​ “My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash like something you caught out of the corner of your eye”
 
Andrew Wyeth quoted in a 2024 exhibition at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine
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Oblique vision can catch what a direct stare fails to comprehend.   The stare may produce proudly uncompromising realism. It may then scold the fleeting glimpse for neglecting the unlaundered exactness of what is clear to see. But abstraction holds a trump card, for its kind of vision has great power to awaken slumbering emotions, jolt them into alertness.
       Perhaps something similar can happen in literature – a fleeting image, a turn of phrase can awaken us in a way narration must struggle to achieve.   Even better is the evocation of a sight that has now passed – a moon that has set, Pleaides one can no longer see.
 

Even though we are not registered voters on the Maine island where we spend summers, we usually attend its Town Meeting, in part to see how democracy works in such a setting. The 2023 “warrant” included a controversial and expensive item, challenged by several voters.  As one voter after another spoke up, the rationale for this item became clearer and clearer. At last its lead opponent rose again, this time to withdraw his objection.  The item then passed, unanimously.
       Before moving on through the agenda the Moderator remarked, “This is a nearly perfect form of government. People speak up; facts become clear; people listen and sometimes change their minds.”
       He’s right, I think, though I came away convinced that democracy is not so much a form of government as a cluster of habits of mind, including a willingness to listen to those with whom one disagrees, and, if need be, change one’s mind. These habits are slow to form; they atrophy unless regularly used.  But when they flourish, they are a source of strength for a community and of pride for its residents. 

​
 
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       For a long time weir was at home with Shakespeare’s three  weird sisters in Macbeth. Its roots went back to Germanic warden, to become; that is, a weoird person was some one who had the power to make things, even very  strange things, come into being.
       Then a weird thing happened.  Weird entered politics, and it seems to be making strange things happen.  According to Politico, a new phase began around July 23rd when democratic Governor Tim Walz    of Minnesota applied it to Trump and Vance.  It caught on:
“As this simple and quintessentially Midwestern description of Trump and Vance catches on, it marks a notable rhetorical shift — away from Biden’s apocalyptic, high-minded messaging toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric of the kind Vance in particular trades in. “
       Smart move? Or a further debasement of our civic discourse?
 What do you think?
P.S. Jessica Bennett has good things to say about the term in her July 31st essay in the New York Times.
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.
 

​   In the April 2024 Atlantic Monthly  ARIEL SABAR  revives the controversies arising from Morton Smith’s  The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mar in which Smith  claimed to have found in a monastery in Jerusalem a passage refledcting “a secret” gospel” of Mark with shocking implications concerning Jesus’ sexuality . Many scholars have taken Smith’s claims seriously; a few have suspected a hoax. 
In either case it’s good to look back to Paul Coleman-Norton’s 1950 article “An Amusing Agraphon” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly ( Vol. 12, No. 4 (October, 1950), pp. 439-449 ) reporting the discovery  in a North African library of an otherwise unattested addition to the ending of the 24th chapter of the gospel of Matthew.  Immediately following Jesus’ assertion that there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” the newly discovered manuscript has Simon Peter asks the Lord, “What if they have no teeth?”   To which Jesus replies, “Teeth shall be provided unto them.”  Coleman-Norton presented his alleged discovery in impeccable scholarly fashion, with countless parallels drawn from other New Testament passages, citations of eminent German and other biblical scholars, and many footnotes (including a reference to a parallel in Lewis Copeland's The World's Best Jokes (Garden City, N. Y., 1941), p. 221).
       The article was, of course, itself a joke, a spoof, and a hoax, as Coleman-Norton eventually acknowledged.  It was all good fun, though the journal and Coleman-Norton’s Princeton colleagues were not amused.
       Did Morton Smith, meticulous scholar that he was, know of this episode when he decided to publish a report of a discovery in another hard to access library of another short passage of Greek with surprising implications?  I don’t know, but publish he did.  Smith, to be sure, does not seem to have had a playful sense of humor.  On the contrary, as best I can tell -- I never met him - he seems to have been very much tied up by the miseries of his own psyche. If there is a hoax involved in the story of the “secret gospel,”, he may have been the victim rather than the perpetrator.
       What can we learn from Coleman-Norton’s article and Smith’s book?   Texts that cannot be examined by independent scholars must, surely be used only with great caution, or at least  with  a twinkle in the eye.  
 
 
 
 

