Dr Nicgorski (a professor of political science at Notre Dame)  continues the conference with a paper on eloquence and Cicero:

As long as we’re talking about Greek (see next post) we might as well mention an item from Washington University in St Louis which  mentions the recent identification of a number of books which once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Some excerpts:

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis announced the discovery by Monticello scholars that a collection of books, long held in the libraries at Washington University in St. Louis, originally were part of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library.

These books, held at the university’s libraries for 131 years, have been confirmed by Monticello scholars as having belonged to Thomas Jefferson himself. They are part of the university’s rare books collection, and were not identified by the books’ donor in 1880 as a part of Jefferson’s personal collection.

Monticello scholars identified several notable books among the 28 titles and 74 volumes, including:

* Aristotle’s Politica, which was likely one of the last books Jefferson read before his death on July 4, 1826.
* Architecture books used by Jefferson to design the University of Virginia, which, like Monticello, is recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site. Two of these volumes, Freart de Chambray’s Parallele de l’architecture antique avec la moderne and Andrea Palladio’s Architecture de Palladio, contenant les cinq ordres d’architecture contain a few notes and calculations made by Jefferson.
* A small scrap of paper with Greek notes in Jefferson’s hand tucked in a volume of Plutarch’s Lives.
[…]

• via: 74 of Thomas Jefferson’s books identified at Washington University library

The best part is that they have a high res photo of that small scrap of paper:

 

They have ‘posed’ the scrap on the page of Plutarch’s Lives which compares Marcellus and Pelopidas, but I don’t think what is written thereon has to do with them. Seems to be an awful lot of ‘corrections’ being listed and I can’t figure out that word before ‘bibliothekes’ …

Erstwhile Classics prof Ken Mayer sent along an interesting item last week … it’s a photo of a can of Kuang Chuan Mountain Coffee (the company is from Taiwan) and the inverted image shows that there’s some sort of Greek manuscript lurking on the label:

What’s somewhat infuriating about this is that the company doesn’t appear to have an (English) web presence where one could research the label. Folks who want to try their hand at figuring out the text can check out largers sizes at Flickr:Kuang Chuan Mountain Coffee with Byzantine Greek manuscript. Feel free to provide glosses, etc. in the comments.

 

UPDATE (early the next morning): G. Dachris and Neils Grotum write in to identify the passage as the beginning of Thucydides Book 5 … (thanks!)

Every now and then, it turns out the journalists get it right. An excerpt from an item in the Telegraph last week:

Solar winds are plumes of electrically charged particles spewed out by the Sun that occasionally hit Earth. The planet’s protective magnetic field pushes these particles to the poles, where they react with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere to produce light. These eerily beautiful curtains of light are the aurora borealis and australis (or Northern and Southern Lights).

Sometimes a particularly violent solar blast known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) means the auroras are visible at lower latitudes. In AD37, according to the historian Seneca, the Emperor Tiberius saw a vivid red light in the sky and dispatched battalions to the seaport at Ostia, “in the belief that it was burning”. In London in 1839, fire brigades rushed north to put out a conflagration that turned out to be an aurora. The same thing happened in January 1938, when the Associated Press reported that a “ruddy glow led many to think half the city was ablaze”.

• via QI: Quite interesting facts about light – Telegraph.

Now when I saw the mention of “the historian Seneca”, my alarm bells went off, but thanks to amicus noster John McMahon (who pointed me in the right direction and so gets the traditional tip o’ the pileus), it turns out the source for this actually is Seneca’s Quaestiones Naturales. Here’s the relevant bit via the Latin Library (1.15.5):

Inter haec licet ponas et quod frequenter in historiis legimus caelum ardere uisum, cuius nonnumquam tam sublimis ardor est, ut inter sidera ipsa uideatur, nonnumquam tam humilis, ut speciem longinqui incendii praebeat. Sub Tiberio Caesare cohortes in auxilium Ostiensis coloniae cucurrerunt tamquam conflagrantis, cum caeli ardor fuisset per magnam partem noctis parum lucidus, <ut> crassi fumidique ignis.

FWIW, plenty of news outlets (e.g. the Huffington Post) last week were suggesting we might be able to see the Northern Lights much further south due to solar flare activity, but I didn’t see any such thing …