the CAMPVS

Recommended article– Greek Tragedy

Reading up for my recent post about the archaic notion of justice, I was reminded of an excellent article also by E.R. Dodds, called “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.” A professor gave it to me when I read the play with him several years ago, and upon reading it again today I was reminded what a valuable part of the Sophoclean bibliography it is. It is brief, only thirteen pages, but points to the major ways the play was misread (by his students) when the article was written in 1966. The article remains a valuable insight into the character of Oedipus, the author Sophocles, and the play itself. I recommend it to all readers of the play as an accessible introduction to thinking about “justice” in the play.

Dodds, E.R. “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.” Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., Vol. 13, No. 1. (Apr., 1966): 37-49.

recent takes on Dante

I just want to link this post about the “interpretations” Dante has been getting recently in Italy– where’s this stuff in the states? Granted, people here do this kind of stuff for Shakespeare.

Homer’s gods and justice

The opening lines of this post are enough to pique the interest of any Iliad-lover. One of the most interesting things about reading the Iliad is trying to understand the conception of the gods and fate put forth. There are reams of books and articles on the subject. One of the best and most accessible is E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, which my Greek teacher gave us the first few chapters of to introduce us to the issue of the brutal gods in the epic. Here is a passage from page 29 of the UC Press 2004 edition:

“In Iliad 24 Achilles, moved at last by the spectacle of his broken enemy Priam, pronounces the tragic moral of the whole poem: ‘For so the gods have spun the thread for pitiful humanity, that the life of man should be sorrow, while themselves are exempt from care.’ And he goes on to the famous image of the two jars from which Zeus draws forth his good and evil gifts. To some men he gives a mixed assortment, to others, unmixed evil, so that they wander tormented over the face of the earth ‘unregarded by gods or men.’ As for the unmixed good, that, we are to assume, is a portion reserved for the gods. The gods have nothing to do with justice: else the moral would be false. For in the Iliad heroism does not bring happiness; its sole, and sufficient, reward is fame. Yet for all that, Homer’s princes bestride their world boldly; they fear the gods only as they fear their human overlords, nor are they oppressed by the future even when, like Achilles, they know that it holds an approaching doom.”

Two Words

In the entry for the Latin noun caput in Wheelock (ch. 11), several English derivatives are listed. Here are two good ones to add to your arsenal:

occiput: the back or posterior part of the head (ob + caput)
sinciput: the front part of the head or skull (semi + caput)

Also of interest is ‘kerchief’, consisting of ‘chief’ < ME chef, chief, < OF chef, chief (= Pr. cap, Sp. cabo, It. capo head):–Rom. type *capu-m:–L. caput head) (from OED entry for chief (n.)), and ker- (whole word from ME kerchef, syncopated form of keverchef, < OF cuevrechief (from OED entry for kerchief (n.)). ‘Cover’ (‘coverchief’ is an earlier form of ‘kerchief’), in turn, goes back via Old French to the Latin verb cooperire.

Steven Runciman on the writing of history

From the preface to volume one of his history of the Crusades:

It may seem unwise for one British pen to compete with the massed typewriters of the United States. But in fact there is no competition. A single author cannot speak with the high authority of a panel of experts, but he may succeed in giving to his work an integrated and even an epical quality that no composite volume can achieve. Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History, as Gibbon, the greatest of our historians, was aware; and it is difficult, in spite of certain critics, to believe that Homer was a panel. History today has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialised dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work can be of the highest value; but it is not an end in itself. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. The writer rash enough to make the attempt should not be criticised for his ambition, however much he may deserve censure for the inadequacy of his equpiment or the inanity of his results.

I heartily agree. And if that makes me unfashionable, well, I just got my copy of Hardy Amies ABCs of Men’s Fashion, so there’s hope.

Housman’s letters again

Another review of Archie Burnett’s edition of Housman’s letters has appeared, this time by Paul Johnson in the Literary Review. Johnson is wrong when he says that Last Poems was ‘reluctantly published’. Housman had no desire to publish for decades because he had nothing to publish, but once Last Poems began to present itself to him he surprised his friends and his publisher with the news that he had something. Housman rarely did anything reluctantly. He did it of his own accord or he curtly explained why he would not.

But Johnson does appreciate Housman as an epistolographer, and excerpts this fine specimen for his readers:

When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it means to the reader.

Not bad. But overall there’s nothing new in this review, and nothing that indicates any greater familiarity with the letters than one can get from a good biography (e.g., Housman, the Scholar-Poet by Richard Perceval Graves).

Now Frank Kermode’s review in the London Review of Books (which I can’t seem to access at the moment)–there’s one worth reading.

How do you make kids care?

Admittedly it wasn’t an inspired decision, but the other day I started off some of my classes with a piece from Nuntii Latini on the reelection of Pervez Musharraf. I thought that having them work through a current event in Latin would arouse some interest, and expected at least some of the students to recognize Musharraf. Not a single student did, and they found the whole thing incomprehensible without careful guidance and a modern history lesson. One student even asked what ‘Pakistaniae’ meant, after he failed to find it in his Latin glossary.

So that was a failure.

Today I was reminded just a bit of some of the silly things kids like to hear about when we came across fenestra, and I taught them defenestration. There was so much joy and laughter upon learning a word that means ‘to throw someone out of a window’, and to be honest I was surprised no one knew the word already. I think maybe I expect too much from them and have missed out on teaching opportunities because of it.

I’d like to hear from anyone who has thoughts on things that capture the interest and enthusiasm of students, however small. Please feel free to comment here.

West on Passages of Disputed Authenticity

In M.L. West’s commentary on the Theogony, he remarks in his introduction to the Typhoeus passage (820-80) that it is ‘one of the sections of the Theogony whose authenticity has most often been disputed’, and then briefly summarizes and responds to six arguments that it is not by Hesiod. Here is the third, followed by an important critical principle:

Gaia’s part in producing an enemy to Zeus’ regime is at variance with her benevolence toward Zeus in the rest of the Theogony. Again, comparison of an Oriental parallel (Enuma Elis) helps to explain the anomaly: see p. 24. The assumption of multiple authorship is the most naive of all ways of accounting for contradictions in mythology.