Classics in Contemporary Culture

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]

The Paul Volcker of Roman Emperors

Will wonders never cease?!  An article citing Domitian as an example...not of cruelty or megalomania (no flies, no dominus et deus)...but of sound economic policy.  Bill Bonner, in the Daily Reckoning, writes:

“Bill, you’re wrong about two things,” begins a helpful Dear Reader. “First, you’re wrong about emerging markets. You say they are going up, along with gold and commodities…while US stocks and US property goes down. But so far, emerging markets have been the biggest losers in this financial ‘adjustment’ we are suffering.

“More importantly, you’re wrong about Diocletian. Not about his economic policies, but about the Piazza di Navona. It was not Diocletian who built a stadium there; it was Domitian. Big difference.”

Our reader is wrong and right, in that order. That is, he is wrong about emerging markets and right about right about the Piazza di Navona. As to the latter, we were misinformed…and realised it when we were having a cup of café latte out in the square and looked over and saw the “Ristorante Domiziano” on the opposite side. Why would they name a restaurant after Domitian in Diocletian’s square, we wondered. Turned out, it was Domitian’s square, not Diocletian’s.

About Domitian, we knew nothing. So we looked him up..

...

The US money supply is said (the government no longer gives out the numbers) to be increasing at 20% per year. Interest rates are being pushed down by the Fed.  The US federal government is running a record deficit…and financing the most expensive war in history with borrowed money.

Rome got itself into a similar bind. It couldn’t support the empire from its own resources. It had the reserve currency of the day…but it was a metal-based money. All emperors could do was to send more slaves to the mines to try to dig out more silver and gold…levy more taxes…and squeeze more money and resources from Rome’s far-flung tributary nations.

The population of the Rome itself rose to over one million people – far more than could be supported by the local economy. What resulted was the equivalent of a huge trade deficit – with shiploads of wheat, marble, wood, wine and other products arriving at the port of Ostia, near the capital, and then shipped up to Rome itself.

By the time of Domitian, this trade deficit – combined with almost constant warfare - had already brought a substantial inflation to the empire. Domitian’s father, Vespasian, had devalued the currency. But Domitian was the Paul Volcker of Emperors. He actually restored the value of the denarius to Augustine levels, increased tax collections, and managed to leave the government with a surplus.

Now, restoring it to Augustine levels would be quite the trick...Here's DIR:

As emperor, Domitian was to become one of Rome's foremost micromanagers, especially concerning the economy. Shortly after taking office, he raised the silver content of the denarius by about 12% (to the earlier level of Augustus), only to devaluate it in A.D. 85, when the imperial income must have proved insufficient to meet military and public expenses.

Oh, and I nearly missed the ambiguous last line of Bonner's column:  I want to read it as when he "left the government" he had a surplus...there was, of course, something of a no-confidence vote...

Ancient Finances

William Goetzmann, featured in this article in Working Knowledge (a publication of the Harvard Business School), researches the origins of modern financial instruments, such as checks (those things I grew up knowing as "cheques").  As you might expect, he goes back to the papyri:

The idea of a bank check seems like such a straightforward tool, he says. "It's essentially a letter to your bank saying please pay to this person such and such amount of money. There is some suggestion that this was a tool used in the Middle Ages by Islamic merchants. 

"I began to look in papyri collections. Lots of different libraries have papyri they have scanned in, so it's like a virtual library. A huge collection is the Oxyrhynchus Online collection." With the help of a research assistant he is systematically creating a catalog of all the financial instruments indicated on these papyri; the checks written in Greek date up to about 400 A.D.

I'd like to know more about this last date:  are we saying "dating back all the way to 400 A.D." or "dating from earlier times down to 400 A.D."?  The latter might conflict with Sassanian origins for the cheque; the former would not.  Maybe I'll check in the book Goetzmann co-edited, The Origins of Value...

Empire of Debt

Resource Investor prints an excerpt from a recent book by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, entitled Empire of Debt:  The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, which "weave[s] current events and history into a highly readable account of exactly why our economy runs the way it does - and the dangers of running it into the ground."  Here are a couple of snippets:

Let us take a moment to stand back and gaze at America's great Empire of Debt. It is the largest edifice of debt ever put up. It sustains the most magnificent world economy ever assembled. It supports more people in better style than any system ever before devised.

Not only is it comparably effective, it is also immeasurably entertaining. For it has its burnished helmets and flying banners; its intellectuals and its gladiators; its Caesars, Antonys, Neros, and Caligulas. It has its temples, its forum, its Capitol, its senators; its praetorian guards; its via Appia; its proconsuls, centurions, and legions all over the world as well as its bread and its circuses in the homeland, and its costly wars in periphery areas.

