Classics in Contemporary Culture

Oh, the Humanities!

Stanley Fish reviews some recent books on education. The first is by a proponent of home-school "classical education," Leigh Bortins, who argues that each subject "can be mastered by the rigorous application of the skills of the classical Trivium, grammar, the study of basic forms, logic, the skill of abstracting from particulars and rhetoric, the ability to 'speak and write persuasively and eloquently about any topic while integrating allusions and examples from one field of study to explain a point in another.'" The third, by Diane Ravitch, critiques No Child Left Behind as an elaborate example of 'juking the stats' [not her phrase, or Fish's, but still...]

The second is a plea by Martha Nussbaum for the place of the Humanities for the training of citizens in democracies, within the context of an increasingly profit-driven global educational system...The first chapter is available online at Princeton University Press; cf. also Nussbaum's book from the late 90s, Cultivating Humanity...

[Thanks to rogueclassicism...]

Deus ex machina vs. Anime

An essay on io9.com--disturbed over the use of God or other supernatural forces in bringing recent television series to a close (Lost, Battlestar Galactica)--compares Aeschylus' Oresteia and Aristotle to the experience of writing anime:

These stories come from an inherently conservative point of view: everyone has a place to stand and a part to play, and attempts to step outside those boundaries can only result in pain and suffering. You'll notice that stories about God commonly involve triumph over the self, not triumph over an oppressive regime - Arjuna never once thinks that he should share his riches with the lower castes, or that he'll unseat the monarchy once he wins the battle. Doing so would overturn the "natural" order of his environment. Arjuna's kingdom, once he wins it, will continue to rely on slavery to sustain itself - because that's how Krishna wants it. God's role in these stories is a conservator, one who might snip off poisoned buds or gently nudge humans in one direction or another in attempt to preserve that which is good and right, without radically altering anything. God conserves the status quo, and we're supposed to take comfort in that: a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.

Recent American television finales have embraced this logic. The endings of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, and LOST all involve a divine figure returning balance to an earthly equation by repeating an ancient pattern. The Avatar achieves his final state and the four nations again live in harmony. Humans create Cylons, battle Cylons, and become Cylons. The Island calls people in need of personal change, gives it to them, then lets them go (to Heaven) before calling another group. All of this has happened before, and will happen again. The pattern doesn't change, it simply repeats.

Another word for "repetition" is "letdown."

As far back as Aristotle, critics and audiences have measured the quality of a story by (among other things) whether it has a discernible beginning, middle, and end. Things must change. The characters must be in a different place than before, and the audience must feel for them. Traditionally, this comes about as a result of the character making a choice or taking an action that has consequences, and then suffering through them. Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia so that his ships might sail to Troy, and Clytemnestra retaliates by murdering him. Hamlet refuses to kill Claudius when he has the chance, and he (and everyone else) dies. Rochester lies to Jane about his marriage, and loses her. Meursault kills the Arab, then awaits his execution. Consequences follow actions. Stories progress. Circumstances change. Characters grow.

But lately on American television, they haven't. Lately, all tension has been drained from their actions, and all opportunities for choice have been robbed from them by fate. Does it matter that humans created Cylons? Not really. They did it because God wanted them to. Does it matter that the Losties all had issues with their parents that they needed to overcome before they could be whole? Nah. They were all in Purgatory, anyhow. Does it matter that Aang had lost access to the Avatar State? No - apparently stray rocks can unblock his chakra. (That's right, kids: Aang works like the Millennium Falcon - a well-placed punch can bring his circuits back online.)

Vergilian Heresy: A Cautionary Tale

An old post at Classico & Moderno (in Italian) puts me in mind of Medieval "demonization" (literally, as Nico Narsi points out) of Classical culture and literature, in the tradition of Jerome's dream, where he was accused of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian.  The story--about how a certain Vilgard was treated to a vision of demons in the form of Vergil, Horace and Juvenal, and was subsequently condemned to death for heresy (circa 970)--comes to us from one Ralph the Bald (Rodulfus Glaber):

A certain man named Vilgard occupied himself with more eagerness than constancy in literary studies, for it was always the Italian habit to pursue these to the neglect of the other arts.  Then one night when, puffed up with pride in the knowledge of his art, he had begun to reveal himself to be more stupid than wise, demons in the likeness of the poets Vergil, Horace, and Juvenal appeared to him, pretending thanks for the loving study which he devoted to the contents of their books and for serving as their happy herald to posterity.  They promised him, moreover, that he would soon share their renown.  Corrupted by these devilish deceptions, he began pompously to teach many things contrary to holy faith and made the assertion that the words of the poets deserved belief in all instances.  But he was at last discovered to be a heretic and was condemned by Peter, archbishop of that city [Ravenna].

Many others holding this noxious doctrine were discovered throughout Italy, and they too died by sword and pyre. Indeed, at this same period, some went forth from the island of Sardinia--which usually teems with this sort of folk--to infect the people of Spain, but they were exterminated by the Catholics...

[In Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p. 73]

So, once again, if you're feeling distressed about the marginalization of Classics in the modern era...repeat again with me, "At least it's not the dark ages!" Actually, I'm more intrigued by the fact that this "heresy" was found to be so pervasive in the "dark ages," and especially that Sardinia was a hotbed of Virgiliolatry.

