​ 
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.

​    In a recent op-ed in the  Dallas Morning News Paul Woodruff probes into the reasons democratic states can outperform autocracies. Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy got it right – it’s the ability to change leaders when circumstances demand it.  Read Paul Woodruff’s full essay here  or Google its title, “Good Government Depends on Ability to Change Leaders.”

​      There’s a recurring phenomenon that puzzles me.  A smart, well-intentioned person makes an easily avoidable blunder with terrible consequences.  Often, no convincing explanation presents itself. Consider, for example, Thomas Andrews, the designer of the RNS  Titanic, a ship of brilliant design, but with a simple but fatal flaw.  Neither arrogance nor stupidity seems to be the explanation for what went wrong.  He simply failed to see a vulnerability that in retrospect is perfectly obvious. 
       Many years ago a student of mine told me he thought the plot of the Oedipus Tyrannos was implausible and Sophocles inept. : How could Oedipus fail to see that Jocasta was indeed old enough to be his mother and that the altercation where three roads met involved his predecessor as ruler of Thebes?  The answer, I believe, is not that Sophocles was inept r Oedipus deliberately portrayed as obtuse or corroded by “overweening pride,” as classicists were once wont to say.  Rather, a reasonable well intentioned person  was afflicted by blindness, metaphorical at first, all too real at the end.
--  There’s a peculiar quirk inhuman psychology.  In  certain states of mind we don't see something  potentially catastrophic, even though it’s right there, at the tip of the nose, hiding  in plain sight’
    Which brings us to Prime Minister  Truss: ambitious, to be sure, but not stupid, ill-educated, or, as best I can make out, exceptionally  arrogant - as politicians go.  that  “Overweening pride” is not the explanation.  Nor is it a useful way to talk abut  hybris.  Instead it’s the old, recurring metaphorical blindness.  Liz Truss  could have avoided disaster by making a few phone calls t people who know how markets are likely to react when inflation is strong and the pound weak.  She didn’t see the danger she was in, nor the need to make those phone calls.  She certainly didn’t waste time thinking about hybris and other Greek entities that might help one avoid disaster. .
       Hybris among the early Greeks is part of an Unholy Trinity.  First, there is Koros, their closest Greek equivalent to our word “success, but it’s a banqueting term, turned int a personification.  He’s the person who’s had enough but thinks one more won’t do any harm,. . Then, enter the second member f the Unholy Trinity,  Hybris. She’s personified, too, .  You can almosy hear her humming the tune “ … everything’s going my way.” - nd will keep going that way, no matter what -even if I d something without thinking it all through, a little silly, outrageous even  , I’ll get away with it. It’s always worked  out well in the past, hasn’t it?. Hybris, in other words,  is the confidence that success will keep replicating itself.
        Then comes Ate (pronounded Ah-tay, not like the past tense of the verb to eat).  She’s the third member of the Unholy Trinity and she too knows about banquets and drinking parties.  She’s  two sided. One side is the mind set of the guest who after one or two drinks too many; is thinking a little fuzzy, a bit muddled, maybe; one might even say some brain fog has settled in. , Out of that fog the other side of Ate emerges,  a disastrous decision followed by disastrous results.  Ate is both the mind set and what follows from it,. You don’t have to be blind drunk for Ate to do her work.. You can be a teetotaler and get tripped up the same way.  Drinking is just a metaphor for the intoxication that comes from  success. 
       Is that what happened to Liz Truss? I leave that to more knowledgeable heads to decide.  .But I know a bit about the Unholy Trinity.  It hasn’t gone away. 

​        The Jefferson lecture is probably the most prestigious lecture in the Humanities, and the question of reparations for slavery is probably the most contentious issue being debated in our contention-filled republic.
     Andy Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of America Studies at Columbia University and President of the Teagle Foundation, will address that issue in his Jefferson lecture on October 19th.  If you are in DC you can attend; elsewhere, go on line.  Here’s how:
      The lecture will take place on Wednesday, October 19 at 6:30 p.m. at President Lincoln’s Cottage, a historic site and museum in Washington, D.C. A reception for attendees immediately follows the lecture. mm   Free tickets are available here. The lecture will also stream online at neh.gov.

