What’s the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome? How about Caesar Syndrome? From Plutarch’s Life of Caesar (ii):

To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth. But after his ransom had come from Miletus and he had paid it and was set free, he immediately manned vessels and put to sea from the harbour of Miletus against the robbers. He caught them, too, still lying at anchor off the island, and got most of them into his power. Their money he made his booty, but the men themselves he lodged in the prison at Pergamum, and then went in person to Junius, the governor of Asia, on the ground that it belonged to him, as praetor of the province, to punish the captives. But since the praetor cast longing eyes on their money, which was no small sum, and kept saying that he would consider the case of the captives at his leisure, Caesar left him to his own devices, went to Pergamum, took the robbers out of prison, and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking.

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What a complete prick.

Howls of outrage (6)

A student recently lent me the movie Alexander. Main impressions: Forget about the historical inaccuracies. That’s between the movie’s historical consultant and his psychiatrist, who will no doubt remind the historical consultant that that’s par for the course in a Hollywood movie. That’s not to say the movie was a success. Even worse than the psycho-babble about Alexander’s motivation was the silly pseudo-Irish accent that some of the actors would put on or take off depending, perhaps, on whether the voice coach had wandered off the set drunk yet that day. These two features were combined nicely in Angelina Jolie’s (playing Alexander’s mother) repeated assurances to the young Alexander that he would some day conquer the “warld.” (I said pseudo-Irish, so I take it that encompasses moments of pseudo-Scottish.)

Howls of outrage (2)

From Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander (I.5):

Alexander, marching along the river Erigon, made for Pelium . . . When Alexander reached it, he camped by the river Eordaicus and decided to assault next day. Cleitus’ forces, however, held the heights surrounding the city, which were commanding and also thickly wooded, so that they could attack the Macedonians, if they made the assault, from all sides . . . Alexander proceeded to the assault; on which the enemy sacrificed three boys and three girls and three black rams, and then made a rush to intercept the Macedonians; but when the Macedonians drew near, they deserted the strong positions they had occupied, and the newly sacrificed victims were found still lying there.

OK, so it looks as if Cleitus’ forces lost heart for some reason or other. But it’s also possible that other things went wrong to spook them. Either way, it looks as if the gods simply weren’t with Cleitus and his troops that day, in spite of the sacrifices.

I hope it’s not presumptuous of me to assume that you think the experience points up the general futility of child sacrifice. You would, though, wouldn’t you? After all, you’re probably not into sacrifice-based polytheism. If you were, it might be easier to see how we could interpret the experience to yield a different lesson: that they didn’t use enough children. It’s easy to imagine one priest turning to another, “You always skimp on the kids. I’ve told you before, it’s the most important part.”

A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

I’ve mentioned before that the NYT’s TimesSelect policy has done me the extremely valuable service of putting the most infuriating NYT content out of reach. I think I kicked the NYT columnist habit before the TimesSelect policy came into effect, but the policy nevertheless helps prevent backsliding or accidental link-following. Anyway, imagine my surprise and disappointment when my mother – my very own mother – forwarded me a David Brooks column last week.

The column offers advice to college students about what sort of courses to take. Here’s the fun part of the column:

Read Plato’s “Gorgias.” As Robert George of Princeton observes, “The explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker can all too easily erode one’s devotion to truth — a devotion that is critical to our integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially soul-imperiling, gifts.” Explains everything you need to know about politics and punditry.

Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. “No habit is so important to acquire,” Aristotle wrote, as the ability “to delight in fine characters and noble actions.” Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.”

What’s funny about these two paragraphs is how uneasily they go together.

OK, first, although I’m a bit of an amateur Greek history buff, I find it irritating when people argue that it’s worth studying Greek history in order to come into “contact with heroes like Pericles” – stop! I thought people stopped saying shit like that in the 19th Century. Look, Pericles was a very talented fellow, but he was also an ardent imperialist who did more than anyone else to launch Athens into an absolutely disastrous war. Now, ever since Thucydides, people have been arguing that if only Pericles had survived (he died of the plague that hit Athens early on in the Peloponnesian War), his sure hand might have guided the war to a better conclusion. What. Ever. If you’re really honest about looking for models of heroism, I’m sure you could do much better if you avoided Classical Greek political and military figures altogether. (You could say that for his time and place Pericles wasn’t so bad morally, but then you call into question why it’s so important to turn to the classical world for heroes.)

I think Greek history (especially from the second half of the 5th Cent. B.C.) is of genuine interest, but for quite different reasons. For one thing, while it’s important not to get carried away with historical parallels, those of us who aren’t idiot pundits might find it thought-provoking to think about how a democracy might come under serious strain under the competing pressures of greed, deep class divisions, demagoguery, and foreign wars of choice. Also, the events of the Peloponnesian War are absolutely crucial background for some pretty incredible works of literature and philosophy, works that are both intrinsically worthwhile and also crucial for understanding a lot that comes later.

