rogueclassicism

Daily Kos appears to want some rogueclassicism love …

He’s the Last Action Hero, with nothing to lose. He’s term-limited from running again, can’t run for President, and has a fallback job that he actually likes. He can do what no one has been able to do since Prop 13 passed and reform state government. Watch him single handedly taking on Herculean labors! Slaying the Nurses’ Nemean Lion! Capturing the Golden Hindquarters of the Integrated Waste Management Board for his friends! Slaying the Nine-Headed Hydra of the Prison System! Cleaning out the Muck of the Stable of State Employees! Drama! Plot! John Williams Themed Music!

… seen on the Classicists list:

*The Alexander Romance in the East*

July 26-29, 2010

The University of Exeter’s Department of Classics and Ancient History and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies will be hosting a conference at Exeter which sets out to explore issues and growth points in the study of the Greek Alexander Romance and its transformations in the Persian and Arab traditions, as well as aspects of the Hebrew tradition as it impinges on the Muslim world. For more details see our website, http://huss.exeter.ac.uk/classics/conferences/alexander_romance_in_the_east.php

Over three days we hope to include some twenty contributions on such topics as the following:

The development of the Greek tradition and its texts, from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period
The historical impact of Alexander on the east and Central Asia
Indian reactions
Mapping Alexander and the east in the medieval west
Alexander in the Qur’an and in the Arabic romances
Persian versions of Alexander
Alexander in the Talmud and its influence
Specific stories – including the Water of Life, the Flying Machine, the Diving Bell, the encounter with the Brahmans

A number of scholars have agreed to speak, but we have room for more. To offer a paper, or for information about attending the conference, please contact:

Richard Stoneman at the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter, AmoryBuilding, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK: richard14stoneman AT btinternet.com OR R.Stoneman AT exeter.ac.uk

*Abstracts*
of proposed papers (twenty minutes) should be no more than 250 words long and should be sent to Richard Stoneman by **31st January 2010** for consideration by the conference committee.

Interesting review in the Times of  David Watkin, The Roman Forum … here’s a pair of excerpts:

A caption in the exhibition on the Emperor Vespasian currently in the Colosseum describes the Arch of Titus – only a few hundred yards away – as one of the best-preserved monuments from the Flavian dynasty. Yet what we have now is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction. In 1819–22 the neoclassical architects Robert Stern and Giuseppe Valadier pulled down the private houses that had encroached on the sides of the arch and thoroughly rebuilt these sides together with the attic, using travertine instead of the original Pentelian marble. The inside of the arch includes the famous relief celebrating the taking of Jerusalem, with the Menorah looted from the Temple prominently displayed. Indeed until 1846, when the ceremony was abolished, every new pope’s inaugural procession passed through the arch, where a Jew was obliged to stand and pay homage to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Both facts – the evolution, as it were, of Titus’ Arch, and its use in papal pageantry – not to be found in most guidebooks, are relevant to David Watkin’s excellent, handy new book, whose main object is to see the Forum not as it looks now – “a long, clean, livid trench”, as Émile Zola wrote in 1896, in which “piles of foundations appear like bits of bone” – but through its metamorphoses over more than 2,000 years, when every age has left its mark. The Forum only ceased to be lived in, by both people and animals, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was turned into an open-air museum, and archaeologists imposed the view that whatever was Roman must be retrieved, and whatever they considered irrelevant, removed. Uninterested as they were in Baroque architecture, which after all shapes modern Rome much more than relics from antiquity, they ruthlessly destroyed several Baroque churches from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; these churches are now recorded only in Piranesi’s incomparable etchings.

[...]

Professor Watkin acknowledges that excavations made such monuments as the great Arch of Septimius Severus much more visible than they had been for centuries, but he argues that in most cases only the foundations – that is, holes in the ground – were unearthed, to be exhibited to the visitor with stones of no visible meaning. Even more questionably, edifices have been reconstructed from small fragments, much in the way a dinosaur might be assembled from a single cartilage. Today’s much-admired Temple of Vesta, for instance, in truth dates from the 1930s.