The Roman Empire rested on a classical model of imperial finance. Beneath a complex and nuanced pyramid of relationships was a foundation of tribute formed with the hard rock of brute force. America's Empire of Debt, on the other hand, stands not as a solid pyramid of trust, authority, and power relationships but as a rickety slum of delusion, fraud, and misapprehension.

...

From the center to the furthest garrisons on the periphery, from the lowest rank to the highest - everyone, everywhere willingly, happily, and proudly participates in one of the greatest deceits of all time. At the bottom of the empire are wage slaves squandering borrowed money on imported doodads. The plebes gamble on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). The patricians gamble on hedge funds that speculate on huge swaths of mortgage debt. Near the top are Fed economists urging them to do it! And at the very pinnacle is a chief executive, modeled after whom... Augustus or Commodus?... who cuts taxes while increasing spending on bread, circuses, and peripheral wars.

Courtroom Tragedy

Gosh, I hate to be too much of a grouch, but...here's the Enron trial described as a Greek tragedy:

The drama unfolding on the witness stand in Houston includes all the elements of tragedy, with tales spun of spousal lies, family betrayals and shattered friendships. It is the ultimate evidence that, despite the breadth and significance that seems to attach to corporate scandals, in the end they are uniquely human tales, ones that rest on the foibles and follies of individuals.

"This is a small community where the knives are out," said Stephen Meagher, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in corporate fraud cases. "With Fastow, here is a guy who has been close, personally and professionally, to virtually everyone wrapped up in this tale, and he has turned on everyone, including his own wife. If that is not a Greek tragedy, I don't know what the Greeks were writing about."

Note the hypothetical in the last sentence...[Thanks to WSJ Law Blog]

Latin Will Get You Fired!

In an obituary/article in the San Francisco Chronicle on architecture critic Allan Temko, there's a little classical angle:

After the war, he finished his studies at Columbia and then headed west. There was an extremely brief stint at The Chronicle in 1949 - it supposedly ended when the cub reporter was found at his desk in the newsroom reading Catullus in the original Latin. Next came graduate studies at UC Berkeley, where Temko met Elizabeth (Becky) Ostroff. They married in 1950, a union that would last until her death in 1996.

Iceland: Small Is (Potentially) Big

How is it that Iceland has so much money passing through its hands?  Easy:  They're just like ancient Athens.  Or Rome.  More seriously, small size fosters intercommunication and innovation:

[Iceland's President] Grímsson puts forward an endearing explanation. 'When we look at renaissance Florence, renaissance Venice and even classical Rome and classical Athens, they were all about the same size as Iceland is now. It is an important lesson of history that small creative communities can do extraordinary things.'

Water on the Brain

You've heard of the "Fountain of Youth"?  Well, now there's Aqua Gilgamesh (TM)--or was:  gosh, with a name like that, I can't imagine why it seems to have already disappeared...Darn water-snake, I expect.  Don't think that...er...plain Aqua Bottled Water will have the same effect...More classically still (not without what I'll call "typos"),  the Bottled Water Web's logo has a "Latin" motto:  Puritas - Qualis - Consistere...

Nomen Omen

Hmm...

QuikTrak Networks dropped nearly 17% - down 0.38p to 1.87p - after revealing plans to refocus its business on investment in natural resources and change its name to Tarquin Resources.

[Emphasis mine.]

Goddesses in the News...

First, there's an underwater humanoid robot named Artemis, put together by Texas' Mainland Robotics Team...

Then, Jo Hilton, owner of Wig Wham, is up for a Hera Award (the Everywoman categories [UK] also include Artemis, Demeter, and Athena Awards)...

And...sequins are in! As Marylou Luther (Cleveland Plain Dealer) describes the trend:

They're already sending off sparks in Roland Nivelais' new collection. The French-born New York designer has celebrated these glittering spangles (in his native France, they're called paillettes) in the truly breathtaking design illustrated here. Each sequin is hand-embroidered in overlapping rows that ombre from black to pink to give the effect of fish scales.

To complete the mermaid effect, Nivelais creates a skirt of vertical ruffles made of hand-painted, satin-faced organza. Think goddess Aphrodite stepping out of the ocean on the island of Cypress, and you have some idea of this goddess gown.

Er...Cyprus...

[In other editing news (uh-oh, catty comment coming up!), Marvin Olasky refers to a "Milton of Croton" in a piece on the Olympics...Milton, thou shouldst have been living at that hour! For Milo(n), see this or any number of reference works...]