Roman History Books and More

it’s not you, it’s your books

Have a good chuckle!

Essay

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: March 30, 2008, NYT

Among the bookish, even casual literary references can turn into romantic deal breakers.

on translating fiction

Being bi-lingual and interested in languages and literature, I have or so I like to believe, a fine ear (or eye) for literary translations in the languages I know.  Here is a recent experience:  A short while ago, I read The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, a history of classical music in and of the 20th century.  Excellent!  Related blog, with musical examples.  The author relates that a number of American musicians/composers have read Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuehn As Told by a Friend. This sent me back to my library to re-read the novel, in the original German, about a composer who makes a Doctor Faustus-like deal with the Devil and eventually sinks into insanity, coinciding with the turmoil of the 1920s in Germany and the rise of Nazism.  The novel is a tour de force in prose, and I wondered how this could actually be translated into English without loosing its impact.  Not very well, I decided, after I had borrowed the above linked 1997 edition, translated by John E. Woods.  As a matter of fact, I could not bring myself reading much of the book, it was too painful.  Somewhere out there, there is a translation authorized by Thomas Mann, but it's out of print. 

The question though is, do translations ever work satisfactorily?

a vote for latin

Op-Ed Contributor (New York Times)
A Vote for Latin
By HARRY MOUNT
Published: December 3, 2007
None of today’s leading presidential candidates studied Latin at a high level. How things have changed since the founding fathers.

AT first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, “Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna.”  Read on

Latin Version: A Vote for Latin

"a good mystery: why we read"

From the New York Times:

Page Turner
A Good Mystery: Why We Read
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: November 25, 2007
At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the forces of the Internet, the notion that someone could move from literary indifference to devouring passion seems, sadly, farfetched.

Image Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

shakespeare's julius caesar

Still slightly handicapped in writing and typing, I have attacked the to-be-read pile and am right now in the middle of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 by James Shapiro, currently available at Amazon.com Bargain Price.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University and a Shakespearean and Elizabethan culture scholar.

1599 was a pivotal year for Shakespeare.  He and his troupe built the Globe Theatre (Wikipedia, handle with care) and became independent of other theaters, and he was ready for new plays.  In this year, he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet, at the same time bringing his work to a new dramatic and intellectual level.

no blogging by irene for a while - broken elbow

Broke my right elbow cum surgery.

No blog post from me until I can get the hang of doing all this with my left (non-dominant) hand. Hopefully, Bingley has some material.

gone fishing . . .

. . . for classical music and other things.

(dicky laptop too)

temporary blogging hiatus (irene)

Due to computer problems, I'll have to suspend blogging until this is fixed.

historical figures in “the dream of scipio” – II : the cathars

In the 14th century part of our current read, The Dream of Scipio, Olivier de Noyen encounters two “heretics” and learns of their beliefs, one of which is reincarnation.  In the novel, this is traced back to the 5th century protagonist Manlius, his philosophical treatise on The Dream of Scipio, and his philosopher friend Sophia.

As in so much in the novel, there is a grain of truth to it, and we were reminded of the Cathars, which were quite familiar to some in our reading group.  Wikipedia (handle with care as usual) has an extensive article on Catharism, with a number of external links, one of which is Cathars and Cathar Beliefs in the Languedoc  (Cathars and the Cathar Crusade: history, cathar theology, crusade leaders, explanations, maps and source documents).

and another comparison to the roman empire…

"The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it.  As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies.  Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those who have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and then they both invoke the bread-and-circus days of the overstretched Roman empire in an attempt to sound even more subtle and profound."

Amen!  to Walter Isaacson's above comment introducing his on the whole favorable review of  Are We  Rome?:  The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy in the New York Times:

Books / Sunday Book Review

The Empire in the Mirror

By WALTER ISAACSON

Published: May 13, 2007

Cullen Murphy examines parallels between the United States today and the world of ancient Rome.

