Category: Classicists

Peter Burian Emeritus

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Nice feature in the News Observer:

Duke University logo
Duke University logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a narrow seminar room at Duke University, Peter Burian leads 14 students through ancient Rome to the palatial Baths of Caracalla, where 1,600 Romans at a time could soak in pools of cool, warm and hot water.

His mellifluous voice narrates the slideshow from his laptop. The imperial baths, he said, were a place where all of society gathered, where any Roman could rub shoulders with another. “There’s nothing like taking all of your clothes off to level the playing field,” Burian told the students.

It’s the end of the semester, and that means the students are witnessing the decline of the Roman Empire, with parallels to the modern economic meltdown in Greece and other parts of Europe.

For 44 years, Burian, a professor of classical studies, has transported his students to the ancient world, a place inhabited by emperors and slaves, gods and heroes. And along the way, he has taught them about their own time and place, and maybe a bit about themselves.

Burian’s last class at Duke was Wednesday. At 68, he’s retiring from the classroom, but will spend a year as dean of humanities at Duke, where he will put his wisdom to work on larger questions about the study of languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion.

It’s a point of critical tension for American higher education. For decades, students have been turning away from those subjects in favor of social sciences, business and science. In 1967, nearly 18 percent of all U.S. undergraduate degrees awarded were in the humanities; in 2009, the share had dropped to about 8 percent, according to data from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It’s no wonder. Any conversation about education these days seems to revolve around “STEM,” the acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. People talk about higher education as job preparation, and parents who pay hefty tuition bills get antsy if their children aren’t acquiring marketable skills.

Amid the rush to math and science, though, there is a growing chorus of those who say the humanities may actually be great preparation for a complex world. Earlier this month, about 250 higher education leaders from across the country gathered at Wake Forest University for a conference called “Rethinking Success: From the Liberal Arts to Careers in the 21st Century.” There, a CEO, an economist and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked about the value of a broad education that challenges students to be critical thinkers and creative problem solvers.

Burian, too, believes there is lifelong value to understanding what happened 2,000 years ago, to digging into the difficult works of Virgil, Homer and Euripides.

“There’s a place for stuff that really does kind of make you slow down and think, make you question whether you understand what’s going on, make you wonder about your own beliefs,” Burian said. “The greater value is discovering yourself in some way.”

Slow down, think

In his calm, gentle way, Burian urges his students to reflect. He requires them to bring a question to class each day, which provides a launch pad for discussion.

Burian arrived at Duke in 1968, long before laptops and iPads, Facebook and Twitter. Students are as smart and accomplished as ever, he said, though they don’t seem to read as much as they used to.

“People are flooded with information,” he said. “Sometimes I think that we should just stop using the word information for a decade or so until we can figure it out exactly what we mean by it. Everything is information. It’s all out there and the idea is to get as much of it as quickly as you can. That sort of leaves open the question of what you do with it. I guess that that’s my feeling about where the humanities ought to come in.”

Duke is taking a new look at how these subjects fit into the university’s curriculum. Last year, the university received a five-year, $6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to revitalize undergraduate humanities.

Part of the effort will look at how the traditional fields fit in with vast changes in society. So, for example, studying the Arab Spring revolutions requires understanding technology and social networks; it also must include questions about language, culture and history.

“We want to be with it, we want to be modern, we want not to seem tedious and old-fashioned and frumpy,” Burian said in his office, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books. “But really, a lot of what the traditional humanities have been good for is not speeding up and creating all the information that you can, but in slowing down, reflecting, developing the imagination, taking the long view and thinking about how to think. And if we don’t have that role, I’m not sure where it’s going to come from.”

So there is work to do, and that’s what Burian will sink his teeth into next year as dean.

It shouldn’t be a problem for the scholar in Greek drama and literary translation who has written five books, numerous articles and taught more than 50 different courses during his years at Duke. Even in his last semester in the classroom, he took on a new course and taught every weekday – unusual for a senior faculty member.

