Classics in Contemporary Culture

L'ego, c'est moi!

Robert McHenry (former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica) is nearing the end of his reading of Plutarch's lives ("Dryden," I fear), and uses it as a springboard for discussion of egoism/romanticism/whatever...

Apart from the historical giants -- Solon, Cicero, Pericles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Pompey, Caesar and a few others -- the “noble Grecians and Roman” tend to run together after a while. The single most persistent impression I’m left with is of the fickleness of the citizenry of Athens and Sparta and Rome. How many times now have I read that this week’s hero, whether soldier or statesman, is next week’s exile, or executee? The most benevolent and self-effacing governor could have his term abruptly limited when the rumormongers or violently ambitious demagogues or frightened oligarchs decided to stir up a mob of ordinary citizens -- idiota in the Greek -- often against their own plain best interests.

In telling his tales Plutarch may be simply echoing Plato, whose doubts about the demos, the people, and disdain for government by them, democracy, are well known. Plato lived through some of the worst excesses of Athenian democracy and so knew whereof he disdained. Since those days we have learned to celebrate -- if not consistently to practice -- and often to romanticize democracy. It is de rigueur for politicians in the Western world to say nice things about the people: “You’re beautiful, we love you, you’re the ultimate source of legitimacy, and you’re all above average.” The more extreme democrats are sometimes hard to distinguish from anarchists in their declared belief that the essential good in mass man needs only the removal of various chains held by various sorts of evil (i.e. rich) persons in order to manifest itself in a paradise on Earth.

Hephaestus Furens

Anne Carson has a new book out, called Decreation.  It's reviewed at Straight.com.  Unsurprisingly, it has many references to things classical...such as the story of Hephaestus' being cuckolded (and On the Sublime):

One expects thunderous declamations and a gory dénouement, but these are singularly modern gods. Yes, Hephaestus does trap his wife and her pal in a net of chains, but they wheedle themselves free with game-show patter, after which the betrayed blacksmith takes to his soiled bed and muses sadly on his inadequacies:

Brittle failure theory
should predict
when some quietly oozing volcano
will erupt

in a deadly pyroclastic way

But with you Hephaistos it’s hard to
know.
You’re strangely slow.

This rings of Broadway, not some ancient agora—and, frankly, it’s better for that. Lest one make the mistake of taking Carson for the next Stephen Sondheim, however, it’s worth noting that while her lyrics go down easy, her essays require chewing. “Foam”, an “essay on the sublime” that conflates the Greek rhetorician Longinus with the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, packs a semester’s worth of philosophical inquiry into its six pages. How welcome it is, then, that it’s balanced by song.

This Just In...

The headline:  "Scholar doubts Bible's inerrancy:  Researcher says changes occurred to the Good Book throughout history."  It's about a new book by Bart Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus).  As for the content:

Among the many examples he cites is the story of the adulterous woman who is brought before Jesus. The story, which appears in the Gospel of John, includes one of the most familiar verses in the New Testament, in which Jesus tells the group who brought her, "Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her," John 8:7.

This story, however, is not found in any of the oldest manuscripts of John's Gospel. Until the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, scribes were not professionals but simply educated people who knew how to write. They took liberties with the text in ways unimaginable in today's world of standard practices and copyright laws.

This is presumably a reflection of Eusebius' mention of Constantine's request for 50 copies of the Bible written by kalligraphoi (Life of Constantine 4.36), and the general truth that early on, Christian Bibles were not copied by professionals...Some scribes were professionals, just not the copiers of early Christian mss.

War Games

Computer game company Slitherine has a product called "Legion Arena" (GameSpot review) in which you e-fight historic battles (a series of Roman and a series of Celtic conflicts are offered, and obviously they cross paths once or twice--apparently a copy of Caesar's De Bello Gallico is included with the game)--but it crossed my desk today because of the expansion module just announced--"The Cult of Mithras."  No announcement of exactly that would entail (battles from the late Imperial period?), only:

The Cult of Mithras is set in the boundaries between history and mythology. Can you keep the gods happy and find your way to Elysium?

Aristotle Would've Been Anti-Hamas

(Besides the whole natural slave thing, that is...)  Ali Sina, a self-professed ex-Muslim, commenting on the recent success of Hamas at the polling booth, writes in the Canada Free Press (a publication I had not heard of before; from a cursory look I know they were not fans of Paul Martin & Co.!):

The solution to the problems in Islamic counties is democracy. But before you hand people that awesome power, you must prepare them for it.   

Aristotle understood the danger of democracy when people are not yet ready for self rule. The peripatetic philosopher was not against democracy. He suggested a sound balance between two extremes--one that romanticizes the rule of people and the other that advocates the governance of the elite that underrate them.

The masses are not always right. It is cruel to let people self-rule when they are not ready for it and have no understanding of democracy. They can end up hurting themselves and others. The tyrannical regimes of the Nazis, the Bolsheviks and the Iranian Islamists were all born out of popular votes. Yet no one would call them democratic.

Self-rule under law is better than all compelling forms of governments. However, democracy cannot be imposed universally. It must arise out of cultural and historical traditions of the people or it will fall into tyranny.

'Oo Are the Britons?

Giles Coren, at the (London) Times, riffs (if that's not too common an expression) on the Britons ancient and modern, and their relations with Rome, in a comment on some coins found recently by an archaeologist with Thames Water.  Here's a taste:

I had thought that Roman Britons were locked in a theological struggle to reconcile old polytheistic traditions with the Christianity that was sweeping the empire. I thought that when seeking after supernal consolation our Latinophone forefathers were torn, at this point in history, between prostrating themselves before their lares and penates and accepting the literal transubstantiation of the Host. I had no idea that the best they could do in times of great stress or hardship was to lob their spare shrapnel in the river.

