In the Double Minority

Novelist Philip Roth recently predicted that within twenty-five years, reading novels will be a “cultic” activity, reserved for an enthusiastic minority who retain the attention span for novel reading and are able to resist the allure of the big and small screens.  Roth said:

I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.

You can read the rest of the story here.

 

Girls Reading Vergil

Things have been rather quiet here lately.  The term is limping along.  At Carleton, we’re in week 7 of our nine-and-a-half week term.  This fall, the flu is taking full advantage of the stressed and sleep-deprived student body.  As of this morning, 30% of my Latin 101 class is out with a reported case of the flu.

To pass the time until the crisis has passed and some original content becomes available, here’s a an article I published in New England Classical Journal about Latin in the Progressive Era, focusing specifically on an episode in Jean Webster’s novel for girls, Just Patty (1911).  The article is a downloadable PDF file.

“Girls Reading Vergil: Stories of Latin and Progressive Education.” Originally published in New England Classical Journal 32.2 (May 2006).  Copyright © 2006 by Rob Hardy.

 

The Ancient Romans on Eating Locally

Emperor Elagabalus.

It was commonplace in Latin poetry that the Golden Age came to a decisive end when humans started to build ships and sail across the sea. In the good old days, men stayed at home and plowed the earth and ate the produce of their own fields. In his tragedy Medea, Seneca (d. 65 CE) writes: “Then every man inactive kept to his own shores and lived to old age on ancestral fields, rich with but little, knowing no wealth save what his home soil had yielded.” The fall from grace came when men cut down trees to fashion ships, transgressing the natural limits that the gods had established. As Horace (d. 8 CE) writes: “In vain did a provident god separate the lands with a disconnecting sea, if ungodly ships still bound across the forbidden depths.”

Ships made possible trade with distant lands, and the Romans no longer had to rely on the produce of their own fields. Corn (wheat) flowed in from the provinces to feed the Roman populace. All boundaries had been dissolved. Seneca writes: “All bounds have been removed, cities have set their walls in new lands, and the world, now passable throughout, has left nothing where it once had place: the Indian drinks of the cold Arazes, the Persians quaff the Elbe and the Rhine. ” Moralists like Horace and Seneca saw that the Romans had abandoned the virtues of the agrarian ancestors for luxury and license.

Food was a clear marker of the fall from ancient Roman virtue. The Stoic philosopher Seneca is obsessed with food. In his Moral Epistles, he writes about the rise in obesity in Rome, comparing his contemporaries with their more abstemious ancestors: “[In those days] men’s bodies were still sound and strong; their food was light and not spoiled by art and luxury, whereas when they began to seek dishes not for the sake of removing, but of rousing, the appetite, and devised countless sauces to whet their gluttony, —then what before was nourishment to a hungry man became a burden to the full stomach.”

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon pauses to dwell on the decadence of the early third-century emperor Elagabalus. First on the list of his vices was that he liked to “confound the order of seasons and climates.” In other words, he ate foods out of season, and imported from great distances. In a footnote, Gibbon writes: “He would never eat sea-fish except at a great distance from the sea…”

The Historia Augusta, Gibbon’s source, records a long list of outlandish foods consumed by Elagabalus, including peacock tongues and ostrich brains. The late Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius includes this recipe for Roasted Flamingo: “Pluck the flamingo, wash it, truss it, put it in a pot; add water, salt, dill, and a bit of vinegar. When it is half cooked, tie together a bouquet of leeks and coriander and cook together with the flamingo. When it is almost cooked, add defrutum [reduced wine] for color. In a mortar put pepper, cumin, coriander, silphium root, mint, and rue; grind, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and poor on cooking broth. Empty into the same pot and thicken with starch. Pour the sauce over the flamingo and serve. Do the same for parrot.”*

Even if you manage to procure a flamingo for roasting, you won’t find silphium root. The exotic and expensive herb, imported by the Romans from Syria, went extinct during the reign of Nero. Poor dyspeptic Seneca was part of the last generation to enjoy the taste of silphium root in his food.

*From Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa, A Taste of Ancient Rome (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120.

 

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Middlemarch is back on the shelf, and my next big read is Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s monumental work originally appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, and is available in various modern editions, including the hefty three-volume Penguin edition elegantly introduced and edited by David Womersley. Pictured above is the 1114-page first volume.

There are some interesting affinities between George Eliot, the philosophic novelist, and Gibbon, the philosophic historian. Both probe into the dark recesses of human motivation; both approach their subjects with an equal measure of irony and sympathy. David Womersley, in his introduction, writes: “[T]he belief in unintended consequences naturally led the philosophic historian to form surprisingly nuanced judgements prompted by unexpectedly broad sympathies… Individuals and institutions, which he could only condemn as in themselves criminal or perverse, at moments contributed positively to human society, while, in obedience to the same principle, those he admired or loved may, despite their best endeavours, have exerted a harmful influence” (xxiii).

Thus Gibbon praises and admires the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, but shows us that, through his indulgence as a father, Marcus bequeathed to Rome the troubled reign of his unstable son Commodus. On the other hand, he dates the beginning of the end of Rome to the reign of the murderous and self-interested Septimius Severus, who temporarily restored a measure of peace and justice to the empire.

