​Happy Thanksgiving! and Welcome back to Then and Now, a now nd then newsletter.
 This month I want to challenge you to think out of the box on the troubling state of American higher education, before going on to riddles, palindromes and other cheerier topics.  But first: Have you missed any recent discussions of whether Greek tragedies continued to be produced during the great pandemic in ancient Athens, whether Thucydides got it right, whether Rishi Sunak is a “person of color,” and Kherson,  and the stealing of the bones of Potemkin, and what the value of Pi has to do with climate change? They are all discussed on my blog, right here.
Connecting the Dots for Higher Education:
          Here are four dots to connect, all from recent developments affecting American higher education, once our pride and joy:
          First dot, the end of Affirmative Action now seems very likely when the Supreme Court rules on policies at Harvard and UNC- Chapel Hill.
          Second dot, Biden’s executive order cancelling (some) student debt is estimated to cost between $379 billion and $400 over the next few decades. That’s a lot of pocket change.  It’s running into a lot of difficulties, legal and practical. Axios on November 19th provided a good survey   Readers of tis Newsletter know I think the plan is very bad policy, but even if it succeeds,. it will do nothing to address the long term problem of financing college education..
Third dot. Taxing College Endowments: Senator Thomas B. Cotton (R-Arkansas), has proposed the “Ivy Tower Tax Act” the proceeds of which would be used to fund  programs in vocational education.  Good camouflage for his own Harvard degree!  As drafted this may hurt his alma mater, but he may have a point in going after those places that spend less than 5% of their endowment per year.  That’s not entirely unreasonable since the IRS requires tax exempt foundations to meet that spending requirement each year and foundations flourish nonetheless.
Fourth dot: Gambling on Campus: at least eight universities are making a lot of money by encouraging betting on their sports teams. It’s already big business ad there’s more to come,,according to a recent article in the New York Time.
Connect these dots:  Try connecting these dots and see if they don’t point to the need for,and funding for,   a new program of  Adversity Scholarships (not loans) for applicants of any race or ethnicity who have demonstrated academic achievements, despite financial, medical or other  adversities.
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Riddle of Last Month:
          The solution I had in mind to last month’s riddle (“What begins with E and ends with E but has only one letter?”) was  envelope, but David Konstan  suggested epistle. It works, too.  And a pun for the solution comes from Al Duncan: “I / eye.” Smart readers, these!
New Riddle for this Month:
This one, freely translated, is attributed to Cleobouline of Lindos on Rhodes in the  sixth century BCE. She is said to have composed many riddles in hexameter verse.:
Alive my braying voice could drive a man to tears;
Dead my knobbly bones will bring pleasure to your ears.
What am I?”
Send on your solutions. .The answer will be in the January Then and Now Newsletter.
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Congratulations, Dr. Fauci:
           Dr. Anthony Fauci will retire at the end of this year after a long career notable for his ability to convey clearly and c cogently the medical knowledge we have needed to cope with the pandemic.  Thank you Dr. Fauci. Is it possible that your accomplishments were built  in part on your undergraduate major at Holy Cross College,, combining preparation for med school with study of the Classics?.
Ulysses in Puerto Rico:
Ulysses, Turey de Vizcaya,¨, Photographs and Sculptures by Adrian Badias are on display at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico in, San Juan, through December.  This work is worth the plane ticket.
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Palindromes:
          Do you know a better palindrome than “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”?  Or these two, one Latin, one English, concerning a meeting in the Garden of Eden, “Ave, Eva,” freely translated as “Madam, I’m Adam.’”
          What’s your favorite palindrome?
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WHY ALL THIS NONSENSE -  Riddles, Palindromes, Neologisms, Words of the Month , and the like?
          Because  in a microscopically small way they help keep us alert to word choice and hence to the power of speech acts and to a macro issue:  the constant need  for the rectification of language.  Chinese thinking on this topic is often cited, but  isn’t it also the core of the Socratic enterprise?
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Congratulations to Mark Mazower  on being awarded the Gennadius Prize.  Mazower, professor of History at Columbia  … has broadened our understanding of Greece through huis  books on Nazi Greece, the history of the Balkans, the multicultural world of Salonica, and most recently the Greek Revolution. .
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Word of the Month:
satisfice
“What most of us do most of the time is “satisfice,” to use a word coined by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in 1956. To satisfice is to satisfy and suffice — to make a quick, easy decision that, while maybe not perfect, is good enough.“  Peter Coy, “In Praise of the Humble Rule og Thumb” : .
 I do this all the time when dining out. Because of my poor vision my wife, Callie, reads the menu t me until I find a dish that sounds good to me. Then we stop and get on with the conversation. I am rarely disappointed in either the food or the talk. In other words, it satifices.
Quotable:
Bernard Williams:  “if we find things of special beauty and power in what has survived from that [the classical Greek] world, it is encouraging to think that we might move beyond marveling at them, to putting them, or bits of them, to modern uses”
Ponderable:
          “Thanks is not a feeling we express but a relationship into which we enter,” Maurice Brendenheim (Confessions, Volume III, p. 389, tr. R..Frotheringham)
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Family Business:
          When Steve Connor started building classical guitars, I thought he was making instruments, that is,. devices that helped  other people produce beautiful art. Now, when I see his guitars, I realize they are themselves works of art.  Check out his website.  https://www.connorguitars.com/
And here’s a play list of performances on his guitars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKMXAm1H5n4&list=PLED303CC375F2ED36
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Happy?
          Froma Zeitlin helps with my question about the Hebrew of Psalm 1: “ he Hebrew word is ‘ashrei, which means happy.  Ashrei is one of the most often repeated prayers in Jewish tradition ,,, In traditional practice, a person recites Ashrei at least three times a day – twice in the morning service and once in the afternoon service. 
Thanks for your help, Froma. Ashrei!
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More on Glob on Bogs:
In the lats Then and Now Newsletter I wondered who wrote the delightful review of “Glob on bogs…”?  Andrew Bridges tells me it was his Greats tutor at Merton College Oxon., Tom Braun, , a man with a reputation for acerbic eccentricity,  remarkable even by Oxford standards.  
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Forthcoming): There’ll be no December Then and Now (after all, it is a now and then newsletter), but I will keep blogging. Stay tuned, and have a happy Thanksgiving and merry holidays. Ashrei!
See you in January 2023. 
 
