​Seneca, Galen, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius all valued this text and thought it deserved not only to be read but its advice to be followed..  The first printed editions of ancient Greek texts featured it probably because it helped sell these incunabula.  It  was clearly widely  admired in the early modern period.
Eventually it dropped out of sight, and was all but forgotten -  until Donald Robertson’s book Honk  Like a Roma Emperor rescued it. It’s almost as if the sands of Egypt or the dust of a monastic library yielded a lost treasure. 
. Give The Golden Verses of Pythagoras a  try..  But here’s the trick:  You can’t read them like a philosophical treatise or a chapter in a History of Philosophy. Galen gave good advice – read each of them twice, one silently, once aloud. But both readings must be contemplative, part of a reflective process aimed at the development of a better set of mental habits.  It takes some time to reflect on these 71 maxims in this way, as if one were learning to read all over again.  Give it a try.  You may be surprised by what you find.
: PS In an essay in Arion in “Unmasking the Maxim” I tried to view these Golden Verses as part of a minor but very influential literary genre, the maxim..
 

 IHe was at Princeton when I was teaching there but I can't be sure I taught him. His rise to fame and power, however, set me to thinking about teaching more generally.  Here's a  unrevised text of a lecture I gave at Wellesley in 2006 - more relevant today than then, maybe?

​     What good is philology if it does not attune our ears to even slight distortions of language?
       In accepting the Republican nomination for  Senator from Ohio, J. D. Vance thanked Donald Trump for his endorsement. He referred to him as the 45th, then paused for a heartbeat before continuing, “the president of the United States.” 
      Note the insidious article, the.  It’s not an accident. It makes Trump not just the 45th president, but the president right now.  We get it. The poor guy was the victim of fraud.  If the system were just he would still be president. Let’s call him that.
      It’s a minimal exploitation of our language, but it recapitulates the self-prostitution Vance had to perform to get Trump’s endorsement, affirming the lie, that Trump really had won in 2020.   Just a little lie; just a little prostitution.
     PS Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy is terrific, funny, incisive, moving – until his grandmother dies. She was the emotional support and moral center of Vance’s early life.  After her death the story spirals downward, and maybe Vance does, too.  

I've launched a Newsletter. Here's the first issue:

Newsletter announcement
Subject NEWS
       A lot of interesting things come my way. I’ve been sharing them on my blog (https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog ).  but a newsletter may be a better vehicle.   Here’s the first edition. If you like it, pass it on; if
at any point you’d like to be removed from the mailing list, just let me know at wrconnor1@gmail.com.
-
 
A Stop on the Invasion Route Putin Shares with Xerxes:
Anacharsis, his murderous relatives, and a Greek town called “Prosperity” (a.k.a. Olbia Pontica):are all discussed in “Prosperity”  in Ukraine, “ a blog post of April 20th 2022. ?
Speaking of Anacharsis, What about Maxims?
       The legend of Anacharsis, the Scythian prince who became one of the Greek Seven Sages, got me thinking about maxims.  It turns out that they are perhaps the most prolific literary form among the Greeks.  They were  not just throw-away lines but the distillation of thought and experience, or so I argue in the Arion article “Unmasking the Maxim.“ . .  The article is available via JSTOR and  through my site at academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/76149434/Unmasking_the_Maxim
 
 
Report on the Princeton  Classics Experiment:
       A year ago the Classics department at Princeton undertook a much criticized experiment: the study of ancient Greek or Latin would no longer be required for a Classics major.  Now the figures are in for the class of 1924. Josh Billings reports that the number of majors has almost doubled from the average of the preceding three years and all of the aspiring concentrators in the field plan to either start or continue the study of the ancient languages.  There’s now reason to hope that the added flexibility will actually increase the study of those languages and provide a challenging and intellectually rewarding experience. So far, so good..  
-
Cerberus and Friends: For Dog-Loving Travelers:
       Ninety years of excavations in the Athenian Agora have told us a lot about the ancient Greeks and their dogs, including the animals’’ names, affectionate burials. and sometimes their sacrifice to the gods of the underworld.  Now the American School has produced a booklet, Dogs in the  Athenian Agora, for all of us dog lovers.  
 
Quotable From the Tight-Rope Walker
Only in America?  Philippe Petit, the high wire artist who was arrested  in 1974 after walking eight  times between the roofs of the two original World Trade Center buildings:
“Only in America!  I do something astounding and magnificent, and they ask me why?”
The film Man on Wire. has been around for a while but is worth seeing again. and again, and … ,
Why Were We Surprised – Again?
       When the Soviet Union collapsed, the experts were all surprised. When Putin’s invasion failed to succeed in a few days or weeks, the experts were surprised again.   In ”Why Were We Surprised?” I suggested an explanation that may still apply..
(The article is available via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41211891
and on my site at academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/76148668/Why_Were_We_Surprised_Word_version
 
 
Spin-off: The Big Issue Is Not Democracy vs. Autocracy:
       In the American Scholar article just mentioned I came to the conclusion that the underlying issue for decades to come would be posed by the multi-ethnic state, or more precisely, by the fear that idea generates.  Autocrats know how to exploit that fear, but democratic processes are not immune to it.  We’ve seen the power of such fears in China, Myanmar, and American immigration policy. Let’s see what happens in France this Sunday. .
 