That seems a bit misleading as worded (by the Times … I’m sure Dr Watkin has a less controversial spin). Reading the description of the Temple in Platner (via Lacus Curtius) one will see that although it was just the podium and ‘various architectural elements’ which were found during various excavations, there was/is quite a bit of documentation from coins, reliefs, etc., of what the Temple looked like. I don’t think we’re in the same sort of ‘use your imagination to reconstruct things’ world like Evans did at Knossos …

• Rebuilt Rome (Times)

… seen on the Classicists list:

COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS IN THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
6-9 JULY 2009

Organisers: Dr Claire Taylor, Trinity College Dublin;
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos, University of Nottingham

Registration is still open for this conference in Dublin on 6-9 July 2009.
Please contact Claire Taylor (claire.taylor AT tcd.ie) to reserve a place (there
is no fee).

For further information, see http://www.tcd.ie/Classics/cnagw/index.php

PROGRAMME
Annelies Cazemier (Oxford): TBC
Claire Taylor (Trinity College, Dublin): Social networks and social hierarchies:
towards a model of social mobility in Athens.
Ben Gray (All Souls, Oxford): Exile communities and the citizen ideal in the
later classical and hellenistic Greek world.
Kostas Vlassopoulos (University of Nottingham): Free spaces: contexts of
interaction between citizens, metics and slaves in classical Athens.
Ben Akrigg (University of Toronto): The metic population in Athens.
Peter Hunt (University of Colorado, Boulder): Ethnic identity among slaves at
Athens.
Barbara Kowalzig (Royal Holloway, London): Trading gods and trading networks:
economies of trust in ancient Greece.
Vincent Gabrielsen (University of Copenhagen): Naval and grain networks at
Athens.
Christy Constantakopoulou (Birkbeck, London): Beyond the polis: island koina and
other non-polis entities in the Aegean.
Esther Eidinow (Newman College, Birmingham): Networks, narrative and
negotiation: magical practices and polis religion.

… seen on Romarch:

Dining Divinely: Banqueting in Honour of the Gods
July 7-9, 2010
The Department of Classics at the University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand

Commensality marked a range of public and private occasions in the
ancient Mediterranean world. This colloquium will explore the evidence
for banquets and feasts held in conjunction with or as a form of
religious observance. Offers of papers from any branch of Classical
Studies concerning the following topics are welcomed:

• The archaeological evidence for banquets (architecture, furnishings,
food remains, representations of banqueting) with a religious dimension.
• Banquets associated with particular religious festivals or rites, or
part of private occasions with a religious dimension (eg funerals).
• Literary or epigraphical evidence for religious banqueting.

An abstract of 250 words indicating the thesis, evidence and conclusions
of the paper offered and including the name, academic affiliation,
postal address and email address of the presenter should be sent to the
conference organiser at the address below. Email attachments and
facsimiles are preferred. Papers will be 20-30 minutes long, depending
on the final number of participants.

Abstracts must be received on or before October 1, 2009. Authors of
accepted papers will be notified by December 15, 2009. The registration
fee will be around US $120/€85/ NZ $175 (postgraduates US $85/€60 /NZ
$125).

Organiser:
Alison B. Griffith, Department of Classics, University of Canterbury,
Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140 NEW ZEALAND
Ph: ++64-3-364-2987 ext. 8578
Fax: ++64-3-364-2576
alison.griffith AT canterbury.ac.nz

This is interesting … we have reported in the past of various studies etc. which have demonstrated/recreated the colours which originally adorned ancient statuary and temples, but apparently no trace of paint has ever been found on the Parthenon before. Recently, however, a researcher at the British Museum — Giovanni Verri — has developed a technique to detect at least one colour (Egyptian Blue) on the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles. An excerpt from the coverage in New Scientist:

Verri shines red light onto the marble, and any traces of paint that remain absorb the red light and emit infrared light. Viewed through an infrared camera, any parts of the marble that were once blue appear to glow.

Egyptian blue has shown up on the belt of Iris, Poseidon’s messenger goddess (see image), and as a wave pattern along the back of Helios, god of the sun, who is shown rising out of the sea at dawn. It also appears as stripes on the woven mantle draped over another goddess, Dione (see image).

If you look at the images accompanying the New Scientist article, you can see we’re definitely talking about ‘traces’. Of course, Dr. Verri has a paper on the technique, the abstract (and possibly full text) of which is available here.

