​       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?
--
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.    
 

​The Gaza war has turned my thoughts in an unexpected direction.  When the savagery broke out on October 7th, I thought I was prepared for it.   After all over the years I have studied many episodes of intense brutality, ancient and modern. This one, however, was in a class by itself.  I knew of nothing quite like it.  I groped for analogies, knowing that analogies bring with them some consolation.  They seem to whisper in the ear: “We’ve seen this before and lived through it. Surely, we can get through this one, too.”  But this conflict seems unparalleled in its ability to strip away every shed   human decency and expose in all its horror our fallen nature.
All this has set me thinking about analogies. . They are historians’ stock in trade and put bread and butter on the table for classicists, as I well know.  But now I have become more wary of the undeniable appeal and power of this way of thinking.  It invites brutality and in the same breath seems to whisper in the ear, “Wehave seen all this in the past and lived to tellabout ut.  This too will pass.”  But will it? Not for those killed in war.
 
Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times of November 2, 2023 has reminded us of the dangers of analogies and the toll they may be taking in Gaza right now. / But, wait: What is an analogy?  It’s not the same as a parallel between something known from history and a
contemporary situation.  Parallel lines can go on forever, constantly reflecting one another, perhaps, but never quite coming to grips with one another..  Analogies are different.  Conventional wisdom has it that they were at first a mathematical construct, later expropriated by Plato for philosophical purposes.  But their origin is perhaps less elegant.  Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War  (5.7) is an early use of the term, describing  among Athenian troops who drew an unfavorable comparison between their commander  the politician Cleon, and the skilled Spartan commander Brasidas:  “  For the soldiers being angry with their stay there, and recounting with themselves what a command his would be, and with what ignorance and cowardice against what skill and boldness of the other, “  Here analogy does means not a recognition of similarity, but calculation based on a contrast.
      Again, in book eight (ch. 83) Thucydides uses the term to depict disgruntled troops who calculate their grievances, looking back to the past to assess their present  : “they mistrusted Tissaphernes before, now they much more accused him. [2] For it fell out that when at the coming of the Athenians with their fleet before Miletus they refused to give them battle, Tissaphernes became thereby a great deal slacker in his payment; [3] and besides that he was hated by them before this “ (8.833, tr. Hobbes). The wording in the next chapter echoes the earlier description of troops thinking of past grievances: “Whilst these were upon this consideration, there happened also a certain tumult about Astyochus.  “
In these setting analogical thinking seems to be the adding up of pros and cons – mostly cons – and deciding on that basis how to act.  It doesn’t reach back to remote history to justify responding to one atrocity with another.  It does the numbers and decides on that basis.  Maybe a similar calculation of benefits and losses, short term and long term, is the best one can hope for in Gaza right now.
 

​Edith Hamilton was not the only one to tie the Greek and Roman classics to “Westen Civilization.” In fact, that term. so loaded and often despised these days, was not in the title of her most famous book on the Greeks when her “The Greek Way” first appeared  .  “Western Civilization” was added to the title in editions that appeared in the 1950s, appealing to “the great generation,” that is those who had been told, time and time  , that they were fighting, and dying, to preserve the values of “Western Civilization,” against the Axis and then against Communist states in the Cold War.   Such language seems out of date nowadays– but have we found something equally powerful to replace it?  If not, no wonder if there is a revival of interest in Hamilton’s unapologetic way of seeing the Greeks (and Romans, and Early Christians, too.)
      The question is whether we can do better than that.  Of course we can!  Still, I have a nagging fear that Brendenheim might have been right when he wrote, “It is a defining characteristic of modernity to dispense with concepts, practices and institutions before well-crafted substitutes are available to replace them..”
     
 
 

​The People Who Study Black Holes Need Some Vocabulary Help
By David Derbes, Guest Contributor

The great English physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, a brilliant autodidact with no more than a fourth grade education, made a series of fundamental discoveries in electricity and magnetism. Turn on a light switch, start your car, the electricity comes from Faraday’s Law. Searching for learned terms to describe his discoveries, he contacted William Whewell of Oxford. Whewell suggested the terms “anode”,  “cathode”, “ion”, “electrode” and “dielectric” among others, all now in common use. Today’s scientists often lack a background in classical languages. When the need arises for a new term of art, they flounder, typically in English.

An example. Protons, neutrons and many other subatomic particles are thought to be constructed from smaller "quarks". These quarks are bound together by exchanging messenger particles. The mechanism is based on electromagnetism which binds atomic electrons to their nuclei. These electrically charged particles exchange different messengers: packets of light; "photons", after the Greek words for "light". A century ago physicists had Greek and Latin in their high schools. Sadly, when the quark model of protons was devised, nobody had enough Greek to come up with a name for the quarks' messengers, the particles whose exchange binds them together. So what are they cal "Gluons".

Astronomers long ago knew classical languages (the first modern translation of Apollonius of Perga’s Conics, into Latin, was made from Greek and Arabic by Edmund Halley of comet fame). Kepler (who knew both Greek and Latin well) realized that planets' orbits around the sun were not circles but ellipses. (Kepler is responsible for "focus", hearth. That is where sunlight is concentrated when a lens is used as a burning glass. Ellipses have two foci, off-center, and the Sun is located at one. Well,where else would you put the central fire but at the "burning place"?) The point closest the sun was called, in good Greek, the perihelion. Many stars in the universe (maybe half) occur in mutually orbiting pairs; they orbit a common point. The closest approach of each's orbit to this point is called its periastron. Recently much progress has been made in the study of black holes. Today's technology allows for the study of stars that move in elliptical orbits around black holes, thousands of light years away. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for work on this topic.

In a very entertaining book (suitable for lay folk) by Clifford M. Will and Nicolás Yunes, Is Einstein Still RIght?, the authors say (p. 165)

"The relativity community has not managed to come up with a good term for [the closest point in] orbits around black holes. “Periholion” doesn’t thrill the community. Our colleague Scott Hughes at MIT has proposed “peribothros” using the ancient Greek word βοθροσ [sic] for hole, but Greek colleagues have pointed out that in modern Greek this word has a different (curse-word) meaning. We invite readers to send suggestions”.

Got any ideas? Cliff Will’s email is [email protected].
--
When he wasn’t taking Classics courses at Princeton David Derbes majored in Physics. After the Tripos at Cambridge he earned his  Ph.D. at  Edinburgh.  His teaching career in the States  culminated at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago.