ante diem viii idus januarias

• 1822 -- birth of Heinrich Schliemann (excavator of Troy and Mycenae)

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:43:51 AM::

Today's selection:

lubricious @ Dictionary.com (great word!)

nark @ Wordsmith (Latin not mentioned, but should be, it appears)

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:35:31 AM::

A handful of items from the UK press allow us to put together another 'roundup' piece. We begin with a piece in the Scotsman, where both Oliver Stone and Robin Lane Fox defend the film, inter alia:

But speaking at a press conference hours before the UK premiere, Stone said: “I operate on my passion and sometimes I’m naive, I don’t think about the consequences.

“I was quite taken aback by the controversy and fierceness of the reviews about a character we don’t really know too much about.”

The movie, which has only taken £18 million in the US so far, sparked controversy by presenting Alexander as bisexual.

The Oscar-winning director said: “Sex is a large issue in America right now, but it isn’t so much in other countries.

“There’s a raging fundamentalism in morality in the US.

“From day one audiences didn’t show up. They didn’t even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words, ‘Alex the gay’. As a result you can bet that they thought, ‘We’re not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him’.

“America also doesn’t understand ancient history in the way Europeans do.”

The acclaimed director behind hits like Natural Born Killers, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July suggested he would make changes to the DVD version.

He said of the homosexual scene: “The bond can be suggested in different ways...we have choices still and we can go in several different directions without altering the fundamental score.”

He added: “We have created something that will last in many forms. It’s a mountain, in my opinion. It’s the epic of my life. I’m very happy with the result and I think Colin’s work is extraordinary. He’s had some tough reviews but he’ll ride it out.”

Oxford professor of ancient history Robin Lane-Fox, who advised Stone on Alexander The Great, said of the movie: “It’s an epic drama with a strong reference to history. It’s all very well for fifth-rate American reviewers to say why didn’t you include this or that but the film would have been seven hours long.”

Farrell admitted that when his friends saw the film they said: “It’s not exactly Gladiator.”

But he said: “When I read the script it took me four hours rather than the usual two hours, the script was insane but it was one of the most heartbreaking and incredible things I have ever read, and if Oliver ever wanted to work with me again I would do it in a heartbeat.”

That 'changes to the DVD version' is interesting ... In another interview (with Reuters), Stone also blamed the war in Iraq for the poor performance of the film in the U.S. [kind of reminds me of a certain Canadian politician blaming the opposition for the 'fall of every sparrow in the forest']:

Director Oliver Stone turned on American critics and audiences on Wednesday, saying they had focused solely on the issue of homosexuality in "Alexander," his big-budget epic that portrays the Macedonian hero as bisexual.

He also blamed the U.S. invasion of Iraq for the movie's poor performance at the box office, arguing that people were distracted by comparisons between Alexander the Great's forays into the Middle East and President Bush.

Thankfully, the Independent prefaces its review of the flick with an excellent overview of the 'real' Alexander (written by Allan Massie?):

In the year 30BC, Octavian Caesar, the future Emperor Augustus, arrived in Egypt in pursuit of his rival, Mark Antony, whom he had defeated a few months previously at the Battle of Actium. The Egyptian business was soon completed. Antony and Egypt's queen, Cleopatra, were dead. Octavian was master of the Roman world. But before returning to Rome he had one ambition to fulfil.

He ordered the sarcophagus containing the mummified body of Alexander the Great to be removed from its mausoleum and opened. Then he looked on the face of the greatest conqueror the ancient world had known, crowned the head with a golden diadem and strewed the trunk with roses, violets and lemon flowers. It was not only an act of tribute: he was proclaiming himself to be Alexander's heir, as Rome was heir to Greece. This happened in Alexandria, the great Greek city in Egypt founded by Alexander, now the second city of the Roman Empire. The symbolism of Octavian's gesture was unmistakable

Alexander's life was short. He was dead at 33. His career was dazzling. It dazzled antiquity; he was the conqueror for all to measure themselves against. Four hundred years after his death a Greek officer in the Roman army, Arrian, wrote a history of his campaign, drawing on the narratives of two of Alexander's companions, one of whom had access to Alexander's official journals and to the work of Callisthenes, appointed by Alexander as his historian but put to death in 327BC for his part in a plot against the king.

Many versions of the story were already in existence, some fabulous; and these were translated from the Greek into Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic. The Latin versions passed in the Middle Ages into Old French and English. The popularity in Scotland of the name Alexander is said to derive from these; in Muslim countries the version is Iskander. In Henry V Shakespeare allows the Welsh officer Fluellen a detailed knowledge of Alexander's campaigns.