Now and then I send a Newsletter to friends.  Below is the latest.  If you'd like to be on the mailing list, let me know at wrconnor1@gmail.com.
​            Over the summer I found myself often thinking about two issues -- the mental health pandemic affecting adolescents (and hence their education, schools and families), and  the revival of interest in ancient Stoicism.  It took me a while to realize that the two were connected: that Stoicism provided a powerful approach to well-being among adolescents and many others of us as well.
            These issues are explored in a series of postings on my blog at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
You might especially emjoy:
Why the Stoic Revival? entry .of September 13th)
The Best Insights I Have Found into the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis (August 31st)   
In Case You Didn’t Notice: There’s a Stoic Revival Going on (August 20th)
Happy  (August 14th)
If you check out these blog posts, you’ll also find discussions of
The Student Loan Problem (August 28th)
Monarchy (September 10th)
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Isonomia, Anyone?
Does the 2,500 year old concept of isonomia, , “Equality before the law” apply to former US president?  You bet it does,.argue  ASHA RANGAPPA and JENNIFER MERCIE  (Thanks to Dan Tompkins for calling this article to my attention.)
Ancient Sailing: The Washington Post tells the story of a reconsyructed ancient ship and how it contributes to our understanding of trade and military movements in the ancient Mediterranean.  The key, though, is not the ship but the comparison of evidence about ancient and contemporary wind patters – they are very much the same, it turns out.   (Thanks again t Jean Houston for putting me on to this story.)
 
Neologism of the Month: ”Manosphere”
 Jennifer Roberts.exposes the fake view of the Bronze Age. behind this hyper-masculiniyy; see the blog entry for August 27th/
A New Phase in Thucydidean Studies?  A discussion with Dimitris Doulgeris of thGreek newspaper Ta Nea, points t a new, more internationalist approach to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.  See the discussion on the blog post of September10th.
 What IS a Classic, anyway?
At Tanglewood in the summer the Boston Symphon okays Randall Thompson’s Alleluia  as a theme song. In Maine our favorite  Da Ponte string quartet has been doing the same.  I find it more beautiful every time I hear it. That makes it, in my view, a true classic – not just “News that stays news,” as Era Pound said, but news that gets better each time you hear it.  Here's a link:to a performance by the Oberlin College choir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fMtFmNqKFI
Where Have All the Najors Gone?:
            The numbers are presented and discussed in an article  from the Washington Post. It’s not a pretty picture.  I’ll be discussing the figures in blog posts in the next few weeks. Stay tuned. (Thanks again t Jean Houston for pointing me to this article.)
Riddle of the Month:
            Why is a eunuch like a bat?  Answer in next months Newsletter, or  you can read  Athenaeus 10. 451b ff.
Quotes  of the Month:
When a sympathetic soul said to Helen Keller that it must be very hard to get along without seeing, she replied, It would be, if I had no vision.”
 
“We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein--
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Coming in the October Then and Now Newsletter
Word of the month
Riddle of the Month
Quotes of the Month
Best One Sentence Book Review, ever.
If you enjoy this Then and Now Newsletter, please consider forwarding it to friends and inviting them to subscribe  by email at wrconnor1@gmail.com,
And, please, send me leads, suggestions  and comments. Thanks!
Bob Connor
 

​A CONVERSATION ABOUT THUCYDIDES
from the Athenian newspaper TA NEA,
(in Greek)
    Last week I had an interesting conversation about Thucydides with Dimitris Doulgeridis of the Athenian newspaper   TA NEA.  Here’s a ;imk for Greek speakers.  It’s based on the publication of my Princeton Press book Thucydides in a Greek translation recently published by the Gutenberg Press in Athens.
     The conversation made me rethink one aspect of my reading of Thucydides, both in the book and in more recent articles..
       All this work is   grounded in American experience and problems, from the Vietnam War, through the demagogy of Trump and others , and now to  the Covid pandemic.  My hope now is that a corresponding reading grounded in contemporary Greek concerns, experience and understanding will emerge and be shared across national borders.  There is no compelling theoretical obstacle to such an approach, I believe, at least if one is willing to recognize the way Thucydides engages with his readers – challenging and shaping their reactions, rather than pontificating about his own views.  Once one starts using such a reader response approach, multiple readings of this amazingly rich work become possible, and new transnational and cross-cultural discussions open up.  I hope that will help shape the future of Thucydidean studies.

