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…reveal a tiny window onto the oddity of the ancient world. Or maybe, the perpetual oddity of the human world. (I found this linked from Metafilter, more tidbits there on the recovered stuff.)
A review of a recent book on Xenophon’s Anabasis passes on a little tidbit about the Iraq War that I hadn’t heard before: “Early plans for the current administration’s invasion of Iraq included a program of infiltration with the code name ‘Anabasis.’” (( The author’s footnote reads: “Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), p. 6. I am grateful to Page Dubois for calling my attention to this instance of classical reception.” ))
That’s actually pretty funny, in a dark way.
There is simply not enough Herodotus blogging in the world, so let’s make our own modest attempt to remedy that, shall we?
I just love the batshit crazy way that Cambyses tries to refute the Persian claim that he was nuts. Here he is speaking to Prexaspes:
“I’ll soon show you if the Persians speak the truth, or if what they say is not a sign of their own madness rather than mine. You see your son standing there by the door? If I shoot him through the middle of the heart, I shall have proved the Persians’ words empty and meaningless; if I miss, then say, if you will, that the Persians are right, and my wits are gone.”Without another word he drew his bow and shot the boy, and then ordered his body to be cut open and the wound examined; and when the arrow was found to have pierced the heart, he was delighted, and said with a laugh to the boy’s father: “There’s proof for you, Prexaspes, that I am sane and the Persians mad. Now tell me if you ever saw anyone shoot so straight.”
Prexaspes knew well enough that the king’s mind was unbalanced, so in fear for his own safety he answered: “Master, I do not believe that God himself is a better marksman.” (Book III.35)
Which sidesteps the question of whether the successful shot proved anything. And what a way to sidestep the question! I understand that Prexaspes was afraid, but if you greet the murder of your own son with “Nice shot,” you run the risk of appearing to grovel.
This is from an Appendix to the English translation of Jaeger’s Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development:
Diocles’ work on diet was dedicated to a certain Plistarchus. Wellmann never asked who this man was. Beloch, in a short footnote of his Greek History, asks whether he was a Macedonian prince, brother of Cassander and one of the younger sons of Antipater. This is, indeed, highly probable. Antipater was Alexander’s man of confidence, whom he entrusted with the administration of Macedonia and Greece during the long years of his absence in Asia. Aristotle had met Antipater when he was the educator of Alexander at King Philip’s court, and from that time until his death Antipater remained his most intimate friend. Aristotle appointed him in his will as general executor. He and his son Cassander were the protectors of the Peripatetic school after Alexander’s and Aristotle’s deaths. Plistarchus became king of Lycia and Caria after the battle of Ipsus in 301. Almost all the Hellenistic kings were protectors of science and philosophy. The dedication of scientific works to princes and other powerful men is a custom which begins shortly before Alexander’s time and throws much light on the relations of philosophical schools and politics. Moreover, in one of Diocles’ books the cucumbers of of Antioch were recommended. Antioch was founded in the year 300 B.C. Thus Diocles wrote his book in the third, not in the beginning of the fourth century.
I love the relentless accumulation of detail, some of it not entirely relevant, building until it reaches the final, victorious piece of evidence: a reference to a cucumber! My emotional response to this is, of course, complex: The anti-climax in finding a cucumber at the end of all this mingles with the excitement of what appears to be a very nice use of evidence. I am then distracted by Jaeger’s use of italics, which are just so earnest here that the excitement is replaced by amusement.
From Podlecki’s paper “The Peripatetics as Literary Critics”:
To [Heraclides of Pontus], too, is ascribed the observation that Lasus of Hermione composed his Hymn to Demeter without sigmas.
Hey, that’s like that French dude. Since Lasus was 6th Cent. B.C., I wonder if that makes him the originator of the lipogram.
I’m reading through Book XII of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists, which is devoted to the theme of luxury and pleasure. (In spite of being a very silly book, it preserves some valuable philosophical material on the topic that would be otherwise lost.) Anyway, the author goes on at considerable length about the luxurious habits of the Sybarites, and then this:
Again, if any caterer or cook invented a dish of his own which was especially choice, it was his privilege that no one else but the inventor himself should adopt the use of it before the lapse of a year, in order that the first man to invent a dish might possess the right of manufacture during that period, so as to encourage others to excel in eager competition with similar inventions.
