My dear friend Karnythia is, with one of her friends, trying to start up a small press for writers of colour. They have called it Verb Noire and are currently running a fundraiser to try and get a little money together for startup costs. If you have a little cash you want to contribute, please do. I think this is a worthy endeavour and I wish them the best of luck.

Contribution widget can be found here.

I’ve been settling down into my new home and program.  The dog had to go back home in December, which makes me sad.  I’m hoping that I can have him back at some point, but now is not that point.

In semi-classical news, a U Chicago professor’s son is charged with identity theft after he impersonated several other leading experts in his father’s field in order to advance his father’s ideas regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls. This came across via the Reuters article, but a bit of Googling found me this wrap-up, to which I shamelessly link, with appreciation.

This is one of those things that I’d like to cast as a cautionary tale, but simply cannot understand why anyone would think that this was a good idea.  We should not need cautionary tales about things like this.

In happier news, I saw the new Watchmen movie last night at a midnight show, and was very very pleased.  The end reminded me very powerfully of the end of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, when Hyllos says,

μεγάλους μὲν ἰδοῦσα νέους θανάτους,
πολλὰ δὲ πήματα καὶ καινοπαθῆ,
κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς.

You have seen great and grievous sights,
and many calamaties hitherto unheard-of,
but there is not one of these things that is not Zeus.

…after this non-commercial break.

I’ve relocated.  Jack remains back home while I start a new adventure in Classics, accompanied by our dog.  I’m currently couch-surfing, a stranger in a strange land.  Expect more soon.  In the meantime, get thee to Amazon and buy season one of The Wire.  Quickly!  Observe the classical themes!  Report back!

The first Greek mummy has been found and is being analyzed by a team of Swiss researchers. She was embalmed in oils and spices, much like the Egyptian process, and some hair including her eyebrows remains. She dates from about 300 CE, and the article notes gravely that they have been unable to determine a cause of death.

Another first, the first complete chariot to be found in Bulgaria has been unearthed in a Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria. This is very exciting! The chariot is about 1900 years old and in a good state of preservation. Nearby they found well-preserved brass and leather that they think to be the harness, even more exciting than the chariot.

In Turkey, a head thought to be the empress Faustina has been found! It’s been a good summer for digging, including for a friend of mine working on a dig in Israel who spent several weeks finding an excitingly-curved wall and some mosaics this year. (And a lot of time washing pottery!)

A Greek court denies the petition of three residents of Lesbos to restrict the adjective “Lesbian” from being applied to gay women, and orders the complainants to pay court costs. I’m sure almost everyone has heard about this case by now–it first hit the news quite a while back–but I thought that while I’m posting links today, I might as well hit this one as well.

These residents were apparently upset that some gay people were using the word “lesbian” to refer to themselves, and decided to do something about it. Of course, they didn’t decide to do something constructive about it–I’m sure the fact that it has absolutely no power over global speech habits had something to do with the court’s decision. Note that the identification of gay people and Lesbos has led to a protracted upswing in island tourism.

One cannot help but call to mind the recent flap over the American Family Association’s policy of globally replacing the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” on their “news” site OneNewsNow. At least, one cannot help it if one is Jane and has a lively sense of the absurd.

They hope, at any rate. A British team is set to attempt a circumnavigation of Africa in a replica of a Phoenician ship. This is a video report from the BBC, about two and a half minutes in length, and well worth your time.

It’s less likely than you think, especially if you’re a first-year college student.

Ken Smith, at Bucks New University, is only the latest to suggest that orthographic regularity and good grammar are things of the past, and should be treated as such. This old chestnut pops up every few years and is promptly shut down again, thankfully, unlike such grammar-school atrocities as teaching reading through word recognition, which comes into vogue like very slow clockwork every fifteen years or so.