Ptolemies in Rome: Relics of a Dynasty

A new novel by Michelle Moran explores the lives of the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and is reviewed in the Boston Globe:

Twins Kleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios are brought to Rome in chains, still mourning the deaths of their parents and their younger brother, Ptolemy. Though paraded through the streets as part of Caesar’s Triumph, they are still considered Egyptian royalty and not officially enslaved, but their futures are uncertain, and they are subject to the whims of a coldly calculating Caesar and his vindictive wife, Livia. The twins grow up surrounded by secrecy and danger, witnesses to the brutality of Rome as seen from within a gilded cage of Caesar’s inner circle.

They find an unlikely protector in their new guardian, Octavia, sister of Caesar and the wife whom their father, Marc Anthony, abandoned in Rome in order to be with Cleopatra in Egypt. But even from the relative safety of her home, they discover that life in “the greatest city on earth’’ is shockingly grim compared with the one they left behind. “Even Thebes, which had suffered destruction at the hands of Ptolemy IX, was far more beautiful than this,’’ Selene thinks as she views Rome for the first time. “There was no organization, no city plan, and though buildings of rare beauty stood out among the brink tabernae and bathhouses, they were like gems in a quarry of jagged stone.’’

In Rome, slaves are maimed or crucified by the hundreds if a single one rebels; assassinations are common; newborns are left out in the cold to die; and women have little value, forced to send away their daughters and remarry if Caesar commands it. “When a girl is born, a period of mourning is begun. She is invisa [unseen], unwanted, valueless. She has no rights but what her father gives her,’’ the slave Gallia, a captured Gaelic princess, tells Selene, who quickly understands that the only way to save her life is to somehow become useful to Caesar.

Moran skillfully weaves into her latest book plenty of political history and detail without ever weighing down the story, which is fast-paced, intriguing, and beautifully written; a subplot about a mysterious “Red Eagle’’ who is trying to incite a slave rebellion is riveting. In “Cleopatra’s Daughter,’’ she once again demonstrates her talent for taking long-forgotten historical figures and bringing them vividly to life.

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...

What Would Pericles Spray-Paint?

An article celebrating the 25th anniversary edition of Subway Art, by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfan, constructs an analogy, which I believe works as follows--Western Democracy is to the Age of Pericles as 21st Century Graffiti Artists are to the Age of Ed Koch.  Hmm...Is that meaningful?

Those who identify themselves as Western look at the ancient Athenians as a smaller, earlier version of themselves. Greeks in the Age of Pericles had the idea of democracy, the idea of the individual, the idea of reason and its importance. Something similar is at work when a hiphop head of the '00s looks at these photos of graffiti artists on the streets, apartments, and subway tracks of New York. We see ourselves in these people who had an idea of postmodern urbanism, an idea of the power of appropriating pop culture, an idea of what David Harvey calls "the right to the city." These citizens of the Age of Mayor Koch are us in our infancy.

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

Looking for material, ancient or modern, that deals with the scourge of the Republic, the monster who did not, repeat, not give his name to a kind of salad dressing, but who did give license to Cicero's O fortunatam natam me consule Romam?  I refer, of course, to Lucius Sergius Catilina...Well, the "Roman History Books and More" blog has compiled a long list of stuff, much of it available online, in various posts, which I thought it might be useful to corral together, with my own, CCC-oriented organization.

• Modern Creative Treatments of the Story of Catiline
  • Fiction and drama featuring Lucius Sergius Catilina I, update for May 20 [link]
    • Robert Harris, Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome
    • Colleen McCullough, Caesar's Women
    • John Maddox Roberts, SPQR II: The Catiline Conspiracy
  • Fiction and drama featuring Lucius Sergius Catilina II (Catilina's Riddle) [link]
    • Steven Saylor, Catilina's Riddle
  • A Catilina short story [link]
    • Steven Saylor, "The House of the Vestals"
  • More Catilinaria: an 1853 novel, "The Roman Traitor" [link]
  • Literary treatment of Catiline, for the esoterically minded, plus an overture [link]
• Ancient Sources and Modern Historians
  • The conspiracy of Catiline as seen by contemporaries and historians, updated [link]
  • Cicero's Orations against Catiline:  Online texts [link]
  • Latin program:  Catiline (pedagogical formatting for Cicero's Latin) [link]
  • Cicero on the monograph, and on a history about himself:  Letter to Lucceius [link]
  • Sallust in high flight (Bell. Cat. 1) [link]
  • Plutarch's Life of Crassus (reference to the Catilinarian conspiracy) [link]
  • "Who, Catiline, can boast a nobler line" (Juvenal 8) [link]
  • Syme and Sallust, and demolishing the "First Catilinarian Conspiracy" [link]
  • A terse statement by Ronald Syme on Catilina [link]
  • Crassus, Catiline and Caesar as seen by Theodor Mommsen [link]
  • For JSTOR users: "Plutarch and Catiline" (C. B. R. Pelling) [link]
  • More JSTOR: Was Sallust fair to Cicero? Was Catiline a madman? Was Cicero the saviour of the state? [link]
  • More JSTOR on Catilina: Sallust's Catiline, date and purpose [link]