The question is: Do we need another of these books?  Is it a bandwagon thing?

request for starter book suggestions on roman history

In this comment, a reader poses the question:

"…I managed to land a job as a tour guide in Rome.  Now, one of the things I get asked a lot by normal people (that is, probably not all the interested before but could become interested) what would be some good starter books for Roman History.  Most of what I know comes from lectures and scholarly materials and the classics themselves, which are not going to fly with a lay audience, so I've been looking for other options.  I feel a bit uneasy recommending something like McCullough (although I do) because she's so long.  I had read good thing's about Goldsworthy's new Caesar biography, although I haven't really looked for it in Italy.  And I feel tentative about something like Tom Holland's "Rubicon" because it struck me as a bit pulpy (but then again, could be more appealing to the normal reader than most other things)."

Any helpful comments are appreciated!

gone fishing…

… for the next ten days or so.

There may be sporadic blogging.

OUP – “what were they thinking?”

Another rant!

Last month our local historical society, The Stamford Historical Society, belatedly received a copy of a book into which we had input:  Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 by Richard Godbeer. (book description below)

This is the first volume in a newish series of small books from Oxford University Press called “New Narratives in American History.”

It's handsomely put together and nicely illustrated; HOWEVER:  There is no index!  So I'm asking: What were they thinking?

kurt vonnegut, writer of classics of the american counterculture, dies at 84

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture,
Dies at 84

By DINITIA SMITH, New York Times

Published: April 11, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five,"  "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night when in Manhattan. He was 84.  more…

Books by Kurt Vonnegut.

tangentially – harry turtledove aka h.n. turteltaub

For Harry Turtledove (known to me mainly as H.N. Turteltaub) fans, a blog and a new alternative history novel: 

Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment & Trial of John F. Kennedy, Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel  or:  What if John Kennedy survived Dallas?

Mr. Turtledove holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, and according to Wikipedia (obviosuly approved by Turtledove as it's linked from his blog), as H.N. Turteltaub he not only wrote the Byzantine novel Justinian – about the 7th century Justinian – which at one time we discussed in our reading group, but also this 4th century BC Hellenistic Traders Series set shortly after the death of Alexander the Great:

toynbee on historical novels

I'd like to share these observations by Arnold J. Toynbee on historical novels, via David Derrick’s Toynbee Convector:

It is difficult to achieve success in writing “historical” plays and novels, i.e. plays and novels in which the social background is not that of the writer or of the public for whom he is writing.  The effort to resuscitate an alien social background seldom produces effects that do not seem either shoddy or laboured.  The reason is that social facts, when presented as a setting for personal relations, must be sketched in with a touch which is at the same time light and sure;  and this touch is difficult to achieve except when the artist is portraying social facts with which he is intimately acquainted at first hand.

[however…] read on

With today's proliferation of historical novels, the question arises:  Does the above still hold true, and if so, to what extent?

Postscript:  This may be an awkward way to pose this question.  Maybe the observation is more true than ever, given today’s tendency towards “political correctness”?

more on floor mosaics

For those who have an interest in mosaics:  this is a craft that has well survived, as this commercial site with their gallery shows.

And here is a Mosaics of Roman Britain Gallery from the BBC, although not the best in color.

More of my own photos from Augusta Rurica (Kaiseraugst, Switzerland) and Trier (Click on images to enlarge):

      

titter ye not

I didn't actually find A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum that funny. It had its amusing moments, but it wasn't really laugh out loud material. It did bring back fond memories of Up Pompeii!, though.

For those who haven't seen it, Up Pompeii! (usual wikipedia caveats apply) was a BBC sitcom starring Frankie Howerd (who was Pseudolus in the London version of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum) as Lurcio, slave to the Pompeii household of Ludicrus Sextus, Amonia, Nausius, and Erotica. Lurcio's attempts to bring the audience a bit of classical culture were always foiled by the fact that he never managed to finish the prologue to whatever story he wanted to tell because the complex machinations of various members of the household kept getting in the way.

To my 13-year-old self it was hilarious, and as I near 50, the clips on the BBC's page devoted to the programme (scroll down for the clips) are still pretty funny. What made it funny was, of course, Frankie Howerd's asides to the audience, which weren't so much asides as the whole point, and the situations forever teetering on the brink of disaster until he managed to get them back under control. Another favourite character, seen making a typical entrance at the end of the first clip, was Senna the Soothsayer. They should have made many more episodes, rather than the dire film version. Woe, woe and thrice woe, indeed.

