​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
--
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.
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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
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Aphorism:
“War begins where reason ends.”
                   Frederick Douglass
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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]
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​       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.
 

   I’m not, I think, an especially sarcastic person but I find it useful from time to time to remind myself of the origin of the word.  So I resolve when I catch myself using sarcasm, or hear others doing so, to remember what happened to the satyr Marsyas.  He did not, to be sure, use sarcasm in his musical competition with Apollo, but when he lost, his punishment was what the Greeks called sarkasmos, flaying, the stripping of skin off the body.  That’s how sarcasm makes us feel, as Ovid describes it:
“Even as he shrieked out in his agony,
his living skin was ripped off from his limbs,
till his whole body was a flaming wound,
with nerves and veins and viscera exposed.
But all the weeping people of that land,
and all the Fauns and Sylvan Deities,
and all the Satyrs, and Olympus, his
beloved pupil—even then renowned in song,
and all the Nymphs, lamented his sad fate;
and all the shepherds, roaming on the hills,
lamented as they tended fleecy flocks.”
(Ovid Metamorphoses 6. 382 ff. tr. More, modified.)
    In its place I resolve to use satire, following the lead of the Century Dictionary which tells me, “The essential thing about sarcasm is its cutting edge ; it therefore is intensely concentrated, lying in a sentence or a phrase ; it is used to scourge the follies or foibles or vices of men, but has little of reformatory purpose. Satire is more elaborate than sarcasm, is not necessarily bitter, and has, presumably, some aim at the reformation of that which is satirized.“
    Wish me luck!
 

Here's what I wrote when a translation of my Thucydides (Princeton Press 1984) appeared in Greece:
​PREFACE TO THE GREEK EDITION OF THUCYDIDES
The writing of this book was mostly done on the slopes of Mt. Lykabettos, in the library of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Now, to my great delight this translation brings my book back to its home in Greece.
The impulse that drove me to write about Thucydides’ often puzzling work was, however, far less joyous.  It was part of a struggle to understand a brutal, vicious modern war – modern yet in many respects echoing what Thucydides had analyzed. In our present situation, it seemed to me, we needed to read Thucydides closely, asking at every turn how his text worked.  Only in that way, I concluded, could we understand the perspective and insight in his complex, but often deeply moving writing.
That was many years ago. For a while there came a time when wars abated, despotic regimes retreated, walls fell, apartheid waned, and civil society seemed to flourish in many parts of the globe, Hope seemed rational
But No!, inevitably perhaps, the old miseries returned – ranting demagogues, ill-considered invasions, carnage, defeat, civil strife, , catastrophic withdrawals, atrocities and disruptions of the order of nature,-“droughts from which came great famines and that exceedingly destructive plague-like disease” (1.23.6)
We were back in Thucydides’ world, or, more precisely, in a situation largely of our own making in which we need more than ever Thucydides’ relentless efforts to bring to light the forces within our nature as human beings  that can, as he says, “enslave judgment.”      In such a setting the close reading of Thucydides’ history seems more urgent than ever.
But that, surely, a new generation of readers and scholars  must determine for itself.  My hope now is simply that this reading of his text will provoke new and deeper understanding of Thucydides’ ever-challenging, ever-revealing work.
W. Robert Connor
December 2021

​FREE ADVICE! WORTH EVERY PENNY YOU PAY FOR IT!
Try thinking of the exam not as a “test”, but as an opportunity to fit together the bits of knowledge conveyed by readings, lectures, discussions, textbooks – all the fragments waiting to be brought together. 
       This works, I believe, both for those who set exams and those who sit for them.
       I wish I had thought this way when I was 

​Some years ago colleges started welcoming new students by assuring them they wanted them not to feel uncomfortable in their new setting. It was a nice thing to do, though some new students may have read between the lines anxiety that despite every well-intentioned effort they might not be happy there.  Others may have found the message empowering.  They could easily accuse someone of “making them feel uncomfortable.”  Almost anything could make someone feel uncomfortable, from a chilly greeting to a direct act of violence.  Distinctions got blurred.  Some people learned to exploit the nowreigning subjectivity..
 
    Perhaps it would have been better if faculty and administrators  had used talk about  feeling uncomfortable only among themselves and then followed it up with thoughtful planning to help students adjust to a new environment, one focused on learning.  To entering students the message might be along these lines: “Welcome!  You have been admitted because we believed you would flourish in a challenging academic environment.  We believe each of you can flourish in this setting and help others to do so, too.  It won’t be easy, but we know you can handle it.   You are here for something totally different from what any of you has experienced before.  Sure. it will be challenging; that’s part of the fun of it.  So get ready for ideas and experiences you have never encountered before.  If from time to time you feel puzzled, awkward, or a little disoriented, good!  That means you are getting a real education -- to question things you have always taken for granted, too listen to people with whom you differ, ...”.”
    Well, reader, you get the point. Don’t feel uncomfortable in taking it from here.
 

​At this moment some of the greatest universities in the world are immobilized by infighting.
    At the same time Israel, grieving after an unspeakable atrocity on October 7th and surrounded by people who hate her, and Palestinians in misery impossible to imagine, are both suffering, and will surely keep suffering for the foreseeable future.
 Hatred is so far the only victor and has spread across the seas and into our campuses..
    Eventually the fighting will stop, most likely temporarily, for there is no coherent answer to the question What next?  Will it just be more of the same?  We need – I mean all of us - to find ways to keep such brutality from recurring and spreading into our hearts.  
    Hatred must not triumph.
This is a challenge of the greatest magnitude, yet the greatest universities in the world are so busy with infighting that they are unable to apply their knowledge, brain power and work together to find  ways, stepby step, out of this misery.  
    It is this that outrages me.  Must we beg our university leaders to apply their institution’s knowledge and understanding to this challenge?
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If you disagree, please tell me why.  If you agree, please share this with those you know at the college or university you care most about.