He continued to dazzle: Napoleon thought him the first of commanders, and sought to emulate him. Throughout the centuries he was the man against whom generals measured themselves, as batsmen do against Don Bradman. We may no longer esteem conquerors as our forefathers did, but Alexander still dazzles. He dazzles Hollywood as Oliver Stone's epic movie, drawing on Robin Lane Fox's biography, shows. He is a figure of history, legend and myth; there are Afghan tribes that claim descent from his soldiers.

Alexander was first the boy who mastered the most famous horse in history. Bucephalus, which means "ox head", was brought to his father, King Philip of Macedon. Nobody could manage him until the boy prince came forward, took the bridle, turned the stallion's head toward the sun, so he should no longer be alarmed by his shadow, spoke soothingly, then mounted.

"My son," Philip said. "Look for a kingdom greater than Macedonia, for it is too small for you." Alexander rode Bucephalus in his battles and when the horse died in India, at almost the extremity of the king's conquests, he mourned "as at the death of a beloved friend" and founded the city of Bucephalia.

Every well-educated schoolboy used to know that story, and also this one. On a visit to Corinth Alexander met the cynic Diogenes who, despising worldly goods, lived in an earthenware tub. Alexander asked him to name any favour he chose. "Stand out of my sunlight," replied the philosopher. "Were I not Alexander, I should like to be Diogenes," the king said. A fine soundbite, if scarcely sincere.

The prince had grown up dreaming of glory, but he was also an educated soldier; one of his tutors was Aristotle. He was credited with planning the library in Alexandria, the most famous in the Ancient World, and also another in Nineveh.

Alexander took part in his first battle when he was 16, and was king before he was 20. His father, Philip, had established Macedonian control over mainland Greece, although many Greeks regarded the Macedonians as almost barbarians and Philip once said they were "a rude and clownish people".

Philip was murdered in 336BC at the instigation of Alexander's mother, Olympias, whom he had deserted for a new wife. Philip's death gave the states and cities he had ruled the opportunity to regain their independence, and so the first year of Alexander's reign was spent putting down rebellion and establishing his authority. Then he prepared for the Persian war his father had been planning.

Persia was the age's superpower. Its ruler, Darius, called himself "the Great King", implying he was king of kings, and ruled all of known Asia and Egypt. There were, however, Greek cities within that empire, and other subject peoples who resented Persian rule, and were ready to welcome Alexander.

Nevertheless his task would have daunted a less self-confident man. When Alexander crossed the Hellespont (the Dardanelles) in 334 he led an army of perhaps 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Darius could put armies into the field that were at least five times as large. That at Gaugamela (otherwise known as Arbela) in 331 was said to be a million strong. This figure was a wild exaggeration, yet in the previous battle, Issus in 333, the Persian army is reliably estimated, according to John Keegan in his History of Warfare, at 160,000, almost three times as large as Napoleon's at Waterloo.

It took three great battles - the first being at the River Granicus - to break the Persian Empire. In all Alexander displayed daring and tenacity. His method was bold and simple: he attacked the enemy at its strongest point. Victory there provoked demoralisation and flight. Alexander himself would lead the decisive cavalry charge; he was wounded at the Granica.

He showed himself chivalrous in victory. When Darius fled from the field at Issus, his mother, wife and children were taken prisoner. Alexander assured them they would be treated with the respect and consideration due to their rank. His humane behaviour is said to have astonished contemporaries. When Darius was murdered by some of his own courtiers, Alexander covered the Great King's body with his own cloak as a mark of respect.

He had set out to subjugate the barbarians, but, when he found himself master of the Persian Empire, he treated his Greek and Asiatic subjects equally, taking Persian noblemen into his confidence, and even adopting the manners and dress of the Persian court. This angered some of his Macedonians. There was a plot against his life. In a drunken rage he killed his companion Cleitus, who had saved his life at River Granicus, because Cleitus taunted him. His remorse was said to be bitter, but nevertheless other Macedonians were executed that year (327) for conspiracy.

Like Napoleon, Alexander could put no rein on his ambition. It wasn't enough to have made himself master of the Persian Empire. He must go further. India lay before him. His followers saw in the adventure a repetition of the legendary conquest of India by the god Dionysus. He crossed the Hindu Kush while his friend since childhood, Hephaestion, took control of the Khyber Pass. Alexander crossed the Indus, defeated a large army made more formidable by a contingent of elephants, occupied Punjab, and was ready to advance to the Ganges, then thought to be the extremity of the earth. But his Macedonian veterans had had enough. They had marched 12,000 miles, and refused to go further. So Alexander had to submit to their will.