A footnote in the Loeb edition to the work claims – whether correctly or not I have no idea – that this is the earliest known patent-law.
I’m shopping for dress shoes. In my web research, I went to this page of Manolo Blahnik shoe designs. (warning: Flash interface)
Do his sketches remind you of anything? Look at his sketches — not the shoes, but the sketches themselves. I realize it’s not a big shocker that high heels are similar in some ways to footbinding, but for chrissakes, look at his sketches and look at that first picture of a bound foot (linked from “remind”).
And, as a bonus, enjoy the fruits of my googling. Here are a bunch of fascinating personal interviews about footbinding in China in the 20th century.
. . . there was just writing it down on a wall:
Other anecdotes emphasize that our actions must be governed by reason rather than the emotions: Archytas refused to punish the serious misdeeds of his slaves, because he had become angry and did not want to act out of anger (A7); he restrained himself from swearing aloud by writing his curses on a wall instead (A11).
From the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, Book XXX (on melancholics):
Wine also makes men affectionate; this is proved by the fact that under the influence of wine a man is induced to kiss one whom no one would kiss, if he were sober, either because of their appearance or their age.
I love the web. Just went from a story about an imagined .007 caper, to the Wikipedia entry about DeBeers, to Edward Jay Epstein’s 1982 article about the history of the diamond industry. Totally fascinating.
Diamonds are not intrinsically valuable and not actually made valuable by genuine rarity; they’re made valuable only by careful control of the supply from the DeBeers monopoly. The story describes the history of the marketing campaign that created, nearly from scratch, in the 1930s, the American psychological requirement of a diamond engagement ring that can then never be sold, but which is to be passed to heirs as a hyper-valuable investment. It is nearly impossible to re-sell diamond jewelry of this sort, and for good reason — DeBeers prevents there being a market for it. Partly this is to prevent competition for the dollars of men buying new engagement rings, but partly to avoid price fluctuations that might destroy the perception that diamonds retain their high value, which in turn would cause more people to panic and sell their old rings. So… they’re kept worthless on the secondary market, so that people don’t realize that they’re worthless.
Read the whole article; there’s fascinating stuff all the way through. International intrigue: the Israelis stockpiled diamonds and to punish them, DeBeers changed its prices in a way that nearly collapsed the Israeli banking industry. Sexual metaphor: DeBeers makes it so that a woman wants a diamond, but can’t really say so in advance to her suitor, because it’s so expensive and impractical. But a real man knows that a woman wants a diamond even if she says she doesn’t — so he buys one, deferring the engagement until he can do so if he must, because you can’t get married without a diamond ring. And when he presents it to her, she is overcome, happy even though she might have protested if he had consulted her in advance, and accepts his proposal. Cultural imperialism: within 15 years, the Japanese go from having roughly no pre-engagement romance to having diamond engagement rings as standard requirement. Thwarted thieves: if they steal diamonds, thinking they’re valuable, they end up unable to resell them. It’s 30 years old, so I don’t know how much things have changed, but really cool article.
Two more recent sources: Why you should never accept a diamond ring, even if someone really wants to give you one. And this 2004 update on the threatened status of the cartel from The Economist.
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.
Michael Specter’s piece, “Political Science,” in the March 13th, 2006 New Yorker isn’t very good. Although he collects some interesting material, the attempt to cram basically a book-length argument into a few pages results in a pretty jumbled, disconnected mess. Anyway, just wanted to call attention to this paragraph:
Science is powerful, and it can seem miraculous. Clearly, it has transformed the way humans live, and for centuries the general view has been that science is neither good nor bad – that it merely supplies information, and that new information is always beneficial. That simplistic view makes less sense every year.
You just know a writer is about to go all silly on you when you get the phrase “for centuries the general view has been.” What makes this especially silly, though, is that the previous three paragraphs are about how incredibly controversial Darwin has been ever since he was first published. Shouldn’t Spector, or an editor at the New Yorker, have noticed that there is some tension here?
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.)
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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