The Enragement of Judgment:
       Covid isn’t over and neither are its psychological and societal effects.  Take a look at “Reading Thucydides in a Time of Pandemic”
It’s available at https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-thucydides-in-a-time-of-pandemic/
 
Time’s Progeny, is the blog entry for March 25th. It’s at  
https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
 
--
Thanks for reading! I depend on interesting leads and links that friends send me. Keep it up!
The next Newsletter will appear in May. Meantime, keep an eye on the blog https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
 
Bob Connor
revised April  27 2022
 
 

We have seen how important that divide is in American politics.  It seems also to have been powerful in the recent French presidential election, with urban voters tending to support Macron, and rural ones more likely to rally behind Le Pen.
With superb timing Charles Nathan makes the case that this divide was also present -and powerful –  in Athens of the fifth century BCE. His article is in  the American Political Science Review:
[PDF] The Urban/Rural Divide in Athenian Political Thought       I am still not sure why this divide has such political significance.  Perhaps readers will comment,  I can only add one observation: in 21st century America the  urban / rural divide seems no longer between agricultural and commercial workers.   That was brought home to me when we lived in an old farm in rural North Carolina. The adjoining 100 acres or so were the only truly agricultural land in the immediate area.   They were farmed by a ,man who lived some distance away,   Our closer neighbors were mostly people who had grown up  on or near this land but no longer farmed it.  They worked in businesses, governmental agencies, medical centers, or were retired. In addition,  there were a few of us  expatriates, “urban cosmopolitans,” some would say, who liked rural living.
       I mention this because it suggests that a myth so important in the framing of  American governance no longer applies.  Rural America is no longer primarily agricultural, and the myth of the citizen farmer turned soldier, then into a political leader no longer works in our society. No more Cincinnatus! And maybe nothing to re-place him - except perhaps nostalgia.
​

​       When the Russians move west from Mariupol, as they almost certainly will, they will have to cross the  Southern Bug river, the second longest river in Ukraine.  It’s 500 miles long and drains almost 25,000 square miles of good agricultural land.
       Take a much-needed time-out from watching Putin’s “special military operation” to pay your respects to “Prosperity,” a.k.a. Olbia Pontica, not far from today’s village of Parutino.  The site is one of the outermost Greek settlements  in the Archaic period. and a terrific location for trade .  That’s what made it prosper. It was also an intersection point with the Scythians.
       Near here, not far from the race course of Achilles the Scythian Anacharsis is said to have been murdered on his return from Greece:
4” So when he came to Scythia, he hid himself in the country called Woodland (which is beside the Race of Achilles, and is all overgrown with every kind of timber); hidden there, Anacharsis celebrated the goddess' ritual with exctness, carrying a small drum and hanging images about himself.f
 Then some Scythian saw him doing this and told the king, Saulius; who, coming to the place himself and seeing Anacharsis performing these rites, shot an arrow at him and killed him.”
              Herodotus 4.76, tr. Godley
His crime? Conversion to the cult of the ecstatic mountain goddess, Cybele?  That was part of it, but Herodotus was convinced it was something more fundamental, a crime many of us share, Hellenophilia.
When the artillery roars and the tanks roll  by, bow your head in respect to the village of Parutino what was once Prosperity. 

​Yes, enough already!  A recent grant to Stanford from The Teagle Foundation points to one way out of the war zone.  Here’s the link: https://www.teaglefoundation.org/Newsroom/News/Articles/Teagle-in-the-News/Enough-With-the-Culture-Wars

Adrienne Mayor’s book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Princeton, 2018. has now inspired Costas Dafnis’ Talos Dreams.  You can now  hear his composition performed  on YouTube.
Thanks to Gary Pence for telling us about its recent performance .
 

​Francis Bacon said that Truth was the daughter of Time.  Are her sons Mutiny and Coup d’état?   I hope so, for I can see no other solution to the problem Russia is causing.
[Thanks to John V Fleming and his blog   for calling Bacon’s aphorism to mind.]

​Progressives may be in for a surprise when, as all the Wise Heads expect. Katanji Brown Jackson  settles into the Supreme Court.  The only revealing response that I heard in the garbage-filled grandstanding confirmation hearings was her answer to Senator Grassley’s question whether “ the Constitution is an evolving, ‘living” document that changes over time.”
Judge Jackson replied,  “I do not believe that there is a living Constitution in the sense that it is changing or infused with my own perspective or the policy perspective of the day,” thereby earning a backhanded compliment from the Republican  Senator, who later  said she had ” done a good job of sidestepping important questions,” “ (Des Moines Register)
It was a crafty answer.  She saw the trap – if she accepted the  “living” metaphor, she would leave herself open to accusations of interpreting  at whim or on the basis of ideology, not the law as written...
We’ll see over time what she meant by her reply. Is she really an “originalist” in the Scalia mold, as  her phrasing might invite one to assume?  We’ll see.
While we are waiting, there’s time to cross-examine this concept of living, v. non-living, a.k.a dead, texts.   Is that the best American jurisprudence has to offer?
Granted, interpretation of old texts is never easy.  We Classicists know that all too well. It’s hard enough to determine an author’s meaning in his own context, one  separated from us by centuries or a even  millennia..  Then, context changes.  What happens then?  Do we call in the coroner to pronounce the document  no longer alive, - dead, dead as a door nail.?  Dead as a dead language? And, here’s the rub, dead and hence no threat to the status quo?  That’s why some people are frightened by “living” texts.   
 Classicists, it seems to me, can point to better ways of thinking about the  interpretation of text written log ago but still claiming to speak to our present condition - es aiei, as Thucydides phrased it.  
Thucydides?  There’s a text that  plays leapfrog with context. . Change the context in which it is read and one sees it in a new and more revealing light.  Live through the reign of a demagogue, experience Covid, witness an invasion, watch brutality and its specious rationales. and at every turn new light flashes from the text.  Why didn’t I see that before?, I fondly ask.
Certain texts, the Constitution is one, I believe, refuse to be confined to one context.  They leap boundaries.  Are they inexhaustible? We’ll see. In the meantime, , Let’s call them classics. and learn from them.