​    All the chatter about  Artificial Intelligence making new breakthroughs culminated for me when I listened to a funny but revealing podcast from “The Daily” on December 16th 2022.   I came away convinced that A.I. could transform the landscape of learning at the college level and beyond.  In some areas it can already answer challenging questions and produce  short stories and essays that one can well believe were written by a not unintelligent human being.   The website ChatGPT.com has gone viral.  Young people in particular  are flocking to it.
     Already one can foresee students submitting essays and term papers written by A.I.  Their origin will be hard to detect.  Will essay writing move into “flipped classrooms,” while lectures and discussions move on line? 
     More important, I believe, is the Big Question, “What is the difference between an  essay produced by A.I. and one by a human?  What are we looking for in such essays: Mastery of facts and bibliography?  Logical reasoning? Or something more - , something to do with personal  values and insights?
     “Don’t Deplore. Explore,” I told myself so I logged on to ChatGBT.com (It’s easy and a one week trial costs only $1.00.)  I decided I’d test its limits by asking it some hard questions. “I need an essay on riddles in Icelandic Sagas” I typed in.  Sorry, the answer came in less than a a minute. That’s beyond our current range, the response told me.. But we may be able to help you in the future.
      Maybe, I thought,, the site could d better with comparative politics. So I asked it to draft a newsletter on comparisons between ancient Greek politics and contemporary American politics. (If I got a good answer I thought I might have some fun sending the result to my Then and Now Newsletter readers, asking them at the end if they noticed anything unusual about it.  I would have to be prepared for the response, “Better than usual.)  But again  ChatGBT flunked. Whew!.
       That failure buys us some time.  A.I. may well  be able to take on such assignments in the future.  And the future moves fast in A.I. settings.  My guess is that colleges and universities and professional associations has a year or two, at best, to think through the implications of this technology.
   Some serious brainstorming is in order. Who will take the lead? 

    In the last blog post I suggested that the further  east one went in the US and Europe the more seriously people took the names they gave to their children, and the more likely people were to internalize their name and let it point to a role model.  But maybe that’s wrong; maybe we all model ourselves to some extent on the name we’ve been given.  If so, what should we make of the list of the ten most popular  grls’ and boys’ names in the United States in 2021:
GIRLS
     Olivia
     Emma
    Amelia
    Ava
     Sophia
     Charlotte
     Isabella
    Mia
    Luna
   Harper
BOYS
    Liam
     Noah
     Oliver
      Elijah
     Lucas
     Levi
     Mason
    Asher
    James
    Ethan
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    What can we make out of the list?   There are few grand historical figures. Few saints, sacred or secular, but a surprising number from the Hebrew scriptures, consciously or unconsciously..  Beyond that, some pop idols, of course, but mostly euphonics – the names have lots of vowels and liquid consonants (ls and rs). No fricatives; sorry  Frank and Phoebe.  The chosen names roll lightly off the tongue. These names “sound nice.” OK, we could do worse. So internalize the message, kids, and just Be Nice.

​

​     On August 19th 2022 thee electronic edition of The New York Times briefly ran a lead article entitled “Odessa is Defiant: it’s also Putin’s Ultimate Goal.”         The article was quickly taken down, but it’s good to have raised the question what IS Putin’s “ultimate goal”?
     s it really Odessa, and  with it a strong presence in the Black Sea?.  Or is it to Consolidate control over Crimea?  Nibble away at the turf in eastern Ukraine?  Recover the glory and grandeur of the pre-1991 Soviet Union? Or what?
    A lot will depend on the answer when, inevitably, peace talks begin.  The answer may be right there before us, hidden in the plain sight of Putin’s name.  Let me explain.
 
