The closing of the banks, the cutting of the safety net, the political gyrations are all appalling to watch but instructive  in one powerful respect: once it goy framed as a “debt crisis” the scenario was set. Creditors would mount their moral high horse, finance ministers, bankers and the IMF would call the shots, the question would be how much to cut and how fast.  Naughty, profligate Greeks. They need to be taught a lesson.

But supposed it were framed as “austerity failure”?   After all, Greece is the poster child for the embarrassing failure of what the Germans and others have been pushing.   What would the scenario have been if that were the way the issue were framed? Surely it would be how to revive the economy, increase GDP, and revive the vision of a Europe bound together by shared values.   The Greeks lost the discourse battle early on. Frankfurt and Brussels fed the hungry media what they craved in a chaotic situation, a nice story line complete with good parents (bankers) disciplining naughty children (Greek pensioners).

Why not be clear about it?  This story line is the old Katzenjammer Kids cartoon series, without the humor.

There’s a lesson here for America, but it’s not, “Cut back or you’ll turn into Greece.”  It’s to watch like a hawk how issues get framed, and fight that battle hard and early. Right now the debate about higher education is framed as  the rule of RoI,  Return on Investment.”  Le RoI rules, the people will  suffer in their  debt crisis until costs are cut to the bone and beyond.  As long as that’s the discourse, the scenario is bleak. But it can be reframed, if not from the top down then from the ground up.  If not with piou exhortations about the  value of a liberal education, then with a new cartoon series showing that Le RoI  has no clothes. 

 

Somewhere, the amazing physicist John Archibald Wheeler made a comment that seems to me could be a guiding principle for classical scholarship: “In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.”

Wheeler, who is sometimes described as having “revolutionized” physics, and certainly played an important role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, had a way with words. He was a veritable US mint, coining them right and left.  Wikipedia lists“ the term "black hole", … "neutron moderator", "quantum foam", "wormhole", and "it from bit", and …  the "one-electron universe". “  But I especially like the phrasing of another comment of his:” We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

But for me the advice to look for what’s strangest and then explore it is a guiding principle. It works, I am convinced, because it keeps the focus on what is distinctive in our fields, and hence on what Classics’ distinctive contribution to education can be. But it also makes us less likely to follow in the wake of other fields, or to adopt presentist clichés.   At the same time it provides perspective,  encouraging awareness of  “cultural warp,” that is, the places where Greek ways don’t match our ways. That raises the big question of cross-cultural comparison: Who’s really strange, them or us?  (Often us, I suspect).

In the classroom, the principle can enrich the relationship between teacher and student.  It  can open the windows and let a fresh breeze blow through, the breeze of honesty.  Students can be forthright about what they find genuinely puzzling in the material; the teacher can  be frank about the continuing feeling of wonder , even mystery, about people like us in so any respects, yet different in often puzzling ways.

The only problem with applying the principle in Classics, as best I can see,  is that among the Greeks it’s not easy to identify what is strangest. There’s too much competition for the title.  But somewhere high up in the list has to be Epimenides,  the legendary Cretan  diviner, and his tattooed hide. Maybe I’ll start with him.  Stay tuned.

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SKIN SLURS AND STEREOTYPES, BLACK AND WHITE

(A sequel to SKIN blog post of June 18, 2015 )

 

Some friends who read my essay SKIN noted that while it had a lot to say about body piercing and cutting, it said almost nothing about skin color.  Is it possible, one of them wondered, that we picked up from them our bad habit of using skin pigment as a sign of racial inferiority?  Can we blame the Greeks?  I took a quick look and found a surprising contrast between Greek and English. Please help me improve this draft!    Thanks.

Bob Connor

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“She was green with envy.”

“I’m in a black mood.” 

“He took a jaundiced view of my last blog posting.”

“He turned red with embarrassment.”

“You yellow bellied coward,”

“A white knuckle drive.”

“I’m feeling blue.”

“He’s a red neck.”

”I’m in the pink.”

                                               

English loves color coding emotions.  Our language is full of expressions conveying a mood or emotion by means of color, especially skin color.   So is art and of course advertising. There’s also a minor industry producing color charts of the emotions.  And of course the races get distinguished with color names, black and white, yellow and red.  How about ancient Greek?  Does that language do anything similar? Not to any comparable extent, as best I can tell.  But when Greek does link color to emotions surprising things emerge, especially when black and white are concerned. .

 

The Greeks had a rich vocabulary for color, but they did not divide the color spectrum in quite the way we do.  The same word, melas, for example, can refer to the color of blood,  dark soil, an ocean wave or of the skin of a strong man’s body (Demosthenes 21. 71), or just plain black.   Similarly, the word we commonly translate “white,” leukos , can mean “pale,” sometimes  almost “colorless.” 

The Greeks closely observed the color on the skin, including changes such as blushing (for example, Xenophon Cyropaedia 1.4.4.).  They  also recognized the pallor on the face of  a miser or a philosopher (see LSJ s.v. ώχρός), They were interested in the skin color of other people,  as when Herodotus (2.104.2)  commented that the residents of Colchis and of Egypt both had swarthy skin (melagchroes).   Greek vases sometimes juxtapose black faces and white.  




The Greeks, however, seem not to have used “black” as a shorthand for inferiority.  In fact, for a Greek white skin was more likely to have those connotations, as when a Spartan commander gave the order “  that the barbarians who were captured by the Greek raiding parties should be exposed for sale naked. Thus the soldiers, seeing that these men were white-skinned because they never were without their clothing, and soft and unused to toil because they always rode in carriages, came to the conclusion that the war would be in no way different from having to fight with women.” (Xenophon Hellenica 3.4.19, trans. Brownson). 

It’s not surprising then to find leukos, “white, / pale,” and its compounds used as an insult.   Furthermore, since women were expected to avoid  the outdoors and thereby maintain an untanned skin, white skin on a man suggested effeminacy, as in the comedy Ecclesiazusae 426,  or in the Thersmophoriazusae where   Aristophanes has Euripides say to a rival:

 … I have grey hair  (polios) and a long beard; whereas you, you are good-looking, charming, and close-shaven; you are white skinned (leukos), delicate, have a woman's voice and are pretty to look at. (Thesmophoriazusae 189 -92, trans. Hall and Geldart, modified).

Or one could use a pun to carry the insult one step further as the comic poet Callias seems to have done, punning on the common insult euruproktos, “with a reamed ass,” calling someone  leukoproktos, “with a well  creamed ass.”

So, OK, white supremacists,  stop wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag, strip down, and hike to the tanning salon.