     Readers of this blog will know that a revival of public interest in ancient Stoic philosophy  is well under way. But why?
     The answer, I believe is straight forwaerd but two fold. First it’s needed; second, it works.
      The need is clear in many ways, not least in in the adolescent mental health crisis we are suffering through. ( The best discussion, I believe, is in The New York Times’  podcast .
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/podcasts/the-daily/teens-mental-health-crisis.html
       But it’s not just adolescents who are affected. . Adults, too, though  not necessarily in crisis mode, often report feeling that life is not as rich and rewarding as they hope.  They are turning t Stoicism fr help.
     Second, Stoicosm works:  Evidence: People are voting with their feet for a reason.  The evidence is coming in that Stoicism contains insights  that really help.  That became understandable to me when I read D. Robertsons book How t Think Like a Roman Emperor. It‘s a brilliant fusion of. ancient Stoic practices and modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Wee are now getting solid  evidence of the effectiveness of CBT.  It’s a good guess, then, that Stoic practices, in so far as they intersect with CBT are genuinely helpful to many people. .
      Laypeople like us will benefit from a look at some of that evidence, even if the technical aspects of it are beyond our reach. …. Rigorous studies are now being published, notably a meta-study, “ Neural Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychiatric Disorders:“ recently published in Frontiers.  I have no expertise in this field but from a layman’s point of view the conclusion is clear and compelling:
     “  Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy of CBT in psychiatric disorders …  And a subsample of … meta-analyses was compared response rates between CBT and other treatments. The result showed CBT was highly effective for depression, anxiety disorders, cannabis, and nicotine dependence. And CBT demonstrated superior efficacy as compared to other forms of psychotherapies in personality disorders, bulimia, positive symptoms in schizophrenia …  . Moreover, much cbt
 addressed that CBT produced long-term persistence of therapeutic effects following the termination of treatment). A meta-analysis suggested CBT was related to symptom improvement in social anxiety disorder …  posttraumatic stress disorder. Similar findings were observed in depression. A meta-analysis found that there was the same effect between antidepressant medication and CBT at follow up-… ““  “
      It’s not surprising, then, that Stoicism should produce some of the same effect. But, is there any reason to seek such therapeutic benefits  through the study of ancient philosophy rather than through reliance on contemporary psychiatric practice?  Obviously one needs to be wary of substituting a private engagement with a Stoic text for professional help with a mental illness.                 There are, however, two considerations that underline the value of Stoicism.      First, , while the Stoics have their own phraseology, their writings are relatively jargon free and hence easier to put into practice. .
      Second, their testimony comes with real world backing, that is from people who lived more productive lives thanks to Stoicism, That  is most evidently the case with Marcus Aurelius, and at the other end of the social spectrum by the ex-slave Epictetus.  And don’t forget Seneca! They knew how to use Stoicism t live a better life.
        Be cautious, though! One feature of Stoicism not found in CBT is its fierce hardening of the body.  The goal was to inure oneself to pain and suffering. – the plunge into the icy Tiber, clothing too thin to protect from the chill winds,  gruel equally thin. No thanks!
     I mention these only as a reminder that Stoicism is not the same as CBT, and to ask what other parts of Stoicism differentiate it, for better or worse, from CBT and to probe into what more needs to be brought into focus about ancient Stoicism.  My hunch is that we are just at the beginning of the road of understanding Stoicism and benefitting from it. 

​     Americans seem to be as absorbed in mourning Queen Elizabeth II as Britons are.  But                             Why?
      Part of the answer must be, I suppose, must the style and elegance of the British  mourners we encounter in the media.  Good show! Or, to  put it more bluntly, good fashion show.
      Surely there’s more to it than that.  Three things, in fact, all tied to the symbolic power of  monarchy. 
     First is the assurance of stability which monarchy brings.  Things will not change with every swing of the electoral pendulum,  Monarchs endure – perhap not s long as the late Queen did, but a seeming eternity by American standards.
     Second, the British monarch is not, or at least pretends not to be, the creature of one political party, thereby assuring the citizenry that government aims to serve all its citizens.  Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and at both ends of the political spectrum profess this, but the American political system requires the head of state also to be head of government, and leader of a political party -  an almost impossible conflict of interests.. No wonder, then, if Americans sometimes look to the British monarchy for an assurance they cannot find at home.
      Third, and perhaps most important, a  constitutional monarchy sends a reassuring message about hierarchy.  We can imagine a truly egalitarian society, but we have not found a way to organize a society without hierarchies of many sorts.  Again, we seek reassurance that the distribution of power along a vertical axis need not be a “construct” designed to suppress those of lower status, as some theoreticians warn us.   
     These are all symbolic messages, not necessarily backed up by facts, economic or social, or by the harsh realities of politicking.  Like most symbols, they speak to our unconscious minds as well as to our practical instincts. Yet they are messages we crave to hear – all humans do, I suspect, semper et ubique.  Without their presence in some form or other, citizenship is an anvious state of being, and political life looks acrss the icean for reassurance,.
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   PS:  If this is right, we need to think more rigorously about politics, ancient and modern, as symbolic messaging..
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