Bob Connor
PS If you enjoyed this newsletter, inflict it on an unsuspecting friend. 

​When Oliver Taplin called attention to the likelihood that  tragic  and comic performances continued in Athens right through the pandemic in the early years of the Peloponnesian War (See my blog post of 15 Novemner), I started thinking again about Thucydides’ account of that pandemic.  He paints a picture of Athens so devastated by the disease that it is hard to imagine civic life gong on with any semblance of normalcy.
Did Thucydides misrepresent the pandemic?  Certainly not entirely,  for  we now have evidence of one mass grave very likely tied to the pandemic.  There may well have been others. And he cites figures showing a high death rate among men on a military expedition. Yet we can compile a long list of Athenians who were still alive fter the pandemic - Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Aristophanes, Euripides, Xenophon, Lysias, the infant Plato and Thucydides himself- in fact almost everyone we can name from Athens of this period.
          Thucydides description of the pandemic can best be understood not as misrepresentation but as a habit of mind or  guiding principle: If you want t understand something intense, look at the extreme, not the mean.  The average experience will tell you very little; at the extreme, when the chips are down and the pressure is on, you can see what people are really like.  That’s when ; you can understand anthropeia physis really is, not a jumble of foibles and weaknesses as our translation “human nature”  might suggest, but a proclivity to savagery.  That’s why Thucydides pays so much attention t the civil strife in Corcyra, the slaughter of school children at Mycalessus, and the brutal end of the Sicilian expedition.  He won’t fall into the trap if saying “Oh  well, those were just exceptions t the rule.” No, these extreme cases show what we are capable  of as human beings. And since war is itself an intense extreme, then by examining it at its worst, one should be able better understand what sort of creature we are. The Greej tragedians, I believe, would totally agree,

​          In 1897 the Indiana General Assembly attempted to setg the value of pi at 3.0. This  would make a lot of things easier, including squaring the circle.
          The attempt came to mind as the U.N. c limate conference debated whether to change the goal of climate policy from a 1.5 degree  Celsius increase to something more easily attainable, say 2.0,  or – back again -  3.0.
          Time for some straight talk from the climate wizards.  Tell us clearly and unequivocally, what to expect if we can stop warming  at 1.5 and what  is likely to happen to us (if we are still around) when we reach 3.0.  Don’t try to square the circle; “Just the facts, ma’m, just the facts.”.

