some notes on gallus

our principal source of information about cornelius gallus is suetonius [see his life of augustus -- section 66 -- on pp 80-81 of your penguin edition of suetonius], but vergil [a contemporary and friend] also mentions him in his tenth eclogue [lines 72-73] in very fond terms.

quintilian also refers to him several times, one of these as a reference to that vergil passage.in some ways the most interesting reference in quintilian is in book ten [10.1.93] where he says elegia quoque graecos prouocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime uidetur auctor tibullus. sunt qui propertium malint. ouidius utroque lasciuior, sicut durior gallus. this means something like: 'in the field of elegy as well we challenge the greeks [for supremacy]. in my opinion the most refined and elegant elegist by far is tibullus. there are those who prefer propertius. ovid is more lasciuus than either, just as gallus is more durus.'

the problem in translation is: what does lasciuior mean? it is the origin, obviously, of our word 'lascivious,' and that might influence us unduly. the latin word can have a positive sense -- 'playful, sportive, frolicsome, frisky' -- but it can also have that negative sense of 'wanton' or 'lewd.' quintilian was a fairly proper old-fashioned guy, so he may have meant that. BUT 'lasciuus' can have yet another meaning -- specifically with reference to literary style: 'luxuriant' or 'overly ornamented.' because the word gets used this way in stylistic contexts, my first reflex would be to go for that third meaning. but then i asked myself: 'is ovid's elegy more luxuriant or heavily ornamented than that of tibullus or propertius?' and i don't really think it is.

let's set that aside for a moment, and think about durior. gallus is said to be durior ['more durus'] than either tibullus or propertius. what might that mean? durus means, first and foremost, 'hard' as opposed to 'soft.' by extension this can mean 'harsh' [in terms of flavor or sound] or, of people, it could mean: rough [i.e. uncultivated]; obstinate; or disagreeable.

this may seem as though it's not much help! but for one thing, it shows you one of the vital differences between latin and modern english: we have a truly gigantic lexicon, and thus can speak with great precision when naming and labeling things. in latin, where the lexicon is smaller, each word may have to do double or triple [or more] duty. hence this problem.

if there's a solution, i think it may lie in the fact that ovid and gallus are set up here in analogy:

ouidius : gallus :: lasciuior : durior

so it's just possible [not necessarily true] that the two ideas are opposites in some way. i.e. ovid is to one extreme [beyond propertius and tibullus]; gallus is to the other extreme.

if that is indeed the case, i'm inclined to read this as saying that ovid is 'more playful' than either tibullus or propertius; and in that case, quintilian might be saying that gallus is 'more severe' than either. [note that this is not the way durior is usually translated here; but i think it makes the most sense, based on the context and the semantic range of each word.] also, quintilian is in an antithetical mood in this paragraph: 'i like tibullus best, though some prefer propertius.' if i'm right, this durior/lasciuior antithesis is just carrying out the motif.

anyway. back to the question that was raised in class today: the main textual references to gallus seem to be in suetonius, vergil, and quintilian. [oh, and ovid, who refers to gallus and his lady 'lycoris' in amores 1.15.

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for those of you who are still eager to see the ipsissima uerba of this gallus fragment [or three fragments -- some think they may be from three distinct poems; either way they may be referred to as i, ii, and iii], here's a text to have a squint at:



the papyrus scrap was found at qasr ibrim, on the banks of the nile in what we now call egypt, but which the ancients thought of as nubia. qasr ibrim has been a great source of ancient papyri, many of which have been published, though i am sure there are plenty more yet unpublished, and probably many many more still undiscovered. our papyrus was not published until 1979 -- the year i began graduate school at chapel hill -- and i can still remember the excitement surrounding its appearance. it does not refer to the oldest extant text written in latin, of course -- we can read quite a few authors who were born before gallus -- but this papyrus is the oldest extant document written in latin. that is saying something.

those of you who read some latin will recognize that the orthography on the papyrus is not what you learnt in latin 101: quom for cum, spolieis for spoliis, deiuitiora for diuitiora. that may just represent the lack of standardized spelling in those days; but it may also reflect the way some of these words were actually pronounced in the place where the document was penned. that could be very valuable information, which our modern editors actually efface by standardizing and homogenizing everything.

you will also note that the meter is clearly elegiac couplets, but [due to physical damage to the papyrus] the middle of part i is missing, as are the beginnings of three of the four lines of part iii. this is where the art [science? alchemy?] of the textual scholar comes in: she must think long and hard about everything she knows about latin literature and culture, about papyrology, about this particular author, about the rules of scansion, etc etc etc, and then propose some conjectural supplements to the papyrus -- i.e., essentially saying, 'there's a hole in the document, but this is my best guess as to what gallus actually wrote there.' a square bracket at one end of the line or the other indicates that the papyrus is missing there. dots are usually used to show missing or illegible letters -- one dot per letter, typically, to help the reader do some more guessing. it helps, that is, to know just how big the gap is.

text i -- a single line -- is obviously the pentameter of an elegiac couplet. so there is at least one full line missing here, before text i begins. the editor has supplied the 'ia' of nequitia, which if correct must be ablative singular. that would make sense, because of the ablative tua at the end of the line.] assuming that supplement as correct, the scansion of the pentameter line tells you that whatever else is missing, in the middle, must be of one long syllable, and be a syllable of a word that ends with a short 'a' [which is the next letter on the papyrus, i.e. just before the vocative Lycori.

there are plenty of other conundrums in our little fragment here, but this is getting pretty technical, so i'll offer you a [very tentative] translation:



note that i have read eris for erit in text ii. it doesn't make grammatical sense otherwise. it's possible that the copyist didn't read latin very well; or [more likely] that he just got distracted while he was writing, and made a slip of the pen here.

text iii is in the worst shape. we can really only guess at what it's about. c[ar]mina sems to have a worm hole in it, but that's pretty easy; there's no other word it could really be. where we are most at sea is in the third and fourth lines of text iii. what is going on here? there were two famous men in roman history named cato -- cato the elder, from the time of the punic wars, and cato the younger, a contemporary of cicero and julius caesar. gallus would have been about 24 when cato died in 46 BCE, so they may well have known each other before gallus went off to become governor [praefectus] of egypt [this was not until much later -- 28 BCE]. both were noted for their stern moral standards, though gallus may well be speaking here of literary standards. at a guess, i would posit that this cato is the younger. but please be aware that 'cato' is [probably] nominative, and thus not likely to refer to the direct object of 'i do not fear.' something very substantial is missing at the beginnings of those lines.

ASK CORAX: pronouncing ancient greek [ii]

EDITOR'S NOTE: over a year and a half ago i was asked [by ian harbor, my student at purdue] about the details of pronouncing ancient greek -- or trying to do so in 21st-century america. i posted a response to ian on this blog. my thoughtful student daphne kalomiris recently appended a comment to that post; but because it is so far back in the archives at this point, and because her question, i thought, deserved a detailed answer, i thought it worth creating a whole new post on the topic. i will begin here by citing her query, and then attempt an answer.

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So, I took a course of Ancient Greek a couple of semesters ago, and was very surprised to hear how foreign the language sounded to me, even though I speak modern Greek. As you obviously know, Ancient Greek is much more complex than modern Greek, but it uses the same alphabet, and there are many similarities in the vocabulary. I know you already covered the complexities of tonal emphasis and accents in the blog, but I'm just bringing up the topic of mere pronunciation. The Greek pronunciations I had to learn in that class made me cringe (by the way, the Greek version of the adage 'It's Greek to me' is 'It's Chinese to me', and that's just like what it sounded when we had to read passages aloud in class).

In Greece, they teach Ancient Greek with modern Greek pronunciation. So why is it that, at least in the United States, the pronunciation of certain vowels and diphthongs are so different? An example to make my point: I was taught in my Ancient Greek class that the letter upsilon was pronounced "oo", while all my life I've known it as a long "ee" sound. Also, the diphthong "oi" (omicron iota) should be pronounced as a long "ee", not "oi" as in "coin".