Such works include . . . Plato’s Gorgias. And what do we find when we turn to Plato’s Gorgias? Why, criticism of Pericles for being downright unheroic! All right, here’s a homework assignment for David Brooks: Reread, Plato’s Gorgias, with special attention to 503cd and 515a–517a.
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Howls of outrage (7)

Everyone knows that Aristotle was a tutor to Alexander the Great. I confess I had not known until yesterday that Aristotle’s nephew (or perhaps great nephew), Callisthenes, was court historian. Alexander dragged him along on several campaigns, where Callisthenes’s main job seems to have been to write ass-kissing propaganda about Mr. Great and His Many Marvellous Conquests. And yet it seems that everyone has a limit. At least Callisthenes discovered his limit in Alexander’s adoption of the Eastern practice of requiring the sort of submission to his person that most Greeks felt was only appropriate for a God. Callisthenes fell out of favour, was accused of plotting against Alexander, and was put to death.

Anyway, I mention this because I found Plutarch’s description of how Alexander tricked him into unpopularity so amusing:

It is said, moreover, that once when a large company had been invited to the king’s supper, Callisthenes was bidden, when the cup came to him, to speak in praise of the Macedonians, and was so successful on the theme that the guests rose up to applaud him and threw their garlands at him; whereupon Alexander said that, in the language of Euripides, when a man has for his words

“A noble subject, it is easy to speak well;”

“but show us the power of your eloquence,” said he, “by a denunciation of the Macedonians, that they may become even better by learning their faults.” And so Callisthenes began his palinode, and spoke long and boldly in denunciation of the Macedonians, and after showing that faction among the Greeks was the cause of the increase of Philip’s power, added:

“But in a time of sedition, the base man too is in honour.”

This gave the Macedonians a stern and bitter hatred of him, and Alexander declared that Callisthenes had given a proof, not of his eloquence, but of his ill-will towards the Macedonians.

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I was sitting in my office a week or two ago frantically trying to come up with something – anything – intelligent-sounding to say to my students about Heraclitus when I came across this: According to Nietzsche, “probably no man has ever written as clearly and as lucidly” as Heraclitus.

If that’s a joke, it’s not really funny or clever. Even if Nietzsche has some serious purpose here, like trying to challenge our preconceptions about clarity or something like that, that’s still a pretty obnoxious way to do it.

Update: Oh yeah, and I don’t think that Mark Kleiman is a pretentious twit at all, but what’s up with calling Heraclitus an intellectual hero? It’s just so damn hard to figure out what Heraclitus meant on any issue, and the best theories ascribe such odd views to him, that I’m not sure what could have led Kleiman to have chosen Heraclitus as a hero.

Howls of outrage (4)

Saw this review recently:

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Translated
into Ancient Greek by Andrew Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
2004. Pp. 250. ISBN 0-7475-6897-9. $21.95.

Reviewed by Tad Brennan, Northwestern University

The book under review is surely one of the most important pieces of
Ancient Greek prose written in many centuries. It will be a delight to
all Classicists, a boon to all teachers of Greek, and a possession for
all time.

It is, of course, Andrew Wilson’s translation, into Ancient Greek, of
J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book. It is also, in this reader’s
opinion, a complete success. On nearly every page there is some
felicity of composition to be admired, some construction that shows off
the Greek language’s power and versatility, some turn of phrase that
arouses admiration for the translator. In its entirety, it is an
extraordinary work — a prose comp. exercise on an unprecedented scale.
But unlike most prose comp exercises, it is also a wonderfully good
read.
[Read the rest]

Yoon (wife) is a big fan of the Harry Potter books. I haven’t read any of them, but this might be a fun way for me to catch up on my popular culture. (Ha! – Don’t worry, I know I’m a complete knob for writing that.)

Howls of outrage (3)

I’m teaching a western Civ class this summer. We recently got around to reading selections from Augustine’s City of God. Augustine is lots of fun, but he’s also a bit excitable. Here’s a passage, in the rather outdated translation that we use (to save money, since the copyright has lapsed):

. . . who can describe, who can conceive the number and severity of the punishments which afflict the human race – pains which are not only the accompaniment of the wickedness of godless men, but are a part of the human condition and the common misery – what fear and what grief are caused by bereavement and mourning, by losses and condemnations, by fraud and falsehood, by false suspicions, and all the crimes and wicked deeds of other men? For at their hands we suffer robbery, captivity, chains, imprisonment, exile, torture, mutilation, loss of sight, the violation of chastity to satisfy the lust of the oppressor, and many other dreadful evils. What numberless casualties threaten our bodies from without – extremes of heat and cold, storms, floods, inundations, lightning, thunder, hail, earthquakes, houses falling; or from the stumbling, or shying, or vice of horses; from the countless poisons in fruit, water, air, animals; from the painful or even deadly bites of wild animals . . . What disasters are suffered by those who travel by land or sea! What man can go out of his own house without being exposed on all hands to unforeseen accidents? Returning home sound in limb, he slips on his own door-step, breaks his leg, and never recovers. What can seem safer than sitting in his chair? Eli the priest fell from his, and broke his neck.