​Oliver Taplin has an exciting essay in the new issue of Arion in which he shows that tragic performances continued in Athens right through the devastating pandemic during the early years of the Peloponnesian war.  You’d never guess that from the description Thucydides gives in the second book of his history of that war.  He depicts near total devastation and demoralization.
     Picture instead, or in addition, finding a place amid a  crowd jostling into the old Theater of Dionysus (not the spacious  Johnny-Come-Lately Theater of Herodes Atticus  in use today) and experiencing Euripides’ Hippolytus.  It’s spring 428. when the plague has ravaged the city and the funeral pyres are still stinking.  Right off there’s vicious Aphrodite and the emvy-driven violence she unleashes, Phaedra, the step, with a sickness of her own (476 f.).  And Theseus, the archetypical Athenian male, in blind rage cursing his innocent son, and Poseidon, destroying the lad. 
       And on and on  the festival  goes:  Trilogy after trilogy, Three tragedies, three times with death all around us. Taplin suggests that the vicarious experience of the sufferings of others gave a kind of  boost to their vital antibodies.  He writes:
      “This reinforcement is such that they  can better cope with those grim eventualities of human life—those  “fates”—that each and every one is bound to have to encounter in  various ways and with various intensities sooner or later. This analo gy accommodates far better than catharsis the huge variety of events  and sufferings that are encountered through tragedies, and of the re sponses to them  “ p 40. 
      Maybe that’s right – being part of the performances of tragedies might help buck up spirits during a time of isolation, widespread misery and danger.  But Taplin also points to the likelihood that Athens  during its pandemic celebrated  the whole Dionysia, comedies, satyr plays, dithyrambs and, presumably, the  drunken, licentious romp. the  komos,  as well.  It brings to mind Mardi Gras in Covid afflicted New Orleans during Covid  in 2020 .  (You can get a tame glimpse of it here..)
….. We must,  then, seek out an explanation that reaches beyond the persistence of  tragic performances.  And that, in turn, raises an even broader question 
    What makes people want to celebrate under such circumstances, , dance in the streets, sing, gasp in horror and then belly laugh at comic absurdity, get drunk, wake up in strange beds – the whole Dionysiac experience?  Is it a need to break out of isolation, smash boundaries  .and  give a  collective finger to Death?  ,  

​The media are reflecting  the joy we all feel  at the liberation of Kherson from a vicious Rusian occupation.  And they are all talking about the strategic importance of Kherson,,,  and the blow its fall delivers to Vladimir Putin’s prestige and credibility.   They are right and the symbolic  significance of the city, (see “Keep Your Eyes on Kherson”  blog post of. October 25th at  https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog/keep-your-eyes-on-kherson)  makes it even more important,
      We should all share in the joy of the citizens finally freed from Russian occupation, and breathe a sigh of relief that Putin did not use nuclear or biological weapons to hold on to the city..
   But where does this leave aputin?  Vulnerable to a coup, I imagine, but not a coup from peace lovers, but from those who complain he was not vicious enough in holding on to this symbol of once upon a time Russian greatness.
What next? A new, even more brutal regime? We’re not out of the woods yet. 

​Maybe every once in a while, just for a few minutes, when nobody is looking, it’s not so bad to divest oneself  of scientific rationalism and take a quick plunge into a totally different way of experiencing nature.   This morning, just before the polls opened, was a perfect opportunity for that.  The moon turned blood red, then I couldn’t see it at all - a total lunar eclipse.
   Any wide awake ancient would know this is no ordinary day, and an eclipse is no humdrum thing. .It’s a chance to think in a different way – just for a few minutes, when nobody is looking. 
Omens tell you something, but you have to figure out what.  Does it have something to do with the election?  Something to do with nature? Or both -  when the chance to vote lines up with our obligation to the natural world on which we depend?  

​       Correct me please, but as best I can tell, when British news sources talk about their new Prime Minister they usually say that he is “of Indian descent.”   American sources often describe him as “a person of color.”
     Which is better?
     Our mode of speaking groups him with African-Americans, Latinax, Chinese, Japanese, people indigenous to this land,  et al. .  The British phrasing evokes British colonial rule, the Raj,  and the migrations after the division of the subcontinent in 1947. and the experience of those who then migrated to Britain and elsewhere. .
     If you were Mr. Sunak, which label would you prefer?    Which tells us more about him?
     Our way of identifying him reinforces the widespread American pattern of thinking about difference in a bipolar way – all whites on one side, all “people of color” grouped together on the other.  In my view, that’s racism rampant.  
     It also raises some important political questions,, for it assumes that all “people of color” will respond in the same way on various issues, and react the same way to candidates. Does this assumption underestimate the diversity of interests and views among various groups in this very diverse country?  Is it really the key to successful coalition building?  Will it continue to work, as more and more communities become “majority minority”?  Or will the uncritical use of such e terminology obscures the genuine and legitimate differences among American population groups? If so, it will likely become less and less useful as more and more communities become “majority minority.”
    This may exaggerate the importance of a phrase that well-intentioned people used merely for convenience’s sake.  But we philologists, for better or for worse, have the habit of focusing on small variations in language and then attributing big consequences to them.  
     Time will tell. 

