Classics in Contemporary Culture

Hyping Hypatia

Alejandro Amenabar's  film about Hypatia, Agora, is opening in the US -- if anyone notices a film about Late Antique Alexandria and its mix of religion and violence, the movie is certain to evoke Pavlovian culture-war reactions from all and sundry...In any case, here's an interview with the star, Rachel Weisz, stressing the theme of opposition to religious intolerance / fundamentalism, and noting (?!) that basically ancient science and acting are interchangeable -- neither one involves telescopes (I know: Totally unfair!):

"What's remarkable is that everything she was doing was imaginary because she was working in the time before the telescope. Everything she was figuring out, she was doing with her imagination. There was some math to back it up - but what she did was imagine things. Which is what I do for a living as well."

And here's a thoughtful essay by Nathan Schneider, generally against the portrayal offered, although appreciative of the lack of sex / the contrast with (e.g.) HBO's Rome series. In particular, some interesting final thoughts:

The best-developed character in Agora, held as a foil against the street riots, is the sky. Amenábar used a starscape calibrated to look exactly as it would have in antiquity, accounting for axial precession. Several times he juxtaposes the stars’ stillness, and the Earth’s roundness, with the chaos below. Like a good Platonist, Hypatia was obsessed with the stars, which Plato and Aristotle held to be demigods, eternal as the universe and its Prime Mover. Contemplating of their order and their perfection is where her philosophy lurked. Unfortunately, other Platonic legacies mar her contemplation in Agora: an obsession with the circle, which blinds her to the elliptical motion of the planets, together with sitting atop a society predicated on slavery and gross inequity.

The Christians turn out to be even worse astronomers, but they do get some things right. The Parabalani—a band of the patriarch’s bodyguards that Agora implicates in Hypatia’s murder—were actually a fellowship chosen from among the poor, principally to serve the poor. They tended to the sick and buried the dead, risking infection in the process. Between violent mob scenes, the movie does at least give a glimpse of what brought so many in the vast Alexandrian underclasses to wear the sign of the cross: bread, freedom, and the good news of the Beatitudes. Hypatia’s slave Davus is, to her, only a slave, albeit a clever one; among Christians, he learns that feeding the hungry is better than fattening the full.

In any case, it's clear that any discussion will be a fruitful venue for centuries of cultural anxieties and antagonisms to be aired willy nilly...

Chimera, Chimeric, Chimerian, Chimerical

...are all real words.  In a New York Times op-ed from this past Sunday, however, Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick cite their own coinage, Chimerica, and speculate about its potential demise:

A FEW years ago we came up with the term “Chimerica” to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy. With a combined 13 percent of the world’s land surface and around a quarter of its population, Chimerica nevertheless accounted for a third of global economic output and two-fifths of worldwide growth from 1998 to 2007.

We called it Chimerica for a reason: we believed this relationship was a chimera — a monstrous hybrid like the part-lion, part-goat, part-snake of legend. Now we may be witnessing the death throes of the monster. The question President Obama must consider as he flies to Asia this week is whether to slay it or to try to keep it alive.

The cartoon art accompanying the column, however, seems to be a hybrid of King Kong and Polyphemus, not lion, goat and snake...But of course the scientific use of the term Chimera is also attested; in fact it's in yesterday's Times:

A geep is not actually an offspring of the sexual mating of one sheep and one goat; rather, it is an animal resulting from the physical mingling of very early embryos of the two species and thus has four parents — two sheep and two goats. The scientific term for an animal with mingled cells from two species is chimera.

Yet another kind of Chimera?  Just look at the Oct. 30 edition:

If history is a guide, then the recent suicide bombings in Baghdad show that the insurgency in Iraq is far from over.

Contrary to much of what is written and said, victory is not near and the notion that the “surge” of troops was some great, decisive military action that set the stage for political reconciliation is a chimera.

It was a chimera for the French in Algeria that their bloody counterinsurgency there defeated Algerian nationalists.

After the war, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, a myth started to build in the French Army and then found its way into American Army thinking, where it lives on today, that the French military operations defeated the insurgents.

Not true. In fact, the Algerian insurgents chose to lay low while the French Army and people impaled themselves on the political problems of colonial rule. In the end, President Charles de Gaulle ordered the French Army out of Algeria in 1961 and Algeria got its independence.

Wow...imaginary monsters, coupled with references to myth and self-impalement!  That's why they call it the paper of record.

Final question:  Which of these meanings was the "Chimera Investment Corporation" thinking of?  One hopes it's not a place where, with Jonathan Swift, one might say, "Rise by merit to promotion; Alas! a mere chimeric notion." [Thanks to OED for that one.]

Head in the Clouds

Another endorsement of Stoicism, in this obituary of Dr. Eilene Galloway, who was active in "space law and policy" ever since (in 1957) then-Senator Lyndon Johnson brought her on board to work on US space-preparedness...