I asked my other professor the same question, but he retorted with something along the lines of, "They teach it wrong in Greece. We are teaching it the right way." What do you think of this discrepancy?

hi daphne,

thanks for your very perceptive observations here. because you speak modern greek at a native level of fluency, you're better equipped than most of us, actually, to think deeply about the implications of any reconstruction of ancient greek pronunciation: you have, hard-wired into you, the sounds of how modern greek is pronounced as a living language. and, btw, the first thing to be said is that that word reconstruction is [alas] carefully chosen: we cannot do more than try to reconstruct what [we think] the language sounded like.

it's not that we are working with no evidence at all. on the contrary, as i indicated in that earlier post, even the ancient authors comment sometimes on details of pronunciation. and the grammarians of later antiquity give us quite a bit of information, though, it has to be used with care. and sometimes even inscriptions on stone can offer some important evidence.

but all languages shift and change over time, in several respects: they change with respect to [1] their vocabulary; [2] their grammatical 'rules' [if that's not too prescriptive a word to label something that happens imperceptibly, day after day, year after year, like the waves lapping at the shoreline, and by very gradual cultural developments rather than by some sort of conscious decision on the part of the people speaking the language]; [3] their orthograpy; and [4] their pronunciation.

take a similar and, i think, analogous case to that of greek: italian. it's clear that modern-day italian is the direct descendant of classical latin, and not only because it is spoken by the direct lineal descendants of the ancient romans. and yet, italian has also demonstrably changed in the first three ways listed above, and i think also the fourth [though i also surmise that classical latin, if we could hop into a time machine and go back to cicero's day, probably sounded a lot more like modern italian that most people think].

now. back to your questions about greek. one important transformation that has demonstrably occurred in the greek language, between [say] plato's day and our own, is a shift of pronunciation, known as IOTACISM: the tendency to pronunce a whole group of [related] vowels and diphthongs the way you would pronounce iota [english 'ee' as in 'feet']. this group includes eta, upsilon, alpha/iota, epsilon/iota, eta/iota, omicron/iota, and of course iota itself. in other words, the development of iotacism was a process of simplification -- of co-opting one single vowel-sound to do the work of several others.

if i'm not mistaken, this shift toward 'iotacism' was already beginning in the byzantine period. certainly before what we think of as 'modern greek' was in place. [my daughter, who's about to finish her PhD in linguistics, writes:

Linguist's note: this is called a "merger" in historical lingo. That is, several previously distinct phonemes "merge" into one sound, such that you lose what was a previous distinction in pronunciation (i.e. you have a net loss of distinct phonemes in the language's phonological inventory).]

so you can see why classicists, who work very hard to recuperate tiny tidbits of precious long-lost information, might get frustrated when they perceive those tidbits as vanishing once again. with all the mass of learning that classics has gathered over the centuries, in many ways we still know very very little about the ancient world.

languages change over time. they also change according to place: consider how differently the word 'half' is pronounced in boston and in memphis and in chicago. it appears that some ancient greek-speakers pronounced zeta as /sd/, whereas others pronounced it as /dz/. so which of those should we teach our students? moreover, which gets to be designated 'most authentic'?

language can be an index of class or of caste. george bernard shaw's brilliant play PYGMALION is essentially about this [and, thus, so also is lerner and loewe's MY FAIR LADY, which was based on that play]. people often tend to judge you based on the way you speak -- not just your grammar and vocabulary, but also your very pronunciation. i think this is why jimmy carter, who had always had a thick georgia accent, began elocution lessons as soon as he became president. by the end of his tenure the accent was almost gone.

literary authors don't always demonstrate an awareness of this; a notable exception is mark twain, who actually tried to represent the various dialects of his characters in the way the words are spelt. ancient writers seem to have paid very little attention to this, though an important early exception can be found in the ANTIGONE of sophocles: early in the play, the guard who comes to tell creon about the violation of his law speaks in greek that is clearly different [and evidently less aristocratic] than creon's. but if you asked a modern linguistics scholar, which of them is more 'genuine' or 'correct' ancient greek?, she would likely say: they're equally authentic, equally idiomatic, and thus equally genuine and correct. a century ago, one might choose to label creon's greek as more 'standard' than the guard's, but to do so today is a sociopolitical gesture laden with implications that can no longer be ignored.

language is also, in some important respects, an index of hegemony. as with matters of class and caste, this is an issue of power. consider the case of today's people's republic of china, which has decreed that the mandarin dialect -- putonghua or 'common speech' as they call it -- shall be the 'official' national language for all the people. this despite [and because of] the many many dialects spoken across china that are mutually unintelligible. [the people of taiwan, who can speak a language virtually identical to putonghua, nonetheless refer to it as guoyu -- 'national language.' this in itself is clearly a political gesture -- an implicit rejection of the hegemony, linguistic or otherwise, that the PRC would love to exert over taiwan.

these issues of standardization [and perhaps of hegemony] are relevant to the teaching of ancient greek as well: much of the literature that people want to read in ancient greek is composed in the attic dialect, the version spoken in and around athens. plato, aristotle, thucydides, demosthenes, the playwrights, all wrote in attic greek. but to read pindar, or the choral odes in the plays, one must understand the doric dialect [the version spoken around sparta]. which of these is, or could be considered, the more 'standard' dialect of greek? or, to put the question more pragmatically for an educator: which dialogue should we teach the student first? one has to start somewhere.

many [not all] classicists would reply 'attic greek,' partly because they want to begin the student on prose rather than on verse, and there is so much important greek prose composed in the attic dialect. but the notion of attic greek as 'standard' is also, inevitably, tied up with the fact that many [not least the athenians themselves] saw fifth-century athens as the zenith of hellenic culture. indeed thucydides's pericles refers to athens as the 'school of hellas': he admonishes the athenians to think of themselves explicitly as cultural examples for the rest of the greek-speaking world.

so: do we follow that example and begin by teaching our students attic greek? my professors did. i first learnt to spell the word for 'sea' thalatta, like a good athenian, despite the fact that everywhere else, greek speakers said thalassa. and so on. i was taught all the vowel contractions that are idiomatic to attic greek; this made for a major wake-up call when it came time for me to try and read herodotus, who wrote not in attic but in ionic greek. [not to mention homer, whose greek text contains elements not only of ionic, but also of mycenaean, corinthian, aeolic, arcado-cypriot, and, yes, attic!] but attic was taught us as the 'default' dialect, and still is in most classics departments. as i have said, one has to start somewhere: but would we be closer to the fact of the matter if we made it clear from the beginning that attic greek is only one of a whole palette of dialects used across the greek-speaking world? as soon as we do that, of course, the task of discovering the 'correct' ancient pronunciation for anything becomes that much more complex.

as pronunciation varied across the ancient world, and as modern languages are pronounced variously across the modern world, so it should probably not surprise us that ancient languages are pronounced variously in different cultures today. listen to an italian choir singing in mediaeval latin, and you will hear distinct differences between their pronunciation and that of a german choir singing the same text. should we be terribly surprised that the pronunciation of ancient greek is taught differently in the US, in germany [where e.g. they pronounce the greek word 'europa' as if it had a german diphthong in the first syllable], and in greece itself?

with each passing year i become more and more reluctant to speak dogmatically on such matters. there is clearly so much that we do not know or understand, even apart from the issues mentioned above. but to say 'in greece they teach it wrong' is, i fear, a very simplistic assessment: on the contrary, greeks in greece today have some very cogent reasons for teaching the pronunciation of classical greek the way they do. they have a historical reason, i.e. the heritage of a very long linguistic phenomenon [see above on IOTACISM] that links modern demotike directly to ancient greek, via the byzantine tradition. they have geographical and genetic reasons: they are themselves the lineal descendants of the ancient greeks, and live on the very soil that was cherished by the ancients. and they have, because of all this, what we might call an emotional reason: to invoke again the analogy i drew above, modern greeks are to ancient hellas as modern italians are to ancient rome. how can anyone discount the combined weight of these factors?