DVDs of the series, together with other Frankie Howerd performances, are available from amazon.co.uk, but not it would seem from the American amazon.

blogging hiatus

I'm in the process of switching to a new computer and find the migration process a major headache.  Thus I won't be blogging for a few days.  An impending snow storm may keep me housebound though, so resumption might be sooner rather than later.

Things on Plautus will be next.

dr. johnson's imitations of juvenal

Samuel Johnson, aka Dr. Johnson, (1709-1784) was the compiler of the first comprehensive English dictionary. He is also known as an essayist, literary critic and novelist, and above all as the subject of James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (the whole thing comes also in one very big file from Project Gutenberg and broken down year by year as far as 1763, or alternatively abridged audio download).

As well as using quotations from Juvenal's Satires (our book for 21 November 2007) as epigraphs for some of his essays in The Rambler (The University of Virginia has Nos. 1-54, Nos. 55-112, and Nos. 171-208, but not Nos. 113-170 for some reason), Johnson published two poems in imitation of Juvenal.  (Selected Essays, Penguin Classics)

a postscript on the clark museum

Last summer, I blogged the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, better known as The Clark, and mentioned my favorite piano.

Mary Beard was visiting there, in her typical irreverent way, on the weekend.  (Not that she isn't right on the money…)  And lo and behold, she found an image of the Alma-Tadema piano!  It wasn't online when I blogged it.   I wish though they would show a frontal view, it's much more interesting.

Enjoy Mary's blog and the piano!

archaeology, religion, and delusions: the parthenon code

For general amusement – and some reflections – I offer the following:

An inquiry at the forum at Ancient / Classical History at about.com about a book called The Parthenon Code: Mankind's History in Marble, by Robert Bowie Johnson Jr. , led me to some – blessedly brief – googling, which got me to theparthenoncode.com.  Johnson's astonishing premise is that the Parthenon metopes represent the story of Genesis (sample chapters) … 

ancient rome 1945/46

I'm currently working on an online version of a local exhibit on WWII.

One of our veterans is Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey fame, who was in Italy in 1945/46 and took many photos and drew a lot of sketches.  Among the – tiny – photos were the Forum Romanum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Colosseum.

Also, look at this one.

Enjoy the sketches and cartoons, but please do honor the copyright!  It was very gracious of  Mr. Walker to give us permission to reproduce items from his scrapbook!

iraq archaeology appeal

Abbas Al-Hussainy, the new Director-General of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Republic of Iraq, spoke at the Archaeology in Conflict Conference at University College London (UCL) last Sunday and appealed to archaeologists and universities who had in the past excavated in Iraq, or who wished to continue working in Iraq, to c0ntact him.

More on Dorothy King's Blog (PhDiva)

Also, for those who are following the news: Donny George, Mr.  Abbas Al-Hussainy's predecessor, is moving to Stonybrook University, Long Island, N.Y.

kilroy was here

… not even tangentially related to our subject matter

How many among our readers are old enough to remember this?  I'm working on the online version of a local WWII exhibit, and the drawing on the left was done for the exhibit by local resident and cartoonist Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey fame, who is honorary chairman of the exhibit and a contributor by way of an oral history interview and loan of his WWII scrapbook.

To make this relevant to Roman history:  I wonder whether Roman soldiers left pictorial graffiti behind …

aristotle detective – book reviews

Of late I've been spending more time in ancient Athens than ancient Rome, reading Margaret Doody's series of detective novels with Aristotle and his friend and ex-student Stephanos as the sleuths. For my reviews of the series so far, see:

Aristotle Detective

Aristotle and Poetic Justice

Aristotle and the Secrets of Life

Poison in Athens

 

Mysteries in Eleusis

Unfortunately, although Amazon.co.uk stocks the books, the US Amazon doesn't, though it has  Aristotle Detective, Poetic Justice, and Mysteries in Eleusis available from other sellers.