​ 
THEN AND NOW.
A NOW AND THEN NEWSLETTER
October 2022
 
     The war in Ukraine and political instability have been front and center in my thinking this month.  On my blog ( https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog  ) I’ve tried to dig beneath the surface of  some of these issues , especially where attention to language, symbols and history give a fresh perspective.  A bonus: probing into these matters has also helped me with my “Thinking Greek,” project, namely some fresh ideas about hybris.  As you browse through recent  blog posts you’ll find discussions of Liz Truss and  Vladimir Putin, Grigory Potemkin, and  (with help from Paul Woodruff)  Livy and Machiavelli.  Also you’ll see why I think it’s so important to Keep Your Eyes on Kherson.  Check these posts out here.
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     There’s also been room for some verbal fun:
Best Bilingual Pun:
    “Peccavi.”  That’s the one word message General Sir Charles Napier. telegraphed back to London when he captured Sindh (now in Pakistan). (Thanks to Roland  Machold for steering me  to this pun.)
PS  If your Latin is rusty, peccavi means “I have sinned.”
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Best Opening Sentence in a Book Review:
     A review of The Blog People by the Danish scholar Peter Glob, , began “Glob on bogs is a good job, and many will be agog at Glob’s bog job.”  
      That’s right: You will not get bogged down in reading this book, and will lavish on  it your own globs of praise. But I have forgotten who wrote this unforgettable sentence. Can you help?
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Quotable: Is Harder Better?
      Ralph Fiennes chose to perform T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets “as a post-pandemic pick-me-up  … , about as difficult an evening as you can offer. The thing about Ralph is that he has the easiest, most relaxed relationship with high culture of anyone I know. He doesn’t give a damn about whether things are too difficult for people. He just thinks difficult stuff is good.”  Maureen Dowd quoting David Hare in The New York Times October 22, 2022/
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Riddle of the Month:
          The solution to last month’s riddle (“Why is a bat like a eunuch?) is “A bat is a bird that is not a bird; a eunuch is a man that is not a  man” (Athenaeus book 10).  
     Riddles in modern English are rarely of this type, for example. “What begins with E and ends with E but has only one letter?” (Answer in next Then and Now Newsletter). 
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Neologism of the month “Humbition”   It’s a fusion of humble and ambition brought tgether by Walter Kaufman. (Thanks t Gary Pence for steering me to it.)  It’s helpful, I think, to bring these two apparent opposites together.
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A Continuing Polemic against “Happiness talk”::
      Readers of this Newsletter will know I am wary of all the happiness talk in our culture. (I have argued that happiness  is a byproduct, not a goal.)  Recently I noticed that contemporary translations of scripture use “happy” where older ones said “blessed.” For example, Psalms 1.1.  You can compare English translations of the passage here. The early translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, the Septuagint, has makarios  (blessed) in Psalm 1 not eudaimon.(happy).  Readers who know biblical Hebrew can help fill in this picture – please.
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Botticelli’s Well-kept Secret: (and the Renaissance, too):
    Joe Luzzi’s new book is just out:. Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance. A guaranteed good read.
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Freedom and Free Speech, then and now:
          Paul Cartledge recommends a half dozen books on this subject.  See his recommendations at: https://shepherd.com/best-books/freedom-and-freedom-of-speech-in-ancient-greece
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News bout the  Athenian Agora: :
     The excavation of Athens’ ancient marketplace and civic center is probably the most ambitious American archaeological effort in Greece.  Here’s an update on changes in its leadership:
 * First I note with sadness the death of T. Leslie Shear Jr. on September 28th of this year.  He was for many years director of the excavation (and my colleague and friend at Princeton.)  
* His successor as director, John Camp, another friend of many years, has now retired. 
* John Papadopoulos has been appointed as the new director.  Best wishes for the continued success of the Agora excavations.
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Forthcoming:  The November Then and Now Newsletter will have another riddle, another word of the month, and another chance for you to steer us toward something interesting, both then and now.   You can contact me at wrconnor1@gmail.com to  unsubscribe or (better idea) give a gift subscription to a friend. .
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STOP PRESS:  Just as I was getting ready to press SEND, I came across  Pamela Paul’s  op ed essay, “The Season of Dark AcADEMIA.” in today’s New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/opinion/dark-academia-halloween.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
 .     She does what I have not quite dared to do – draw a connection between the psychological suffering  state of many of today’s students, and institutions’ drift away from the joy of learning for learning’s sake.
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      Thanks!
Bob Connor
October 30th, 2022
 