i do not know who your other teachers were, and i do not mean to contradict or impugn them. but i would emphasize again that the best we can do is attempt to reconstruct a model of ancient pronunciation. [and i would note too that nobody who is not also at least attempting to speak ancient greek tonally can claim to be even possibly 'right' about it. classical greek, like modern putonghua in china, was spoken tonally, and those 'accent marks' we see on the page are meant to convey not stress-accent, but tone -- i.e. they are more akin in music to a melodic score than to a percussion score. unless we are demanding that our students learn this as well -- and the vast majority of classics department in the US do not -- we would do well not claim that we have cornered the market on correctness.

another detail, as a side note: whoever said that upsilon was pronounced 'oo' in ancient greece, was very likely mistaken. in fact it was probably something closer to the french sound of 'u,' or the german 'ü' with umlaut. one way to try and make this sound is to position your mouth as if you were going to say 'oo,' but then try to say 'ee.'

this is, i fear, rather a complicated answer to what you probably thought was a straightforward question; i am sorry the response could not be more simple. someday, maybe, we will be able to offer a more substantive solution to what remains a very mysterious conundrum in the study of the ancient world. but at the moment, we remain very considerably in the realm of speculation on these matters.

women with/out agency [ancient and modern]

wow. what a discussion we had in class today. and, of course, we barely scraped the surface.

as several of you asked for a forum on this blog in which to discuss the matter further, i am hereby opening a thread on the topic. in the interest of speed, i won't recapitulate in detail today's discussion; just bear in mind that some of the questions raised were:

[1] semantics vs substance? i.e. the problematic of

male/masculine ~~~~~ female/feminine
first-class ~~~~~ second-class
logical ~~~~~ emotional
powerful ~~~~~ weak

[2] 'feminism' vs believing in equality of the sexes

[3] women with or without agency in ancient greece and rome [and today]

[4] catullus -- 'emotional' and 'mediterranean male with agency'

but don't limit your comments to these topics! please let us know what is on your mind, whatever that may be. you may be as forceful as you like, but always let courtesy and mutual respect prevail.

OK, go.

modern slavery?

it seems i often end up in conversations about the state of the world: about whether the human condition is, overall, getting better -- or worse -- or just staying the same.

a surprising number of my colleagues seem to agree with hesiod who, in his WORKS AND DAYS -- a poem in epic meter, approximately as old as the ILIAD and ODYSSEY of homer -- opines that our lot is steadily going to hell in a handbasket: from the originary golden race, he laments, we have steadily declined to the race of his own day -- the 'race of iron' that he wishes he had not been born into. [see the famous legend of the five races, lines 109-201.]

other folks, of course, take a much brighter view: every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.

there's plenty of leeway between these two extremes. and it also need not be simple or linear, of course. some things could be deteriorating even as others improve.

ever the optimist, i've looked hard for evidence of actual progress on the part of the human race. one thing that i thought -- thought -- i could point to as incontrovertible evidence of progress was our virtually global rejection of slavery. over the centuries from ancient rome to now, we have come to the point where, by the middle of the 20th century, we could conceive of and produce a so-called universal declaration of human rights. whatever its strengths or weaknesses as a document, the sheer fact of its existence ought to be cause for some satisfaction. and its very first article affirms that 'all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.'

in any case, when i made the observation to a [witty, sardonic] friend that at least we have dispensed with slavery in the modern world, he smirked at me and said: 'you want fries with that?'

and sarah baird just wrote in with this link to a story reporting that liz hurley and her tycoon husband 'paid their maid as little as £1.20 an hour' -- expecting her moreover to work interminable hours at a stretch.

are these examples, as some serious thinkers would assert, tantamount to modern slavery? and, to take an even more wide-angle view of the problem, have we indeed made any moral progress [as opposed to purely technological progress] since ancient times?

decoding the 'antikythera mechanism'

well, we ['we' meaning 'the human race' -- specifically, a team of astrophysicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and classical scholars -- not a group including me specifically] have finally done it: we have figured out the basic functions of the so-called ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM, or AM as i'll call it here. the newswires are abuzz just now with information about the AM -- there are articles in the new york times and nature, among others -- so i'll offer just a few of my own observations here.

[1] this is a prime example of how hi-tech modern science can shed light on ancient cultures -- AND if we [and *here* by 'we' i mean 'the classicists'] can make a convincing case, deep-pockets organizations like the national science foundation [NSF] will put out [what feels to us like] big bucks to fund the research. my esteemed colleague and longtime friend nick rauh has already taken this theory to the bank several times, winning a jaw-dropping THREE 6-figure grants from the NSF for his 'rough cilicia archaeological survey' project.

[2] how interesting that the AM was found, not in rome or athens, not even on kythera, but off the coast of *anti*kythera -- a tiny little island, population approximately 44. who knows what other treasures remain as yet undiscovered in such out-of-the-way locales. keep your eyes peeled.

[3] interesting too that it took 'us' over a century to decipher. when we did, it turned out that this gizmo was designed -- suprise, surprise -- to measure the movement of the sun and moon, and to calculate eclipses. once again we see the absolute primacy of these heavenly bodies in ancient thought. we ourselves tend both to take them for granted, much of the time, and to be completely captivated by them, at others. this function of a complicated mechanical device over 2000 years old, by the way, tends to confirm my surmise that the theory of gerald s. hawkins, about STONEHENGE, is also correct. it just stands to reason.

[special thanks to my pal CHAD BUSK ESQ for sending me this link to an excellent article on the AM. it's the best i've seen.]

ASK CORAX: pronouncing ancient greek

Magister,

In reading and discussing the Iliad, I'm picking up an actual aversion to using character names because I don't know how to say them correctly, and neither (it seems) does anyone else. For example,

Patroclus - Pátroklos - which I would instinctively pronounce something like PA-truh-kluss, I have heard in forms such as PE-truh-kluss, puh-TRAW-kluss, and even with a textually invisible extra schwa, puh-TRAW-kuh-luss.

I realize that none of these is probably analogous to the original Ancient Greek (if we can even say for sure how that language sounded), but I'd really like to be able to mumble something passable when I'm talking about Diomedes, Idomeneus, Andromache, etc. Any suggestions? Many thanks in advance,

Ian


SALVE DISCIPVLE OPTIME : S : V : B : E

ah my good ian, what a can of worms you've opened up here. nonetheless, i am glad you did so -- i want you to pursue your classical education up hill and down dale, and into every nook and cranny of knowledge that you can find. just so you know, though: this is the hard-core stuff you're peering into now.

the reason i call this 'a can of worms' is that you have touched on a couple of issues that cannot be disambiguated without getting pretty technical, nor without also addressing several other issues equally esoteric and difficult. that said, i'll try and keep this as streamlined -- and as lucid -- as i can. you know me well enough to know not to hesitate to ask for clarification if i have not been clear on this or that topic.

first, time out for some nomenclature.

[1] ACCENT in greek does not mean what it means in latin. rather it means something more like what is meant in modern chinese: classical greek accent was TONAL. thus [despite whatever you may hear, even out of the mouths of classics professors] those diacritical marks on a page of greek are NOT there to mark stressed syllables: they are to mark what was originally a quasi-musical tone [intervals of perhaps a musical third to a fifth].