He takes on demanding translations, speaks beautiful Italian and he lends his ear to students, said Tolly Boatwright, a professor in classical studies.

“He offers students a way to connect with humanities and being human,” Boatwright said. “He listens to students and draws them out and encourages them to develop in that way.”

Haun Saussy enrolled at Duke in 1977, and decided to try Burian’s course in beginning Greek. By Christmas, he was reading Plato.

“Right away I decided that being a Greek major was the most interesting thing I could do,” said Saussy, now a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of Chicago. “He was just a terrific teacher … He was just a great observer and commentator and made it come alive.”

Adapting at Duke

Burian was raised around Boston and in Iowa City, where his father was an ophthalmologist at the University of Iowa. His family was dominated by science and medical types, and he tried it himself, working at a hospital kidney lab for two summers.

It wasn’t for him. A bookish youngster, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where his freshman adviser encouraged him to try Greek. He was hooked, and went on to write his Princeton dissertation on Greek tragedy.

After he took a job at Duke, Burian had to overcome his anxiety about standing up in front of a classroom. Short and just 25, he wore a tie to class every day so the students knew he was the professor.

“I’d never taught anybody anything,” he said. “My greatest fear was that 40 or 45 minutes in I’d run out of things to say and everybody would see me for the fraud that I was.”

So he over-prepared, every night writing and refining his lectures. “Once I relaxed a little bit,” he said, “I realized I loved teaching.”

Then, of course, he had to learn about the South. When he tried to start a chapter of Faculty Against the Vietnam War, he was called on the carpet by an administrator who told him campus mail could not be used for private activities. And crossing the parking lot on the way from a protest in Army surplus gear, the scruffy-bearded Burian encountered the Duke president.

“Terry Sanford emerges and looks at me with this obvious what-the-hell-is-this-person-doing-on-my-campus look and said, ‘Howdy.’ And I said, ‘Howdy.’”

Though he may have started as an outsider, Burian would become something of an institution at Duke. He chaired his department and served on dozens of university committees; he led the main faculty governance body, the Academic Council, in 2000-2002.

Along the way, he got a front-row seat as Duke blossomed from a good regional campus to a national player and a top-10 university. Duke’s rise was partly due to its investment in humanities, Burian said, when a provost realized he could build a first-rate English department for the price of a few chemists with their labs and graduate students.

Back at the classroom, Burian fumbles a bit with a cord that doesn’t work with his laptop. During the slideshow, he clicks on the wrong spot, and the slides disappear. A student helps him get back on track with his mouse.

Burian may not be completely comfortable with the latest technology. But when he assigns his students “The Iliad,” he knows that they gain something from the difficult epic poem.

They ride the emotional journey of Achilles, the fierce warrior who is ultimately a fragile character.

“In the end, the kinds of human issues that we all face are identifiable,” Burian said. “There’s something important about recognizing that people have been worrying about the same things, arguing about them, desperately trying to understand them, forever.”

Mary Beard is Everywhere!

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

This is one of those posts that has been on the backburner for a while because things just kept coming up, both on my side of the keyboard and Mary Beard’s, so I better get this out before it becomes a book unto itself. In any event, obviously in conjunction with her very interesting (from what I’ve seen, despite the fact that BBC’s iPlayer doesn’t have it here in Canada even if you pay the subscription fee) documentary series Meet the Romans, Mary Beard has been all over the interwebs talking about all sorts of interesting things. We’ll excerpt them below:

An item in the BBC commenting on the tombstone and inscription of a lad named Quintus Sulpicius Maximus (this is just the incipit; the original article also includes a photo of the monument and a video link or two):

In 94 AD young Quintus Sulpicius Maximus died.

A Roman lad who lived just 11 years, five months and 12 days, he had recently taken part in a grown-up poetry competition, a sort of Rome’s Got Talent. He had composed and performed a long poem in Greek.