(In using the term Roman Britons, by the way, I am aware of the terminological sensitivities of mixed-culture communities in this country, and mean also to include those who consider themselves British Romans, or, indeed, Brito-Romans or Romano-Britons, and also Britons of a Roman Persuasion.) The thing is that only very, very dim people chuck money in water. Which is why it happens mostly around fountains and ponds at theme parks, out-of-town shopping centres and Trafalgar Square. Rather than, say, in the urinals at the British Library, or in the River Cherwell (except in the long vac when Oxford is turned over to American students for the summer).
...

They arrived on these shores saying things like Veni, vidi, vici and In hoc signo vinces and Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes but after a century or two in Bromley could manage nothing better than: “Werl, you ask me, it’s VI of one and half a XII of the other.”

They no doubt imported the principals of the Circus Maximus from Rome but as time wore on gradually gave in to British demands for “reality circus”, which involved putting a dozen members of the public in the ring for a month and watching them call each other slags. And when this got boring they presumably started doing it with “celebrities”, including former gladiators, oracles, actors and orators — giving rise to a kerfuffle over what that Visigoth-loving senator Georgus Gallowus was doing in there.

In the early years of the occupation I imagine they were still reading their Virgil and their Horace and their Herodotus but within a generation had given in to the local preference for children’s books about schoolboy wizards, and were saying to each other: “I never knew reading could be so much fun.”

And so on...(You have to be in the right mood; if you can't seem to get enough, try this--his take on  film version[s] of Beowulf.)

Modern-Day Thales...Or Not

Film Fodder on Steven Soderbergh and the projected Ocean's 13:

..."Do you make these films just to make money to fund your arty stuff?" And he gives the typical answer that these films are a fun diversion where he gets to do things he doesn't get to do in his other projects. Which I buy, but I kinda wish Soderbergh was like a modern day Thales.   

Thales was a Greek philosopher who was given a bunch a crap for being a philosopher because there was no money in it. So he used philosophy to corner the market in olive presses. Then he made a mint on olive presses because there was a bring olive crop the next year.

Eric Rasmusen seems to be an economist who discusses it...The story comes from Aristotle (Politics, 1.1259a).

Greeks vs. Romans

At MaineToday.com, a little knee-jerk pop-culture recommendation and vituperation, respectively, of Greeks and Romans:

Have you asked yourself, as Albee and many thoughtful people have, what’s it all about? Life, death, loss, longing, desire, loneliness, agedness, etc. You want family entertainment? Try Greek tragedy or Shakespeare or O’Neil or Miller, Williams, even Albee. Does the term ‘family entertainment’ mean bland, unrealistic, simplistic, avoidance of anything that might engender some controversy or diverse opinions--thought? It need not. Or do we need the heavy handed ‘reality’ shows that are carefully staged to create the illusion of reality? For now, apparently so. Such bad theater on TV and in films typically numbs us to quality writing and acting. Now and then the movies bravely present films with serious subject matter, treated seriously and literarily such as Brokeback Mountain; Good Night, Good Luck; Capote, Crash for current examples. These are the rare exceptions. Just think of the great financial successes of recent years, the action films with their mindless, testosterone-guided theatricality, their improbabilities, their essential pointlessness. Violence and vulgarity in speech, dress and manner, technical tricks do not a drama make: its bread and circuses, those wonderful spectacles put on by depraved Roman Emperors for the entertainment of the peasants and oppressed minorities that typically involved feeding unarmed, starving Christians (or other enemies of the state) to hungry lions or to powerful gladiators. What redeeming value did such activities have? What do most movies and TV shows have that respect your intelligence? You can count them on one hand, with two fingers omitted.

Maybe I can find an occasion to use that:  "Violence and vulgarity...the bread and circuses of the entertainment industry"...Hmm...

Gibbon = Everest

I noticed today that Lynn S (of the blog "A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance") just posted that she had now got through the complete text of Gibbon's Decline and Fall (online, no less!), after a two- or three-year process...And that, in itself, is evidence enough of Classical influence on the modern world.  But her direct inspiration, a post at Pejmanesque, gives Gibbon even more glory and relevance:

But beyond dry wit and well-placed insults, Gibbon's work stands out because it is so relevant to our world today. The collapse of empire is a subject of much debate in the United States--what with various commentators and pundits assuring us that we will go the way of the Romans quite soon. Gibbon tells us what the crumbling of an empire really is and what it means--in sumptuous detail. In discussing the empire of the Romans, Gibbon lends perspective to geopolitical arguments of today. We can use his analysis as a starting point--the definitive discussion on how a world power may reach its nadir, and may ultimately see its power dissipate.

So there you go...

Plautus Would Have Laughed

An article on cosmetics reprints some "makeup moments in history," including:

100 A.D., Rome. Romans used sheep fat and blood for nail polish and crocodile excrement for mud baths. "A woman without paint is like food without salt," said the Roman philosopher Plautus.

Hmm...Haven't heard that one before, nor can I track it down, although it has some popularity on the internet.  [147 results on Google for the quote attributed to Plautus; 142 results for the quote and characterization of Plautus; only 9 include the erroneous date too (granted, not all, perhaps not even the above-cited passage, are specifically dating Plautus at 100 AD)...on the other hand, 35 results attributing it to "Platus" (28 with the date too)...Draw your own conclusions about modern culture...]  This quote (against heavy perfume, and B.O., presumably), however, is from Plautus (Mostellaria 274).

And of course, let us not forget Ovid's acknowledgment (Med. Fac. 23-26) of the "metrosexual" male, 2000 years ago:

Nec tamen indignum; sit vobis cura placendi,
     cum comptos habeant saecula nostra viros.
Feminea vestri poliuntur lege mariti,
     et vix ad cultus nupta, quod addat, habet.