    First, a crude generalization, but perhaps a revealing one. about naming a child:
       The further east one goes among so-called Christian countries   the  more seriously are personal names taken
      In America even parents who go regularly  to church are likely to give their child a name that just “sounds good,” or pays tribute to a pop culture idol, or  occasionally to a grandparent or a favorite aunt or uncle.  In Britain, I suspect, names are more likely to have a historic echo, George and Arthur, for example. In Italy Leonardo leads the pack, for obvious reasons.  
     But in countries where Orthodox Christianity is prominent Saints’ names appear more frequently, and birthday celebrations are eclipsed by the saint’s day of the namesake.
     In Russia nearly  three million people have the name Vladimir,, including the head of state.   It’s the name of a warrior and conquered turned saint.  And in a country were political and ecclesiastical authorities often work hand in hand, it is a name of potentially great significance., especially if the person so named internalizes it, sees it as part of his identity, lets it shape his ambitions.
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     So what about “Vladimir”?  It’s the name of a ferocious tenth century warrior based not in Russia but in   Kyiv where the cathedral is named after him (In Ukrainian his name is spelled  Volodymyr).  As nearly as I can tell, he never traveled as far east as Moscow,, but that did not stop Putin who  in 2016  Putin unveiled a 17.5 meter high monumentin his honor.   At the ceremony Putin said, “He laid the moral foundation on which our lives are still based today. It was a strong moral bearing, solidarity and unity which helped our ancestors overcome difficulties and win victories for the glory of the fatherland, making it stronger and greater with each generation …  Today it is our duty to stand together against contemporary challenges and threatsing our spiritual legacy and our invaluable traditions of unity to go forward and continue our thousand-year history.”
     Fine words but what is now Ukraine, not modern Russia, was the center of Vladimir’s empire and his greatest architectural monument remains, the  Cathedral of Agia Sophia in Kiev. whose construction, modelled after Agia Sophia in Constantinople, may have begun as early as 1011 under Vladimir himself. 
    Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988  and  saw to it that his subjects converted as well. No wonder then  that he is often called “the Great,”  and is widely venerated and was canonized as a  saint recognized by both  Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. In the Russian Orthodox church he  is one of  the most widely venerated saint and regarded as “The Baptiser of Russia and Equal of the Apostles.” ,
     His conquests include much of what is now Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic states. If Putin is modelling himself on his namesake, his “ultimate goal” is likely to involve the subjugation of these countries .
    If your name is “Vladimir,” Kiev is in your bones. (or more precisely  in the relic bones of Saint Vladimir  which were originally in Kiev but were brought in  1635  to Moscow.  The Soviets, of course, treated them not as sacred objects but as historical artifacts, property of the State. In 2010, however, under president Dmitry Medevede these relics  “ were solemnly given to the Russian Orthodox Church  and placed inside the Patriarchal Cathedral in Moscow. Inn 2015 , the 1000th anniversary of Vladimir’s death, under the rule of  president Putin, and with the support of his ally, the Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill I.,   the relics were sent to cities and towns  in Russia and Belarus   for veneration.  The bones were fervently venerated, not only in the Russian towns and cities , often in remote northern regions, but also, strategically, in   Belarus. At every stage they were presented as  “the embodiment of an ideal and wise ruler.”  The message was clear: the sainted  Vladimir was an exemplar of both religious and secular power. Perhaps his cntemporary namesake  was , too.
 
    It is not easy for  secular western observers to comprehend what’s in this name, but if in Russia you name your child Vladimir,  you send a powerful message, especially if over time the new Vladimir internalizes it as his identity,  and sees the advantages of such a name.   If so, it may kindle ambitions which can not be quenched except by the waters of the Baltic Sea.   

​       The removal of Potemkin’s bones from a crypt in Kherson received brief attention in the media. and in this blog (post ofOctober 28 ).  But there seems no agreement why the Russians removed them. Maybe it was just to keep the hated Ukrainians from  holding on to a piece of Russian history, or, as Marc Santoras suggests, “  among Kremlin loyalists, the belief in what they view as Russia’s rightful empire still runs deep. “
       The bones of the great, however, have an ancient and deep hold on the psyche, and thereby power for those who control them.  One can sometimes see that in the veneration of relics in both Roman Catholic  and Eastern Orthodox settings, and in ancient Greece as well.  When I note the return of Theseus’ bones to Athens, various friends reminded me of other such episodes, including the smuggling of exiled Themistocles’ bones back into Attica.  Bill Race reminded me of Herodotus’ account of the removal of Orestes’ bones from Tegea in Arcadia to Sparta.  The end of Herodotus’ account is especially revealing:
“ Ever since then the Spartans were far superior to the Tegeans whenever they met each other in battle. By the time of Croesus …  the Spartans had subdued most of the Peloponnese.”
That pattern of thought, I believe, lives on in the Kremlin.  Potemkin‘s bones are not a dusty  reminder of past Russian glories;  they are a sign of Putin’s grand ambitions, and an assurance of power, military success and territorial domination – even, or perhaps especially, when things are going badly.

​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?