And, though he hadn’t actually won, everyone agreed that he had done amazingly well for his age. The sad thing was that only a few months later he dropped down dead.

We know this because his tombstone still survives, put up by his grieving mum and dad. There’s a little statue of him in the middle, dressed up in his toga, and his poem is carved all over the stone – so everyone would know how brilliant it was.

How had he died? As his parents explain, he had collapsed from too much hard work.
Continue reading the main story

So was little Sulpicius a prodigy, snatched by death from a waiting public? Or was he the victim of some very pushy parents – like all those modern kids drilled by their dad in maths, so they can grab the headlines by getting an A-level when they are six.

Who knows? But my bet is that this is a nasty case of the “pushy parent syndrome”. In fact, this Roman family reminds us of one universal lesson of parenting – it’s a good idea to give the kids a break from time to time.

Yet perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on Sulpicius’ mum and dad. Even more than we do today, ordinary Romans invested in their children.

The grieving couple who put up this memorial to their child were ex-slaves. Freed by their owner, they now had to fend for themselves. A celebrity poet in the family would certainly have done wonders for their finances.

And at a less glamorous level, in a world without pensions or social security, they really needed some children to look after them in old age. Not too many of them though, or else – almost as expensive 2,000 years ago as they are now – they’d eat them out of house and home.

This was a calculation that most Romans found hard to get right. There was no such thing in the ancient world as reliable family planning. […]

Then we had a short excerpt from the second episode, just dripping with social history goodness:

In another video, she was talking about gladiators and was showing off (and almost donning … pun intended) a very nice helmet:

She did a History Extra Podcast for BBC Magazine (her segment is at the beginning after all the intro fluff) …

In another video, she shows us some items found in Herculaneum:

Then she did an interview with the Staffordshire Sentinel about Roman bathing and the like:

“THE Romans are dead,” says Mary Beard, above, “but they can still speak to us.”

A bit like the Liberal Democrats.

A world away from Russell Crowe and Frankie Howerd, Professor Beard’s series aims to show us what life for the average Roman was really like. “There’s an old saying,” she said. “If you want

to understand a culture, look to its lavatories.”

It’s to be hoped she never sees the ones at Hanley bus station.

“For ordinary Romans,” she explained, sat in, and on, a Roman communal toilet, “what we do in private used to be a far more public affair, everyone sitting together, tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went.” Our street are thinking of doing the same. We’ve just got to square it with Severn Trent.

The reason Romans had communal lavatories was because they did everything – eat, wash, toilet themselves – outside the house. They only came home to sleep. In many ways they set the template for the modern teenager.

After a hard day watching a lion consume an ill-favoured eunuch, the public baths were another favoured destination. “Most Romans,” said Beard, “went to the public baths to wash and let it all hang out.” Good fun until you trap something in a cubicle door.

“Some baths were the size of small towns,” she continued. “Not just places to sweat and steam, but with stalls for food and maybe a bit of sex on the side.” You don’t get that at Dimensions.

“These were rough noisy places,” she went on, “full of grunting gym goers, men getting their armpits plucked, and loitering thieves.”

It will be similar at this summer’s Olympic Village.

“The baths were a great social leveller,” said Beard. “Imagine, everybody’s here in the nude. It’s then that the poor man aged 20 with a great body can turn the tables on the 60-year-old Roman plutocrat with the paunch and the hernia.”

You might not be 20, but you can get a similar feeling by stripping to the waist and walking past an old people’s home.

Unlike the British, a race who are generally happy with a bag of Maltesers and Countdown, the Romans were a people who revelled in luxury. “Baths, wine and sex ruin your body,” said one, “but they’re what makes life worth living.”

Although doing all three at once can be tricky if you’re at the tap end.

After a soak, meanwhile, a Roman would often fancy refreshment. “The ancient Roman bar,” revealed Beard, “ranged from seedy dens and strip joints to modern gastro pubs.”