-
Do you remember the silly puzzle in the last Newsletter (What English word has all the vowels in order (a, e, i, o, u and y), each one occurring once and only once)?  It provoked a lot of responses, from which I learned something that surprised me.  So, before going on to thinking about the Classics, and higher ed, (and a new challenge for readers), let’s start with the puzzle and those who solved it..
And the Answer Is:
          facetiously or abstemiously.
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And the Winner Is:
Judith Hallett was first to respond with a correct answer – facetiously. We promised eternal fame as the prize, which is hereby conferred upon her. Brava!
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The Discovery That Surprised Me:
          It turns out that many respondents had used AI for an answer.  I pass no judgment on such apparent depravity, because in so doing they have taught me not one but two lessons:
First, a big generalization from a tiny data base -  we have passed a cultural divide.  We used to sit and scratch the head until we came up with a solution to such puzzles.  Now we turn to AI.  It’s a brave new world!
Second lesson: Be careful which chatbot you choose!  Some come up with implausible answers (anteriourly, indeed!) Other AI bots claimed there really wasn’t an answer.
 Some of the problems at this stage of AI  became clear in a response that deserves special mention
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Honorable Mention: Good Try!
          John Mole, a writer of always enjoyable books,  took the challenge one step further, asking for a Greek word, including all the vowels in the order in which they occur in the Greek alphabet.  It proved a good test of AI tools at this stage of their development: “Gemini failed completely,” he reports.  “Chat CPT produced seven words, none of which included omega.”  Google Gemini pontificated "While there likely aren't many common Greek words containing all six vowels, there are definitely some! Unfortunately, due to the way vowels interact in Greek, forming diphthongs (two vowel sounds combined), it's nearly impossible to have all six vowels maintaining their distinct sounds in one word.”  Blame those naughty diphthongs!
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Why Stop With Greek?
The same challenge can be posed for Latin and modern  languages.   Your German is flawless?  Proud of your French? Swahili?  Solve the same puzzle in these languages, then email your answers to [email protected].  Great fame will follow.
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What I Learned from the Puzzle:
          First, the Big Divide: Some of us scratched our head until we found a solution, but most of the respondents turned to generative Artificial Intelligence for an answer.  Was this cheating or some other form of moral depravity?   I pass no judgment, but this episode is instructive, convincing me that, like it or not, with only imperfect bots in hand, we have crossed the electronic Rubicon and entered AI territory.  That means we have to learn how to use it, alert to facile or false conclusions, but, increasingly, benefitting from what AI does best.     That’s the new puzzle we have set for ourselves.
          So what does it do best?
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What’s AI Really Good At?
          At this stage AI, as we have seen, is not especially good at the very human task of thumbing through lexicons.  I’m not even sure that it’s very much like human intelligence.    Its great strength may be in seeing things we humans recognize only very slowly, or maybe not at all.  What has really impressed me is its ability to recognize patterns in large bodies of data.  It has already, for example, detected incipient breast cancer by recognizing patterns that even skilled human observers do not notice. Or consider this breakthrough:
“It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks.  The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup.”
 Carl Zimmer in The New York Times of March 10, 2024.
Could something of comparable significance be achieved if top quality generative AI was given access to the large amount of data we now have available in electronic form about ancient Greece, or some portion thereof, e.g. Greek drama?  Could it recognize patterns we have overlooked?  My layman’s hunch is that classical scholarship may be approaching a breakthrough moment, in which AI will help us see ancient Greece (and other cultures) in fresh ways.   
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On “Breakthrough Moments”:
          When budgets for the humanities are being cut, self-appointed prophets are talking gloom and doom for liberal education, and despondent lemmings are jumping off the Cliffs of Academe, it’s time to think back to a breakthrough moment not so long ago. Classical studies in the United States experienced something of that sort in the 1970s and 1980s as ancient texts became machine readable and scholars found new ways of understanding the ancient world: “ ... it was the advent of modern technology and a young classicist's search for "terms of happiness" that provided the catalyst and impetus for the creation of the electronic thesaurus, namely the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae fittingly named after its Renaissance predecessor.”  But the TLG did not stand alone. There was also the work of the Packard Humanities Institute and the Perseus Project.  Here’s the story of the start of one of these projects. 
          The achievements of that era made it possible to access texts in a vastly more efficient way, but did not fundamentally change how one put that access to work - the questions asked, the conclusions searched for.  This time it may be different.
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And Now?
          The potential of AI is only part of the story for Classics.  A lot has been happening:  The Vesuvius Challenge is starting to make accessible a whole library of hitherto unread ancient texts.  And new discoveries underwater point to more good things to come.  Meanwhile, back at the Institute for Advanced Study “ The Krateros Project is launching a new, exploratory effort to further unlock the texts of ancient Greek inscriptions using its collection of epigraphic squeezes. “ For more information click here.  In most of these projects new technologies are making possible new approaches, and over time a deeper understanding of antiquity.
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Forbidden Words of the Month:
          Speaking plain English has become a hazardous occupation.  Say a forbidden word and you can lose a friend or get in other trouble.  Here’s an example:
          obese (adj.), obesity (n.)
Both are now forbidden, as you can see here.  The objection is etymological, for these words imply that one’s weight is tied to eating.   Drug companies now assure us that any such problem can best  be treated by anti-obesity drugs.  (“Anti-obesity” is still an acceptable term.)
They are right about the etymology.  Obese & Co. entered the English language in the 17th century, probably as a genteel Latinate substitute for blunt AngloSaxon fat.  Obese and its relatives have a long pedigree, , as Etymonline explains: “1610s, from French obésité and ... from Latin obesitas "fatness, corpulence," from obesus "that has eaten itself fat," past participle of obedere "to eat all over, devour," from ...   PIE root *ed- "to eat". (Compare Greek esthiein,  English edible.)
So, yes, it implies that being overweight has something to do with overeating.  Ban the word, say the drug companies. Use our drugs instead. But, beware, the NIH warns us: some of these treatments are risky.
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What Can Philology Do?
It can help “Keep Dead Languages Alive,” as Linguists say in Austin.  But the perspective provided by those languages can help keep our own language healthy and vigorous, even if one has only “small Latin and less Greek,” as someone said of a poet he admired.
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Verses of the Month:
          Everyone knows that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” but do you remember the context for that judgment? Here it is:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
From Ben Jonson “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Mr. William Shakespeare.--
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Brush Up Your Latin / Start Testing It Now:
          The study of Latin, beleaguered at some levels, is flourishing in some pre-high school settings.  So, how’s your Latin?  See how you do on the National Latin Exam, which grammar school Latinists are using to test their progress in the language.
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Civic Discourse, and Civil, too?
Congratulations to Jed Atkins on his appointment as Director and Dean of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership  at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Political controversy has surrounded the creation of such programs at several universities, but Atkins brings to his new post a solid reputation as a scholar of Cicero and ancient political thought, and a vision of shaping this new School into living-learning communities such as Duke's Transformative Ideas program.  His real test, however, will be in guiding the selection of 10 – 20 new faculty members for whom the NC legislature has promised support, hoping for appointees willing to challenge views thought currently to dominate the campus.
In the meantime, take a close look at the Duke model.  It seems to me like an exemplary program, well designed to deal with the dread “sophomore slump.”
 
For Your Reading List:
          League of the Lexicon
“This original quiz game is hilarious and erudite, wildly entertaining and learned, zany and academic. Some of the categories addressed are a usage guide to novel punctuation, a Simpsons lexicon, delicious English words for nonsense, reduplicative words, obsolete occupations, origin stories of eponyms, phrases the English use to insult the French and vice versa, the slang and jargon of drunks and drinks, obsolete occupations, grammar jokes (who knew?), medical conditions that make pretty girls’ names, original titles of famous books, and on and on.” The New York Review
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Where Did “The Humanities” Come From?
“[I]n a law court of 63 BCE, Cicero first spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits of humanity”) to highlight the learning of his adversary, the austere Stoic grandee Marcus Cato. Fundamentally, humanitas meant the human condition, but it evolved to describe both humane conduct and a liberal education — synonymous with the artes liberales. “
          David Butterfield in The Critic March 2024.  (Thanks to Michael Fontaine for calling this article to my attention.)
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How Different Things Could Be:
“Must things be this way for the Humanities in the twenty-first century? No. And I saw a brief glimpse of this last summer: on a Greek island, I was surrounded by 30 students reading Ancient Greek, speaking it to each other, amid long-form conversations about what moved them most in these texts. It was so simple, so fresh, and so incredible that the students in question had never studied Greek before, and that their attendance was philanthropically covered by full scholarships. To begin their MA in the Humanities they sat alongside two of the top five ancient linguists in the world, before returning to Savannah, Georgia, to chart the Western tradition up to the present. That institution, Ralston College, models just how different things can be if the Humanities are given the space to breathe and believe.” (This too is from David Butterfield; here’s a link to Ralston’s program of an M.A. in the Humanities.
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A Firebrand in a Hot Bed:
Stanley Fish is now teaching (Milton, et al.) at New College in Florida, a center of controversy.  Here’s a glimpse into what it’s like.
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A Decipherment:
Mark Saltveit reports that his team (including Mike Fontaine and Rachel Fickes has “deciphered nearly all of a previously illegible part of a manuscript (British Library Harley MS 2735, fol. 1r).  It turns out to be a collection of 4th-6th century Roman poetry: 8 versus recurrentes, three Christian distichs, three pagan poems, two by Claudian and one attributed to Seneca, plus five palindromes and one Christian distich comparing two of the Apostle Peter's miracles. Much of this treasure trove is otherwise unknown to scholars who now await its publication.  What to make of it as a whole? I think of it as a time capsule, the collection of favorite pieces brought together by someone who moved freely between pagan and Christian sides of Late Antiquity, and who delighted in language at play.
          Congratulations to Mark and his team.   
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Save the Date for Fireworks on the Hill:
          On April 17 the House Committee on Education and the Workforce will interrogate the president of Columbia University on antisemitism on her campus and relates issues.  (Remember what happened to the presidents of Harvard and Penn after the last such interrogation?)
          Columbia has a Taskforce on antisemitism, but it has not said how it defines the term.  This leaves an opening which will surely be exploited at the hearing.  Stay tuned!
 
A Contest:
          What’s your favorite mixed metaphor?  Here are two birds in hand to prime the pump:
“Every lemon has a silver lining,”
“A rolling stone catches the worm.”
You can do better than that! Send your entry to me at [email protected].
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Quotable:
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of though on the unthinking.”   
John Maynard Keynes, quoted by Paul Krugman.
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Jilted? Breaking Up?
          Michael Fontaine, following the lead of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, has some advice in How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On.  It’s part of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.
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Guilt Me, Kate:
The Neologism of the Month is to guilt.
          Example, “I guilted him.”’
  The old noun guilt has now morphed into a verb, a transitive one at that, expressing the power of those who master the techniques of modern guiltification.  To ”guilt someone,” which is first attested in 1995, overlaps with old fashioned “making someone feel guilty,” but is not quite the same, since one can be guilted not for what one said or did, but simply for who one is.   
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A Missed Opportunity:
          I would have taught better if I had thought through what Adam Nicolson learned while sailing in the eastern Aegean, for example about early Greeks: “Entrepreneurial qualities governed them: inventiveness, a sprightliness of mind, a new athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to rule themselves, to generate their own systems of law and regulate their turbulent lives and to find justice by accommodating difference.”
          Nicolson’s most recent book is How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
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The Magnetic Power of Grandchildren:
The tug of grandchildren is pulling us back north. Our house in idyllic Hillsborough NC has sold and we will soon move to Cataumet on the Cape.  Here’s the contact info:
Post Office Box 188
(1090 County Rad)
Cataumet, Massachusetts 02534
There will be no change in email address. Use [email protected] to send items, links, or new subscribers.
Bob Connor
P.S. Please forward this Newsletter to friends, especially rebellious younger friends who might be willing to share their perspectives, ideas, and links.
STOP PRESS: The Trojan War has just turned up in Pompeii.  Here’s the story. 

