A char­i­o­teer of FACTIO VENETA.

I tweeted ear­lier today about some games for use in the Latin class­room, and men­tioned that I would blog about my favorite. Apolo­gies to the orig­i­na­tor of this game.*

CIRCUS FACTIONS is a great game for get­ting stu­dents up and mov­ing while actively review­ing and cor­rect­ing var­i­ous points. It’s par­tic­u­larly effec­tive for deal­ing with lists, like con­ju­gat­ing verbs or declin­ing nouns. It’s highly adapt­able, and I’m sure you can think of other appli­ca­tions, but it can be used prof­itably at any level.

Teams

Stu­dents are divided into the four famous teams from the cir­cus races, which were sup­posed to have rep­re­sented the four seasons:

• FACTIO PRASINA (‘the greens,’ rep­re­sent­ing the spring).
• FACTIO RVSSATA (‘the reds,’ rep­re­sent­ing the summer).
• FACTIO VENETA (‘the blues,’ rep­re­sent­ing the autumn).
• FACTIO ALBATA (‘the whites,’ rep­re­sent­ing the winter).

A char­i­o­teer of FACTIO RUSSATA.

Teams can be cho­sen how­ever you like (count­ing off by num­bers, etc.), but one thing I’ve done to good effect in the past is to choose teams that divide stu­dents as equally as pos­si­ble by abil­ity level, the effort each stu­dent puts in, or by grades earned. Stu­dents don’t need to know how the teams have been cho­sen (you can pre­tend it’s ran­dom, and can swap play­ers around occa­sion­ally to keep up the illu­sion), but con­sciously divid­ing groups allows you to ensure that no one group will dom­i­nate the game to such a degree that oth­ers become discouraged.

Set-up

A char­i­o­teer of FACTIO ALBATA.

Choose a rea­son­able start­ing line some dis­tance away from the board (not too far, not too close), and clear any and all obsta­cles away. Each team lines up in sin­gle file, the first mem­ber hold­ing a piece of chalk or a dry erase marker. (It’s great if you can match these in some way to the team’s color.)

The images in this post are tacked up at the board above where each team is to com­plete its list.

Rules

1. The first stu­dent from each team dashes to the board on the teacher’s com­mand and com­pletes the first item in the list.
2. The first racer returns to the start­ing line where the next racer waits and passes the chalk (or marker) like a baton in a relay race.
3. This and each suc­ces­sive racer has two options (and only two): either to com­plete the next item in the list, or to make one cor­rec­tion to some­thing that has already been done.
4. Teams earn points based on the order in which they fin­ish, and the final win­ner is deter­mined by adding up the points earned in suc­ces­sive races.

This can be an incred­i­bly fun game, but, like most, I wouldn’t overdo it. Make it some­thing stu­dents beg for.

A char­i­o­teer of FACTIO PRASINA.

* I learned the game when I began tak­ing courses for New Jersey’s Alter­nate Route to Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. The sequence of courses is tech­ni­cally sequen­tial, but you can begin at any stage, com­plet­ing the ear­lier sec­tions that you’ve missed later in time. When I started a group of teach­ers was com­plet­ing their assign­ments from the last unit, and this con­sisted of pre­sent­ing games for class­room use. I’m noto­ri­ous for not remem­ber­ing names (Sarah teases me for not know­ing the names of any of my col­lege room­mates), so I can’t recall the teacher who pre­sented this to the class. If you’re him (or know him), please let me know.

“Words mean things, and the study of words is the nat­ural intro­duc­tion to that knowl­edge of ancient life, social and polit­i­cal, which it is the object of the scholar to attain.“
–H. Net­tle­ship, from the pref­ace to Pas­sages for Trans­la­tion into Latin Prose (1887)

A per­sonal favorite has passed:

Bernard Knox, 95, Clas­sics Scholar, Dies
By WOLFGANG SAXON

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” (1990) and “Odyssey” (1996) 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.”

William Grimes con­tributed reporting.

This arti­cle has been revised to reflect the fol­low­ing correction:

Cor­rec­tion: August 19, 2010

An obit­u­ary on Tues­day about the clas­sics scholar Bernard Knox mis­stated the pub­li­ca­tion dates of two books for which he wrote intro­duc­tions. Robert Fagles’s trans­la­tion of the “Iliad” was pub­lished in 1990, not 1991, and his trans­la­tion of the “Odyssey” was pub­lished in 1996, not 2002.

Sarah and I went to the hos­pi­tal on Mon­day, and our son man­aged to snag a pretty nifty birth­day (unless you’re out­side the States): 8/9/10.

Here he is:

He was born by c-section, and we were half-tempted to call him Caesar.