Many of the English spelling conventions decried by the spelling-challenged come directly from my beloved Greek (the word phonetic itself cannot be spelled phonetically, as wags often note, because it’s based on φωνη). However, even were I not a classicist, as someone who has had the duty of grading hundreds of first-year essays every year, I cannot see the virtues of accepting phonetic spellings for commonly-used words as clearly as Professor Smith does. I cannot imagine how much longer it would take to decipher my students’ essays if I did not hold them to ordinary spelling and grammar conventions. The amazing misspellings I have sometimes seen in essays, despite the ready availability of spellcheck, attest to that. Orthographic regularity is not an old-fashioned constraint on modern freedom of expression: it is a kindness to your readers.

I will, however, admit to an awful joy in first-year malapropisms. The drop-down thesaurus, coupled with an insufficient grasp of the nuances of vocabulary and an unwillingness to look up words in the dictionary, provides a great deal of amusement during a long night of grading.

Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina have dated the revenge of Odysseus precisely, using mentions of astronomical phenomena in the Odyssey. The Odyssey covers a timespan of only forty days¹, and each of the days is clearly noted in the epic. There are frequent mentions of planets, stars, and constellations, and coupled with Theoklymenos’s statement in Book 20, which they, and many others, interpret as a total solar eclipse, these scholars have assigned a date to the murder of the suitors: April 16, 1178 BCE.

τοῖσι δὲ καὶ μετέειπε Θεοκλύμενος θεοειδής:

“ἆ δειλοί, τί κακὸν τόδε πάσχετε; νυκτὶ μὲν ὑμέων
εἰλύαται κεφαλαί τε πρόσωπά τε νέρθε τε γοῦνα.
οἰμωγὴ δὲ δέδηε, δεδάκρυνται δὲ παρειαί,
αἵματι δ᾽ ἐρράδαται τοῖχοι καλαί τε μεσόδμαι:
εἰδώλων δὲ πλέον πρόθυρον, πλείη δὲ καὶ αὐλή,
ἱεμένων Ἔρεβόσδε ὑπὸ ζόφον: ἠέλιος δὲ
οὐρανοῦ ἐξαπόλωλε, κακὴ δ᾽ ἐπιδέδρομεν ἀχλύς.” (20.350-57)
(And godlike Theoklymenos spoke to them,

“Oh wretched men, what is this evil you suffer? Your heads and faces
and the knees beneath you are wrapped in night.
Wailing kindles in your breast, your cheeks are weeping,
and the walls and well-wrought beams are spattered with blood:
the forecourt is full of ghosts, the courtyard is full,
hastening to Erebus deep under the dark: and Helios
is blotted from the sky, and an evil gloom runs over us.”)

Magnasco and Baikouzis mention that they are assuming a close association between astronomical bodies and gods (in this case, Mercury and the god Hermes) that, while documented in Babylon around 1000 BCE, is not an idea thought to have reached Greece until somewhat later. This is not a particularly dangerous assumption, to my mind, but I can understand the desire to qualify conclusions based on this kind of speculation. Another of the team’s questions is that Homer (if there was an historical Homer) is usually thought to have lived several centuries later than the 1178 BCE date given; how then could he have so accurately depicted these phenomena? Indeed, several of the articles listed below mention that Magnasco and Baikouzis’s dating of the slaughter of the suitors may change our ideas about the dating of the Odyssey itself. It is generally accepted, however (among classicists, at any rate), that the Odyssey doesn’t have a firm date of composition, having evolved among competing lines of oral storytellers before a rough consensus was reached. The product of this consensus was further standardized and emended and then later written down, accounting for the generous mixture of details from disparate times. Regardless, Magnasco and Baikouzis’s decision to look at Mercury for the final piece of a puzzle that has been bothering scholars since Heraclitus and Plutarch was inspired, and their finding is as fascinating as their process.

More articles about Magnasco and Baikouzis’s work. Most of these say basically the same thing, but I thought you might like a little variety.

• In New Scientist.
• In E-Science News.
• In NatGeo.
• In Live Science.
• In Scientific American.

__________
1. “What?” I hear you saying–”forty days? But it took him ten years to get home!” Well, yes, but most of the journey is told in flashback. Like the Iliad, which is a snapshot of forty days from the ninth year of the war intended to signify in miniature the whole, the portions of Odysseus’s journey which we see and hear about are essentially the “good parts” version, like Goldman’s Princess Bride, a book made entirely of the good parts.