​Eclipses demand our attention, then keep tugging at our minds.  In this we are not alone. and neither are eclipses..
Thucydides realized war is like other disruptions in our hoped-for order of things.   He believed that war, like eclipses, had understandable causes, but like them war tugs us back toward more primitive ways of thinking.
With war raging in Ukraine and Gaza, earthquakes, the persistent pandemic and now the eclipse, we know what he meant.
Here’s how Hobbes translated the crucial passage:
 Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague. All this came upon them with the late war
Thucydides’ point is not about causality or predictability but about the stories that get told about the past at times of disruption. .  With the sun darkened, the ground under foot shaking, the rasping coughs from those dying in the pandemic. old fears and old-fashioned ways of talking and thinking about experience become credible once again.  For Thucydides this was perhaps a temptation he himself felt, but – read on! – he declines that invitation to return to old ways of thinking about the past, and moves on instead to new ways of understanding human experience.    
Here’s the Greek of 1. 23.3 so you can see if I’m right:
Τά τε πρότερον ἀκοῇ μὲν λεγόμενα, ἔργῳ δὲ σπανιώτερον βεβαιούμενα οὐκ ἄπιστα κατέστη,
 σεισμῶν τε πέρι, οἳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἅμα μέρος γῆς καὶ ἰσχυρότατοι οἱ αὐτοὶ ἐπέσχον, ἡλίου τε ἐκλείψεις
, αἳ πυκνότεραι παρὰ τὰ ἐκ τοῦ πρὶν χρόνου μνημονευόμενα ξυνέβησαν, αὐχμοί τε ἔστι παρʼ οἷς μεγάλοι
 καὶ ἀπʼ αὐτῶν καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ ἡ οὐχ ἥκιστα βλάψασα καὶ μέρος τι φθείρασα ἡ λοιμώδης νόσος· ταῦτα 
γὰρ πάντα μετὰ τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἅμα ξυνεπέθετο.

​ 
 
THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
March 9, 2024
 
 
A New Philology:
The old philology that once dominated Classics and many literary fields loved, as its name implied, language, especially in the form of old texts and individual words which could be traced back to remote origins.  It deciphered papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, determined what was the best reading when sources disagreed about a text, cherished verbal nuance, meter, and figures of speech. It flourished in the Renaissance , and added a new dimension after 1786 when Sir William Jones argued that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and many other languages were all descended from a common ancestor (now often referred to as PIE -  “Proto-Indo-European.”).
          In the twentieth century, however, philology gradually lost ground to modern, “scientific” linguistics, new ways of analyzing texts, including enhanced attention to their social, intellectual, and historical contexts.  Philology never disappeared but it lost its appeal, so much so that in 2013 the professional association of American classicists abandoned the name American Philological Association and became the Society for Classical Studies.  Fine! Any good philologist would appreciate the greater clarity about the purpose of the organization.
Now, however, some signs are emerging that may add up to a New Philology.  I detect three developments that point to a philology that is more international and interracial than its predecessor, more high-tech, and more acutely aware of the importance of keeping language clear and incisive.  Will they add up to a New Philology? I don’t know, but this and subsequent Then and Now Newsletters will examine developments that have that potential.  
 
The Vesuvius Challenge:
 Speaking of high tech: an international team has applied sophisticated technologies to decipher scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.  With assistance from AI these carbonized and seemingly illegible papyri are yielding the continuous text of one ancient treatise, perhaps Philodemus On Music.  There are about 8,000 scrolls to go, and many more, surely, still buried under the volcanic effusions.
          The Vesuvius Challenge is getting big results by offering big prizes for breakthroughs in extracting text from these scrolls.   (The Grand Prize for 2024 is $100,000.)  I am still trying to imagine what the field of Classics will be like when those scrolls are deciphered, translated, and interpreted.  That will take many old-line philological skills and a new savviness about what they can tell us.   
   Congratulations to the Vesuvius Challenge and winners to date.   Here’s the story as it appeared in The Jerusalem Post.  
 
 Getting Language To Do Its Job:
Any philology, old or new, values clear, vigorous, forthright speech.  That may be especially important in politics, but academia has a special responsibility to be a model of clarity and cogency, not a font of turgidity.  A 1946 essay by George Orwell is still a useful guide.  It should be required reading in every graduate program – NO, for every citizen.
 
Politics and the English Language:
 You can read George Orwell’s 1946 essay with that title here.  His most important point, I believe, is not his critique of then fashionable ways of writing and speaking, though many of those persist today.  Rather, it’s his understanding of the ability of language not just to express thought, but to shape thought, and hence action.
Here’s my favorite passage:
 “ ... the English language ...becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation, and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
 
Rethinking Demagogy:
The core idea in Orwell’s essay - “If thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought” set me thinking again about demagogues, ancient and modern.  For a long time. I thought of their rants and especially their reliance on hyperbole to be an identifying mark of this type of politics – a symptom rather than the disease itself.  Now I wonder if it is not the other way around: slovenly speech, vitriol, invective, addiction to hyperbole may be causes of this form of political malaise.
(On hyperbole among demagogues, ancient and modern, you may enjoy my essay in Arion (2019) “When Hyperbole Enters Politics.”)
 
Keeping Our Language Alive and Kicking:
          It’s not always hard work.  It’s play – word play in all its forms -- rhymes and rhythms, riddles and limericks, palindromes and even a corny joke now and then.  They all invigorate the spoken and the written word; that’s why they’re in this Newsletter.
 
A Corny Joke:
“When is a car not a car?
          “When it turns into a driveway.”
I groan, but secretly admire it: It’s a joke, a pun, a riddle, held together and solved by an image, all packed into a half dozen blessedly silly words.  Thanks to Jim Montana for it.
 
 
A Puzzle:
          What English word contains all the vowels in order, a, e, i, o, u and y, each one occurring once and only once?
          Send your answer to [email protected].  The answer will be in the next Then and Now Newsletter.  No, there’s no cash prize, just eternal fame.
 