We’re call­ing him Ash from his ini­tials (Alexan­der Sage, plus my wife’s sur­name, which begins with an H). We’ve also taken to call­ing him Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μικρός: Alexan­der the Small.

We liked Alexan­der because it’s a great clas­si­cal name that will give lots of pos­si­ble nick­names. We were torn between Alexan­der and one of its Gaelic forms (Alas­dair or Alas­tar), but when he was fresh from the womb and Sarah was still being sutured, she soothed him by recit­ing the open­ing of the Iliad. That set­tled the mat­ter (and no, we don’t expect him to be any­thing like Homer’s Alexan­der, AKA Paris).

The mid­dle name Sage is a nod to the great Carl Sagan. Though it’s not ety­mo­log­i­cally con­nected, we liked the sound of Sage as an echo of Sagan, and of the fact that we could also link it by sep­a­rate deriva­tions to Latin roots mean­ing both’wise’ (VLat *sapius, cf. sapere, sapi­ens) and ‘well, sound’ (Lat salvus).

Thanks for your sup­port, and rest assured that this will not become a blog about how cool our baby is.

Well, our baby should be here very soon, but while we wait I thought it might be fun to see what all of you thought about baby names; more specif­i­cally names for a boy.

This one is already out:

Her­ak­les by the­cam­pvs

We have our own short list, and to the con­ster­na­tion of our fam­i­lies are keep­ing the names secret. If you have a suggestion–serious, clever, humor­ous, Clas­si­cal, or otherwise–please leave a comment.

With­out your help we may resort to Sortes Vir­gilianae (or per­haps Home­r­i­cae).

Jami Rodriguez jew­elry demon­strates bad numis­mat­ics (click to see larger)

It seems as though jew­elry design­ers like using ancient coinage as inspi­ra­tion for their pieces, but aren’t as con­cerned about the accu­racy of the descrip­tion on the web­sites that sell them.  In  Bad Jew­elry Latin (well, His­tory), I dis­cussed a ring that was described as depict­ing Cae­sar, but was clearly actu­ally a coin depict­ing Alexan­der the Great. In this instance, the sam­ple sale web­site Bil­lion Dol­lar Babes calls this item “God­dess Ban­gles” and describes them as “14k Gold Filled Ban­gles with Gold God­dess Coin.”

Unfor­tu­nately, though the coin is pur­ported to depict a “god­dess,” it is imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able to those who study numis­mat­ics as the obverse of the coinage of Rhodes, which was unique among the major pro­duc­ers of coinage for using a 3/4 face instead of the more com­mon full pro­file for much of their coinage.  This face is of course no “god­dess,” but the god Helios, a god so impor­tant to Rhodes that they com­mis­sioned a mon­u­men­tal statue of him, the Colos­sus of Rhodes,  to over­look the city.  Here is a nice image of the coin that is being recre­ated on the bracelet.  Note the reverse image, the dis­tinc­tive Rho­dian rose.

Those famil­iar with ancient iconog­ra­phy can prob­a­bly tell that the image depicts a youth­ful god, even with­out know­ing the Rho­dian coin.  The CAMPVS’s own Den­nis, who doesn’t have the same train­ing in numis­mat­ics as I, guessed that the coin might depict Apollo, but hadn’t even con­sid­ered a god­dess.  If only the peo­ple that write these descrip­tions of coins had some sort of clas­si­cal train­ing, or con­sulted some­one who does, when their pieces draw on ancient icono­graph­i­cal tra­di­tions, then per­haps this sort of error wouldn’t keep occuring.

Tell me you wouldn’t want to see a baby in this:

Her­ak­les by the­cam­pvs
design your own shirt on zazzle.com

It was Sarah’s idea, as our baby is due any week now. I drew lit­tle Her­ak­les yes­ter­day after­noon and uploaded the image last night.

The fol­low­ing is only tan­gen­tially Classics-related, but we’re also big fans of sci­ence and science-based med­i­cine (which is also the name of a great blog), and so we wanted our baby to have a pro-vaccination shirt. The Clas­si­cal con­nec­tion is the owl, which I drew just the other day. We’ll pre­tend it’s Athena’s. There are two ver­sions, depend­ing on your lan­guage preference:

Amer­i­can English

Both shirts fea­ture the owl hold­ing a sign which reads “Be wise!” The Amer­i­can ver­sion then says “Immunize!”

Be wise! Immu­nize! by the­cam­pvs
Design cus­tomized t shirts at Zazzle

British Eng­lish

This ver­sion instead reads “Immunise!”

Be Wise! Immu­nise! by the­cam­pvs
Browse Vac­cine T-Shirts

Both end with the line “vac­cines save lives.”

