Malouf, David: Ransom

Pantheon, 240 pages
1st published: 2009

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

David Malouf's Ransom is a re-imagining of the events narrated in book 24 of Homer's Iliad. Achilles, mad with grief over the death of his friend Patroclus at Hector's hands, has slain Hector in turn. But contrary to convention, still savage in his unquenchable grief, Achilles daily abuses Hector's body, dragging it behind his chariot around the Greeks' camp, the insult further sorrow to Hector's parents and to the rest of the Trojans. Hector's father, Priam, the King of Troy, is visited by the goddess Iris, who bids him travel to the Greek camp and ransom his son's body. Priam does this, Achilles relents, and Priam returns home with the corpse, which the gods have preserved from decay and Achilles' degradations. Book 24 ends with Hector's funeral.

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Joyful Latin Learning

_From: A New Weblog Announces Itself_

“Joyful Latin Learning” is the theme of “Tres Columnae” (our working
title), which aims to be everyone’s home on the Web for (you guessed
it!) Joyful Latin Learning. In fact, we aim to build a Joyful Learning
Community where all kinds of people can come together to learn about the
Latin language, the history and culture of the Roman Empire, and the
ways that Latin (and the Romans) have influenced today’s languages and
cultures. We’ll be launching the actual website (and the Joyful Learning
Community) early in 2010. But first, we want to spread the word, to
invite people to join us, and to let you know what’s special and
different about “Tres Columnae.”

So, what exactly is a Joyful Learning Community? Read more and join in
at http://joyfullatinlearning.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/hello-world/

Meanwhile, Happy MMX to all!

Judith

--
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East
<http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com>

Lady linguists

I just ran across the strangest comment in How and Wells' Commentary on Herodotus (now available for the Kindle for $1.59!). At 4.114 Herodotus is writing about how these Amazon women were in relationships with Scythian men, but while the Amazons learned the language of the Scythians, the Scythian men were unable to learn to speak Amazon. Later, in section 117, Herodotus says that the Amazon women spoke Scythian but not quite correctly.

So How and/or Wells write in their commentary at 4.114:

"The greater aptness of the Amazons is a delightful touch of nature; but they were inaccurate (cr. soloikizontes chap. 117), as lady linguists often are."

So...some private joke with the lady linguist down the hall? An inter-departmental romance turned sour?

Monopoly power warning

Reposted from Ancient World Bloggers Group (posted by Charles Ellwood Jones). 

It's certainly distressing but perhaps also a serious warning of the power of a monopoly that aspires to be the digital librarian and cataloguer of the entire world. 

Distressing? Distressing! BMCR is not spam!

A notice at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review reads:

Please note that Google has removed all access to our blog after incorrectly flagging it as a spam blog. We had requested a review which did not happen, and on September 28 Google removed all access to the blog, which we are attempting to appeal.

I certainly hope this is a mistake!

For now the BMCR blog is blank.

(Via Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East
)

News on the Antikythera Mechanism

L.S.,

From Hewlett Packard: "The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 B.C. It was found on a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1900, and its exact function still eludes scholars to this day. In September, 2005, as part of the Antikythera Research Project, HP was able to access the device in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens to apply reflectance imaging techniques to the front and rear surfaces of the > 70 fragments that comprise the mechanism."

[I would doubt the word 'computer'; orrery would be better.]

A metre-wide plastic dome, covered with flashbulbs, is used to take photos of an object lit from 50 different directions. The images are fed into a computer and used to make a reconstruction of how the surface of the object reflects light. Once that's done, you can ask the computer to light the object from any angle, even impossible ones like beneath its surface, or you can change how the surface reflects light - such as making the crumbling stone of a cuneiform tablet as shiny as metal. Then it's just a case of playing around to find the effect that makes the lettering as clear as possible.

You can try this for yourself on Hewlett Packard's website. Click on one of the images to download the interactive demo in a new window, then move the mouse around to change the direction of the light. Or  right click on the image to bring up a little menu, and under "effects" turn on "specular".

The applications in the field of archaeology are awesome (not a word I often use).

For more on the Antikythera Mechanism, see Jo Marchant's blog, Decoding the Heavens, especially the Stunning Antikythera video.

Judith

-- 
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East <http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com>

Argonautica

I'm a small press publisher in the hinterland of central Ohio, and have just published a fine translation of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica -- 1st century AD Latin version of earlier Greek epic, now in lively English verse. The translation is from Michael Barich of the Kenyon College Classics department, with illustrations by his student, Thomas Chappell Lewis (including a vivid cover illustration crafted on Post-It Notes). The little-known Latin Argonautica has keen Roman touches that heighten the sense of adventure and erotic passion of the Greek, and Professor Barich does a fine job in creating his accurate and compelling version in English verse. Take a look at http://xoxoxpress.com/titles.php?g=poetry -- and thanks!