 

​     In suggesting in my last blog post that Kherson in the Ukraine had a powerful but often unrecognized  symbolic significance  for both Russians and Ukrainians,  I was worried about something I did not  state – that Kherson might be of such importance to Putin that he would use nuclear weapons to hold on to it.
    That is still a worry but today’s news (“Why Russia Stole Potemkin’s Bones from Ukraine”) points to another symbolic aspect of the war.  The Russians have removed the bones of the great commander Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin (1739 – 1791) from his burial spot in St, C atherine’s church in Kherson.
     The act indicates that Russia’s leadership knows that they are unlikely to hold on to Kherson.  Fearing that, they have removed what seems to them the most valuable symbolic treasure from the city - the bones of one of its founders.. They even speak of that as rescuing Potemkin himself, as if this mighty historical figure were the same as a black sac k with bones in it..
    ..Post-Enlightenment thinkers will find this almost unintelligible.  Classicists who remember Plutarch’s account of the Athenians’ claim that they had found the bones of Theseus on the island of Scyros and brought them back for veneration in Athens, will recognize Russia’s  an old and deeply rooted pattern in certain cultures.  Those who understand Orthodox Christianity will nod in assent, for God can work in and through the material world, that is, through sacraments, incense,, icons and relics.  Seen in this way, efforts to control the bones of an acknowledged Great Man ares no surprise.
     So, the Russian action needs to be understood in symbolic as well as economic and strategic terms.  Seizing Potemkin’s bones is a way to acquire symbolic capital.  The war itself is to some extent about symbolism.
     That’s not a trivial suggestion, for it raises the question of Putin’s long-term objectives.  Some other bones help answer that question, as I hope to show soon in another blog post.   

​Wars are fought on many fronts for many reasons, economic, strategic and sometimes  symbolic ones.   These are all at play in the battle for the city of Kherson, on the west bank of the Dnieper River in Ukraine. It’s a place where symbolic and strategic objectives intertwine.
     Its name tells an important part of the story.  Kherson is derived from the Greek chersonesos, peninsula.  The city is not itself a peninsula, but its history goes back to a peninsula colonized by Greeks in the fifth or maybe sixth century BCE, These Greeks in calling their settlement Chersonese nust have been thinking of  the whole peninsula, which we now call the Crimea, and many in antiquity recognized as Scythian Taurica. . 
    The Greek settlement, 3 km. or so from modern Sevastopol, lasted for almost two thousand years, its citizens driving off attacking Scythians, bargaining and, if need be, fighting with local tribes, and all the while sailing and trading around the Black Sea.  Finally, in the late middle ages it was  abandoned and almost forgotten.
     It was not, however, forgotten by Catherine the Great of Russia.  In June 1778 she gave the name Kherson to a city she was founding on the west bank of the Dnieper River. It was about 150 miles away from its namesake, Chersonesos.  Her purpose, however, was not to revive the ancient city but to proclaim her strategic objective, for the new city would not only become a center of commerce, shipping and ship building; its location made it also the key to control of the Chersonese, that is all of Crimea. If you want to dominate Crimea, you need Kherson.  If you dominate Crimea, you can also dominate the Black Sea. Or so the Russians thought when they took the next step: in 1784 Russia established a naval base  on the Black Sea, Sevastopol, right next to the site of ancient Chersonesos.  Once again the name had classical echoes. Sevastopol was the Augusta’s city. And, once again, the objective was dominance of the Black Sea. 
    The name Kherson is still a reminder of Catherine’s strategic goals, and, I believe, of Vladimir Putin’s. .He wants land, resources, wealth, power, but also symbolic success, to restore the grandeur Russia enjoyed under Catherine the Great, Peter the Great and his namesake the sainted Vladimir. He will not lightly relinquish Kherson. The Ukrainians, I believe, know all this full well and will do everything they can to take that city away from Russia.
      Keep your eyes on Kherson.