I’m sure by now many of you have heard the news about the 52,000 coin hoard found in Britain by using a metal detec­tor.  For my part, I’d like to thank Patrick Calla­han of Ford­ham for draw­ing the story to my atten­tion.  A rather thor­ough arti­cle on the find can be found here.  Like many who are dis­cussing this story, I want to draw atten­tion to the integrity of Dave Crisp, who when he real­ized as he dug that he had found a sub­stan­tial find, reported it to the author­i­ties.  The hoard was then able to be exca­vated by pro­fes­sion­als who may con­se­quently be able to learn much about the little-understood 3rd c. AD in Britain, when Carau­sius usurped power and began to mint coins under his name at the Lon­don mint.  He was quite busy at this dur­ing his 7 years in power, as you can see by brows­ing his page at Wildwinds.com.

Debates flair up occa­sion­ally but pas­sion­ately about whether coins ought to be included in trade and sale bans, as in the Cypriot ban of 2007, dis­cussed by me here.  Soon after the ban, sev­eral coin col­lect­ing orga­ni­za­tions sued the State Depart­ment for details about the deci­sion.  This New York Times arti­cle says of the ban, “It was the first time the gov­ern­ment had barred trade in a broad cat­e­gory of ancient coins, and col­lec­tors and deal­ers were sur­prised. Archae­ol­o­gists, who often use coins to help them date finds, sup­ported that ban on the grounds that trea­sure hunters using metal detec­tors to search for coins fre­quently dam­age sig­nif­i­cant sites.”   Mr. Crisp proves that “trea­sure hunters using metal detec­tors” can be a valu­able ally for archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery, pro­vided that they report their finds appro­pri­ately.   Arti­cles on the the story all sug­gest that he will be rewarded finan­cially for his dis­cov­ery, split­ting the reward with the owner of the land on which the coins were found.  This is an incen­tive for those who may think they would only profit from a sim­i­lar dis­cov­ery through pri­vate sale (as on eBay, where a quick search turns up many ancient coins claimed to be from British hoards).  Along with his finan­cial gain (and even with­out it), Dave Crisp has a small place in the annals of archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery, which is pretty cool in its own right.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Clas­si­cists on Twit­ter, I can now link to some more great infor­ma­tion on the hoard.  Con­stan­tina Kat­sari (c_katsari) linked to this great arti­cle on the hoard, with details about the exca­va­tion and the coins found therein, and this link includes tons of pic­tures.    Ter­rence Lock­yer (TLock­yer) tweeted this BBC inter­view video on the hoard.  While I’m on the sub­ject of twit­ter, the Campvs’s own Den­nis is on Twit­ter (dmmch), and his tweets include links to new blog posts.

There’s a lot to be learned from texts that might seem out of date, and while it seems odd to say that to any­one inter­ested in ancient texts, it’s easy to for­get that the lat­est schol­ar­ship isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the most instruc­tive. I think that one of the great­est obsta­cles to the past is the ever-increasing wall of inter­pre­ta­tion and with it the end­less branch­ing of every field into a thou­sand specialties.

Clas­sics of his­tory and schol­ar­ship endure, despite—and in part because of—the crit­i­cism and revi­sion they inspire (think of Gib­bon), but equally instruc­tive is the way in which clas­sics help you to see how oth­ers see things.

George Grote pro­duced such a clas­sic in his His­tory of Greece (1846–1856), and from the start his method is clear and his rea­son is sound, at least on a topic that frus­trates many stu­dents and pro­duces moun­tains of use­less con­jec­ture. Here he is on leg­ends regard­ing the gods:

I main­tain, more­over, fully, the char­ac­ter of these great divine agents as Per­sons, which is the light in which they pre­sented them­selves to the Home­ric or Hes­iodic audi­ence. Ura­nos, Nyx, Hyp­nos and Oneiros (Heaven, Night, Sleep and Dream), are Per­sons, just as much as Zeus and Apollo. To resolve them into mere alle­gories, is unsafe and unprof­itable: we then depart from the point of view of the orig­i­nal hear­ers, with­out acquir­ing any con­sis­tent or philo­soph­i­cal point of view of our own. For although some of the attrib­utes and actions ascribed to these per­sons are often explic­a­ble by alle­gory the whole series and sys­tem of them never are so: the the­o­rist who adopts this course of expla­na­tion finds that, after one or two sim­ple and obvi­ous steps, the path is no longer open, and he is forced to clear a way for him­self by gra­tu­itous refine­ments and con­jec­tures. The alle­gor­i­cal per­sons and attrib­utes are always found min­gled with other per­sons and attrib­utes not alle­gor­i­cal; but the two classes can­not be sev­ered with­out break­ing up the whole march of the myth­i­cal events, nor can any expla­na­tion which dri­ves us to such a neces­sity be con­sid­ered as admissible.

Would that Robert Graves (and many oth­ers since) had felt the same.