Can We Still Talk To One Another Even When We Disagree?
          It’s sad we even have to ask  such a question, but we do and Danielle Allen gives a resounding affirmative, plus a list of conditions for such conversations to succeed.  It’s in her Washington Post op ed: “We can all still be as partisan and ideological as we want, as long as enough of us can come together around a few big things.” https://wapo.st/3wkOkAG
 
Poetry at the Divide:
             In Yellowstone, when we crossed over an unimpressive saddle in the mountains, the same Jim Montana told us that we had just crossed the continental divide.  There were higher mountains all around, but a snowflake that melted a few feet away would flow into the Atlantic, while a nearby snowflake would find its way to the Pacific.  We had crossed the Rockies.
Verses in book six of Wordsworth’s Prelude came to mind, from his description of a similar experience and his ruminations on it.  He and his companions had lost their way in the Alps, then seen a stream flowing in an unexpected direction.  “We had crossed the Alps,” he wrote and then went on to meditate about the experience:
“Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.“
 
Infinitude?
“Looking for a miracle?  Trying to imagine “infinitude”?  Something miraculous is close at hand, whenever a creature of infinitesimal capacities manages to imagine, however imperfectly, an infinite universe.  That is what you are doing right now.  You need look no further.”
          Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
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A Mellon Million:
          Dan-el Padilla Peralta of Princeton and Sasha-Mae Eccleston of Brown University are the recipients of a million dollar grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation for a project called Racing the Classics. The writing in the press release is turgid, but it provides  more information.
 
Buruma on Spinoza:
In an incisive essay Ian Buruma writes about another Dutch writer,  the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza, launching some timely polemics:
“In our own time, we see demagogues inciting the masses with irrational and hateful fantasies. We see universities torn by ideological struggles that make free inquiry increasingly difficult. Once again there is a conflict between the scientific and the ideological approaches to truth.”
Anecdote (if I remember correctly): Wordsworth and his friends often talked about Spinoza, whose name they pronounced “Spy-nosey,” thereby convincing the government agent assigned to keep an eye on them that his cover had been blown.
 
Job Description:
A visual image can rescue speech from the precipice of abstraction.  Speech then reciprocates by turning images into thought.  That’s the job description of metaphor.
--
Short Takes:
** The Netflix series on Alexander the Great:
          Whether you’ve been watching Alexander: The Making of a God, or not, you’ll enjoy Paul Cartledge’s critique, available here.
** A Fashion Show at the Parthenon Marbles:
          The British Museum has decided to hold a fashion show at the display of the marbles removed from the Parthenon in 1806.  Greece thinks this is totally inappropriate use of sculptures that belong back where they came from.   Here’s the story  
** International Day of Happiness is March 20th:
          Contemplate some Stoic Wisdom on the 20th: “A man is as miserable as he thinks he is.”  (Seneca Nescio quo.)
The maxim also works in reverse: We are as happy as we think we are.  But it may not work for joy, since joy has a way of surprising us, swooping in, then sweeping us off our feet, and bringing us to where we never thought we could be.
**Does Your Muse Dance?
          This one did.
**Murder in Macedon:
There’s new evidence on the murder of king Philip II of Macedon -- possibly at the behest of his former wife Olympias.   Only a few days earlier his new wife, Cleopatra, had given birth to a possible rival to Olympias’ boy, Alexander.  For the evidence click here.
**What’s It Like To Be A Scholar?
...      Peter Brown knows better than almost anyone else. His new book  Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.  
** “The Return”:
          Coming soon:  a film based on what happened after Odysseus returned to Ithaka. It stars Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
 
A Surprising Turn by a Traditional Liberal Arts College:
Just what is the relation between the traditional “liberal arts” and the “creative arts”?  That may be the big question (along with cultural policy more generally) Hamilton College will be exploring under its new president, Steven Tepper.  At Arizona State, Tepper was Dean of the Herberger Fine Arts Institute (art, art history, architecture, music, film, theater, dance, not to mention a unit devoted to the intersection of art, media, and engineering).  At Hamilton he will surely be looking for synergies between some of these fields and liberal education.  Stay tuned; it might work.
--
On Your Next Trip to Rome:
Don’t miss the newly-reconstructed colossal statue of Constantine the Great.  It’s now to be seen in a side garden at the Capitoline Museums, just around the corner from the courtyard where fragments of its feet, hands and head were found.  For the story of its reconstruction click here, or go to the website of the FACTUM Foundation which has made the restoration happen.
 
Shaking the Champagne Bottle Before Opening It:
          That’s my best metaphor for David Brooks’ effervescent reflections on his own education and what it has meant throughout his life. His long, hyperventilating essay is funny, excessive, an eye opener in which he argues “that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society [is] in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings.  We’ve overpoliticized, while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.”
Brooks’ prescription? “The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?”.
 
Thucydides in China:
          Don’t miss the amazing story of a Chinese scholar who taught himself Greek (at age 40), read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Greek, then translated it into Chinese and produced a commentary on it.  Yuanguo He’s story is posted on my blog.  Don’t miss it.
--
Learning Greek at 40?
           What helped my Chinese friend,  Yuanguo He, learn Greek at 40 is the two-volume JACT series Reading Greek.  Hats off to its authors and to Cambridge University Press, the series’ publisher.  And loud applause for those who give it a try.
 