[2] STRESS: when we say 'accent' in speaking of modern western-european languages, and even of classical latin, we are talking about the stress that falls on one or more syllable in a word. physiologically i assume this has to do with greater breath coming through the larynx and out the lips. as you can see, though, this is an accident waiting to happen, because of the confusion between classical and modern notions of 'accent.' so it's good to keep the notion of 'stress' separate from 'accent' in ancient greek.

when speaking of the stressed syllables in greek [or even latin] verse, some scholars, at least, still call this the 'ictus.' it's useful to have another word than 'accent' to talk about this, so i support the use of 'ictus' in this context. it is roughly synonymous in such a sense with 'rhythm,' but that's a mine-field of its own, in classical metrics, so best for the moment just to set the word 'rhythm' aside.

[3] QUANTITY: modern verse is ictus-based: that is to say, modern metrics depends on recognizing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. tennyson's

to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

[from his poem 'ulysses,' in fact] is a perfect iambic pentameter -- in the modern sense: five unstressed syllables alternating with five stressed. [note, just FWIW, that they are all ten of them monosyllables, and that 'not' is one of the stressed. masterful.] classical greek meter, on the other hand, was NOT ictus- or stress-based, but rather what we call quantative -- i.e. based on the QUANTITY [long or short] of each syllable. thus the first line of the iliad

andra moi ennepe, mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla

is scanned as a perfect dactylic hexameter -- in the ancient sense: six dactyls, i.e. six feet, each composed of one dactyl: one long syllable followed by two short ones. NOTE, however, that 'long' does not necessarily mean 'accented' [in either the modern or the ancient sense of that word]: i.e. it is possible for a LONG syllable to have a tonal marking or not. *** since both VOWELS and SYLLABLES can be termed 'long,' some scholars use the terms LIGHT and HEAVY to distinguish the short or long syllable when speaking of ancient greek [quantitative] verse.

[4] MELODY. as if this were not complicated enough already, add to all the above that homer's iliad and odyssey were originally SUNG to the lyre. that is, in addition to knowing where the stressed and unstressed syllables [if any] came, and where the tones rose and fell in ordinary conversation, there was also a melody mapped on to the text. i have always surmised that the melody [probably fairly primitive -- and n.b., the lyre in the 8th century BCE only had four strings] roughly followed the ups and downs of the spoken tones of greek. but there's no absolute proof of that; we don't have any reliable evidence of what homeric music was like; but i was gratified some years ago when martin west, one of the greatest living homeric scholars, published an essay in the JOURNAL OF HELLENIC STUDIES positing this theory himself. [for some inexplicable reason he does not, however, acknowledge me as the fons et origo of the idea ...]

so you see, to answer your question we are conjuring with a number of different elements here. you ask, innocently enough, how to pronounce 'patroklos'; i assume that at one level you are asking how the name was spoken in conversation. but i do want you to realize that that is [or might be] different from how it is spoken [or sung!] in homeric verse. also, that the way homer pronounced it [in conversation] might have differed from how a byzantine [or later] scholar pronounced it.

the accent marks, incidentally, were not yet written on greek words in plato's day, and certainly not in homer's [if anyone was even writing greek in homer's day -- yet another can of worms]. plato is of course aware of the differences in tonal accent, and in fact refers to the phenomenon in his CRATYLVS [399], but he is talking about the sound, not any written indication of accent. it appears that accent marks began to be added in about 200 BCE -- probably at alexandria, and very likely by the scholar aristophanes of byzantium.

by the time of socrates and plato, the living tradition of improvised oral [pre-literate] epic, i.e. what homer produced as a creative artist, was long gone; what you had instead was a professional class of re-creative artists known as RHAPSODES, who RECITED [rather than SANG] the portions of the epics that they had MEMORIZED. so already the performative tradition had morphed drastically by the fifth century BCE, the glory days of athens.

i have made a couple of recordings of classical greek verse. these are online in streaming audio at

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/fll/kirby/index.htm

if you play the one of stesichorus's 'palinode,' you will hear my attempt at rendering classical greek tonally. the other excerpt, which is a bit longer, is a passage from homer [iliad 3.395-412], and in this one i despaired of trying to keep a regular hexameter rhythm going while also pronouncing the tonal accents correctly. but if homer had been induced to speak rather than to sing his verses, that is precisely what i expect he would have done. did the rhapsodes also recite tonally? i bet they still did, for the simple reason that [on the evidence of plato's cratylus] they were still speaking conversationally with tonal accents.

here are some other recordings of homer read aloud with attention to the tonal accents:

http://turdpolish.com/greek.html [despite the inelegant URL he has some smart things to say here, as well as some well-produced sound-recordings]
http://www.prosoidia.com/od1-10.html

several hundred years after plato -- certainly by the late fourth century CE, and likely a couple hundred years before that -- the shift had probably reached the point where the tonal accent was being lost in greek. what was happening at that point was that the syllables marked with [originally tonal] accent-marks were beginning to be pronounced as if they received the stress. and, moreover, new verse being composed in that era was stress-based, rather than quantitative.

i still have not answered your question, i see. here is what w. sidney allen, in his authoritative book VOX GRAECA, has to say about stress in classical greek [i assume he was not talking about its effect on the student studying it]:

the classical greek accent was, as we have seen, tonal. it is, however, improbable that greek words and sentences had no variations of stress. this has often been recognized, but there has been a tendency to assume that any such element of stress must have been connected with the high tone, since pitch is frequently an important factor in the complex phenomenon of stress-accentuation. but, for one thing, it is not necessarily high pitch that is involved in such cases -- in different languages it may be high, low, or changing pitch; and for another, stress is not conversely a necessary feature of tonal accentuation; so that it is possible for a language having a tonal accent to have also a stress-patterning that is quite unconnected with this accent.

moreover, any connection of stress with high tone seems to be ruled out by the fact that in classical greek there is no correlation of the accent with the metrical stress or 'ictus' .... we therefore assume that greek verse was recited with a stressed rhythm .... it should ... be possible, from a statistical study of various types of greek metre, to discover whether there are any strong tendencies for particular syllables in words of various quantitative patterns to coincide with the presumed ictus of the verse; if so, it may be reasonably deduced that such syllables were normally stressed in speech. from such a study the following rules seem to emerge [for words of more than one syllable]: [a] words were primarily stressed on their last heavy syllable; [b] a secondary stress fell on preceding heavy syllables if separated from the primary stress by at least one mora of quantity ... this hypothesis produces 90-95% agreement between verse-ictus and natural [prose] speech-rhythm in both the tragic trimeter and the epic hexameter .... [[pp 120-121]]

and how, you may well ask, does one distinguish a heavy syllable from a light? here's allen again:

if a syllable contains a long vowel, it is always 'heavy' .... but if it contains a short vowel, its quantity depends upon the nature of the syllable-ending. if it ends with a vowel ['open' syllable], the syllable is 'light' ... but if it ends with a consonant ['closed' syllable], the syllable is heavy. [[p 97]]

that book was first published in 1968 [third edition 1987; my citations are from the second edition of 1974]. allen went on to advance a more fully-enunciated version of his stress-accent theory of spoken ancient greek in a book called ACCENT AND RHYTHM [1973, so my 2nd edition of VOX GRAECA would reflect that]. the whole thing boiled up a firestorm of controversy: based on what we can find in ancient grammarians who sort-of-discuss this stuff, the received wisdom was that there was no stress accent in classical greek, whether spoken or recited [i.e. prose/conversation nor verse]. but allen was one of the 'big guns' of historical linguistics at that time, so his theories could not be dismissed lightly. on the whole, i would say that most linguists have felt the need to reject allen's thesis -- very respectfully, to be sure, but reject it nonetheless. a good example would be the article by a. m. devine and l. d. stephens in the transactions of the american philological society 115 (1985) 125-152, 'stress in greek?' in this long and technical essay, they weigh allen's thesis on its merits, but decide when all is said and done that classical greek was probably a non-stress-accented language like japanese. here is the clearest passage in that essay [this from pp 146-147]:

if we believe that in ancient greek the accented vowel was not only higher pitched but also significantly louder and/or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the greek accent was a pitch differentiated stress like that of serbo-croat or lithuanian. in that case, the innovation of the modern greek accent is limited to the elimination of the rising/falling distinction between acute and circumflex and the sharpening of the durational distinction between accented and unaccented vowels (note in particular the elimination of long vowels in unaccented syllables). if, on the other hand, we believe that in ancient greek accented vowels were not significantly louder or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the ancient greek accent was a pure pitch accent comparable mutatis mutandis to that of japanese. this latter view has the better chance of being correct.