Now that’s what I call a Cultural Quarter.

Now despite all this amazing information and clearly professional presentation, some proto-shallow-hallish-spawn-of-the-tanning-salon/critic-who’s-so-posh-he-doesn’t-even-have-a-first-name-but-just-a -pair-of-dittoed-initials took Dr Beard to task for not meeting his aesthetic standards, apparently (I have not been able to find AA Gill’s original column, by the way) … the responses from others have been swift:

… to name but three. Dr Beard herself wrote a lengthy piece in the Daily Mail, which culminated in an invitation:

[…] First, I’d like to invite him to a tutorial in my study at Cambridge and ask him to justify and substantiate his opinions. We could talk them through. Possibly then he would learn a little about the crass assumptions he’s making and why they don’t amount to anything more.

Next, for my Roman-style revenge on Gill, I’d force him to watch each of my programmes from start to finish. And to ensure he did so with appropriate diligence, I’d ask Clare to be on hand to enforce the penalty.

And as Gill is also a food critic —and I’m certain there is a veritable battalion of angry chefs and restaurateurs who would gladly volunteer to help with this bit — I’d force-feed him, like a goose destined for pate de foie gras, his least favourite dishes, while he sat and learned about the Romans.

And then we’d talk about them — and I mean about their substance, not just about my lack of lipgloss.

I do wonder, if he met me face to face, would he be prepared to reiterate the insults he has heaped on me in print? Somehow I doubt if he would have the guts.

I am often asked to review books in newspapers and I always make it a rule never to write anything critical in a review that I would not be prepared to repeat to the author face-to-face — a basic tenet of responsible journalism.

And I ask only one thing of anyone who chooses to condemn me for not quite living up to the stereotype Botoxed blonde Gill seems to want me to become: see my programmes for yourself and decide if it is worth investing your time in watching me, even with my grey hair, double chin and wrinkles.

… well done Dr Beard … on all of the above.

Honours for Judith Lynn Sebesta

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Nice item about our longtime interent friend Judith Lynn Sebesta! From the Yankton Press and Dakotan:

Judith Lynn Sebesta, Ph.D., professor of classics and chair of the department of history at the University of South Dakota, is the 2012 recipient of the Monsignor James Doyle Humanities Teaching Award. Presented by the College of Arts and Sciences at USD, Sebesta was honored with the award and $500 at the 2012 Phi Beta Kappa initiation/Lifto Amundson Lecture on March 29.

Sebesta is co-editor of “The World of Roman Costume” (University of Wisconsin Press) and co-author of “The Worlds of Roman Women” (Focus Press). She is co-editor of “The On-line Companion to the Worlds of Roman Women” (www2.cnr.edu/home/sas/araia/companion.html <http://www2.cnr.edu/home/sas/araia/companion.html> ), executive secretary of the National Committee for Latin and Greek (www.promotelatin.org) and is noted for her expertise in Latin teaching methodology. She has taught courses in Latin, Classical Mythology, Ancient Egypt and Women in Antiquity, and her research interests include Women in Antiquity, particularly Roman women, and Roman clothing and costumes. Sebesta received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Made possible thanks to a gift from Monsignor James Michael Doyle, former chair of religious studies at USD and a prominent theologian inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, the Doyle Award is awarded annually to an outstanding teacher in the Humanities Division of the College of Arts and Sciences.

via: USD Professor Recipient Of Doyle Humanities Teaching Award (Press and Dakotan)

d.m. Colin Austin

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From Cambridge City News:

Cambridge professor Colin Austin, one of the world’s leading specialists on ancient Greek texts, has died of cancer at the age of 69.

Australian-born Prof Austin was educated in England and France – his mother tongue was French.

He studied at Oxford and came to Trinity Hall as a research fellow in 1965.

He was made a director of studies there, and remained a fellow until he retired in 2008.