“It’s the Climate, Stupid!”-
Semantics matter, even in the form of a campaign slogan. 
Bill Clinton’s 1992 upset victory came in large part from James Carville’s slogan, “It’s the economy stupid!”  Now, approaching the 2024 election isn’t it time we heard the slogan “It’s the climate, stupid!”?  That is, after all, the great life and death issue of our time, yet we hear little on either side except bland assurances and self-congratulation, as if everything else matters more, and climate can now take care of itself.
Yes, slogans matter, not just because some people are motivated by them, but because they focus the mind of policy makers on what needs to be done.
Last year was the hottest on record globally and January 2024 was the ninth straight record setting month.  Now February has set its own record.  In 2023, disasters, mostly climate related, forced 2.5 million Americans from their homes.
          Come on, stupids. Focus.
 
Etymology Of The Month:
Change:
          English borrowed it from Old French; Old French from Late Latin and Late Latin probably from the Celts.  After all this borrowing, change is a bit worn, like a dog-eared lending library book that has circulated for years, still useful but unlikely to inspire action at a moment of crisis. “Climate change” is just too insipid a description of what is really happening to us.
          OK, readers, what do you suggest?  Send me suggestions for a word for change that has some oomph.
--
SATs:
          Eighty percent of American baccalaureate institutions do not require applicants to submit scores on the SAT or a comparable exam.  But things are changing, -- most recently Yale and Brown -- recognize that, used wisely, such scores can help make admission decisions fairer.
--
Ponderable (Maybe Even Doable?):
“To live is to risk it all.  Otherwise, you are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
Aleksei Navalny

Thanks again:
Thanks to Judith Hallett, Jim O’Donnell, Callie Connor and all who have sent me suggestions and links.  Keep ‘em coming, and, please, forward this Newsletter to friends you think might enjoy it.  I can always be reached at [email protected].
--
An Apology and a Request:
          So many people responded to the last of these Newsletters by clicking “Reply,” that my old computer couldn’t handle the volume, since each reply included the full text of the Newsletter.  Result: my decrepit old computer just dropped the whole chain.
Sorry! Do let me hear from you, but please use this:  [email protected].
Bob Connor
 
 

​Yuanguo He has achieved extraordinary things in the study of Thucydides.  Here’s his story in his own words:
My name is Yuanguo He. I am a professor of classics at the School of History, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
I published my translation of Thucydides’ Histories in 2017, which is the first and only version from ancient Greek to Chinese in my country. I have spent about 4 years on a book, A Grammatical Commentary on Thucydides, which covers all the 8 books, and was completed in June, 2023. I also published several articles on Thucydides. 
In the spring of 2006, when I was 40 years old, I found myself  really interested in the history of ancient Greece, and began to teach myself ancient Greek.
Unbelievable? I had received my doctoral degree (Doctor of History, not PhD).  Life begins at forty. It is an old saying but a truth for me! Fortunately, I encountered a series of textbooks, Reading Greek. I have to say it is very excellent. It is organized very well and provides a lot of exercises. The independent study
guide is so helpful and friendly!  My thanks to the authors and publisher are from the bottom of my heart!
The best way to learn a foreign language is to teach it. I began to teach ancient Greek in my university in 2008. But as an elective course, my students have only one semester, 3 hours per week, to learn it. It is not enough of course. Anyway, it’s better than nothing.
After grappling with Thucydides’ text for so many years, I find my research is just a beginning. Now I am working on an article about W. R. Connor’s view, the artistic technique of progressions, including introducing it to Chinese readers and some comments. In the not distant future, I plan to do some comparative research between ancient Greek and Chinese historiography,
focusing on their literary dimensions, which Hayden White recommended. I sincerely hope to hear from you, the distinguished guest contributors to this blog. My e-mail address is [email protected].
 Thanks a lot!

THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
  JANUARY 2024
 
          The discouraging developments of recent months have raised in my mind one big question about American higher education:  Is there light at the end of this dark tunnel?
             Not long ago admissions procedures at some selective institutions turned out to have been corrupted. The Supreme Court ruled against the use of race in admissions decisions.  Florida and several other states began telling colleges and universities what they could and could not teach.  The president of Stanford resigned when doubts were raised about the integrity of his research. The atrocities of October 7th and its sequel set off campus protests and back and forth recriminations, followed by Congressional hearings on antisemitism, then, ... Well, you know the rest, and surely there’s more to come.
It’s hard to see any light at the end of this tunnel, but I believe these problems can turn into opportunities provided colleges and universities seize the moment and demonstrate more unequivocally what they value most.
--
Do You Agree?
  A friend who knows about such things writes, “The universities need to go back to what they did best:  solid scholarship, strong teaching, and protection of academic freedom.  That is all.“
          Do you agree? Or what’s your alternative formulation? I’d like to hear from you.
--
Search Committees, the Secret:
          Who’s to blame when an academic appointment doesn’t work out? The person appointed? A right-wing conspiracy? The overwhelming demands of the job?  Here’s the secret: Search committees at topflight institutions usually get exactly what they are really looking for. If the scholarly credentials of those appointed turn out to be flawed, maybe those who made the appointment didn’t really care about that. If the appointee waffles or sounds spineless before a Congressional committee, could it be that those who govern the institution wanted someone pliable, a figurehead who would comply with their wishes?
          If so, a truly effective search will begin not with compiling a list of attractive candidates but by thinking hard, and  if need be, arguing passionately about what the institution really stands for and needs.
--
Ponderable:
“What is best in the new responds to an ancient need.”
Paul Valery.
Questions: What are these “ancient needs”? Are they ones all humans experience but can’t articulate well since they are deeply buried within us?  Are they waiting for someone to bring them to light and give them voice? Is that what the new does at its best, and what ancient texts did in their day and may still do in ours?
--
Neologism of the Month:
          Indigeneity (noun)
Before 2000 or so, as best I can tell, almost no one used this word. In the last few years, however, it’s taken off, especially among academics and progressive activists. It’s a very convenient term, grouping together Palestinians. victims of colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, and native peoples in many settings.  suggesting that their experiences and responses to them are essentially similar.  While native peoples themselves do not seem to make much use of the term, it may be headed for a prominent place in the curriculum at some institutions, to judge from one recent college president’s list of topics for the university’s curriculum.
Latin based (within-born) Indigeneity is displacing Greek derived autochthony (identity from the soil). a word that has been around in English since the 1600s and can cover a wide range of relationships between earlier settlers and later arrivals, including the assimilation of the latter into the former.
--
“Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard”:
Forner Harvard President Derek Bok has published an important article with that title   Here’s a key passage: “In 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring with a majority of the Supreme Court, set forth what he described as the four essential freedoms of a university: to decide who will teach, what they should teach, how they will teach, and who should be admitted to study. He recognized that these freedoms could not be absolute but added that the government should not intervene except under circumstances that were “exigent and obviously compelling.” During the decades that followed, however, the courts have become less and less inclined to accept his formulation. In 1978 the Supreme Court began a process of regulating and eventually forbidding the use of racial preferences in deciding “who shall be admitted to study.” As Steve Sanders recently detailed in the pages of The Chronicle, the court’s eventual decision in 2023 to end the use of racial preferences was only the latest in a series of cases in which judges displayed a diminishing trust in the academic judgments of universities . ...  The steady erosion of Justice Frankfurter’s essential freedoms has now continued over several decades and shows no signs of abating.“ 
--
2019:
For American higher education the tipping point, or “inflexion point,” as we say nowadays, came in 2019.
.  That’s the year when polling showed that Americans had flipped from a generally positive view of higher education, to a negative one.  That opened the door to individuals with their personal agendas and to politicians who began to recognize that attacks on higher education would advance their careers and the causes they support. The effects of the change in public attitudes were evident at first in public universities; that is likely to continue even if at this moment topflight private universities are the more conspicuous targets. 
          The polling data don’t stop with 2019 results. Last summer Gallup summarized its polling on public confidence in higher education in this way:

• “36% have ‘a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education
• Confidence down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015
• All major subgroups less confident, with Republicans dropping the most.”
• -

Two explanations come to mind, objective and subjective.  The objective one points to specific instances, e.g. unfair admissions policies at some institutions, or refusal to let unpopular views be heard on some campuses.
Subjective explanations may, however, be closer to the mark. We are in a mood of national grumpiness, where nothing seems to assuage feelings of annoyance.  As a result, we are often better at spotting flaws than in recognizing contributions to personal lives and societal wellbeing.
Still more troubling is the fact that higher education is not the only sector of our society to experience a loss of public confidence.  Other institutions, the media, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Presidency, et al., are in the same boat.
In another Gallup report one can trace an approximately 50% decline in confidence in the institutions Gallup regularly monitors.  Maybe polls are just a way for people to express their frustrations and disillusionment, but if we take the polling results at face value, it’s hard to see how a society can remain stable amid such declining confidence in its major institutions.
--
What’s Next? Bok’s Answer:
“In 2017, Congress imposed a 1.4-percent tax on the earnings of endowments above $5 billion. Following the massacre of Israelis by Hamas on October 7, 2023, several members of Congress threatened to stop all federal funding of universities that did not act appropriately to prevent acts of antisemitism on their campus. In 2022, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill that would deny eligibility for government-backed loans to any university charging tuitions greater than $20,000 per year unless they reduced the size of their administrative staff by 50 percent within a few years. More recently, Donald Trump announced that if elected president in 2024, he would create a free online university to be paid for by “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
--
Does Bok Get It Right?
          This is a frightening prospect for Bok’s institution and many others whose continued flourishing depends on their continuing autonomy.  The threat, however, is much more immediate for public institutions where the threat of the Know Nothings is close at hand.
--
A Museum Commemorating an Atrocity:
Greece is planning a new museum to house skeletons found a few years ago in a mass grave near Phaleron on the coast of Attica. Some had iron shackles on their legs; others had had their hands tied behind their backs. The story can be found in The Greek Reporter.
 Pottery evidence suggests a date near the time of an attempted coup d’etat by Cylon and his in-laws from nearby Megara.  Thucydides (1,126) tells of an atrocity when the Athenian authorities butchered the suppliants in Athens itself.  If the skeletons could talk, they might recount more widespread retaliation against the conspirators.
--
Another Look at Skin Color in Greek Antiquity:
          Christopher Parmenter has some thoughtful observations in this post.
--
Quotable:
          “"Man is an adventurer of the infinite, which gives him unknown resources. His activity is to make sense, and in all drawings, in all poems, and in all musical compositions, it is reinforced by the faculty to make an obscure sensation clear and coherent."
          Alfred Kubin (Thanks to Claude Cernuschi for providing this quotation.)
--
Ponderable: On Polytheism and Monotheism:
“Polytheism sets a high bar for monotheism to clear.  The polytheist has not only a dozen or so divinities squabbling on Mt. Olympus; the divine is represent in one form or another in e in every human experience - the growing of grain, the drinking of wine, the birth of a child, initiation into a mystery - everything from birth to death and thereafter.  When the divinities from Mt. Olympus are distracted, one of their children, Eros for example, can step in, or one of the forces we misleadingly call “personifications.”
          “Monotheism can’t compete in this game.  Instead, for those whose imagination is up to the task it allows a flickering glimpse of remote but unbounded light.
“What is a poor monotheist to do?  Surely not to push that glimmer off to some far-off heaven but to let it find and illumine the darkest corners of the soul.’
Maurice Brenmdenheim Confessions
--
A Transgendered Emperor?
          Click here for the debate about Elagabalus.
--
Jargon of the Month:
          bioesssentialism
Short definition: DNA is destiny.
--
Breakthrough or Regression?
          DNA extracted from ancient skeletons may in time tell a lot about ancient peoples, their migrations and now, it seems,  their diseases and  medical history.  There’s still, however, a ways to go, as Christopher Parmenter argues:
 
