Classics in Contemporary Culture

Bob Dylan, Amateur Classicist

Douglas Brinkley interviewed Dylan for the new issue of Rolling Stone, in the course of which the conversation turned to religion, morality, and the musician's early intellectual "influences" (as reported by Douglas LeBlanc of GetReligion.org):

After that evening’s show at the Heineken Music Hall — at around 11:30 p.m. — I interview Dylan again. Because it is Easter weekend, I decide to push him on the importance of Christian Scripture in his life. “Well, sure,” he says, “that and those other first books I read were biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius. … I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.”

Top Billing

Just saw this at the Ottawa Citizen (canada.com):  review of a 2006 book called The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived, by Alan Lazar, Dan Karlan, and Jeremy Salter.  [And here's the associated website.]  Classical antiquity gets:  Prometheus, Apollo and Dionysus, Venus and Cupid, Pandora, Helen of Troy, Odysseus, Midas, Pygmalion, Icarus, Hercules; and Oedipus.  More detail on one:

No. 46 is Prometheus, whose defiant gift of fire to man challenged the gods and they amply punished him. He reappeared in the first modern horror story in Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley penned after a bunch of writers, sitting around on a rainy Geneva night, decided to invent a new genre of fiction. Frankenstein's promethean hubris in creating life, and carelessly tending to it afterwards, still serves as a metaphor for ego-driven, misguided and unrestrained science -- a charge most recently levelled against Frankenfoods.

So there you go.

Belated MLK Day

Ah--I almost forgot...I had meant to make the return from the break by citing Martin Luther King back at the beginning of the week.  Here's some historical review from MLK's last speech, in Memphis:

As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" - I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

...he stops, by the way, in the 20th century...

Stephen Hawking, Delphic Oracle

Jonathan David Carson (The American Thinker) complains about how (in his view) there is an established religion in America today:  Scientism.  The essay cites some ancient sources, notably Lucretius' veneration of Epicurus, and includes the wonderful solecism(/wordplay?) scientismists.  And don't think for a minute that Hillary Clinton isn't part of the conspiracy.  Here's an excerpt on Hawking:

An unintentionally revealing article in the June 2002 issue of Scientific American, one of the holy books of the established religion of the United States, begins.... [quotation suppressed here]

Hawking, the rest of the article informs us, is not only God, a saint, a writer of epistles, and a Christ-figure with multitudes of apostles, but also “the Delphic oracle” and a “shaman.” He gives authoritative answers to questions of “theology.” He has a “transcendent mind.” He preaches “sermons.” He is the apotheosis of a “modern incarnation.”

...

Veneration of atheists is not new. Some of the schizoid attitude of scientism, at once materialist and New Age, is captured in a curious incident recounted by Martin Rees in Before the Beginning:    

“When Hawking received an honorary degree from Cambridge, the Orator quoted the encomium of Epicurus by Lucretius: ‘The living force of his mind overcame and passed far beyond the flaming ramparts of the universe, traversing in mind and spirit the boundless whole.’”

Who the “Orator” is, Rees does not say, nor why he deserves capitalization, but what we have here is the praise of one atomist (Epicurus) by another (Lucretius) echoed by the praise of one materialist (Hawking) by another (Rees), with atomist and materialist praised with what can only be religious fervor.

Classicist in the Woodwork

This deserves more attention.  Debra Hamel posts a snippet from Alan Alda's autobiography:

Bill Christopher, who played Father Mulcahy [on M*A*S*H], was studious, translating ancient Greek during his breaks. For one scene, he had to spend a long time at the bottom of a car in which about twelve nurses were piled on top of him. When he finally crawled out, someone asked him if he was all right, having spent two hours under all those women. 'Yes, fine,' he said. 'Fortunately, I had my copy of the Iliad with me.

Here's Mike Farrell's take:

A wonderful man and a good friend. He's very droll, very funny when you get to know him. An intellectual with an in-depth understanding and appreciation of classical music and literature. He reads Homer in the original Greek and studies languages for fun. 

Red Chinese Trojan Horse of Paris

Michael Moriarty, who used to play Ben Stone on Law & Order, has morphed into a decidedly eccentric political figure in Vancouver (5-year old Salon article), and his latest editorial for Enter Stage Right riffs on the Da Vinci Code, the Trojan War, and Red China:

The first Grand Master of the Priory of Sion was Jean de Gisor in 1188 A.D. His successors were mostly French until the undisputed creative supremacy of the Italian Renaissance replaced French leadership with artists like Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci. France regained control of this intellectual supremacy movement, which then crossed the English Channel and was briefly led by Isaac Newton. Paris again reclaimed authority under Jean Cocteau's veritable papacy, which ended with his death in 1963.

Paris. What a name for a city. Paris was the singular cause for the fall of Troy in ancient Greece. This son of Priam and Hecuba, King and Queen of Troy, had slipped into Athens, stolen Helen, wife of Agamemnon, and carried her back home to Troy. Because of that, the Greeks and the Trojans warred, battled and slaughtered one another for over 10 years. The Greeks won eventually. Under the cunning advice of Odysseus, better known under the Roman name Ulysses, the legendary Trojan Horse was built and presented as a gift from the Greeks to the Trojans. Inside the horse were Greek soldiers who, once inside the gates of Troy, erupted from within the wooden beast and conquered the fabled city.