• New test reveals Parthenon’s hidden colour (New Scientist)
• Parthenon was covered in colourful paint (Telegraph)
• New Imaging Technique Shows Parthenon Was Once Brightly Painted (Discover)

Came across this while waiting for my Sirena to heat up for espresso … Greek Street is a very interesting looking comic which, to judge by descriptions all over the internet, reimagines Greek myths/tragedies as modern ’street stories’. Newsarama has an interview with its creator — Peter Milligan (the guy who brought us John Constantine) — which includes this incipit:

The premise to Greek Street seems pretty straight forward – classic Greek dramas retold in modern-day London. How would you describe the series and what fans can expect?

PM: The premise might be straight forward enough. The reality of the comic is anything but. Greek Street is a very strange beast. I think of it as The Long Good Friday meets Agamemnon. A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek Tragedy to take a look at our world, and to explore some of the things I think about this world. I hope readers aren’t put off, thinking that this is somehow going to be dry or demand that they are well versed in Greek literature. The book is very sexy. IT has beautiful girls, beautiful boys, guns, tension, and the supernatural. The aim, or trick, is to forge something new. Something that refers to and echoes Greek Tragedy but that is also modern, new.

NRAMA: What drew you to retelling these greek legends?

PM: I’ve always been interested in the Greek Tragedies. A few years back a re-read a translation of the The Oresteia and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.

There’s a preview of the first issue (and others) at Facebook, where one will see that this comic probably is ‘for mature audiences only’. The covers are definitely interesting … will have to track this one down.

… or at least that’s what Paul Cartledge asserts in his most recent tome (and I tend to agree with him), which is beginning to get some media attention (although the various news outlets seem unsure whether to consider this news or a review). Here’s a bit from the Independent:

In his new book, Ancient Greek Political Thought In Practice, published today, Professor Cartledge says that while politicians and historians have used the trial to suggest that democracy can sometimes descend into mob rule, this was not one such example. “Everyone knows the Greeks invented democracy, but it was not democracy as we know it, and we have misread history as a result,” he said. “The charges Socrates faced seem ridiculous to us but in ancient Athens they were genuinely felt to serve the communal good.”

In his book, Professor Cartledge questions traditional arguments that Socrates was purely the victim of political infighting. Historians influenced by ancient writers, including Plato, have claimed that Socrates’ open criticism of prominent Athenian politicians had made him many enemies, who then pinned the impiety and corruption charges on him to silence him. Other historian believe Socrates’ teachings stirred political rebellion, and he was made an example at his trial by those seeking to quash dissidents in Athenian society.

Professor Cartledge said Socrates questioned the authority of many of the accepted gods and claimed to be guided by his inner “daimonon”, a term which he may have intended to mean “intuition”, but which could also be interpreted as a dark, supernatural influence, which would have outraged conventional believers.

The charge of “impiety” was entirely acceptable in a democracy deeply reverential of their gods, Professor Cartledge said. Accusations were brought by amateur prosecutors before a jury of 501 ordinary citizens of “good standing” who acted on behalf of what they took to be the public interest. If the prosecution could prove that a defendant was responsible for jeopardising the public good, he was likely to be found guilty.

The author also believes that Socrates invited his own death. Under the Athenian system, in this kind of trial a defendant could suggest his own penalty. Instead of taking this opportunity seriously, Socrates first joked that he should be rewarded and eventually suggested a fine that was far too small.

Unsurprisingly, his jurors did not see the funny side and passed the death sentence. Instead of fleeing, Socrates accepted the verdict, claiming that “he owed it to the city under whose laws he had been raised to honour those laws to the letter”.

FWIW, I’ve always felt that the ‘traditional’ view of the trial of Socrates –which tended to see the religious side of things merely as a pretext, as mentioned above — has been one of the longest-lingering examples of modern scholars imposing modern values on the ancient world. There continues (I think) to be a view that the ancients — especially those rational Greeks, but even those brutish Romans — in general didn’t really take their religion seriously. Whenever they used it, it had to be for some other, cynical reason. Did Socrates take it seriously? Perhaps … perhaps not. But it seems to me that a large portion of the jury likely did and when he suggested an alternate form of punishment, he alienated a pile of others as well … I’ll have to keep my eye open for this one.

• Arrogance of Socrates made a compelling case for his death (Independent)
• Academic: Socrates’ trial was fair (Press Association)
• Socrates trial and execution was completely justified, says new study (Telegraph)