i suppose one of the most important, perhaps THE most important, lesson to be taken away from this is that not even the experts can agree. allen is a god in that subfield of classics, and devine & stephens are among the very most respected classical linguists working today; but they are diametrically at odds here -- and yet the most emphatic demurrer devine & stephens can offer is 'this latter view has the BETTER CHANCE of being correct.' nobody truly knows.

now the best argument that can be rallied [apart from allen's own] against what devine & stephens assert here is that greek is, like latin [and serbian and croatian and lithuanian] an indo-european language, whereas japanese is not. it would be very helpful if one could cite uncontroversially an indo-european language in which there is no stress accent. FRENCH is sometimes adduced as an example -- i.e. one is often taught that each syllable in a french sentence should receive an identical amount of stress -- but all you have to do is turn on any french TV or radio to see that this is science fiction. [in practice, it's better to teach one's french student that the default syllable for a stress-accent is the ultima. but that's for someone else's blog to hash out, i guess.]

a second argument might be the very difficulty of imagining a pre-literate poet improvising, on the spot, hundreds of lines of hexameter verse [in a meter, by the way, that was not native to greek -- it seems to have been imported into the greek-speaking world from the indus valley] in which he is expected sometimes to balance syllables that are long but unstressed, on one hand, against syllables that are short but stressed, on the other. [this is precisely what vergil does, incidentally, in the AENEID -- but remember that vergil is [a] composing in LATIN, where there has been a long prior tradition of stress-based verse; [b] composing in WRITING, which gives him the opportunity to linger as long as he wants [we calculate from his comments about the GEORGICS that he composed these at the rate of one hexameter line per day], and [c] experimenting [as it's been shown by scholars] with a particular technique in which the first half or so of the hexameter line deals with conscious tension between long syllables and stressed syllables, whereas the second half of the line has much greater coincidence of long and stressed. in other words, the vergilian hexameter is quite a different animal from the oral improvised verse of homer and hesiod.

we've come a very long way, i fear, for you just to be told 'there's no clear answer to your query.' if you are fuming by now, you have every right to be. let me say, though, that this also gives YOU a certain license: it means that you can pronounce 'patroklos' in whatever way pleases you best.

one way that has appealed to many who come [like you] from latin to greek, is to use the rules of latin accent: if the vowel of the penult is long, the penult is stressed; otherwise the antepenult. [remember now that we are talking just about VOWELS, not about SYLLABLES, in which a short vowel + 2 consonants = a long syllable.] as long as you remind yourself every day that that is NOT a rule in greek, you could do worse than that. moreover, it accords somewhat with what allen so gingerly advances in the theory cited above.

if you were to approach it this way, you would have the following the [tonal] accent is on the first syllable, but the stress is on the penult'. saying 'putt-ROK-loss,' with a trilled R, ought to get you somewhere in the right ball park. if you want to get fancy, pronounce the first syllable higher than the other two -- that should be the most 'accurate' for the greek of homer's day.

as for the other names you mention -- diomedes, idomeneus, andromache -- the situation is further complicated by [a] the way the ROMANS pronounced greek words, which may well have been something like what we've discussed above, and [b] the way MODERNS [in english, german, french, etc] pronounced greek [and, for that matter, latin] before the twentieth century. if you read the wonderful novella GOODBYE, MR CHIPS, or c. s. lewis's autobiography SURPRISED BY JOY, you will see references to the 'new' pronunciation of greek and latin.

why are you hearing such disparity of pronunciation amongst your colleagues? well, the pronouncing of the language overall is a difficult problem, but the whole NAME issue is particularly hopelessly mucked up. we refer to vergil's poet friend as HORACE, for example, but that's because the french call him that; we borrowed their name for him. his actual full name, in latin, was 'publius horatius flaccus' -- except in the vocative case, which was 'publi horati flacce.' his mother probably called the young horace to dinner with 'publiiiii!' -- but in adulthood, friends and acquaintances probably referred to him as horatius [the family name] or flaccus or horatius flaccus. so what should we do? insist on 'horatius'? nobody will know whom we are talking about, at least not till we explain. [and, to be consistent, it would mean calling catullus 'valerius' from now on ... etc etc etc]

so too with APOLLO: this is what the romans called this [greco-roman] god. but in greek he was called APOLLON, with the final O being an omega. so what should we do? insist on the 'correct' greek name? we will sound hopelessly pedantic. [even more than most classical scholars do.]

this is the problem we are facing with 'diomedes.' in greek, those vowels come out, more or less, 'dee-oh-MEH-dess.' that will work fine in germany. but -- if you are speaking english, to someone in the USA or UK, it will seem quite esoteric. most americans say 'dye-oh-MEE-deez.'

'idomeneus' entails a particular problem: that final diphthong, which is odd to american ears. if you can imagine the duchess of devonshire wrinkling her nose in disdain, and exclaiming 'oh!' -- that is more or less the sound of the diphthong EU in classical greek. [my first greek professor told us to say it the way choate boys say 'choate.' as an old choate boy myself, i took umbrage, but i said nothing. the next day i did come to class wearing my choate tee shirt, though.] 'idomeneus' is an unusual enough name that you can probably get away pronouncing it 'accurately' in that way -- but if you are going to strive for absolute consistency, you will have to pronounce 'zeus' that way too -- and nobody i know says anything, in english, other than 'zooss' for that.

andromache: again, the ancients would have trilled that R at least lightly. you will sound precious if you do that in english. i suggest 'ann-DROM-ma-khee,' bearing in mind that in greek, the final E was an eta, and thus more or less a longish open 'ehh.'

this should at least get you started. i should close by stressing once again that these are deep and troubled waters: not entirely uncharted, but full of sea-serpents. i've probably given you a lot more philology here than you bargained for; but you deserve nothing less. that's what i say.

some more relevant and useful URLs, if you haven't yet quenched your linguistic thirst:

greek phonology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology

phonation in different cultures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek_in_teaching

mora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29

erasmian pronunciation
http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/10/erasmian-pronunciation.html

an impassioned plea, by william harris, for reading greek tonally
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/Greekaccents.html

ASK CORAX: the eleusinian mysteries and hallucinogens

Dear Corax,
Is there any reason to believe psychedelics were involved in the Eleusinian Mysteries?

