While watching the Jane Draycott interview (below) I notice I seem to have missed another Classics Confidential interview with Sebastian Heath of ISAW fame talking about what he does and that #lawdi thing we were following on Twitter a short while ago.
Category: Classicists
Classics Confidential: Jane Draycott on Roman Gardens
The Classics Confidential folks are back with an interesting interview in which Dr Draycott talks about an anatomical votives conference she organized as well as her own work on Roman gardens.
d.m. David Ridgway
From the Herald:
DAVID Ridgway, who has died aged 74, was the English-speaking world’s leading expert on how the ancient Greeks colonised the Mediterranean almost 3000 years ago.
He passed on that knowledge during a 35-year career as lecturer, then reader in archaeology and finally reader in classics, at Edinburgh University.
He and his Sardinian-born wife Francesca became popular figures at the university, where she was an honorary fellow, first in Archaeology, later in classics, until they moved south to Colchester, Essex, on his retirement in 2003.
From their Edinburgh base, the couple, who met in 1964 on an archaeological dig in Calabria, southern Italy, and married in 1970, became leading authors in their fields. She was recognised worldwide as an expert on the Etruscans.
Their joint work Italy Before the Romans, published in 1979 and covering Italy from the Bronze Age to Roman rule, became widely known to fellow academics and students simply as Ridgway and Ridgway. It included the first account in English of the Etruscan colonisation of Corsica.
During his many years in Edinburgh, Mr Ridgway’s work was perhaps better known in Greece and Italy, where he was considered the pre-eminent classical archaeologist of his time in the field of ancient Mediterranean history.
At the same time, he became something of a bridge between British and local Mediterranean scholars. His work helped reveal how the Greeks colonised the sea’s shores all the way to the Iberian peninsula (the name Iberia itself came from the Greek) long before the Roman Empire became the regional superpower.
He explained how the Greeks began colonisation partly to find more fertile land to help feed the motherland, partly to get away from over-populated cities riven by social unrest.
Among Walsall-born Mr Ridgway’s specialist areas was the colonisation of the lands bordering the central Tyrrhenian Sea, between western Italy and the islands of Sicily, Corsica and his wife’s native Sardinia.
He was also deeply involved in the excavations at ancient Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia near Naples, one of the first areas colonised by the Greeks in the eighth Century BC.
Born in 1938, David Ridgway studied classics at University College London, graduating in 1960. He then spent five years on a post-graduate course at Oxford, during which he added a Diploma in Archaeology to his CV in 1962, guided by the renowned Iron Age archaeologist Professor Christopher Hawkes. From 1965-67, he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Classics at the University of Newcastle before moving to Edinburgh in 1968.
Thirty-five years later, after moving back south to retire, Ridgway and his wife were made Research Fellows of the Institute of Classical Studies, one of 10 Institutes making up the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. They commuted regularly from their home in Colchester to use the fine library of the Institute’s headquarters, Senate House, in London’s Bloomsbury district.
In 2006, 50 of Mr Ridgway’s fellow scholars from around the world published a Festschrift – a volume of relevant archaeological essays – in joint tribute to the Ridgways. It was entitled Across Frontiers: Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Cypriots.
Mr Ridgway’s colleagues said they found it fitting that he had died, in Athens, after a long hot day doing what he loved best – visiting excavations in the village of Lefkandi on the Greek island of Euboea, whence the earliest Greek colonists had gone west almost three millennia ago. His wife Francesca died in 2008. They had no children.
- via: David Ridgway (Herald)
Classics and the Greek Debt Crisis
There have been plenty of non-Classicist commentators dropping the word ‘tragedy’ and making all sorts of facile comparisons to the ancient world in regards to the ongoing debt crisis in Greece … finally, a Classicist — Oxford’s Armand D’Angour — wades in with some useful comparanda. From the BBC:
What advice would the ancient Greeks provide to help modern Greeks with their current financial worries?
1. Debt, division and revolt. Here’s the 6th Century BC news from Athens.
In the early 6th Century BC, the people of Athens were burdened with debt, social division and inequality, with poor farmers prepared to sell themselves into slavery just to feed their families.
Revolution was imminent, but the aristocrat Solon emerged as a just mediator between the interests of rich and poor. He abolished debt bondage, limited land ownership, and divided the citizen body into classes with different levels of wealth and corresponding financial obligations.
His measures, although attacked on all sides, were adopted and paved the way for the eventual creation of democracy.
Solon’s success demonstrates that great statesmen must have the courage to implement unpopular compromises for the sake of justice and stability.
2. What happens next? The Delphic oracle
Ancient Delphi was the site of Apollo’s oracle, believed to be inspired by the god to utter truths. Her utterances, however, were unintelligible and needed to be interpreted by priests, who generally turned them into ambiguous prophecies.
In response to, say, “Should Greece leave the euro?” the oracle might have responded: “Greece should abandon the euro if the euro has abandoned Greece,” leaving proponents and opponents of “Grexit” to squabble over what exactly that meant. It must have been something like listening to modern economists. At least the oracle had the excuse of inhaling the smoke of laurel leaves.
Wiser advice was to be found in the mottos inscribed on the face of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, advocating moderation and self-knowledge: “Know yourself. Nothing in excess.”
3. Nothing new under the sun: The sage Pythagoras
If modern Greeks feel overwhelmed by today’s financial problems, they might take some comfort from remembering the world-weary advice from their ancestor Pythagoras that “everything comes round again, so nothing is completely new”.