          “After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering on migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, DNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism.”
Christopher S. Parmenter.  ”The Twilight of the Gods? Genomic History and the Return of Race in the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean” forthcoming in   History and Theory.
--
Etymology of the Month:
plagiarist (n.)
“ ...  from Latin plagiarius "kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, one who kidnaps the child or slave of another," used by Martial in the sense of "literary thief," from plagiare "to kidnap," plagium "kidnapping," from plaga "snare, hunting net" – Etymonline.
The first person named as a plagiarist seems to have been Fidentius, chastised by Martial 1.29 et alibi for using his works without credit.
By 1601 the term was creeping into English when Ben Jonson spoke of a plagiary, meaning a copycat. (To save me from a charge of plagiarism, please  click here.)
The term now covers a wide range of offences from carelessness in citation, to the deliberate stealing of someone’s ideas or research results.   Maybe we’d be better off with two terms, reserving plagiarism for the kidnapping of ideas and results, and coining  Fidentism after the Roman who failed to give Martial the credit he deserved.
--
Journeys:
Daniel Mendelsohn, now the editor at large of the New York Review, will lead a series of seminars in 2024, which the Review describes as a continuation of “his acclaimed literature seminars on the theme of “Journeys.” This fall, over 1,000 participants joined his first two seminars—on Homer’s Odyssey and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Beginning in February, Mr. Mendelsohn will continue the series with three month-long seminars, devoted to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Second Place.“  You can sign up on the NYR website.
Dan Mendelsohn reports on a journey of his own in his account of teaching a class in which his father enrolled. His  Odyssey is on my reading list.
And now there is Peter Brown’s much acclaimed (a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, etc..) Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.
--
Poem of the Month:
     When we think of journeys, we usually think of goals, arrivals, destination.  Cavafy provides an antidote:
     Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
 
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind--
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
 
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
 
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
          tr.  Edmund Keeley
--
Aphorism:
“War begins where reason ends.”
                   Frederick Douglass
--
Stylish Stylites:
          Old drawings of Athens sometimes show a strange structure perched high on the ruins of the temple of Olympian Zeus.  What was it and what was it doing there?
It was, perhaps, a place for a stylite, that is an ascetic of Late Antiquity or the Byzantine period who withdrew from the world by climbing a column and living there. The story:
https://greekreporter.com/2023/12/10/building-top-temple-olympian-zeus/
          Why such bizarre behavior?  It meshes with many attitudes in Late Antiquity, but more broadly with a an earlier and deeply engrained habit of thinking about value on a vertical axis – the higher the better.  We still talk about high minded people and lofty aspirations; the stylites acted it out.
--
Sarcasm, Thucydides, Keep the SAT, but... –
You may enjoy several posts on my blog but the one most relevant to this Newsletter is “This May Make You Feel Uncomfortable.”  Check it out.
--
End Note: One Ways Forward:
          Moments of gloom and doom, such as those discussed earlier in this Newsletter, may provide an incentive to rethink some core questions: What do we expect from a college education and what are the best ways toward those goals?
 
 If we believe a good education should help us speak thoughtfully and persuasively across social, political and intellectual divides, then an ancient practice may help us:
“Rhetorical training meant more than teaching students to declaim prettily; it meant arming them to engage as citizens in an irrational and contentious world ... It’s time to resume teaching the skills that form the basis of interaction and a civilized life.” John Bowe “An Ancient Solution to Our Current Crisis of Disconnection” in the New York Tines.
--
Thanks:
Many readers have sent me links, leads and ideas, so many, in fact, that I can’t name all my benefactors.  Two, however, deserve special recognition, Judith Hallett, and Kevin O’Connor.
--
Requests:
Please forward this Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it, and please send me links and ideas that you think should be included in the next issue.
Bob Connor
[email protected]
​

​       Some years ago on the back of an envelope I did the math. SAT scores correlated closely with family income. If youe dad wants you to get inti a highly selective college, tell him to increase family income by a hundred thousand or more.  Oh, I know, the correlation doesn’t predict results for any individual, but the point was obvious. SATs favored more affluent applicants.  No wonder then that many colleges and universities have dropped them.  Now, however, David Leonhardt of the New York Times has taken a fresh look at the evidence about what happens when standardized tests are eliminated from the admissions process.   Something important is lost, because standardized tests are better predictors of success in college than high school transcripts, letters of recommendation or applicants’ essays.  What’s more, these other indicators actually favor more affluent applicants..
       The solution, I believe, is obvious: keep the SATs but use them in smart ways.  For example, look for applicants whose SATs are significantly higher than what one would predict based on family income.  A poor kid scores high: that could well mean that she has surmounted some obstacles in the past and can be expected to do so in the future. A real achiever! Admit,
       On the other side: mama and papa bring home the bacon, big time, and Johnny, their favored child, scores just a little   above the median for admits at Ivy Tech.  Sorry, Johnny; that’s not good enough.  Your affluent family has probably given you all the advantages, a top-flight secondary school, tutoring whenever needed, an admissions adviser who has helped shape your essay, special courses on how to conquer the SAT, etc., etc.
       Basic principle: more evidence is better than less evidence, if you are smart enough to use it right.