LOL! that depends [partly] on one's theology.

i laughed just now, but i actually meant what i said there. an ancient who really believed in the existence and divine power of demeter and persephone would answer you, 'well, there's no need for 'extra help' from psychedelics: the goddess can accomplish whatever she wants, no matter how overwhelming or supernatural, on her own.'

a rationalist/naturalist, looking for non-numinous explanations of what was happening at eleusis [and clearly something important and memorable was happening there -- for hundreds and hundreds of years] would of course posit that there had to be some natural explanation of the phenomena. absent the modern ability to create really trompe-l'oeil virtual-reality special effects, the likeliest non-supernatural explanation is some sort of hallucinogen.

the best exposition [that i'm aware of] that could be adduced in support of a rationalist/naturalist explanation is carl ruck et al., THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS. [if you're interested in eleusis you should also read karl kerenyi, ELEUSIS: ARCHETYPAL IMAGE OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, and then perhaps also ESSAYS ON A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY: THE MYTH OF THE DIVINE CHILD AND THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS, a collaboration between kerenyi and his pal carl jung.]

we know that the initiates at the eleusinian mysteries were given a kukeion or 'mixture' of something to ingest as part of the initiation ritual; that's as close to a 'smoking gun' as we are liable to get here. what makes this plausible is that [a] demeter is a grain goddess above all, and [b] ergot grows on grains -- so if the kukeion was made from ergotic grains, as seems very likely for such a ritual, it would be a convenient way to deliver the stuff to the initiate. the greatest single obstacle in our way is the amazing reluctance of anyone, even initiates who later converted to christianity [thus putatively repudiating any allegiance to the old pagan gods], to discuss the details of what went on in that initiation ceremony.

incidentally, you may not know that a similar biochemical explanation has been given for the 'mania' of the maenads: the theory was published in ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, no less, in the nov/dec 1995 issue. it was by adrienne mayor, and was called called 'Mad Honey! Bees and the Baneful Rhododendron.' briefly, mayor's theory posits that the mead drunk by the maenads [or 'bacchae,' to use a less deprecatory term] was made from rhododendron honey that contained grayanotoxin. this stuff sounds much less body-friendly than, say, psilocybin. but i suppose it's possible that such a honey was indeed used in making their mead. what you don't see in the descriptions of the bacchae [say, in their eponymous play by euripides] is any mention of the somatotoxic effects associated with grayanotoxin. to hear them tell it, they've seen god. [if you haven't read that amazing play, btw, you should. i recommend especially the hair-raising translation by paul woodruff and published by hackett.]

plenty of stuff online about this, at e.g.
http://tinyurl.com/qomnu
http://www.sonomapicnic.com/06/ravhoney.htm
http://www.paghat.com/toxichoney.html
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ag151/addendum.html

and apparently mayor has included something about this in her 2005 book:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/12/224943.php

here's an old [1996] post to sci.agriculture.beekeeping and citing a
presumably older USDA report on grayanotoxin:
http://tinyurl.com/ezjy9 [also at
http://www.hbd.org/brewery/library/HonD.html ]

i don't know how one would go about preserving the euphoric effects of such a substance while also minimizing its dysphoric. it sounds pretty potent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

anyway. thus far, two theories seeking to explain the eleusinian mysteries: a theological one and a biochemical one [the latter designed to debunk the former]. of course, there is also a third possibility: that both explanations are true. to accept this third way, one has to allow for the scope of the divine in biochemistry; or [conversely] for a theology that is not inimical to the discoveries of science.

someday you should go to greece and see eleusis itself. even in the searing sunlight of a greek summer, it is hauntingly evocative. it's only about 13 miles from athens, but it feels like another world away -- much quieter than the tourist sites in athens proper. last summer i took a group of students there as part of my course, 'greek mythology in greece.' we read the ancient texts [in english translation of course] and then went to see the actual places where they were set.

until you can get over to greece, here are some graphics to whet your appetite. start by having a look at an archaeological architect's model of the reconstructed precinct, just to jump-start your imagination.

as soon as you arrive at the site, you come to the greater and lesser propylaia, through which for a thousand years it was death to enter if you weren't [or weren't about to become] initiated. the gates were so heavy, they made grooves in the stone.

even before you get to the telesterion there are 'sites' associated with the story of the abduction of persephone -- for instance, the cave of hades. hard by the cave is a hole which, they say, leads directly to the underworld. this is just a guess on my part -- maybe someone has published research to corroborate this by now -- but i'm guessing there were dramatic reenactments of the whole story in this area -- outside the telesterion but within the precinct.

the telesterion itself was huge -- particularly for an ancient venue of this sort. you can see what's left of it by clicking here. [just think, those were the very seats [carved out of the living rock] on which the initiates sat as they were inducted into the mysteries!]

as i mentioned, it's all so quiet now. whenever i go there, it's completely deserted. but one would love to know what were the 'things seen' that the ancient participants described in such veiled language ...

a new blog column [blogumn?]: ASK CORAX

hi all, and happy summer to you. today i received via email a query that got me thinking: why not answer it at CORAXIOMS? that way we can entertain something like an 'ASK CORAX' column here, where people write in with questions about classics.

so watch this space for the inaugural ASK CORAX column [or 'blogumn' -- if that word catches on, remember, you saw it here first!] ... and consider sending corax your own query [email: corax@purdue.edu]

in defense of vampires?

in her presentation on bathory erszébet yesterday, daphne tossed out a rather provocative idea: the possibility that, unlike bathory, who might well be classified as a serial killer, the classic vampires of fiction and film [like dracula] deserve our sympathy if not our outright approval: they, like any other predators of the animal kingdom, must feed on their prey to survive. like a lion or a tiger, they are simply doing what it is their 'nature' to do, and, as such, ought not to inspire revulsion -- much less be hunted or destroyed.

so: any responses to this?

neil jordan's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE [1994]

here, as promised, is a blog post where you can [via the comment function] add your reflections on jordan's INTERVIEW. as we have said in class, i'm particularly interested in your responses to the following:

1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?

2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the anne rice novel?

[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]

francis ford coppola's BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA [1992]

here, as promised, is a blog post where you can [via the comment function] add your reflections on coppola's DRACULA. as we have said in class, i'm particularly interested in your responses to the following:

1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?

2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the stoker novel?

[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]

the da vinci code: have at it

here you go: your one-stop, all-purpose blog entry on dan brown's best-selling novel THE DA VINCI CODE.

for those of you who have not yet read it -- indeed, for those who have, as well -- here's the WIKIPEDIA entry on the novel. [note that the article contains plot spoilers, so if you intend to read the book or see the movie, and want to be surprised, now is not yet the time to read the entirety of this wikipedia entry.']

speaking of the internet, i think it's noteworthy that this print-format book has not only a feature film based on it, but also a very significant 'web presence.' there is, for example, an 'official website' for the fictional protagonist robert langdon, and other websites such as thedavincicode.com and seekthecodes.com which [potentially] dramatically increase the interactive nature of the reader's/viewer's experience of the book [and presumably of the film].

rather than say anything more about this phenomenon -- arguably as big a 'splash' in the publishing world as the advent of the novel DRACULA itself -- i'll just open the floor for you. add your comments below! jk

two encyclopaedia entries on athens/attica

DEMES [*dêmoi*], local communities or parishes in Attica, eventually numbering about 170. In the reforms of Cleisthenes, they replaced kinship groups as the basis of the democratic constitution in Athens. Cleisthenes arranged the demes into ten tribes [*phulai*], and each tribe into three thirds [*trittues*]. In each tribe one *tritus* comprised demes from the city region, another demes from the interior, and the third demes from the coast. In this way each tribe was made representative of the whole. Each deme had its own finances and its 'demarch' or deme leader, elected by its assembly [*agora*] whch dealt with local affairs. After Cleisthenes, membership of a deme was hereditary and did not change with change of residence. On reaching the age of 18 every male Athenian citizen was registered in his family deme.

CLEISTHENES [died after 507 BCE], the founder of Athenian democracy, grandson of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon. He was archon under the tyrant Hippias in perhaps 525 BCE. When Hippias was expelled by the Spartan king Cleomenes I in 510 and those exiled had returned, there was a movement in favor of oligarchy by the aristocracy in Athens, led by Isagoras and supported by Cloemenes. At this point Cleisthenes put himself forward as the champion of democracy, and overthrew the aristocrats. He then proceeded to pass far-reaching political reforms of a democratic nature. He brok up what remained of the old political organizations based on family groups, and substituted a new system based on topography. He divided the territory of Attica, including the city of Athens, into DEMES, local communities or parishes, possibly on the basis of existing demes. Cleisthenes then grouped all the demes into ten new tribes so as to ensure that no tribe had a continuous territory or represented a local interest; on the contrary, each contained groups of demes [*trittues*] from the city region, from the coast, and from the interior. By these means groups of people in various parts of Attica were brought together and required to act in common, and the old parties acting out of purely local interest were abolished. The organization of the army depended on the tribes, each of which contributed a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of cavalry. Cleisthenes subordinated the *boulê* and the Areopagus to the supreme authority of the *ekklêsia*, the 'assembly' of all the citizens, which met regularly and might deal with any important state matter.