Back in Persia he extended his policy of fusing the Greek and Asiatic parts of his empire, by colonisation, by unification of the military services, and by marriage; he married, as his second wife, one of Darius's daughters, and his friend Hephaestion was married to another.

Much is made today of Alexander's bisexuality, and I read that Oliver Stone hints at least at a sexual relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion. There is no doubt they were close and Alexander was wretched when Hephaestion died in 324, but, whatever they had been as youths, it is highly improbable they remained lovers when grown up. Greeks disapproved of sexual relations between adult men and despised those who practised them. Although as a Macedonian, Alexander was not a pukka Greek (Albanians even today claim him as their own), this was not a convention he was likely to flout.

It was quite another thing for a soldier to have a paideka (which Robin Lane Fox translates as a "sex-boy"). That was quite acceptable. Relations with a boy, such as the Persian eunuch, narrator of Mary Renault's novel The Persian Boy, where he is the paideka of Darius and then Alexander, are far more probable than a relation with an equal such as Hephaestion.

Alexander's story remains astonishing. No wonder it has attracted film-makers. No wonder it appealed so to Napoleon. Asked once on St Helena which had been his greatest battle, he replied Borodino, fought on the way to Moscow. Asked why, he said, "because it was so far from home". Alexander would have understood the answer. Perhaps, in his delirium, dying of fever in Babylon in 323, his only regret may have been that he had been compelled to turn back in India.

Viewed from the perspective of our times, his career may seem one of pointless conquest and slaughter. We no longer approve of war. Yet that conquest changed the world, if only for a time; it resulted in the extension of Greek civilisation over Asia. Paul Harvey's Oxford Companion to Classical Literature sees that Hellenistic Age as one in which the idea developed of world inhabited by men possessing a common civilisation. "Commerce increased and helped to extinguish the hatred of the stranger. The notion of a brotherhood of man, imperfectly conceived by Alexander and developed by the Stoic philosophy, bore fruit" - even if Alexander's empire fell apart, divided between his generals, one of whom, Ptolemy, became King of Egypt and the ancestor of Cleopatra.

It is no wonder that the young Octavian Caesar, soon to be Augustus, imposing the Pax Romana on the Roman world, was so eager to gaze on the face of Alexander, three centuries dead. Few men have ever exerted a more powerful influence on the imagination of succeeding ages. [the rest]

 

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:26:11 AM::

Last week I posted a mini-rant about assorted things about the APA, including how they made information about the Annual Meeting known, contrasting it with their 'sister organization's' efforts (i.e. the AIA). From the Daily News Transcript comes this:

Wanted: aspiring Indiana Jones of all ages.
     Kids and adults can dig into the past this Sunday at a "Hands-On Family Fair" hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America.
     Meet a mummy and learn to write your name in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Discover a 2,000 year-old shipwreck. Excavate Red Sox nation.
     More than two dozen interactive events and exhibits will be available at "Digging into Archaeology" Sunday, Jan. 9 at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in the Prudential Center.

Click to learn more...

     AIA president, professor Jane C. Waldbaum said the fun and informative fair will "appeal to children's imagination."
     "You can't start too young. Archaeology is an exciting field with new discoveries being made all the time," she said.
     Got a question about ancient Troy, the mysterious Mayans or that ceramic pot you dug up in your back yard?
     This year the Family Fair's motto is "dig, discover and create."
     Visitors can meet "real field archaeologists" who'll discuss the techniques and thrill of "creating a future for the past."
     Waldbaum said the children's fair "is part of the AIA's educational outreach efforts to bring the thrill of scientific archaeological discovery, discovery interpretation and decipherment to the younger generation."
     Boston area archaeologists, field experts and museum curators will be hosting activities designed to appeal to children and adults.
     For the first time, this year's fair will feature Plimoth Plantation whose staff experts served as consults for the historical reality show, "Colonial House."
     Visitors can build an obelisk or use ancient tools to build the kind of ships that sailed the Mediterranean in the days of Ulysses.
     The Family Fair will take place on the final day of the AIA's 106th annual meeting which starts today. The four-day meeting will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, Hynes Convention Center and the Hilton's Back Bay.
     The AIA meeting includes lectures, scholarly presentations and educational workshops on ancient China and Pompeii and other fascinating subjects.
     The oldest and largest North American organization devoted solely to archaeology, the AIA was founded in 1879 and chartered by Congress in 1906.It has 9,000 members in more than 100 chapters in the U.S., Canada and oversees.
     This year's meeting celebrates underwater archaeology with several papers and a lecture on a Boston-based troop ship sunk during the 1609 siege of Quebec.
     The essentials:
     "Digging into Archaeology: A Hands-on Affair" will take place Sunday on the second floor, Republic A & B, of the Sheraton Boston Hotel, 39 Dalton St.
     Tickets are available at the door and cost $4 for children; $6 for adults; or $12 for family of three, which must include at least one child. Children under 3 are free. Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.
     The exhibit hall for the AIA meeting will be open today from 2 to 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; and Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon. Tickets may be purchased at the door and cost $140 for non-members; $175 for members; $55 for member students; $95 for student non-members. There is also an $80 one-day admission fee available
     The AIA Web site, www.archaeological.org, features the online exhibit hall, bookstore, floor plan and names of individual exhibitors.

