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?