Paris. The future of the human race can almost be charted by names alone. The poetic underpinning of all communication, no matter what the language, carries Jungian symbolism that, when examined closely enough, determines the fate of millions.

The city of Paris was the birthplace of an anti-Judeo-Christian ideology, but it wasn't until the advent of Da Vinci that the ultimate Anti-Christ was found.
...
...
Beijing said if it detects even the slightest movement within our atomic missile system, it will rain atomic bombs on us. It won't matter by 2012. By then, should a Chinese missile even lift one foot out of its silo, our own missiles will be released and reach our targets before the Chinese atomic salvo reaches theirs. God willing, SDI will take out at least a third of their incoming. The world, the entire human race, of course, will be rooting for us. There'll be no doubt about that. Why? Because we'll be watching the Red Chinese Trojan Horse bring all of Europe to its knees.

Whew!

           

Influential Classicist (singular)

The journals Foreign Policy and The Prospect have collaborated on a project to name the world's top "public intellectuals." Their list of 100 includes one classicist (ok, classed as a philosopher): Martha Nussbaum. A Kagan is on the list, but it's not Donald. Web-voting for your top 5 choices, with the possibility of adding a write-in candidate to their list, can be done here. Their criteria for "public intellectual":

What is a public intellectual? Someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it.

Candidates must have been alive, and still active in public life (though many on this list are past their prime). Such criteria ruled out the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago. This list is about public influence, not intrinsic achievement. And that is where things get really tricky. Judging influence is hard enough inside one’s own culture, but when you are peering across cultures and languages, the problem becomes far harder.

[Thanks to Political Animal]

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas...

Recent resonance of Classical literature:  the Italian blog Classico e Moderno, in a post subtitled "Qualis pontifex pereo" (wish I'd thought of that one!), has more reflections on the presence of the Classics for Pope John Paul II--especially the phrase "Non omnis moriar" (Horace, Odes 3.30), allegedly whispered by the pontiff very recently (according to I Miserabili--printing the whole poem with Italian translation), but also in the pope's "Roman Triptych" (2003)--cf. English accounts here and here (scroll down).  NN (CeM) also points to a 2003 article in La Reppublica, entitled "Il Papa, Orazio, e la morte," which gives more on JPII's Classical leanings, and mentions his statement on being given honorary citizenship in Rome in 2002 (cf. CWN):

Ma anche di Roma si sente questo papa nato in Polonia, scheggia latina tra il Baltico protestante e la Russia ortodossa. "Civis romanus sum", mormorò con soddisfazione, quando il sindaco di Roma gli portò la pergamena con la cittadinanza dei romani.

As to be expected, this has Biblical resonance too!  This might be a good time to try out Ultralingua, which will transform a page with hyperlinks to dictionary entries for you (cf. the RogueClassicist's recommendation--which reminds me:  for related tidbits of Classics relating to the pope, see Classical Pope and Classical Pope II ibid.)

What to Do with Virgil?

(A category related to "What to do with a Classics degree.")   

You could become an award-winning novelist, like Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides (who just did a reading in Houston):

As a schoolboy he studied Latin, reading Ovid (where he came across the hermaphroditic seer Tiresias) and falling under the sway of Virgil. He once said The Aeneid influenced him more than any other book, although he also cites the great Russians — Tolstoy, Nabokov — and American novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth as influences.

Or, a CPA-engineer-lawyer, like the recently deceased Robert D. Wallick:

In law journals, he pulled from classical sources to make his points in the otherwise Saharan references to attachments, circulars and external operating manuals. His footnotes sometimes included Virgil's "The Aeneid" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias."

Achilles Hits the Blogosphere

In a point that meanders from a discussion of the new movie about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber brings in Achilles (as well as Hegel on Alexander the Great, incidentally):

Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

The discussion is picked up by Brad DeLong (inter alia), arguing that Hector is the hero, not Achilles; a response from Henry Farrell (Crooked Timber):

For Brad, a hero is someone whom we should both admire and emulate. Thus, we should aspire to the virtues of the sagacious Hektor, who fights only because he must, and not those of the vainglorious Achilles. But Homer and his interpreters among the classical Greeks surely understood Achilles in a rather different way. To them, he was an embodiment of the arete of the hero bound by his self-understanding and his honour-code to choose glory over a life of respectable insignificance, and to seek retribution for affronts regardless of their consequence (as in Achilles’ vengeance after the slaying of Patroklos).The fate of the hero is bound up in tragedy - he (and it is usually a ‘he’ of course in early Greek thought) does what he must, even when he knows that he will be punished by the gods. He is bound by his fate and his code of honour. Bowra captures this sense of heroism quite well in this fragment - as he argues elsewhere, it is precisely the capacity for heroism that distinguishes men from the gods. Just because Guevara did “personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity,” he was a hero in a certain sense, and his fate was precisely a tragic one - it was a direct consequence of his aims and personal limitations. His arete may not be one that anyone sane would want to emulate in today’s world, but it’s surely an arete nonetheless.

...And a riposte from DeLong...(and comments threads a-bristle with comments all around...)