So ... is the APA doing any similar outreach associated with the Annual Meeting? Is the press covering it? [genuine questions ... not criticisms at this point]

Still in followup mode, I also wonder whether the APA, CAC, and other Classical organizations are aware of the apparent "renaissance" of public lectures, according to an article in the Independent. If so, they have to start publicizing them better ... any such announcements aren't showing up in any of the extensive scans I do every day ...

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:10:03 AM::

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:03:36 AM::

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:00:29 AM::

[the APA in Montreal next year? I just might have to crash the party ... .ed] 

APA MONTREAL MEETING JAN. 2006: PANEL ON NORTH AMERICAN CLASSICS

Canadian input is being sought or an American Classical League (ACL) panel on North American Classics: Past, Present, Future, to be held at the APA's 2006 meeting in Montreal. Organizers are Paul Properzio (Boston Latin Academy) and Kenneth Kitchell (ACL President).The panel will focus on the history, present state, and future challenges facing the study and teaching of the Classics at all levels in the United States and Canada. Questions which may be addressed: Are conditions for Classics different in the two countries? Do they differ region to region within the same country? What are the driving forces behind change in the respective countries? Are there programs of distinction that could be recognized as models for training pre-collegiate teachers? What is the state of the supply of pre-collegiate teachers of the Classics and how might the two countries collaborate in this area? Papers may focus on a single problem or time period or take a historical or comparative approach. Papers addressing possible joint ventures between Canadian and American classics programs and organizations are especially encouraged. Deadline for receipt of submissions is February 1, 2005.

Would anyone interested in contributing to this please contact both Martin Cropp (mcropp@ucalgary.ca) and Catherine Rubincam (rubincam@utm.utoronto.ca) as soon as possible. Catherine Rubincam is hoping to discuss plans for the panel with the organizers at the APA meeting in Boston later this week.

... seen in the Canadian Classical Bulletin

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 4:54:26 AM::

A rogueclassicism reader passed this little tidbit along (thanks RE!) ... the Seattle Times magazine has an article on the impact of technology on our lives and inter alia says this about 'multitasking':

Multitasking and angst about its necessity have been studied for several decades, and Roman philosopher Publilius Syrus himself uttered in 100 B.C., "To do two things at once is to do neither."

This one was on my 'check out the quote list' because it does appear semi-regularly in various internet contexts and I have assumed it is the following in Latin (courtesy of the Latin Library, of course):

Ad duo festinans neutrum bene peregeris.

The text at the LL, however, has this in a section entitled sententiae falso inter publilianas receptae.

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 4:52:37 AM::

I don't think I posted the December job listings from the APA yet (I think they just went up the other day) ...

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 4:36:15 AM::

The University of London External Program (ULEP) and the Department of Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London are seeking applications from qualified candidates to write 1. a course in Greek Drama and 2. a course in Greek History to 322 BCE, for the online distance learning BA in Classical Studies. The courses, when completed, will be hosted in an online learning environment as part of the University of London classics E-Degree curriculum. The successful candidate will be asked to compose learning materials and compile ancillary materials appropriate for international distance students (no HTML or other design/formatting skills are required. All materials. will be formatted and processed for online publication by ULEP specialized support staff). No active teaching or follow-up support by the course-author is required after submission of the materials.

For further information about the University of London’s E-Degree Programme, please see http://www.londonexternal.ac.uk/undergraduate/classical_studies/index.shtml Informal enquiries may also be addressed to Professor Ahuvia Kahane (address below). Applicants should submit a letter of application briefly outlining their general approach to the proposed course, a CV, a very short sample of writing, and two confidential letters of reference. Please send all materials to Professor Ahuvia Kahane, Department of Classics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, ahuvia.kahane@rhul.ac.uk +44/1784/443208. Application materials may be sumbitted by email. Review of applications will begin Feb. 6, 2004.

... seen on the Classicists list

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 4:35:09 AM::

::Thursday, January 06, 2005 4:33:30 AM::