[taken from M. C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers, The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature]

literary darwinism?

there's a provocative article in today's NY TIMES called 'the literary darwinists.' adherents to this [admittedly very small] school of literary interpretation -- which is a subset of the [ever-so-slightly larger] field of so-called 'biopoetics' -- claim to take a biological, even a darwinian, approach to the reading and evaluation of literary works. [they see this as, among other things, a way of uniting science and the humanities.] have a look at the essay and see what you think about all this.

HUBRIS in comedy?

kyle's email also included a p.s., related to his observation in class about 'south park's' cartman character as an example of HUBRIS:

here is article about eric cartman which demonstrates how he displays hubris.

eric cartman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Cartman

on thursday we discussed HUBRIS in the context of what i call the 'calculus of moral decline' -- that gradation of human experience that can slide one into the abyss of tragic misfortune. it's worth thinking about this in the context of COMEDY, which is -- arguably -- the flip-side of tragedy. and i submit to you that cartman, like other characters on 'south park,' is a *comic* figure. how are the creators of 'south park' [trey parker and matt stone] inverting the tragic paradigm here? is it perhaps the case that the comic hero is precisely the one who can evince hubris without sliding into the abyss? and if so, does this mean that we do not take him/her seriously?

TERROR vs. HORROR

this just in, from kyle, à propos of our thursday discussions of TERROR vs HORROR as cinematic concepts/frameworks. [a word of caution: these wikipedia articles about the SAW movies are explicit and gruesome. if physical violence disgusts or upsets you, you should not click on these wikipedia URLs. NB: they also contain 'spoiler' materials for the films discussed.]

dear professor kirby,

i thought u might like to learn a little more about the saw movies just so you know how terribly creepy they are. these links will take you to the wikipedia articles about them.

saw 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_%28film%29
saw 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_II

these movies fit perfectly into the horror category but they are also terror movies also. i believe that the difference between horror and terror is that horror is something that is temporary like when we see a scary movie. we know that is not true but it still scares us. terror however is something that lasts for a long time, like the threat of nuclear war or terrorism (which
concidentally has the word terror in it). terror is a sustained feeling that even though the thing we are afraid of stops, we still are afraid that it might come back up.

i am fascinated by kyle's distinction between 'terror' and 'horrror' based on whether the effect is temporary. is this how others of you have distinguished between the two concepts? your reactions, please.

turner classic movies and animé

this just in, from nathaniel:

Professor Kirby,
I remember you talking about Spirited Away in class earlier in the semester and wanted to point out this article to you:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/article.php?id=7677
As an avid anime fan, I think this is great news. Not only will many people be able to see these films if they haven't already, but it could mean a boost for the general population's perception of legitimacy toward the animation medium. What do you think about this development?

well, i think it's great. TCM has a lot of oomph in the TV world, and whatever it acquires will see frequent airing. and miyazaki is, simply put, a genius. one of the great film-makers alive today. i believe that the first and third places on japan's list of top-grossing films -- *ever* -- are held by his SPIRITED AWAY and PRINCESS MONONOKE [#2 is, i fear, our very own TITANIC].

watching SPIRITED AWAY is truly a wondrous experience. when i saw it, i felt that the genre of cinema had actually advanced. there were times when i looked at the animation and just had to nudge myself to remember that it was, in fact, *animation* and not photography. and it's not because it's 'trompe l'oeil' realism; it transcends that entirely, somehow. chalk it up to miyazaki's particular magic.

but we're not just talking about technical mastery here. he also has a sense of the *tale*, of what it takes in terms of plot and character to make a truly superb film. i submit to you that SPIRITED AWAY is an instantiaion of the monomyth -- though, as in THE WIZARD OF OZ, the monomyth hero is a young girl.

in any case, nathaniel is spot-on about the genre of anime' receiving a big boost -- both from the very work of miyazaki, and from TCM's wholeheartedly embracing these films from studio ghibli. it will be interesting to see how many more americans know of them in a year's time.

joss whedon's FIREFLY and SERENITY

à propos of our conversation in class today -- this just in, via email:

I was just wondering what you thought of Serenity/Firefly the TV series if you saw either of them.

as it happens, i saw the film as soon as it came out -- having already viewed the entire TV series on DVD from the public library.

as you can probably guess from that, i think it's brilliant. i'm very impressed with whedon's creativity. it may be a bit too difficult or challenging for the average viewer, for whom [particularly in the case of television] material is often pitched at the lower end of the middle of the spectrum. remember, from the point of view of a sponsor, a TV show is just a way to get the viewer to watch their commercials. if the viewer is put off in any way -- including because s/he is confused -- one risks having h/er turn the TV off -- which is, from a sponsor's point of view, fatal.

i do *not* get the sense that whedon sacrificed his art on the altar of commerce. at least not in the making of the TV series. those shows are edgy and creative and transgressive of boundaries, in a number of healthy ways. those i know who have made it through the whole series [including the pilot, which -- perversely -- was *not* shown before the other episodes] find themselves playing the 'which FIREFLY character is your favorite?' this, of course, is related to our monomyth template [item #10, 'identification']: one is far less likely to identify with a character one doesn't resonate with and care about. but whedon has succeeded in creating a whole shipful of characters with whom one tends to engage strongly, and about whom one tends to have intense opinions. that is a measure of his success.

the film, i think, differs in some predictable ways from the TV show. [1] its production values are of course higher, which reflects the bigger budget whedon had to work with. [2] it can't assume a narrative arc of many hours, the way a [putatively] season-long series can; so it has to offer a potted history of the situation for the viewer who has no prior exposure. [3] the film is measurably more *violent* than the TV series -- a reflection of the fact that, when it comes to cinema, violence sells.

whedon's shows don't seem to be the most easily-marketable material, but this may just be an index of their ingenuity and originality: the classic 'ahead-of-his-time' syndrome. i remind you of the poster that was made in the 18th century, advertising an upcoming organ recital: 'please come to the such-and-such kirche this sunday at 4 pm to hear an organ recital by johann bach. herr bach is an accomplished organist and also a very passable composer.' artists, that is, are often not recognized or fully appreciated during their own lifetimes.

KHALEPA TA KALA

thanks to nathaniel who pointed me to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_phrases

for a handy [though very cursory] list of greek phrases. the beginnings of a greek *bartlett's familiar quotations*, if you will.

at nathaniel's encouragement, i created a wikipedia account for myself, and added my first edit of a wiki article. nathaniel had pointed out that there was no entry for khalepa ta kala; this simply would not do.

thanks moreover to matt, who had emailed separately asking for the precise citation for this proverb in plato. as you'll see from the wiki page, i've located it in book 4 of the *republic* [stephanus page 435c, at the very end of that section; he calls it to legomenon, i.e., a 'saying' -- a synonym for gnômê or 'proverb']. i'm pretty sure i've read it in the *laws* too, but i'll have to keep searching for it there [and the *laws* is a biggish dialogue].

meanwhile, this passage in the *republic* is important for other reasons: here is where plato correlates his famous tripartite division of the psukhê to aspects of a polis. [brief aside on psukhê: what is that, anyway? the 'mind'? the 'inner self'? probably 'soul' is not the best translation for psukhê in plato, as it brings with it some christian religious connotations that would have quite bewildered socrates or plato. FWIW, however, psukhê is precisely the word that early christian writers do use for 'soul'; this may, among other things, tell us something about how they read *plato*.] you can read the passage online, in english, by clicking here.