 

Cavafy on the Emperor Julian

A splendid piece in The New Republic by the always readable Peter Green on the Daniel Mendelsohn translation of the collected poems of Constantine Cavafy. Every autodidact, someone once claimed, can be guaranteed to have a bee in his bonnet somewhere, and this was certainly true of Cavafy, whose bee (pursued in no less than a dozen poems, five of them unfinished) was the improbable figure of Julian the Apostate. It might be thought that a poet who glimpsed the old gods winging it over Ionia would welcome an emperor who aimed to put them back officially on their pedestals; but in fact Cavafy reveals a visceral distaste and contempt for Julian. G.W. Bowersock, in two characteristically erudite and incisive essays....

Read more at Bread & Circuses

All good wishes,

Judith Weingarten
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East

Saveguarding Zenobia/Halebiye

L.S.,

The city of Zenobia, said to have been founded by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and refortified by Justinian, is now in mortal danger from a plans for a new dam on the Euphrates River.  The French-Syrian Archaeological Mission, excavating at Zenobia/Halebiye since 2006, are circulating a petition in the hope of saving this fascinating site.  They do not aim to cancel the project (which is needed for the development of the region) but to have the dam moved so that it will not drown most of the city.  Please help by clicking here and signing the petition:

Please also forward the petition to as many interested parties as you can.  More information on the site and excavations at the Mission's webpage.

And you can read a post that I recently wrote about the city's history here: Where Did Zenobia Die?

All good wishes,

Judith Weingarten

British Library dissertation EThOS

Via History News Network, the British Library's EThOS beta is now available on-line. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service.  Nearly all British Universities are participating (except Cambridge and Oxford; naturally not). Any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s.  The theses have been OCRed, not just scanned, which means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. And, if you only want an electronic copy, it is free of charge (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn't been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that.

Brilliant.

Judith Weingarten

Herodotus is on Twitter!

You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/iHerodotus.

Dido is no longer online

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the Aeneid on Facebook: http://home.comcast.net/~fuuchan/aeneidonfacebookfinal.png



I particularly like the various relationship statuses.

East, Rebecca: A.D. 62: Pompeii

iUniverse © 2003, 292 pages

Miranda, the protagonist of Rebecca East's A.D. 62: Pompeii, is a graduate student studying classical archaeology at Harvard. It turns out that her knowledge of ancient cultures and her relatively small size make her the ideal candidate for a time travel experiment being conducted by unnamed researchers. The science behind the experiment and the particulars of its financing are never spelled out, but our heroine is due to earn a hefty sum as a guinea pig. The plan is for her to be sent back roughly 2000 years to ancient Rome, though the scientists won't be able to pinpoint precisely either her location upon arrival or the exact date. She is to live among the natives for a few days, attracting as little attention as possible, and then return to the 21st century by activating the transmitter that's embedded in her upper arm.

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Cleobis and Biton go bowling

Another story from The Week (November 14, 2008). This one's not funny (unlike this one), but it does call to mind an interesting classical parallel:

"An avid bowler from Michigan bowled his first perfect game after 45 years of trying, and promptly died. Don Doane, 62, had just rolled his final strike, say witnesses, bringing his score to an unimprovable 300, and was accepting congratulations from teammates when he suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly. 'It was like a book, a final chapter,' said teammate Todd Place. 'He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives, and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face.'"

Readers familiar with Herodotus will immediately see this as a modernized version of the Cleobis and Biton story (Hdt. 1.31). The Athenian sage Solon, asked by the Lydian King Croesus to name the most fortunate of men, named as second most fortunate the brothers Cleobis and Biton. When their mother needed a ride to a religious festival, but the oxen weren't yet available for her cart, they yoked themselves to it and pulled her some five miles. Everybody was impressed: people gathered around and congratulated the boys, and they congratulated the boys' mother on what great sons she had. And she, the mother, prayed to a statue of Hera that her sons might get from the goddess whatever is best for men to receive. Afterwards the boys feasted and then fell asleep and they never woke up again, and so died at the pinnacle of their accomplishments. And, importantly, because they died there was now no chance for misfortune to befall them in the future: fate, being fickle, tends to upend the lives of men given enough time.

Are there Greeks in Philadelphia?

Both these blog posts came through my RSS reader today. The question is, what's inside the real one?

links for 2008-09-16

• A Garden Carried in the Pocket: The Blood of Caesar

links for 2008-09-05

• The Labors of Herakles -- 21st century

links for 2008-09-01

• Counting My Blessings - Sunday Salon: Favorite history books?
  Re. Peter Green
• Powell's Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - Bright Oblivion

links for 2008-08-29

• Ancient gold treasure puzzles Greek archaeologists - Yahoo! News

links for 2008-08-23

• Et Tu Brute? « Blacklin’s Reading Room Reviews & More
  Re. the UNRV History site

Grene, David: Of Farming & Classics

University of Chicago Press © 2007, 169 pages

The title of David Grene's autobiography reflects the twin passions of his life. He was (I betray the source of my own familiarity with him by giving this half of his life pride of place) a classicist who spent nearly all of his career at the University of Chicago. He is perhaps best known as the co-editor of Chicago series of complete Greek tragedies, but he is widely published otherwise. I will always think of him primarily for his translation of Herodotus, published in 1988: I'm wearing out the second copy of the book that I've owned. Grene divided his time between teaching and farming. He grew up in Ireland but bought his first farm in Lemont, Illinois, in 1940. In later decades he divided his year between Chicago and a farm he owned in Ireland.

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