Pythagoras of Samos was a 6th Century BC mystic sage who believed that numbers are behind everything in the universe – and that cosmic events recur identically over a cycle of 10,800 years.
His doctrine was picked up by the biblical author of Ecclesiastes in the 3rd Century BC, whose phrase “There is nothing new under the sun” is repeated more than 20 times.
If you look at the picture at top of the story, the young man with a laptop on a Greek vase from 470 BC (in fact, a writing-tablet) seems to prove the proposition.
4. Mind you, it could be worse… Odysseus and endurance
“Hold fast, my heart, you have endured worse suffering,” Odysseus exhorts himself in Homer’s Odyssey, from the 8th Century BC.
Having battled hostile elements and frightful monsters on his return home across the sea from Troy to his beloved Ithaka and wife Penelope, Odysseus here prevents himself from jeopardising a successful finale as a result of impatience.
The stirring message is that whatever the circumstances, one should recognise that things could be, and have been, even worse. Harder challenges have been faced and – with due intelligence and fortitude – overcome.
5. Are you sure that’s right? Socrates and tireless inquiry
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being,” said Socrates.
By cross-examining ordinary people, the philosopher aimed to get to the heart of complex questions such as “What is justice?” and “How should we live?” Often no clear answer emerged, but Socrates insisted that we keep on asking the questions.
Fellow Athenians were so offended by his scrutiny of their political and moral convictions that they voted to execute him in 399 BC, and thereby made him an eternal martyr to free thought and moral inquiry.
Socrates bequeathed to humanity a duty to keep on thinking with tireless integrity, even when – or particularly when – definite answers are unlikely to be found.
6. How did those jokers end up in charge? Aristophanes the comedian
The most brilliantly inventive of comic playwrights, Aristophanes was happy to mock contemporary Athenian politicians of every stripe. He was also the first to coin a word for “innovation”.
His comedy Frogs of 405 BC, which featured the first representation of aerial warfare, contained heartfelt and unambiguous advice for his politically fickle fellow citizens: choose good leaders, or you will be stuck with bad ones.
7. Should we do the same as last time? Heraclitus the thinker
“You can’t step into the same river twice” is one of the statements of Heraclitus, in the early 5th Century BC – his point being that the ceaseless flow of the water makes for a different river each time you step into it.
A sharp pupil pointed out “in that case you can’t step into the same river once”, since if everything is constantly in flux, so is the identity of the individual stepping into the water.
While change is constant, different things change at different rates. In an environment of ceaseless flux, it is important to identify stable markers and to hold fast to them.
Bond markets, debt and bail-outs must feel like a similar challenge.
8. Tell me the worst, doctor. Hippocrates faces the facts
Western medicine goes back to Hippocrates, late 5th Century BC, and doctors still take the “Hippocratic oath”. An extensive set of ancient medical observations details how patients fared when they were treated by means such as diet and exercise.
What is exceptional in ancient thinking about health and disease is the clear-sighted recognition that doctors must observe accurately and record truthfully – even when patients die in the process.
Magical or wishful thinking cannot bring a cure. Only honest, exhaustive, empirical observation can hope to reveal what works and what does not.
9. Seizing the opportunity: Cleisthenes and democracy
The ancient Greeks were strongly aware of the power of opportunity – in Greek, kairos. Seizing the moment – in oratory, athletics, or battle – was admired and viewed as an indication of skill.
In many cases, such temporary innovation, born of the moment, will be more enduring, especially if successive innovators build on its principles.
When the tyrants of Athens were deposed at the end of the 6th Century, the leading citizen Cleisthenes needed to think up a constitution that would cut across existing structures of power and allegiance.
He devised with amazing rapidity a system of elective government in which all the citizens (the Greek word “demos” means “the people”) had a single vote – the world’s first democracy.
10. Big problem, long bath: Archimedes the inventor
Asked to measure whether a crown was made of pure gold, the Sicilian Greek Archimedes (3rd Century BC) puzzled over a solution.
The story goes that when he eventually took a bath and saw the water rising as he stepped in, it struck him that an object’s volume could be measured by the water it displaced – and when weighed, their relative density could be calculated.
He was so excited by his discovery that he jumped out of the bath and ran naked through Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” – Greek for “I’ve got it!”
Finding the solution to a knotty problem requires hard thinking, but the answer often comes only when you switch off – and take a bath.
- via: Ancient Greek solution for debt crisis (BBC)
Triste: Steven Jackson
Seen on various lists (by John Hilton) … we await a more formal obituary:
The Classics discipline at UKZN (Howard College) regrets to announce the death of an eminent colleague. Dr. Steven Jackson (8/12/1946-26/5/2012) was lecturer and later senior lecturer at the University of Natal from 1989 to 2000. He obtained his M.A. at Queen’s University, Belfast, and his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin. He was widely respected as a researcher in the field of Hellenistic Poetry and published prolifically. His publications include: Creative Selectivity in Apollonius’ Argonautica (1993); Myrsilus of Methymna: Hellenistic Paradoxographer (1995), which is quoted in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition, as the definitive study of this author’s work; Istrus the Callimachean (2000), and Mainly Apollonius: Collected Studies (2004). Steven had a wide range of interests outside Classical Scholarship. He was also interested in Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, the P&O liners, and sport in all its forms.
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