Make that word of the “whenever it occurs to me”.

In my previous post (“The three–no, six–loves”), I used the word “egregious”. In English, it means “extraordinary in some bad way; glaring; flagrant”. (Dictionary.com, which I highly recommend. If you have any doubts about the word you are using, says the Speaker to First-years, please do look it up. Even when you’re just blogging.)

Egregious comes from the Latin egregius -a -um, which is a compound of ex, out of, and grex, gregis, flock or herd. When you are egregius, you are distinguishing yourself from those around you by your actions, bearing, etc. Context tells you whether this is good or bad, but generally it means you are admirable. In English, apparently, we don’t like that, and it has come to mean “standing out in a bad way”.

Fox News recently ran this column by “sexpert” Dr Yvonne Fulbright partially reviewing Jenny Block’s new book Open, a memoir detailing her marriage’s transition from cheating to polyamory. (Disclaimer: I have not read Ms. Block’s book.)

Dr Fulbright’s column begins with the misuse of a philosophical term of art (“begging the question” is not “manifestly asking something”) and continues on through some fairly pedestrian musings on the nature of relationships only to bring the reader up short with a description of “multiple types of love”, supposedly as named by the Greeks, complete with names for these love styles. In Greek. Sort of (about which more in a moment). In reality, this list of “love types” has been lifted without attribution from John Lee, who published a book, The colors of love (1973) and then an article, “Love Styles” in The psychology of love (1988). Let us take a closer look.

Fulbright writes:

While our society has set one standard for love and relationships, other societies have recognized that multiple types of each exist. The Greeks had several words for different types of love, including:

Eros –- erotic love involving physical attraction and emotional intensity;

Agape –- sacrificial love involving placing a loved one’s welfare above your own;

Storge –- love as friendship and companionship;

Pragma –- love as a “shopping list” of desired attributes, such as being a good parent;

Ludus –- love as a game;

Mania –- jealous, obsessive, dependent love.

This seems pretty straightforward. The Greeks were so advanced that they had sixty words for love! This is like the eighty Inuit words for snow. Now I feel enlightened about the linguistic nobility of the savages, and am definitely ready to kick ass at Trivial Pursuit.

Except for a few slight problems. Let’s start with the most egregious.

Ludus is Latin, not Greek. It means “game”. In a sexual context it can mean a love-game, flirtation, or sportive romantic or sexual play, but that meaning is only in context. If you read ludus and it’s not in a romantic context, read “game”. If it occurs in a civic context, particularly in connection with a large amount of money, it probably refers to gladiatorial games.

Ερως (eros) is love or desire, but any qualifications regarding intensity or attraction are going to be expressed using context and modifiers; they are not inherent in the word. This word is also not strictly sexual: you can have an ερως for something as well as for someone.

Αγαπη (agape) is just love. It’s often used to mean something like charity, or the love of brothers or friends. In the New Testament it becomes a sexless divine love, but that is decidedly a post-classical meaning.

Στοργη (storge) is love or affection. Antipho uses it to specifically denote parental or filial love.

Πραγμα (pragma) is the most puzzling word included in Lee’s list of “love types”, because it has nothing to do with love at all. Πραγμα is a deed, a task, an accomplishment, an act; in plural it can refer to politics, and the negative sense (indicated by context) is used to refer to problems, troubles, or annoyances. It comes from the verb πρασσω: to do, to accomplish, to be busy about. I literally have no idea where the idea that it could mean anything connected with love could possibly have come from; I’ve never run across any of the πρασσω-derivatives meaning anything like that in actual Greek.

And last, but not least, μανια just means frenzy or madness, as it does in English. I will give Lee the benefit of the doubt and assume that his impression of the word is colored by its frequent use in the Medea, but even so he is wrong–Medea’s μανια is just that–madness, frenzy–inspired by jealousy, perhaps, in part, but mostly just her being absolutely nutbar.

Among the many things about this list that puzzle me is the fact that φιλια, the traditional companion of ερως and αγαπη in modern rhetoric about the types of love, has been omitted. Perhaps Lee felt his readers would be unable to separate it from “paraphilia”.