You know, Augustine had me right up to the end, but the bit about Eli just cracks me up. Usually the introduction of the particular into a passage like this makes the writing more vivid. Here, the choice of the particular example is so anticlimactic that it drains the preceding general claims of their power. What was a pretty decent lament about the woes of the world is suddenly transformed into the sort of thing you’d hear from a cranky old man sitting on his porch, bitching away without really caring if you’re listening: “. . . And did you hear what happened to Eli? He was sitting in his chair, and the next moment his neck was broken! I tell you, the world is . . .”

A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

The students in the class I’m TAing (Contemporary Moral Issues) paid something like $65 for this textbook. It has brief discussions of each topic it covers, some okay, some not. And it (typically) provides two papers per topic – on the theory, I suppose, that every issue has exactly two sides. The selections are fine, as far as they go, but because there are only two papers per topic, you are clearly expected to race through a whole lot of topics in precisely the way I’ve complained about before.

One problem with anthologies of this sort is that publishers insist on really crappy translations of older materials in order to save money. And so any students who actually got around to reading the little snippet of Aristotle would have been treated to this:

Now, as the qualities of the soul are three, viz. emotions, faculties and moral states, it follows that virtue must be one of the three.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is one great, big, fat translation mistake. It is the kind of great, big, fat translation mistake which makes one hold one’s head and wonder why one’s students shelled out $65 for the privilege of being badly misled about Aristotle’s views.

Very briefly, the phrase “moral states” is supposed to translate the Greek word hexis. A hexis actually refers to any stable disposition or condition. Now, eventually Aristotle is going to try to show that a virtue is a special kind of hexis. But at this point, he’s offering an argument from elimination, and so the procedure is to work through the possibilities, showing why the first two possibilities won’t fit. The general sense of hexis is required here because if it is too specific then the three options won’t be an exhaustive list of all the possible things that a virtue might turn out to be. To translate hexis as “moral state,” then, botches the argument from elimination, and in a way that sort of makes Aristotle look like he’s cheating.

A bit less important, but still worth keeping track of, is the ambiguity in that expression “moral states”. That expression might mean a) a state of moral character or b) a moral state of character. Since a vice, too, is a sort of hexis, Aristotle requires a) here. But I would guess that b) is slightly more natural way to read “moral states” – was that the way you read it? – so the ambiguity is likely to add confusion to what is already a flat mistake.

There. I managed to get through that without impugning anyone’s integrity or patriotism. I even managed to avoid any of these nasty tricks. Aren’t I a good boy?

Howls of outrage (5)

Although I shudder to think of what it will do to the Google ads at the top of the page, I can’t resist quoting the first paragraph of a response to a review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Just read it and try to tell me that the Greeks weren’t having fun.

Ruden on Clayton on Ruden. Response to BMCR 2003.12.25

Response by Sarah Ruden (sarah@zingsolutions.com)
——————————-

Barbara Clayton’s judgment (31 December 2003) of my Lysistrata translation is not harsh all through. I appreciate her words of praise, but I feel I must challenge her decision not to recommend the book for classroom use (in favor of Jeffrey Henderson’s Loeb?). She objects first of all to my obscenity, but she does not fairly represent the amount added over that in the Greek. To consider her initial, charily presented list of words in the translation that struck her: all but three (one being the mild “nookie,” at which a footnote of mine gives a literal translation of the whole relevant phrase) are close renderings of words in the text that the ancient Greeks considered crude (at least when in figurative use in Aristophanes)–and this is according to decades of studies by Henderson, not according to me. Looking at the list, we don’t even need Henderson to tell us, for example, that PANKATAPYGOS, which I translate as “fit for boning up the butt,” is a compound of “all” or “completely,” “down,” and “butt,” “ass,” or “rear end.” The compound is literally about anal intercourse and connotes shamelessness. A more genteel translation than mine would simply not do
justice to Aristophanes. I can’t see how, in context, my use of naughty
slang could rightly be called “excessive,” “extensive” or “going too
far.”

I enjoy the contrast here between icy scholarly tone and the actual content. Can you imagine spending your days arguing over how to capture the nuances of such words?

Myself, I work on Aristotle. He has his moments, but I’m afraid it just isn’t as wild as Aristophanes.

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