Classics in Contemporary Culture

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...]

Odysseus Lags in the Polls

Odysseus rates #3 in the San Francisco Chronicle's top 10 fictional travellers. #3? Here's their description:

If Homer's "The Odyssey" was the first novel ever written, as some scholars suggest - yes, technically, it's a poem - that would make his Odysseus the first great fictional traveler. His far-fetched adventures-including his encounter with Circe, who turned men into swine - still resonate with modern travelers. But what's most impressive is how this fictional traveler has endured through the ages. Odysseus' wanderings around the Mediterranean inspired, among many other works of art, the most ambitious modern novel ever written, James Joyce's "Ulysses," and its hero's epic wanderings around Dublin.

Now, I know this is not scientific, but Google reports 3,000,000 hits for Odysseus; 2,000,000-odd hits for Don Quixote; but only 682,000 for Sal Paradise...even trying Kerouac On the Road only gets 1,000,000...I'm just saying...

Back to Ithaca

Hillel Halkin (Commentary) writes about a trip to Ithaca that was strangely evocative...Here's part from the beginning:

But the Ionian islands meant Ithaca, and Ithaca meant The Odyssey, and The Odyssey is a book I have cherished. Several years ago I made a list of the things I most wanted to do before I died. One of them was learning Greek to read The Odyssey in the language Homer wrote it in. Poetry, not just as language heightened, but as language transformed, its particles fused into rare new elements, begins with Homer. The winedark sea! The rosyfingered dawn! No book has lovelier phrasing. How could I have been so foolish in college as to major in English, which I needed no instruction to read, when I could have been studying Greek? How not sail to Ithaca now?

And here's the sort of goofy, sort of poignant end of the piece:

Nor did I encounter any ghosts on Ithaca. It was just a small, pleasantly undeveloped Greek island, and while something in me was fulfilled by being there, I did not learn much about The Odyssey that I couldn’t as well have learned from books. But then again, I had only read, or re-read, the books that I did because I went to Ithaca.

It was fitting, then, that the only ghost that did appear was a book’s. It was the ghost of the same book I had lost when I was little. For years, this was a blank in my memory. Apart from having lost it, I couldn’t remember a thing about it. And then, as I was writing this essay, a small part of it came back to me.

It was a Donald Duck book. That is, Donald Duck was its main character; I can’t recall even now who else of his comic-book entourage was with him. But I know he was on a sea voyage and crossed the Equator, because the book had a chapter—I presume it was my favorite, since it alone has surfaced in my memory—in which he had to go through the traditional equatorial ceremony of being judged by King Neptune and sentenced to a symbolic dunking. There was, I’m quite sure of it, a colorful illustration of the captain gotten up as Neptune with a trident, prodding a reluctant Donald in full dinner dress off the diving board of the ship’s swimming pool

Now the odd thing, which must be what stirred this memory from its depths, is that Neptune, the Roman god of the seas, is the Greek Poseidon, Odysseus’ nemesis. Poseidon thwarts Odysseus’ return to Ithaca because Odysseus has blinded his son, the one-eyed Cyclops, who prays to him for vengeance. Consequently, as Homer has Zeus say, “From that time forth Poseidon, the earth-shaker, does not indeed slay Odysseus, but beats him off from his native land.”

So I had to go to Ithaca, it would seem, to find a fragment of a children’s book lost sixty years before. Things turn up where you least expect them to.

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.]

Mediterranean Echoes

The Globe and Mail reviews travel/political writer Robert Kaplan's Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece. Kaplan lets the historical resonances come through loud and clear (seeing Sicily through the lens of Thucydides, for example), which in the reviewer's opinion leads to some glib overstatement:

There are times you wish that Kaplan were truer to his younger self, that he could set aside the big-picture view of the warring world and focus more innocently on the humble details of the day-to-day traveller. For readers not determined to compare and contrast ancient Rome with modern America, his history lessons can feel trite and simplified, whereas his more random observations -- Of noisy nomads: "The ceaseless wind had given them the habit of talking loud" -- have the ring of deeper truths.

Spend a Weekend in Gay P...ergamum?

...ok, actually Antalya. The story (from ekathimerini): there is controversy in the resort town about whether a statue should be erected in honor of the founder, Attalus II--namely, because of allegations that he was gay--not to mention Greek! [Thanks to DW at Classics-L; here's the story via Yahoo. Incidentally, this is a mini-case-study in light editing for slant: assuming Yahoo gives the AFP story intact, the version at ekathimerini adds "Greek" to "King Attalus," as well as a reference to his connection with the Stoa of Attalus; it suppresses the dating of Attalus to "more than 2000 years ago," an alternative commemorative project, and some further words of the mayor: "Attalos was an Anatolian. And all the cultures of this country belong to us." Not that the mayor's words are without slant themselves! Philetaerus, the founder of the dynasty, certainly had some Paphlagonian blood; yet Attalus was "Greeker" than, say, Mithridates...The spelling conventions, on the other hand, are presumably an editorial thing...]

Around the Mediterranean with Athenaeus

Louis Grivetti (food geographer [sic]) and Matthew Lange (computer technologist) are teaming up to create maps of the ancient Mediterranean and its various foodstuffs...using Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae as their guidebook. More power to 'em!

Bacchus on the High Seas

A new cruise ship, the Carnival Miracle, has a classically-themed dining room, called the "Bacchus Restaurant"; the restaurant annex is the "Ariadne." Think of the myth, think of what happens on cruise ships...