well, nobody said any of this -- least of all, plato -- was easy. but it's worth knowing. or, to put it another way: KHALEPA TA KALA.

homeric ithaca?

here's a provocative news piece from bbc.co.uk:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4293786.stm

this is actually a brief notice about a new book, ODYSSEUS UNBOUND, by robert bittlestone, just published by cambridge university press. bittlestone's theory is that what is now a peninsula of the island of kephallenia/cephalonia was once actually a separate islet. [note that kephallenia is in any case right near what is now called 'ithaca,' off the west coast of greece.] bittlestone has put up a website for the whole project, at

http://www.odysseus-unbound.org/

he is not the first to point to kephallenia, and his is not the first book on the topic, as you can see from this web page [though most of those books listed are not in english]:

http://tinyurl.com/d4hmm

he is, however -- as far as i know -- the first to bring satellite imaging technology or modern seismology to bear upon the issue. you can read more about 'world wind,' the NASA '3D planetary visualization' software at

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/odysseus.html

another review of bittlestone:

http://tinyurl.com/9c2da

here's the fundamental issue underlying all of this: how 'real' is the odyssey? you can set aside the question of whether athena and zeus are real [or *don't* set that one aside, if you prefer], but: what about the people and palces in homer? it's not so very long ago that people would have heaped scorn upon anyone who tried to assert that there had actually been a troy or a trojan war. and yet, well, there you go. and excavations at mycenae and sparta make it pretty obvious that there were glorious and mighty kings in those places during the period homer describes. [agamemnon and menelaus? you decide.]

so the next question is: did odysseus and penelope and telemachus ever exist? and if so, where did they live? *that* is the place to which odysseus would be trying to get back, after the trojan war [and note that if there *was* a trojan war, one assumes here that odysseus did participate in it].

another book [actually a summary of three previous books] that appears to agree with the bittlestone theory:

http://tinyurl.com/aawz8

this author, gilles le noan, claims to have actually identified the palace of odysseus. you see the ramifications of such archaeological quest[ion]s? if there was a palace, was it once actually overrun by suitors? if there were suitors, was there actually once a contest of the bow and axes? and so on, and on. the boundaries between history and fiction [fantasy?] begin to blur significantly.

if you want more bittlestone, you can start by reading the cambridge UP description of the book, at

http://tinyurl.com/7cgoj

the whole book is over 600 pages! but from the link above you can get a sneak peek by downloading a 1.1 MB excerpt, in PDF format, that includes numerous illustrations and a good map.

taste in art

daniel brought me a provocative essay by paul graham, called 'taste for makers.' you may find this piece stimulating, whether or not you agree with it. so have a look at it online at

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html/

and, of course, post your comments *here*.

graham works as a programming-language designer, among other things, so some of his ideas are doubtless stimulated by what he thinks a good *design* is [sc. in a programming language]. but his interests, and his comments in this essay, range very widely -- over sports, architecture, and the arts generally.

you'll see that a number of his points are enumerated in a series of paragraphs beginning 'good design is --- .' you might ask yourself critically whether you agree with each of these; if so, why; and if not, why not.

and then, of course, tell us.

back yet again: a new beginning

to a certain extent, this blog has been rather desultory precisely because there was no pressing need for it. i read recently [in the NY times?] that something like 80 THOUSAND new blogs are created each day. so it stands to reason that some of them must be, to some extent at least, supererogatory [not to say gratuitous].

that said, i have been feeling a pressing need for a web-based forum in which my students can discuss topics of interest [including but not limited to topics that come up in class, for which there's not sufficient time to devote the detail they deserve]. the blog format is not the ideal medium for this -- actual bulletin-board software would be better -- but for now, this will serve.

so, as of today, i intend to devote 'coraxioms' primarily to the discussion of topics that i would like to see pursued further. only i can *post* a topic, but anyone can post a *comment* on a posted topic.

so students, read the topics as they are posted, and use the comment function to pursue [or continue, if we've begun in class] the conversation. have fun!

study abroad fair

today was purdue's annual study abroad fair. there were a couple dozen tables out on memorial mall, each one staffed by folks eager to induce passing students to at least think about studying abroad -- for a summer, a semester, a year. there were professors who [like myself] have taught abroad on such programs. and there were the students -- milling, collecting swag, munching popcorn, and checking it all out.

i feel very strongly that the study-abroad experience is vital to the american university education. it's extraordinarily important for a purdue student, because so many of them have never left indiana, let alone the USA. the notion of doing so may never have occurred to them. their parents may initially be actively hostile to the idea. this was all already true before 9/11; the sentiments have only grown stronger since then. and of course it's a recipe for xenophobia, prejudice, and blinkered living.

all of this is *in addition to* the intrinsic value, to classical studies, of travel to greece, to italy, and to other places in the mediterranean (and britain) where there are material remains of the greco-roman world. this summer i taught a course in greece, 'land of gods and heroes: greek mythology in greece,' which was based on the concept of linking texts to places. we would read myths and legends, and then go and see where they 'happened.' i do firmly believe that there's no more powerful way to experience the classics; and that no student who spends even a few weeks abroad will ever be the same person again. it's as simple as that.

back again

i think it's really funny that i haven't touched this blog for a whole year now. just over, actually. that should tell you what the past year has been like.

so i'm a year older, and the world has gone around the sun another time. how has the world of classics changed in the interim?

well, hmm. not sure we can measure it in cataclysmic events. but two things that i have noticed in particular:

[a] in the humanities outside of classics, people feel more than ever that theory is 'over.' [in practical terms, i think this means primarily 'poststructuralism' and in particular 'deconstruction.'] but just as it took quite awhile for literary theory to percolate into classics, i imagine it will take it awhile to leach out of it as well. [strictly speaking, i suppose, this is a way in which classics has not changed over the past year.]

[b] a trend that i think has continued [and in fact burgeoned] in classics is the visual turn. we continue to see an emphasis on the exploitation of classical civilizations in the visual media. this past year has seen the premieres of TROY, ALEXANDER, and now -- on television -- ROME. from a pedagogical angle, i would say that students are more visual than ever in the way they process information. this is something i try hard to keep in mind as i teach.

first post

this is my first blog of any sort, and i'm regarding it as something of an experiment -- not quite a 'lark,' but i like the ludic quality of that approach, so i will hope to hold on to it.

'corax' has been my screen name since the mid-90s, back when purdue's email system still used bitnet. when we switched to various versions of 'purdue.edu,' i kept the handle 'corax,' and in april 1997, i put up an instructional website, which i used to call 'the corax zone.' it has been running nonstop since then, and now has its own dedicated URL -- www.corax.us -- an a newer, more streamlined portal page. at this point 'corax' [as i also now call the site] is fairly dense -- it's what i term a 'hypersite' because it depends heavily on *metasites* to take you to the material you need. but the point of it all is to provide, as i say, 'a comprehensive online curriculum for classical studies.' it's no exaggeration to say you could teach an entire MA program in classics from this site alone.

corax.us morphs all the time, of course, because the web itself does so. the average life-span of a website is 90 days, did you know that? this means that many links expire quickly. by the same token, new resources are being put online all the time, so one has to be vigilant about updating such a site.

what i have not yet added, as i've indicated above, is a blog. CORAXIOMS is meant to fill that gap. we'll see how it fares; i'm envisioning it as a place for me to express my ideas about the field of classics in specific, and the academic world in general. i expect there will be posts on texts and authors, but also about learning and teaching, about scholarly publishing, and about the profession [and the professoriate]. who knows what else. maybe some random extras [my favorite recipes?]

meanwhile, for an auspicious beginning, oblations to hermes, god of communication and eloquence; to apollo, god of the arts; to athena, goddess of wisdom; and to dionysus, god of bliss and ecstasy [there's altogether too little of those in the world generally or the academy specifically]. and off we go!