The Amazon UK links are as follows:

Aristotle Detective
Poetic Justice
Secrets of Life
Poison in Athens
Mysteries in Eleusis

gone fishing again . . .

I'll be out of town for a few days this week, enjoying fresh ocean air and sans laptop, so blogging may be sporadic, depending on what Bingley can do. 

new novel by margaret george: helen of troy

Thanks to David Meadows at rogueclassicism, an alert about a new novel by Margaret George, Helen of Troy, with a review.

Some of you may remember her excellent Cleopatra treatment: The Memoirs of Cleopatra, which we discussed aeons ago.

tangentially: the blind traveler

Long before a blind man went up Mt. Everest, there was John Holman (1786–1857).   In  A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler, Jason Roberts narrates the astounding story of Lieutenant John Holman, who as a blind man traveled through much of the world on his own, and on very modest means.  Holman's service in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars had been cut short by a very painful form of rheumatism, and soon thereafter he was stricken by a sudden onset of total blindness.  He achieved an astonishing adjustment to his affliction, considering the times he lived in:  he went to university, even studying medicine;  and when his rheumatism flared up again, he went to the Continent on the advice of his doctors, the first of his several travels, which included a circumnavigation of the world.  With his utmost desire of independence, he succesfully evaded his younger brother who was supposed to accompany him, and from then on, he mostly traveled alone.

gone fishing, sort of

I will be away on vacation for a while, but will blog sporadically to keep the Marius thing going, maybe write on some concert performances, and post some pics if I find the time to install PhotoShop on my laptop before I leave.  It all depends on how good or bad (i.e. , hot and keeping us indoors) the weather is . . .

classical education c.1800, via Jane Austen

What little boys (and girls) were plagued with c.1800, from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Chapter 14 (at Bibliomania):

[Catherine Morland] "That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?"

"Yes, I am fond of history."

"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs - the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books."

I'm still here...

... a badly pinched nerve is keeping me away from the computer. Hexenschuß, we call it in German.

Stay tuned.

LibraryThing, a new way to catalogue your home library

Tim Spalding, whom you may know from Isidore of Seville and Ancient Library, has created a new thingy: You can put your books or your reading list into his new program, LibraryThing | Catalog your books online. You can just do it for yourself, or share it with the rest of us. Up to 200 books are free, for the remainder you pay a very modest fee.

My thanks to Bingley for alerting us.

Tutankhamun's tomb: discovery & excavation

The book Tomb of the Golden Bird (Amelia Peabody Mysteries) by Elizabeth Peters has come in. I'm not sure yet whether or not I like it: It's a mixture of farce (the tomb discovery and first developments) and melodrama (Sethos in trouble – or is he?). The cast of characters is so big that it required a listing at the front of the book. More I can't say so as not to spoil the suspense. I will say, however, that the story concludes with a sickening plethora of Amelia's "happy endings" …

All this notwithstanding, I wanted to find out the real story of the tomb discovery and excavation and found this truly amazing site from the Griffith Institute (a great site on its own merits) at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford:

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation

which includes Howard Carter's diaries, Harry Burton's photographs, etc., etc., with more to come!

To Peters' credit, her intellectual honesty led her not to tamper with the known facts of the tomb story, but rather, she amuses herself with Emerson's frustration of having to observe the goings-on … and, oh well, a little meddling and blackguarding … enjoy your read!

This, BTW, is the 18th book in the Amelia Peabody series.

tangentially: new Amelia Peabody mystery to be out soon

Strictly for Amelia Peabody fans: the latest mystery will be out later this month.

Tomb of the Golden Bird (Amelia Peabody Mysteries)
by Elizabeth Peters

Did they or did they not? I've always wondered what would happen when the time comes that Howard Carter discovers Tutankhamun's tomb. Was it rather Amelia Peabody and her husband Emerson, the greatest egyptologist of this and any age, who actually found the tomb? We'll find out soon, but for sure they are getting involved again with criminals, "...every year a dead body!" and foil a dangerous plot -- or so I'm told. And where Amelia is, and where tombs are, Sethos can't be far away.

Can't wait for the book to arrive!