Prof Austin, a fellow of the British Academy, taught in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge and was treasurer of the Cambridge Philological Society for 40 years.

Colleagues said he had “a remarkable gift” for reconstructing fragmentary poetic texts preserved on Egyptian papyri.

Prof Austin had been working on a new edition of Greek New Comedy poet Menander.

He is survived by his wife Mishtu, their two children and four grandchildren.

d.m. Bernard Knox

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From the New York Times:

Bernard M. W. Knox, an authority on the works of Sophocles, a prolific scholar and the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, died July 22 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 95.

The cause was a heart attack, said his son, MacGregor.

An American born and raised in Britain, Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. While serving in the United States Army during World War II, he parachuted into France to work with the resistance and went on to join the partisans in Italy.

Returning to the United States with a Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre, he resumed his study of the classics at Yale, where he earned a doctorate in 1948 and taught, becoming a full professor in 1959. In 1961, he was asked to lead the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, a Harvard affiliate, whose directorship he held until 1985.

His first book, which established his reputation, was “Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time.” Originally published in 1957 by Yale University Press, it remains in print in a new 1998 edition, as do several of his other books.

Notable among those is a landmark anthology he edited with college students as well as general readers in mind, “The Norton Book of Classical Literature” (1993).

He also wrote introductions for Robert Fagles’s new translations of Homer’s “Iliad” (1991) and “Odyssey” (2002) and Virgil’s “Aeneid” (2006).

Professor Knox was admired for the clear and powerful prose he brought to his essays, many of them published in general-interest magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

They remain required reading in college courses on Greek and Roman literature and were collected in “The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy” (1964), “Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater” (1980), “Essays Ancient and Modern” (1989), “The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics” (1993) and “Backing Into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal” (1994).

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on Nov. 24, 1914. He studied classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1936. Spurred by the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, he had committed himself to the political left well before that.

He spent vacations in Paris, staying in cheap hotels, becoming fluent in French and befriending fellow students marching against fascism for the Popular Front. When civil war broke out in Spain, he joined a machine-gun unit of the French Battalion of the 11th International Brigade, fighting on the northwest sector of the Madrid front. He described his experiences in “Premature Anti-Fascist,” a lecture delivered in 1998 at New York University.

In 1939, he married Betty Baur, an American he had met in Cambridge, and began teaching Latin at a private school in Greenwich, Conn. His wife died in 2006. In addition to his son, MacGregor, of London, he is survived by a sister, Elizabeth L. Campbell of Chapel Hill, N.C., and two grandchildren.

Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army, where he trained as an aircraft armorer and, after attending officer training school, returned to Britain in 1943 as an air defense officer at a B-17 bomber base.

He found the duty boring and approached the Office of Strategic Services, which took note of his fluent French and assigned him to an operations unit, despite his history with the international brigades in Spain.

After training as a parachutist, he fought with a special force organized by the O.S.S., the British and the Free French to coordinate elements of the French Resistance with advancing Allied troops after the Normandy invasion. He also instructed members of the French Maquis in the use of explosives.

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”

He continued, “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”

Professor Knox’s many honorary degrees and distinctions included the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism in 1977, given for a review-essay in The New York Review of Books on Andrei Serban’s production of “Agamemnon” at Lincoln Center; the Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment of the Humanities, in 1990; and the Jefferson Medal of the Philosophical Society of America in 2004.

The Frankel Prize, awarded for contributing to the public’s understanding of the humanities, cited his books on Greek culture written for a general audience. In 1992, the National Council on the Humanities chose Professor Knox to deliver its yearly Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In his later years, he found himself defending classical learning against the champions of multiculturalism.

“There is a sort of general feeling among radicals that the whole of the Western tradition — and the Greeks are the heart of that tradition — is something that has to be repudiated,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “I feel appalled. God knows what the world would be like if we were all brought up on the stuff they’d like us to read.”

via: Bernard Knox, 95, Classics Scholar, Dies | New York Times