (ancienthistory.about.com) points to a couple of articles that go through some possibilities...Notably:  Swine flu?*  West Nile virus?  Arsenic seems not quite up-to-the-moment...

Might I suggest:  Knowing that a 72-foot statue of him would one day be erected in Skopje did him in?  No, I imagine he would receive a tribute of such adulation pretty willingly.

---

*Ok, ok, the article doesn't really suggest H1N1, only generic influenza.

A Colossal Something-or-Other

The latest on the FYROM vs. Greece front (or is it the Greece vs. FYROM?  Well, the latest scuffle seems to be the former):  A 72-foot high bronze statue of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus is now in production in Florence...to be set up in the center of Skopje.  The comment from the EU is nice and terse:  the project is "not helpful."

Greece worries that FYROM has designs on the province of Macedonia and is increasingly suspicious of its propensity for renaming airports and highways after Alexander. The statue is the latest insult, provoking the Greek Foreign Ministry to ridicule it as "inversely proportional to seriousness and historical truth."

Underlining their tie to Alexander, Greeks voting by Internet last month elected Alexander as the greatest Greek of all. The yearlong poll organized by TV station Skai gave the conqueror 127,011 of the 700,000 votes cast. Runner-up with 103,661 votes was George Papanicolaou, who invented the pap smear test for cervical cancer.

Thessaloniki, capital of Greece's province of Macedonia, has long had a statue of Alexander, and in January the Greek and Iraqi governments agreed to put up a statue of the conqueror near the port city of Mosul, at the battlefield where he crushed the Persian army in 331 B.C.

Meanwhile, Macedonia's prime minister, 38-year-old Nikola Gruevski, is pushing ahead with his plans to honor Alexander astride his horse, Bucephalus. The 22-meter- (72-foot-) high statue in bronze is being molded in Florence and will go up in 2010. Along with a church and another dozen statues of historical figures, the bill will total euro10 million ($14 million), in a country where monthly wages average $440 and unemployment runs at 35 percent.

Many Macedonians fear the project will stoke ethnic tension. Some ethnic Albanians are saying any new church in the square should be matched by a mosque.

Meanwhile, on the Iraq (Mosul) connection (!!), PR at Classics-L comments:

For the Sunni-dominated (in a Kurdish area) city of Mosul to erect a statue to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians at Gaugamela has some frightening ethnic implications, given the historical connections between Persian culture and Iraq's Shi'ite populations. We'll leave unspoken the whole idea of celebrating the liberation of Nineveh from a foreign conqueror by a foreign conqueror and what that may imply about what the current Mosul government would like the US military to do.

Orphic Revival

The University of Alabama at Birmingham recently sponsored a trip to Greece and Bulgaria in furtherance of their study of theatre and their production of a new play, "Orpheus:  An Experimental Myth."  The trip culminated with a performance of their new play in Sofia.

According to [Emilie] Soffe, “It was a piece that was created by all of us, with some text that was borrowed from poetry and song lyrics. It was about 30 minutes long and was comprised of several different pieces which we wove together to create one show.”

“Within the one piece there were actually eight smaller sections which were connected by transitions,” she said. “We focused mainly on three different aspects of the myth that we found interesting: Love, Loss, and Memory, and the pieces each commented on one of those themes.”

...

[Kristina] Howard says that the group spent two weeks in May traveling through Bulgaria and Greece and that they visited several historic sites throughout Bulgaria and Greece. Among the highlights, according to Howard, were, “Peperikon, the ancient Thracian palace and temple; the Devil's Throat cave, which is said to be where Orpheus entered the Underworld; Orpheus' supposed burial place; the Acropolis, which contains the Parthenon; the ancient temples at Delphi.”

...

Soffe notes that the students compared and contrasted modern day theatre acoustics and those of the ancient Greek theatres they visited. “It was sad for us to realize that theirs were, for the most part, much better,” she said.

The benefits will spill over into next season's "Eurydice"...