She constantly affirmed the core principle of the 1967 U.N. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (the Outer Space Treaty), stated in Article II: “Celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriations by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

...

Eilene was fearless. When she was six, her mother enrolled her in the Georgie Brown Dramatic School in Kansas City, Missouri, where she learned to be confident in front of audiences. She was one of a group of girls from the School who performed a patriotic song and dance for Theodore Roosevelt at the Muhlbach Hotel in Kansas City, when he was campaigning for the U.S. presidency in 1912. Throughout her life, she was not afraid to take on any task that came her way. She always found a way to turn crises and problems into opportunities. In times of stress, she turned to her favorite book, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for guidance. [emphasis mine]

Chimaerae

At the Motley Fool, an explanation of a mythological name:

From Typhon and Echidna comes Chimera

The attractive returns that can come from buying investment securities -- whether equity or debt -- at heavily discounted prices has attracted the interest of mortgage investment REIT Annaly Capital Management (NYSE: NLY), which is working with Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) on the IPO of a new mortgage investment REIT called Chimera Investment. Last Friday, the company filed its initial S-11 filing with the SEC to kick off the IPO process.

The stated objective of the fund is to use the management team's expertise, along with a heavy dose of leverage, to find attractive opportunities in the world of mortgage debt. The strategy isn't all that much different from what Annaly already does, though Chimera does appear to have a greater appetite for risk.

Fear the Chimera
Those up on their Greek mythology (Wikipedia helped me with mine) know Chimera as an unearthly creature that was part lion, part snake, and part goat. As Hesiod's Theogony describes it, the beast "breathed raging fire, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth a fearful blast of blazing fire." Well. Such a grotesque and intimidating image is probably a good one for a fund focused on investing in an asset class that's in such sorry shape.

But I found myself questioning Chimera's aim. Though the timing is perfect for a vulture fund of this sort, Chimera's S-11 makes no direct reference to the idea of using current market dislocations to find good assets on the cheap.

Uwe Justus Wenzel warns about another kind of Chimera:

He warns of the dangers of inserting human DNA into animal egg cells to produce new stem cells and draws on mythology to make his point "Even the Chimera, which by its very nature serves as a messenger here, urges us to be cautious. It, too, stands for divine punishment, or more precisely, for the indirect outcome of the vindictiveness of the gods. The 'Chimera' - a three-headed monster, part lion, part goat and part snake - was the issue of an incestuous coupling between Typhon, a huge monster with the heads of a dragon and a snake, and Echidna, a creature that according to Hesiod was 'half woman and half monstrous serpent'. Both were conceived by Gaia, who had coupled with Tartaros of the dark underworld in an act of vengeance for the death of some of her other numerous children, the titans and the giants, who were killed by Zeus in a battle for power. The Chimera was finally destroyed by Bellerophon, a grandson of Sisyphus. It echoes in your ears: Gaia, the earth's primal mother, takes her revenge! Does she also stir up experiments in the Petri dish?"

Climate Goddess

An EU project for more sophisticated weather/climate predictions has the name Demeter...apparently it's been around since 2000, but was in the news just recently because they're using it for help with malaria in Africa.  Their website displays and links to some vase paintings from the Perseus project...

NASA...Uncovers...Early Gospel

Gotta love this headline (tendentiously excerpted for my own headline--let's play Telephone): "NASA science uncovers texts of Trojan Wars, early gospel"--the most recent article on the new high-tech readings of some Oxyrhynchus Papyri. See RogueClassicism for other recent news stories...

There is no new "early gospel" as yet, by the way--the only one mentioned in this item is the Gospel of Thomas.

For the Archilochus fragment mentioning Telephus and Mysia, see the P.Oxy. website...In other "news," "Welcome to the Telephus"...

Greeks and Romans on Disabilities

Today, the RogueClassicist cites the testimony of Rud Turnbull (click here for 75-page CV; here for his page at the U of Kansas) before the US Senate HELP Committee on issues related to the Terri Schiavo case. In the relevant section, Turnbull basically outlined Greco-Roman discussion of infanticide, quoting Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the XII Tables. For more (in fact, with close to the same citations), see Bonnie L. Gracer, "What the Rabbis Heard: Deafness in the Mishnah," Disability Studies Quarterly 23 (2003) 192-205 [html/pdf]; also, note one of her sources, Margaret Winzer in the Disability Studies Reader (ed. L. J. Davis) [ah--link to "search inside" may not work; but here's amazon.com's page on the book; search inside for "Margaret Winzer" to get access to specific pages--pp. 84ff. are the important ones here], who gets the Hippocrates reference from R. Etienne, "Ancient medical conscience and the life of children," Journal of Psychohistory 4 (1976) 131-61 [sorry, no link!]. Also of interest in this regard is a page (under construction) of notes on children, disabilities, insanity, etc. in the ancient world at "Diligio.com." In all this (though I could be wrong), I don't think I've seen one reference to blind poets and seers, such as (traditionally) Homer himself and Teiresias--nor to the lame god Hephaestus. Hmm...

