Has anyone noticed of late that reading/quoting Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations seems to have become the barometer of whether you are a serious intellectual these days? Look at these examples just in the past week … from the DC Examiner in regards to Arthur Brooks (president of the American Enterprise Institute):

So it is that he begins his day with this routine: For an hour beginning at 5:30 a.m., he exercises — cardio and weights. (The rigor of the regimen is obvious from his linelike figure.) As the early morning continues, Brooks, a Roman Catholic, reads the Bible and, lately, has devoted some of his morning reading period to the second century A.D. “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.” He also does math problems.

Then, Sir Terry Wogan was mentioning in a Times interview:

I’m very interested in religion and if you went into my loo you’d find the writings of St Thomas Aquinas and Marcus Aurelius.

Then there’s Alexander Lebedev, the new owner of the Evening Standard, who was also mentioned in the Times:

One of his many historical heroes is the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. “I would like to think that I am following his example, rather than other emperors who were more profligate.”

He was a bit more explicit in the Independent:

He conceded that his financial resources had been drained by the economic downturn. “I will survive? Every economic crisis is cyclical – one day you borrow cheaply, one day you have to pay it all back. Like Deribaska’s 27 billion or Usmanov with 12. So I didn’t amass any losses, any debts, and I live through it. So, for me, my personal consumption is very limited. I’m taught to be more Marcus Aurelius than Caracalla if you know your Roman history.”

One of the things I think we need a new word or term for is the phenomenon whereby someone notices a sudden ‘cluster’ of mentions of some potentially ‘obscure’ reference to something or someone — sort of like synchronicity of reference or something like that. A case in point is that over the past week, I’ve suddenly seen a bunch of references to Odysseus and the Sirens.  The first one to catch my eye came under the headline Slutty prairie voles make Science news in the Times Beacon Record:

According to an article written by John Tierney in one of my favorite reads, the Science Section of the Tuesday New York Times, we are not far away from an actual pharmaceutical love potion and hence an anti-love vaccine as well.

A love potion may be possible as the result of analysis of brain chemistry in mammalian pair bonding by neuroscientist Larry Young. His work is presented in the latest issue of the highly respected magazine, Nature. But Tierney has taken this a step further. If we know how to make a love potion because we understand what chemicals are involved, he reasons that we also know how to make an anti-love potion, “a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself.”

OK, so Tierney is not a romantic, but he does make a point. Remember that Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast as he sailed past the irresistibly seductive Sirens whose aim was to cause ships to crash upon the rocks and their sailors to become prisoners.

Okay … fair enough. You’d figure it would be the article citation from Nature which caused a pile of hits. That’s certainly what happened with a column in the New York Times with the headline Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss.

Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens.

I can’t check whether the Odysseus/Sirens ref is in the Nature article (it’s behind a payfer wall, of course), but it makes sense for the reference to suddenly appear in a couple of places from the same source. But then we read of a sculpture by Terry Allen which will somehow be broadcasting the Obama inauguration … the public sculpture described thusly in the LA Times:

It is exceedingly strange to encounter these ghostly gray memories of nature entombed in the grove — especially when they seem to be murmuring something at passersby, like Homer’s Sirens beckoning to Odysseus.

… and even less connected is the incipit of a piece in the Motley Fool:

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus plugged his crew’s ears with wax to tune out the Sirens’ song. He left his own ears unplugged, but he lashed himself to the mast to avoid making any regrettable decisions.

Perhaps the idea was implanted in assorted journalistic synapses with all the coverage of the Blagojevich brouhaha … e.g. the State Journal-Register noted just before Christmas:

The same week in 2004 that Blagojevich skipped his own Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Springfield in order to react to Chicago Mayor RICHARD DALEY’s proposal for a casino there, Blagojevich quoted both THEODORE ROOSEVELT and Odysseus from Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

In the process of turning down the Chicago casino idea, Blagojevich likened himself to Odysseus being strapped to the mast of his ship so he could hear the beautiful song of the Sirens without being lured to his death.

I think I’ll call these things synchrorefs … (which doesn’t even trigger WordPress’ spellcheck!)