Of Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon writes: “The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable, and the only defective, part of his character” (108). This is typical of Gibbon’s style, contrasting, in the same sentence, a positive and negative assessment of a person’s character or actions. “The most amiable, but only defective, part of his character.” There’s a kind of dizzying, dazzling even-handedness about Gibbon as he performs his stylistic juggling act, making judgments while seeming to keep judgment suspended in the air.

Cross-posted on Rough Draft.

 

Hipparchus

This is an interesting little dialogue.  I’d encountered bits of it, as it is one of the sources (besides Herodotus and Thucydides) for the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and it is also a source that tells us something about the herms which my 415 project has me interested in.  So the middle part of the dialogue, about Hipparchus, was familiar to me.  But I’d never read the full context.

 

Lysis

I’ve been delaying blogging on the Lysis because I’m not sure what to make of it.  It’s odd!  The subtitle is “On Friendship” (philia), and that’s what the bulk of it is about, but the frame is much more concerned with eros.  Socrates visits a wrestling-school and finds a young man besotted by a boy (he is described as “quite young” and designated a pais; but how old?  10? 12?).  The initial part of the dialogue involves Socrates instructing the young man how best to go about wooing his favorite.  It is only in this context, as he demonstrates how Hippothales should converse with his beloved Lysis, that we get the discussion about friendship.

 

The Laches

My daily blogging experiment was rudely interrupted by a Labor Day Week-end trip to Chicago (which, by the way, yielded an exciting new picture of the torpedo seafish mentioned in the Meno; scroll down to see the new picture).  But I am still pretty much on track with reading.

 

Metacognition

Charmides 163-172.  Here Critias has taken over as interlocutor from sweet young Charmides; he pushes first his revised definition for temperance (sophrosune): from “doing your own business” to “doing good things” (163e) which is abruptly dropped (when Socrates asks if it’s still temperance when you do good in ignorance) and replaced with the Delphic admonition to “know yourself” (164d).

Now given that Socrates himself, back in the First Alcibiades, suggested this as a good goal, and furthermore defined it as knowing your own soul, and furthermore suggested that the method for knowing one’s own soul was to contemplate the knowing soul in someone else (thus practicing knowing knowing, as it were), it is odd and confusing that here he absolutely resists the possibility of any such thing. 

 

Experiment

I’ve clearly gotten way behind with Plato, and now will need to read at a rate of 10 Stephanus pages per day rather than 5 to keep up.  I’m going to experiment with the Charmides on the possibility of blogging this daily, rather than having a posting per dialogue (which frankly encourages me to skip reading and then catch up later).  So here’s a quick post on the first 10 pages of the Charmides, which is about “temperance” or sophrosune.  (There are a lot of Greek words below, but I’m figuring that anyone actually reading this knows what they mean.)

Charmides 153-162: Socrates returns from the campaign at Potidea and goes to the wrestling-school to catch up on hot youths. 

 

Platonic Diablogging 18

For reasons not entirely clear to me, my Loeb (1927) tells me that the Second Alcibiades is spurious while the first is not.  The dialogue is about prayer, and the risks of being granted what you wish for, but the underlying assumptions being probed have more to do with desire.  Socrates suggests to Alcibiades that if a god were to grant him power, but that power resulted in his death, then the prayer for power would result in harm rather than good; best (like the Spartans) simply to pray “that the gods will give them for their own benefit the beautiful as well as the good” (148c).

For Socrates this all has to do with knowledge, and specifically “knowledge of the best” — the possession of which alone allows one to pray safely.  Desire without knowledge is dangerous.  Knowledge — at least knowledge of “the best” — is what allows us to regulate our desires, to understand that things we think we want may end up being harmful.

It was interesting to read this right after the essay of Richard Seaford (currently at the top of the Obiter Lecta list) on the Greeks and money.  Seaford claims that money differs from goods in being, theoretically, without limit.  At a certain point, the argument goes, you have enough cows or tripods or slave women, but you never have enough money: when you have 6 talents you want 16, then 40.  This unlimited nature is problematic for the Greeks, Seaford claims, and their philosophical tradition therefore values limit over the unlimited.  Seaford quotes the Philebus in support of this, as well as Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: “bad is of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans surmised, and good is of the limited”.

Seaford’s essay (like his 2004 book) is fascinating and thought-provoking.  But I’m not sure I’m convinced that it’s the introduction of coinage that focuses the Greeks on the dangers of the limitless: desire (and other emotions, like anger) seems by nature to be infinite; this is why the Epicureans and Stoics tried so hard to learn to control it.  The question raised by the Second Alcibiades is whether “knowledge of the best” is the way to do that.  If I know that great power will put me in personal danger, will I stop desiring power?  Perhaps.  If I know that my child may be “utterly bad” or may be killed by disaster (142c), will I stop desiring children?  What kind of a world will we end up in if everyone somehow gets this knowledge?  This feels like a cost-benefit analysis gone wild!

The answer in the context of the dialogue is to avoid specific requests in prayer, and leave to the gods the question of what will be beneficial to us.  But at the end, Alcibiades gives Socrates the garland he was going to offer to the gods; Plato (or whoever wrote the dialogue) clearly implies that Socrates possesses the knowledge of the best.