The specific references to Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle obviously focus on paramount Greek thinkers, for rhetorical effect (?)--but their views on infanticide amount, more or less, to endorsement of the contemporary status quo; Margaret Winzer (p. 84) makes it clear that Hippocrates, at least, had a positive impact with respect to the issue of disability: "He attempted to treat a variety of disabling conditions--visual impairment, deafness, epilepsy, and mental retardation--and, in doing so, largely discounted older conceptions of etiology." Winzer also mentions (p. 86) Galen's attempts at treating deafness. Early Christian and Medieval society were regressive from this perspective, although I wonder about the allegation that Augustine excluded deaf people from "church membership" (p. 91).

Final comment (of linguistic pedantry): Contra Radutsky apud Gracer, Roman Law did not classify deaf people as mentecatti furiosi (see Winzer, p. 88, for the correct mente capti).

Moons - Trojan and Otherwise

Newly discovered moons of Saturn have been named classically (BBC; PhysOrg) [unlike some others recently found--Ymir et al.--as you can see from this factsheet]: Methone, Pallene, and Polydeuces. The first two are interesting, since they were taken from Greek place names--although maybe someone who has followed such nomenclature more closely knows better...The newly named Polydeuces is (as you might expect) one of a pair: it's a so-called "Trojan moon," which means it orbits in tandem with another body...That body, however, is Dione (not the companion you might have been expecting). The term "Trojan moon" appears to be an extension of "Trojan asteroid," which indicates a class of asteroids occupying specific points in relation to the Sun and Jupiter: in theory, those at one "Lagrangian node" are given names of Greeks associated with the Trojan war [the first-discovered of which is "Achilles"], those at another names of Trojans--but the complications continue:

Following Wolf's lead these asteroids were given names associated with the Iliad—in fact, those in the L4 point are named after Greek heroes of the Iliad (the "Greek node" or "Achilles group"), and those at the L5 point are named after the heroes of Troy (the "Trojan node"). Confusingly, the latter group are sometimes called Patroclean asteroids after the most prominent of those, even though Patroclus (the hero) was on the Greek side. However, 617 Patroclus (the asteroid) was the first discovered asteroid at the L5 point, and was named before the Greece/Troy rule was devised. The Greek node also has one "misplaced" asteroid; 624 Hektor.

As the Iliad deals with the events of the Trojan War, the asteroids came to be collectively known as Trojan asteroids. Over time, this term has come to be more generally applied to any planetoidal body at the triangular Lagrangian point of any two bodies—besides Jupiter's Trojans, Mars and Neptune have one Trojan each, plus there are Trojan moons around Saturn (Telesto–Tethys–Calypso and Dione–Helene). Strictly speaking, the term Trojan applies only to those in the L4 and L5 points of the Sun-Jupiter system.

Got that?

The "True" Location of Troy

So, I've been seeing this book, Trojan Odyssey by Clive Cussler, on display at bookstores recently; a few weeks ago I checked it out of the public library and um...ended up reading a little of it...and mostly skimming through to find out about the shocking new location proposed for Troy...Well, well, well:  England.  Mycenae was in France.  Ithaca was at Cadiz.  Odysseus' adventures:  in the Atlantic and Caribbean...Cussler depends on the recent Where Troy Once Stood, by Iman Wilkens--and also on the more ancient  Theophile Cailleux ...

All well and good, but how does he know that Troy wasn't in Croatia???  Or  in the Baltic area???  Or in Atlantis [Sanskrit Lanka]???

More outlandish theories are welcome in comments...and is there a website anywhere devoted to, er, shall we say, non-mainstream identifications of the site of Troy?

[CLARIFICATION:  The theories don't have to be "more outlandish"--just outlandish, and more of them is what I'm after...]

[UPDATE 2/24/05:  N. S. Gill at About.com points to an essay by Tom Slattery, hosted by About.com, speculating about the possible relation between smallpox, Troy, and the Exodus story...Not a different Troy location, but interesting in this context.]

Titan Expedition = World Peace?

An article in the Concord Monitor suggests that the shift to interest in Saturn's moon (from focus on Mars) may presage a new era of global cooperation...

For the past year or so, America has had a couple of robotic explorers crawling around on Mars, the planet named for the god of war. Since Friday, however, the new information has been coming from Saturn, the son of Gaia (Mother Earth) and Ouranos (Father Sky).

Saturn is the god of agriculture. Though he took power by castrating his father with a sickle, Saturn's reign over the universe is known in mythology as the Golden Age. It was a time with neither harsh weather nor war. So maybe the ringed planet and its 30-some moons - at least two new ones have been discovered by Cassini -have something to teach Earth.

The cost of this great effort was shared by 20 nations. The $3.3 billion price tag for the mission is roughly what America spends in 19 days for the war in Iraq.

Ah, but can we be sure it will not be an era of castration?